Today's Ride

The cockpit of my bike: Pump, heart rate monitor, phone with mapping software, and areobars.

Today I repeated the ride to Glendalough I did a couple of weeks ago. This was my last long bike ride before the race, and now tapering starts. I watched my heart rate carefully and pushed as hard as I could without jeopardizing the later part of today's ride. If I can keep that pace during the race, I should be able to make the cut-off time I'm worried about. Barely.
Going through Dublin into the Wicklow mountains involves a lot of red lights and stops. I stopped my watch during those interruptions and also when I had to eat, with the justification that I wont have them during the race. But, of course, it skews the results. I'm a little bit more confident than two weeks ago that I will make the cutoff, but not by much.
At the race I will have better roads, volunteers to guide me and stop other traffic, a faster bike with faster tires --- and a marathon to run afterwards. My legs were pretty much toast after today's ride...
I am happy that I found a route that mimics the elevation profile I will encounter in Zürich.

Elevation profile for today's ride

The two-loop elevation profile for Ironman Zürich

As you can see the total amount of climbing is about the same. The distances in the figures are wrong: I did 90 miles today, and the Ironman will be 112 miles. So, today's ride should be representative for what to expect in three weeks.
I mentioned before that I am not doing this to beat someone's record. The goal for me is to finish. I'm doing this, and the shorter races I have done before, to motivate me to exercise. In some sense, when I step to the starting line in three weeks, I have already won. I put in all the work and burned thousands of calories, improved my cardiovascular health, lowered my resting heart rate to around 40 beats per minute, lost some weight, and improved my cholesterol ratio. All that before 7 O'clock Sunday morning, July 10th!
To celebrate and replenish my sodium levels (and because it's a cool brand), I had those yesterday:

With a brand name like that, what could possibly go wrong ;-)

(In the US, Honky Dory means everything is alright.)