Professional / Triathlete

A small home improvement project

2011-11-14T19:05:00.001-08:00

When I was shopping for my new townhouse, one feature that I wanted was “a rooftop deck with a nice view.” Somehow this morphed into “a rooftop deck with a nice view that could support a hot tub.” When I found this rather awesome place on Capitol Hill with a large rooftop deck, I asked the builder whether the roof could support a hot tub. He said no.

I don’t like “no.”

I like “what would it take to make X happen.”

So being a bit of a geek, I turned to the internet. Specifically, I found Kevin Bauman’s rather thorough post about what it takes to install a large aquarium, from a structural engineer’s point of view. Armed with this newfound knowledge, I went back to the builder with a proposal. He offered to talk to his own structural engineer and agreed to have the modifications built into my rooftop as a condition of the sale. Win.

While shopping for tubs, I quickly decided that a used tub would be a *much* better value than a brand new tub. At first I thought of getting a free tub from a friend who doesn’t use theirs… but I started wondering about mechanical reliability and about delivery and realized that a reconditioned tub from a dealer would be a much better choice. I shopped around for awhile on Craigslist and talked to a few dealers. I also checked out some new tubs in a showroom. I eventually decided on a well-kept Hot Springs Sovreign, as it had the right combination of appropriate size, insulation, and expected reliability.

Next up, I needed to figure out how to get a tub onto the roof. The stairways aren’t particularly wide, and each has a 90- or 180-degree bend. The building suggested that I get a few guys with ropes and sticks, and that I drag it up the side of the building. My dad suggested a block and tackle with some pulleys, but we weren’t sure how we would counterweight the crane arm. So I found a few guys on Craigslist who deliver hot tubs for a living and learned that they often hire a crane service.

I talked to four or five crane services before finding a guy who would/could take on my job. His truck was small enough to avoid the trees and power lines near my house, but wasn’t big enough to reach all the way to my rooftop. My townhouse is the third one in from the street. So I asked the builder about craning the tub onto the first house, and decided to hand-carry the tub over from there.

I drew up the awesome diagram to the left, took a picture of it with my phone, made a few annotations in MS-Paint, and sent it to each of the crane guys. You’ll note that there are two half-ways to navigate on the way, and that we have an 8.5’-wide section and a 7’-wide section. The hot tub is 6.'5’ wide by 8’ long by 31” deep. Fun times. Luckily I have enough good friends and tasty beer to make such work feasible.

So… house, check. Tub, check. Crane, check. Awesome friends, check.

After one last-minute reschedule from the crane guy, we had everything lined up to go this past Saturday. I was pleasantly surprised with how easily we go through that part.

On Friday I tried to reserve a good parking spot for the crane by moving my roommate’s car. I also borrowed a few construction cones:

The first Really Exciting Moment was when the crane truck arrived, with the tub on the flatbed:

After getting the truck in place, the crane guy attached the hook and lifted the tub off the flatbed:

The tub was hanging a bit lopsided, so we set it on the sidewalk and rebalanced a little:

The next Really Exciting Moment was when the tub cleared the railing onto the roof:

We “caught” the tub on the roof and carefully placed it onto the roof, with maybe an inch to spare on each side. Then we carried it over the first railing, turned it onto its side, and slide it on carpet & towels to my railing. Yes, I forgot to ask the Hot Tub Guy to bring one of his dollies. He had so many of them at the showroom…

A hearty THANK YOU to Aaron, Zach, Dave, Susan, Ellick, Ted, Stephanie and even Peter (although he napped during most of the hard work). With ten friends helping out, the tub didn’t even feel all that heavy! Although if you ask Zach, that’s b/c I wasn’t carrying my fair share of the load.

Finally we carried the tub over the last railing and moved it into position on my rooftop. It was time to celebrate with a few beers!

