Pain, pills and two ambulances, or How did we get to the fifth place IronStar 226 in Sochi
Never. Hear? Never agree to participate in this madness. Everything in IT is not bad at all - warm and comfortable offices, large monitors, good canteens, VHI. Do you want to drive, work on the limit of forces, experiences? You are welcome. Go to work on projects such as GIS utilities (previously written on Habré here and here ), zakupki.gov.ru or similar projects of your company, and you will get it all. But stay away from triathlon, marathons and other such evil spirits. You will be more whole.
Source of As I imagined our participation in the relay
When I signed up for the IronStar 226 baton and seduced my colleagues from LANIT and in general all of the habrovchan join us, I thought it would be cool and fun. “What a great team building,” I thought. Of course, I read about triathlon from the position of my wife , but at that moment I took this cry of the female soul too lightly. In the end, we registered only for the baton, i.e. it should have been three times simpler.
Looking closely at what the triathlons call the “full” distance, you begin to suspect that you are in a riot department in a psychiatric hospital. The distance consists of almost 4 km of swimming, 180 km of cycling and 42 km of running. Professionals, who since childhood only do what they train, go this distance in 8-10 hours. If you look at training programs for full distance, for example, on TrainingPeaks website known in triathlon circles (the de facto standard among triathletes for planning your training and tracking progress), you find that the average program implies approximately 14-16 hours of training per week . And this is just to complete the distance with a more or less decent result of 12-13 hours and leave the finish line on your own two feet, and not in the ambulance. It turns out that in addition to work, you need to train at least 2 hours a day, 7 days a week. “But what about serialchiki? - you ask. - How to sit in a bar with a beer? Family? Children? .. ”So I do not know. This remains a mystery to me. In short, a triathlon cannot be practiced from time to time. In this case, there is no question of any results, you just won't even finish the distance.
')
The next aspect is the number of technical gadgets needed. Among the triathletes known formula: any gadget should be N + 1 piece, where N is such that N + 1 <M, and M is the number of pieces of equipment at which you are expelled from the house. In swimming, in principle, everything is quite sparing. We need a pool for training, swimming trunks, goggles, balls, flippers, snorkel, and wetsuit. A wetsuit is optional, but desirable if the start is held in cold water. But the most important thing is that it improves your pace by an average of 5-10 seconds per hundred meters. Wetsuit provided by the company. I tried it in the pool. It looked, probably, very strange - the dude in a tight rubber jumpsuit cuts circles in a usual 25-meter pool among impressively floating grandmothers.
For running, special running shoes are required. Still, run 42 km in what did not work out. It requires a good shape that should be light, it should breathe and sweat. Someone sticks the nipples with a plaster, because bad clothes begin to literally wash off their blood. We had no problems here. The company LANIT provided us with excellent trisyuts (these are such special clothes for triathlon).
Well, the most technically difficult stage is cycling. Here, in addition to the bike itself, we need bicycle shoes, contact pedals, a helmet and bikes (and better a helmet-drop with a visor), a hydration and power system, racing tires, racing tires, a repair kit in case of a puncture, etc.
The third important aspect is the elements of the passage of the distance itself. There are so many of them that at some point the head starts to spin and hands fall. Before swimming it is necessary to smear with a special ointment, so that the wetsuit does not rub in the neck, it is necessary to study the track well so as not to get lost and properly swim all the buoys. You need to be able to quickly remove the wetsuit and fasten everything you need for the cycle stage (shoes, helmet, goggles), then run with the bike through the transit zone, quickly climb on it and run on shoes with contact pedals. You need to eat right on the track, and at the end of this stage, quickly change into all running and jerk at the marathon.
For the relay, everything is easier, of course - in the first transit zone the swimmer is already waiting for a dressed cyclist, he simply removes the chip from his irresponsible colleague and leaves for his stage. In the second transit zone, the runner acts in the same way with the cyclist and rushes to his marathon.
Anton learned that a bicycle can cost 900 thousand rubles.
Using the right of the organizer, I chose for myself the shortest swimming stage. It was necessary to swim almost 4 km. Do not swim at all or for a long time stupidly did not suit me, so I turned to swimming coach Kristina Kochetkova . Not paying attention to the critical eye and the words "you want too fast a result," I began to prepare. As a result, since the beginning of July, I sailed an average of 13 km per week (4 water training + GPP in the form of parallel preparation for the Race of Heroes).
