38 bottles of beer

This afternoon we bottled the beer that we brewed two weeks ago, a Scotch ale. A taste test was conducted (of course) and the beer is quite drinkable already. The previous two brews haven't tasted all that great prior to bottle conditioning. They improved a lot with age, and so we have high hopes for this beer.

We also tested the final gravity and with this and the original gravity reading (taken before fermenting), we determined that the beer has an alcohol content of 6.1%. Not too bad!

We ended up with 38 bottles: 10 tallies (750ml) and 28 regular size bottles (330ml).

10km

I ran 10km this morning, my longest run to date. As far as I can recall, I've never run this far before in my life and certainly not in the last couple of months of training. My previous longest run was 7km, and that I did on Thursday.

The 10km run is a milestone for two reasons: (1) it's the length of the run in an Olympic distance triathlon, and (2) it's the length of the run I'm planning to do at the Gold Coast on July 1. Now that I know I can manage the distance (even though I didn't feel all that good), I can go ahead and sign up for the race.

I was pretty happy with my time (1 hour, 5 minutes, 11 seconds), as it was very close to what I was expecting (1 hour, 5 minutes). This is pretty slow compared to most runners, but I'm just happy that I made the distance.

New bike, new bike, new bike!

I bought a road bike today.

It's an Apollo Raceline Giro, which is the model in the middle of 2007 Raceline series range of road bikes. I got it from Cycleworld. They sponsor the tri club based at the aquatic centre at Olympic Park, with whom I have gone to running training a couple of times. It also turns out that a couple of the guys from Cycleworld started their own tri club recently, and by joining it I got a 15% discount off everything. Besides the bike, I bought shoes, a bike computer, lights, a wind trainer and a bike carrier.

Anyway, I won't go into all the details about the bike. You can follow the link and read all about it if you're interested.

47 minutes 51 seconds

Well, I've done my first triathlon (a little one anyway) and I did it in under an hour. I came 4th out of 7 in my age group, 18th out of 23 females and 71st out of 80 overall. Things didn't go exactly how I thought they would though.

I thought the swim (300m) would be the easiest but of the three legs of the race, it felt the worst. The water was pretty cold, so I'm not sure if that made a difference. Most people seemed to finish before me. I got out of the water and my legs were like jelly. In training, I try to mostly using my arms for propulsion and just kick gently for balance. I think in the excitement of the race and in worrying about being left behind, I did quite a bit more kicking than usual. From the swim exit, I couldn't even run into transition. I was out of the water after about 4min 45sec, but then the transition took ages. It was hard to put socks and shoes on with such wobbly legs! My official swim split was 7min 17sec.

At least I managed to run out with my bike, and I managed to ride it. I feel now that I could have gone harder on the bike leg (10km). Lots of people passed me, but only two of them weren't on road bikes (and both of them were male). I know from having ridden a road bike once, they go faster than a mountain bike with the same effort. My split was 24min 32sec, which is an average speed of 24.46 km/h. Not too bad.

My second transition was much quicker than the first, because I wore the same shoes for the ride and the run (3km). This may be the reason why I had pins and needles in my feet, which lasted up until about the turn around point (about 1.3km supposedly). I felt like I was running slowly, but that may just be how the legs feel when you get off the bike. My run split was 16min 2sec. This seems a little too good to be true, as that is an average speed of 11.23 km/h (5.20 min/km). I don't see how I could sustain that speed for that distance given what I've done in training. I suspect the course wasn't long enough.

Overall, it was a good experience and I plan to continue training and to do future triathlons (though I was thinking the complete opposite after the swim). The race highlighted a few things:

1. I need to do a lot more swimming training if I'm going to do a 1500m swim leg,
2. I should get a tri suit so I can skip the putting on shorts step after the swim,
3. I need to get a road bike and proper cycling shoes that don't make my feet numb,
4. I need to get used to running without socks (I may need to get race shoes).

In short, I need to spend quite a bit of money (and train hard, but that's a given).

Scotch Ale

It's hard to balance an interest in triathlon training with an interest in beer, which is why it's been a while since we last did a home brew. However, today we finally did our third, and finally did what we had planned to do first, a Scotch Ale. We're still keeping it simple and using malt extract as the base for the beer (as opposed to doing a mash), but this time we added the hops ourselves and used some grains for flavour. Here are the ingredients that went into our brew:

• Unhopped pale liquid malt extract
• Crystal malt
• Chocolate malt
• Brown sugar (imparts a rum-like flavour says the recipe)
• Fuggle hop pellets
• Safale S-04 yeast

The wort is dark in colour, quite hoppy and very, very sweet. Actually, it's pretty awful at the moment. Though from previous experience I've found this is not a great indicator (to me anyway) of what the beer is going to taste like.

Training

This is in response to a question about what training I've been doing in the lead up to this novice triathlon. I started training about five weeks ago, after watching my brother, Andrew, and my friend, Toby, complete the Mooloolaba Triathlon (Olympic distance, i.e. 1500m swim, 40km ride, 10km run). I've mostly been concentrating on running, because I've never done it much before. When I started I could run for about 10 minutes before I had to stop. My longest run to date has been 6km (which took me just under 40 minutes, I'm pretty slow).

I've been doing some riding too. I should be fine for the novice event, but before anything more serious, I'm going to have to put in quite a bit of work (and spend some money too). I currently have a mountain bike. I'm going to have to get a road bike. I've ridden a road bike once and found it's quite a different experience. It was also the first time I used cleats (I only fell down once).

I was going swimming, but I haven't been for about two and a half weeks. I plan to go this weekend. Swimming is probably my strongest of the three disciplines. I still plan to take some stroke correction classes at some point in the future though.

On top of that, I go to the gym and do weights and pilates classes. I keep reading and being told that core strength is important for runners, and I imagine it's important in cycling and swimming too.

This probably makes it fairly clear that my sights are set beyond the novice triathlon. Although I reserve the right to decide I'm not up to it closer to the time, I'm aiming to do the Noosa Triathlon on November 4 this year as my first Olympic distance event.