It's not all about the swim, bike, run

Last Saturday I learned a great lesson. After embarking on a 3 hour tour...yes it was a 3 hour tour and we came out alive....kinda, well during this 40 mile bike I learned a lot about my athletic ability. I had always heard about how important it was to get carbs and calories in your system after hitting the 45min/1 hour mark. I guess I was just lazy that morning or thought it wouldn't happen to me. Hehe wow was I wrong, the beginning of our ride was great. It was an easy ride and we had a good draft line going so I was content. At one point the advance riders just broke away in a dead sprint, no clue why I just remember looking down then up then down and then up again and they were gone. John and I stayed together untill we hit a fork in the road..we were lost haha the guys had sprinted off so fast that they managed to lose us. Well we caught back up with Shanin and he led us in the right direction to DQ. After our stop in the DQ parking lot is where I went down hill, I couldn't notice my exhaustion in like just yawing and stuff, but I did notice it in my performance...every thing was going downhill, my avg speed, my hill climbs, my gears...just all around bad. I was exhausted when I got home and just loaded up on protein, water, sodium and calories. I knew my problem was nutreitional so I went to the internet...ugh way to much info. But after consulting my tri coach, hammernutrition.com and Melissa (the one person that just made it simple for even me to understand). I tried what she suggested last night which was a meal 2-3 hours before my workout that had a carb to protein ratio of about 4:1. This worked AMAZING...my performance was top notch we went for a 3 mile run straight to a 15 mile bike back to a 2.5 mile run. And I wasn't the least bit exhausted, and we kept a pretty fast pace. This was a key running workout is what Shanin told me. You warm up with your run, exhaust yourself on the bike then go back to the run and make that run faster than your first. We did just that and it felt great, my running legs after my bikes have come back much faster, probably within 3-4 mins last night. I never really needed any Gu last night, my bike though I packed water and high concentrated electrolyte mix and just sipped on that. I have to say this was a huge turning point for me last night, great fun.