My swimming stage was supposed to last a little over an hour, and Dmitri Sidelnikov was the most “lucky” because his cycle step was to take about six hours. To structure the training, he decided to use the Gran Fondo New York training plan 100 miles from Tim Cusick (via TrainingPeaks). On average, Dima rolled on 335 km a week. Relatives have forgotten him a little over these three months, and the neighbors are almost used to the constant hum of home cyclists.
Anton Starshov was responsible for running. In principle, he does not like to run classic running races like marathons, as he prefers trails, rogains. But he had to change his training for the marathon a bit.
Training with Anton did not stop even on vacation.
At some point, it became all very stressful. Too much load, too much detail. Everyone has his own business. Difficult logistics. A well-known triathlete Andrei Bruhankov helped us psychologically . He also told how to eat on the cycle stage. The fact is that there is another ambush. If you don’t eat at all, after a couple of hours, you will use up all the energy reserves of the body, and this will end your race immediately and ingloriously. On the other hand, if you take steaks with you and try to eat them at the 90th kilometer, the best that can happen to you is that you simply cannot eat them.
For Dima, an entire nutritional program was developed, which consisted of a set of solid bars (they can be eaten first, when the body still takes solid food) and beautiful gels with the taste of fresh clay (when you can only pour something inside). Also for Dima, Paracetamol and salt pills were stored (in case he has muscle contractions or they get sick). According to our plan, he had to disconnect after completing his stage, but not before that!
It all started at 7:20 in the morning. I had to swim 3.84 km in Imereti Bay.
For obvious reasons, I have the least pictures. I ran a little over the pontoon, ...
... jumped into the water and swam two laps of 1,940 meters (in the photo - not me, but I jumped about the same).
After the first transit zone, we were the seventh among the men's teams.
Dima (in the photo) immediately and imperceptibly for me took the chip on T1, grabbed the bike and rushed to the track of his dream. Here he is still fresh and photogenic.
Dima overcame two laps 90 km from Adler towards Krasnaya Polyana. He definitely had something to look at. In the first round on the descent, Dima, according to him, reworked - he had to rest a little more, and he, with joy, broke into all the money and with a high pulse. In the second round, in the region of 140 km, he was turned off on the hill itself and he was arriving exclusively on moral and volitional.
The result of our race was largely determined by the result of Dima, since his stage is the most technically difficult, the most traumatic and the longest. Therefore, we were most worried about him. Think about it, at some point he was driving on the highway at a speed of more than 60 km / h!
After the cycle step. Check the basic reflexes.
Then there was T2. Anton rushed forward. Before us at that time there were eight teams. During the relay, I shouted to Anton that SIBUR was 1 minute ahead of us. The nearby girls from SIBUR started to giggle that we had already lost, but Dima and I were sure that Anton would definitely overtake their runner.
Anton quickly caught up with the SIBUR and URANIUM teams. The start was great. We again became the seventh.
For the run, the weather was pretty hard, it was very hot. Unfortunately, Anton took a little salt pills, and his legs began to move in the second half of the race. One of the teams in front of us went out of the race (the runner from 1001 Triton Caspian looked just awful, barely dragged his feet, but did not give up until he was taken away in an ambulance). We were sixth with a three-minute lead in front of the URANIUM team.
At that moment it seemed to me that we could not be the fifth, since the PRO TRENERS team was significantly ahead of us. But in the end something happened to their runner too, and we entered the top five. Now our task was to keep this place.
Here is what Anton himself writes: “The support group informed me that in 30 seconds my opponent was catching up. It was necessary to keep the advantage of another 5 km. The finish was fascinating: 200 meters before the end of the distance my leg reduces, and a group of runners walks around me. I feel that among them should be my opponent. Through the pain of doing the finish spurt, bypass them all. The result - overtook the guy for 12 seconds and kept the fifth place ”.
We finished together. Pay attention to the faces - it is immediately obvious that Dima and I are true athletes and we do everything with pleasure.
But for Anton it is clear that running no longer brings him such pleasure as us ;-).
It’s just that without training you can’t even go through the 226 relay in the triathlon, and it’s just a cosmos to do the full distance alone.
The race itself is another thriller! This is not "dived to you, and after 25 seconds it is clear who won and who lost." The race lasts 10 hours or more, and there is a constant struggle. Chances are good that something goes wrong and you drop out of the race.
As a result, we were able to get to the fifth place among the men's relay teams. But this happened, among other things, because the two teams left the race.
