Mission Enduracool instant cooling towel

The good folks over at Mission sent me one of their Enduracool instant cooling towels to try out and given that we are in the grip of summer the timing couldn’t have been better! This is what they say on their website:

Mission’s™ Enduracool™ is made from a proprietary performance fabric that instantly cools when wet with water or sweat, wrung out and snapped in the air to activate the sustained cooling properties. Use during or after competition to provide sustained cooling on your neck, head or other hot zones.

How It Works: A revolution in cooling, this performance fabric absorbs and retains sweat and water, circulating the molecules while regulating the rate of evaporation to ensure an instant cooling effect against the skin for hours, without feeling wet.

In other words it’s best described as scientific voodoo! Well not quite…here is a sweaty guy to explain the technology:

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More importantly than how it works is does it work and I can confidently say hell yeah! After several hot runs I have popped it out of its plastic tube, soaked it in water and given it a “snap” (take each end in your fingers and pull sharply) and low and behold instant cool. Now I choose the word cool (as I am sure Mission did) specifically because it is that and not “cold” and in fact that is just about perfect to drop your temperature without having that harsh effect cold can have. After each run I simply air dried it and rolled it back up and put it back in the tube, voila!

Inexpensive but effective…almost the perfect combination (only the addition of bacon somewhere would make it perfect) the towel is available in various colors and sizes and for diehard NBA fans has a branded version too. You can purchase it directly from Mission through their website or via Amazon and other online outlets

Best of all I have one to giveaway! It’s the usual format; doing multiple things will get you multiple entries:

• Leave a comment on this post will get you one
• Like Mission on Facebook gets you another
• Follow Mission on Twitter is good for a third
• Finally copy and tweet the following will get you another possible three; one tweet a day for three days, for six in total! “I just entered the @quadrathon @MissionAthlete #Enduracool towel giveaway, you can too here http://bit.ly/Rhcr3g”

I will draw a winner on Sunday and mail if off out next week.

This towel was provided free of charge by the good folks at Mission. See previous gear reviews under the Product Reviews tab above. If you have a product you’d like reviewed, contact me at quadrathon@gmail.com.

July; a month of “I”!

Another low mileage month but with a couple of valid reasons, Injury and Ironman 70.3 Vineman.

I started the month with an injury to my knee; I dug in deep getting it treated and despite seeing my Chiro 7 times in 16 days it really wasn’t until halfway through the week before Vineman that it felt like it was behind me. It’s still not 100% right but now it’s a case of rolling out the scar tissue that built up and getting it stronger again.

Vineman turned out far better that I hoped for on the Swim front and all things considered the Bike went well with just a tough Run that I managed to finish with a fair bit of walking. After the race I took 4 days off and then hit the pool and the bike with training officially starting a full week after.

The focus for August is building back a stronger running base and working “as always” on my form in the pool with one eye to endurance, my swims, right now, have an average of 2500 yards and that’s only going to get longer. I am heading off to Canada for the second week which coincides with a down week but I’ll be taking my bike and hope to spend some time on the IM Canada course as well as meet up with some folks who I have known forever but never met in person! Lots of fun times ahead!

So here are the digits:

• Swim: 9.55miles 16,608 yards
• Bike: 184 miles
• Run: 63.15 miles

IMAZ training Week 1

Well Week 1 of IMAZ training is in the bag, very tidily given my Virgo tendencies it was an exact 10 hours! This is the training times/distances, the rest was made up of foam rolling and stretching…yeah I am actually doing it, yay me! An easy start to a plan and looking a couple of weeks out things soon ramp up. A couple of highlights was the second swim of the week which went really well, here is the Garmin data; there are a few phantom laps which is usually a sign of poor form, although drills can mess with it too.I also had a great mid week long run of 11 miles, which is probably the second longest run this year after the Half Marathon I ran in January and the Half I ran at Vineman! My running has a long way to go but I was pleased with the consistency of my pace.I am thinking about my nutrition planning and trying some new things as the rides and runs get longer; I recently received some free samples of an electrolyte called Hi5 worked really well so I have ordered some of that. For fueling I am going to try Carbo Pro and see how it sits, I have heard a lot of good things about it and now is the time to start trying these things out

Also for the shorter duration runs I am trying to get back onto the local trails for the short term to build up all those little stabilizer muscles that are ignored when running on the road. I hope this will help with my knee long term which is still not quite right.

There’s 16 more weeks to go, but this is a good start.