It’s become a little bit of a habit now to post up a picture of my bike ready to go. Only needs it’s race number on and it’s ready. I’m feeling nervous about this race which is normally a good sign as it means I feel I should race well. That said, I need to keep it in check. Before New Zealand this year I was horribly nervous and didn’t sleep a wink. Don’t want that this time and I keep reminding myself that I’m ready for this, I do it for fun, it’s a Time Trial … all things that have a calming effect on me.

Sleep is something I’ve been getting a lot of recently. 10 hours last night and

[it’s now a day later. At that point I decided to check my average sleep for November and get a graph of my sleep from my training diary and in doing so found that I’d lost the past 8 days changes to files due to a mess up with Apple iDisk. Seriously upsetting … meant I couldn’t face going to the opening dinner last night and the briefing afterwards which is a first for me.]

So… I had 10 hours sleep Thursday night and in November averaged 9.1 hours per night. Here’s a graph of my sleep for the past year:

This hadn’t really dawned on me till recently but through the summer my weekly average sleep rarely got above 8 hours per night and on several occasions got below 6 hours. Through July and August I was busy moving in to a new house and in September I got engrossed in building a new training database which saw me having lots of late nights but my motivation got me up most mornings to swim at the cost of sleep. In September my average sleep was a mere 6.6 hours per night. I do wonder whether this contributed to me just not having an oomph at Kona.

I’m hoping so because it you look at my sleep for the past two months it’s been great. I should at least be rested.

The nerves are kicking in today but I must admit that a big part of that is due to all the loss of data on my computer and me trying to work out how I’m going to manage my files in future to avoid it. It took my mind off the race which can be viewed as a good or bad thing … so may as well take the former.

I’m feeling nerves about the race for sure and I’m never really sure why I do. It’s a fun day and I’ve done it loads. I feel a little worried that I won’t live up to my expectations and I feel a little pressure to match last years bike split which would be good going. So here’s my hopes / guesstimates for the race:

Swim: 55 / T1: 3 / Bike: 4:50 / T2: 4 / Run: 3:30 TOTAL TIME ~ 9:22

I would be very pleased with that but as with Kona the most important thing is the run. I need to get my running back if I really want to perform next year.

Now to rack…