Official results . Our team LANIT Triathlon Team ranked fifth among the men's relay teams and 10th place in the absolute of 33 teams
And, of course, a triathlon is not a team building. This is not a glamorous party with beer and dancing, after which the staff “get to know each other better”. After this, you understand exactly who is who in this life, and are you ready to go at least with these people to explore, even to the IT project, at least to ...
Thanks to the company LANIT for help in organizing, for support and for the most beautiful equipment in the world. As you know, an ugly plane cannot fly well!
When I signed up for the IronStar 226 baton and seduced my colleagues from LANIT and in general all of the habrovchan join us, I thought it would be cool and fun. “What a great team building,” I thought. Of course, I read about triathlon from the position of my wife , but at that moment I took this cry of the female soul too lightly. In the end, we registered only for the baton, i.e. it should have been three times simpler.
How I was wrong
Looking closely at what the triathlons call the “full” distance, you begin to suspect that you are in a riot department in a psychiatric hospital. The distance consists of almost 4 km of swimming, 180 km of cycling and 42 km of running. Professionals, who since childhood only do what they train, go this distance in 8-10 hours. If you look at training programs for full distance, for example, on TrainingPeaks website known in triathlon circles (the de facto standard among triathletes for planning your training and tracking progress), you find that the average program implies approximately 14-16 hours of training per week . And this is just to complete the distance with a more or less decent result of 12-13 hours and leave the finish line on your own two feet, and not in the ambulance. It turns out that in addition to work, you need to train at least 2 hours a day, 7 days a week. “But what about serialchiki? - you ask. - How to sit in a bar with a beer? Family? Children? .. ”So I do not know. This remains a mystery to me. In short, a triathlon cannot be practiced from time to time. In this case, there is no question of any results, you just won't even finish the distance.
')
The next aspect is the number of technical gadgets needed. Among the triathletes known formula: any gadget should be N + 1 piece, where N is such that N + 1 <M, and M is the number of pieces of equipment at which you are expelled from the house. In swimming, in principle, everything is quite sparing. We need a pool for training, swimming trunks, goggles, balls, flippers, snorkel, and wetsuit. A wetsuit is optional, but desirable if the start is held in cold water. But the most important thing is that it improves your pace by an average of 5-10 seconds per hundred meters. Wetsuit provided by the company. I tried it in the pool. It looked, probably, very strange - the dude in a tight rubber jumpsuit cuts circles in a usual 25-meter pool among impressively floating grandmothers.
For running, special running shoes are required. Still, run 42 km in what did not work out. It requires a good shape that should be light, it should breathe and sweat. Someone sticks the nipples with a plaster, because bad clothes begin to literally wash off their blood. We had no problems here. The company LANIT provided us with excellent trisyuts (these are such special clothes for triathlon).
Well, the most technically difficult stage is cycling. Here, in addition to the bike itself, we need bicycle shoes, contact pedals, a helmet and bikes (and better a helmet-drop with a visor), a hydration and power system, racing tires, racing tires, a repair kit in case of a puncture, etc.
The third important aspect is the elements of the passage of the distance itself. There are so many of them that at some point the head starts to spin and hands fall. Before swimming it is necessary to smear with a special ointment, so that the wetsuit does not rub in the neck, it is necessary to study the track well so as not to get lost and properly swim all the buoys. You need to be able to quickly remove the wetsuit and fasten everything you need for the cycle stage (shoes, helmet, goggles), then run with the bike through the transit zone, quickly climb on it and run on shoes with contact pedals. You need to eat right on the track, and at the end of this stage, quickly change into all running and jerk at the marathon.
For the relay, everything is easier, of course - in the first transit zone the swimmer is already waiting for a dressed cyclist, he simply removes the chip from his irresponsible colleague and leaves for his stage. In the second transit zone, the runner acts in the same way with the cyclist and rushes to his marathon.
Using the right of the organizer, I chose for myself the shortest swimming stage. It was necessary to swim almost 4 km. Do not swim at all or for a long time stupidly did not suit me, so I turned to swimming coach Kristina Kochetkova . Not paying attention to the critical eye and the words "you want too fast a result," I began to prepare. As a result, since the beginning of July, I sailed an average of 13 km per week (4 water training + GPP in the form of parallel preparation for the Race of Heroes).
My swimming stage was supposed to last a little over an hour, and Dmitri Sidelnikov was the most “lucky” because his cycle step was to take about six hours. To structure the training, he decided to use the Gran Fondo New York training plan 100 miles from Tim Cusick (via TrainingPeaks). On average, Dima rolled on 335 km a week. Relatives have forgotten him a little over these three months, and the neighbors are almost used to the constant hum of home cyclists.
