Triathlon: Surprising Strengths and Weaknesses

I'm now two weeks into training for the triathlon. Apart from my body being very tired, it's been going great! Here are the stats for last week: Running: 8 miles, Biking: 88 miles, Swimming: 4700 yds. Going into the program, I was already in pretty good shape. But this is definitely a ramp up from what I was used to.

Going into the program, I was already averaging 30-60 miles per week on my bike. Although I was doing some running and swimming, it was at most 1x/week. Thus I expected the bike to be my strength. However, this weekend we just completed our last time trial that we'll use to divide people into groups for our organized workouts. What I found was that the bike is actually my weak area. Out of 42 people, I came in 3rd on the run, 4th in the swim, and 7th on the bike.
For our workouts, we've been doing shorter distance, high intensity workouts for our team workouts. The program has us focusing on longer distance, low intensity, base building for our individual workouts. For the base building, we are aiming to do the workouts at 75% max intensity. As our coach said, if you can feel burn in your muscles, you're working to hard. The goal for these workouts is to build up an aerobic base, not to build muscle mass. This was by far the hardest thing to get used. Like most people, I've always tried going as hard as I could in all of my workouts. After a long ride, it just doesn't feel right seeing that I only average 13.5 mph.

The fundraising is off to a good start. I'd like to thank my mother for a very generous donation of $750. I'd also like to thank FedEx/Kinkos for donating copying services for my fundraising letter.

Lastly, this is a good article I recently came across in the San Diego Union Tribune which talks about one girl's fight against leukemia and her association with Team in Training.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060602/news_lz1s2herdream.html