Anton Starshov was responsible for running. In principle, he does not like to run classic running races like marathons, as he prefers trails, rogains. But he had to change his training for the marathon a bit.
At some point, it became all very stressful. Too much load, too much detail. Everyone has his own business. Difficult logistics. A well-known triathlete Andrei Bruhankov helped us psychologically . He also told how to eat on the cycle stage. The fact is that there is another ambush. If you don’t eat at all, after a couple of hours, you will use up all the energy reserves of the body, and this will end your race immediately and ingloriously. On the other hand, if you take steaks with you and try to eat them at the 90th kilometer, the best that can happen to you is that you simply cannot eat them.
For Dima, an entire nutritional program was developed, which consisted of a set of solid bars (they can be eaten first, when the body still takes solid food) and beautiful gels with the taste of fresh clay (when you can only pour something inside). Also for Dima, Paracetamol and salt pills were stored (in case he has muscle contractions or they get sick). According to our plan, he had to disconnect after completing his stage, but not before that!
Race ... no ... RACE!
It all started at 7:20 in the morning. I had to swim 3.84 km in Imereti Bay.
For obvious reasons, I have the least pictures. I ran a little over the pontoon, ...
... jumped into the water and swam two laps of 1,940 meters (in the photo - not me, but I jumped about the same).
After the first transit zone, we were the seventh among the men's teams.
Dima (in the photo) immediately and imperceptibly for me took the chip on T1, grabbed the bike and rushed to the track of his dream. Here he is still fresh and photogenic.
Dima overcame two laps 90 km from Adler towards Krasnaya Polyana. He definitely had something to look at. In the first round on the descent, Dima, according to him, reworked - he had to rest a little more, and he, with joy, broke into all the money and with a high pulse. In the second round, in the region of 140 km, he was turned off on the hill itself and he was arriving exclusively on moral and volitional.
The result of our race was largely determined by the result of Dima, since his stage is the most technically difficult, the most traumatic and the longest. Therefore, we were most worried about him. Think about it, at some point he was driving on the highway at a speed of more than 60 km / h!
Then there was T2. Anton rushed forward. Before us at that time there were eight teams. During the relay, I shouted to Anton that SIBUR was 1 minute ahead of us. The nearby girls from SIBUR started to giggle that we had already lost, but Dima and I were sure that Anton would definitely overtake their runner.
Anton quickly caught up with the SIBUR and URANIUM teams. The start was great. We again became the seventh.
For the run, the weather was pretty hard, it was very hot. Unfortunately, Anton took a little salt pills, and his legs began to move in the second half of the race. One of the teams in front of us went out of the race (the runner from 1001 Triton Caspian looked just awful, barely dragged his feet, but did not give up until he was taken away in an ambulance). We were sixth with a three-minute lead in front of the URANIUM team.
At that moment it seemed to me that we could not be the fifth, since the PRO TRENERS team was significantly ahead of us. But in the end something happened to their runner too, and we entered the top five. Now our task was to keep this place.
Here is what Anton himself writes: “The support group informed me that in 30 seconds my opponent was catching up. It was necessary to keep the advantage of another 5 km. The finish was fascinating: 200 meters before the end of the distance my leg reduces, and a group of runners walks around me. I feel that among them should be my opponent. Through the pain of doing the finish spurt, bypass them all. The result - overtook the guy for 12 seconds and kept the fifth place ”.
We finished together. Pay attention to the faces - it is immediately obvious that Dima and I are true athletes and we do everything with pleasure.
But for Anton it is clear that running no longer brings him such pleasure as us ;-).
Finally
It’s just that without training you can’t even go through the 226 relay in the triathlon, and it’s just a cosmos to do the full distance alone.
The race itself is another thriller! This is not "dived to you, and after 25 seconds it is clear who won and who lost." The race lasts 10 hours or more, and there is a constant struggle. Chances are good that something goes wrong and you drop out of the race.
As a result, we were able to get to the fifth place among the men's relay teams. But this happened, among other things, because the two teams left the race.
And, of course, a triathlon is not a team building. This is not a glamorous party with beer and dancing, after which the staff “get to know each other better”. After this, you understand exactly who is who in this life, and are you ready to go at least with these people to explore, even to the IT project, at least to ...
Thanks to the company LANIT for help in organizing, for support and for the most beautiful equipment in the world. As you know, an ugly plane cannot fly well!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/434722/
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