The next step was to get the electrical setup finalized. I’d had the builder’s electrician run 220V 40A wiring up to the roof b/c that’s what was readily available from the stove circuit. 50A would have been better, but we’re going to try running the tub in 110V 20A mode for awhile first, as 220V requires $500 worth of extra hardware on the roof. Anyways, the Hot Tub Guy’s uncle is an electrician and he showed up in the evening to finish the wiring job.

Meanwhile we filled the tub up with water so that we could plug ‘er in once the wiring was ready. The tub takes about 24 hours to heat up with the 110V circuit, so we had to wait through Sunday night for the tub to warm up. I am almost home now and ready to test the tub myself, but my roommate tells me that the tub was nice and toasty at mid-day today:

San Francisco Triathlon at Treasure Island

2011-07-13T23:15:00.001-07:00

After a fun-but-slow day at Monroe, it didn’t take much effort for Andrew and Lauren to convince me to jump into this past Saturday’s ITU race in San Francisco. I’ve raced there five or six times before and I <3 Tri-California.

I was a bit disappointed to swim in the back group at Monroe, so I actually swam five times in the two weeks between races – two hard swims with Dave in Lake Sammamish and three easy pool swims in three different cities/states – w Rusty & Lauren at the Bellevue Club, alone at Highland Park pool in Pittsburgh, then w Kenny, Andrew and Lauren at the Cal Berkeley pool before the race. Still not a lot of volume, by any means, but more than I’d been doing!

I didn’t get any real biking in as I spent much of the two-week interlude traveling to see my sister in Pittsburgh. I did ride around town a bit on an old road bike that I borrowed, and I went for two easy runs. Mellow training.

So, on to How It Went Down:

Swim: Before the race I told myself that I should still be a mid-pack swimmer. I was correct. I swam relaxed/fluid/strong most of the way and exited the water 31st out of 50, in a group of about 15. There were twenty athletes ahead of our group and 15 behind our group, so it is safe to say I was in the middle. I was happy to see Manny Huerta next to me as we exited the water, as he’s had solid World Cup swims before and I hoped that his presence meant that we were in a decent position.

T1 was uneventful, except for running about 10 meters past my bike and having to double-back for it.

Once onto the bike, Manny and I easily got into a group of 8 or 10 riders that was forming ahead of us. After negotiating the first few corners, I went to put my left shoe on and disaster struck. I got my foot about halfway into the shoe and then accidentally unclipped the shoe from the pedal. Now I had the shoe half-on my foot but not firmly attached to anything. It is hard to fix such an issue while riding! Somehow I managed to get the shoe back onto my foot, but I lost my group. I dug deep and caught up to a smaller group of riders, only to have issues getting my other shoe on, too. The little things… so I lost another group and tried to ride smart/steady/relaxed as I knew there were still plenty of riders behind me.

I rode with a few different groups over the last 5 laps, and found that I didn’t have much margin for error out there – likely a sign of low bike fitness. If a guy ahead of me hit a traffic cone and flipped it up in the air, I lost the group. If we caught a sketchier rider and he disrupted our cornering and rotation, I lost the group. Lame. It was almost like I was looking for excuses out there. Gotta work on that.

T2 was interesting again, as I apparently threw my helmet into the wrong bin. The official tried to help me and yelled after me, but I had a hard time figuring out what I’d done wrong in the heat of the moment.

I was happy to not have debilitating leg cramps on the run (yay! better nutritional prep this week!!) but I was disappointed to have a bit of stomach discomfort for the first 6-7km. I just couldn’t push the pace that I wanted. This was actually a rather familiar feeling, and this tells me that I have something very specific to work on during my preparation for future races. Who cares what kind of open 10K you are capable of running right now if your angry stomach or crampy legs won’t let you run. If I make it out to Myrtle Beach in October or to the mythical South American Double in January (Vina del Mar and La Paz) then I should do a bit more analysis into what drinks, concentrations and timing are causing such issues. I went with a rather straightforward approach at TI, but it looks like I need to tweak that approach.

After the race, we had a fun evening in Berkeley with some of the athletes and friends. I left SFO with a bit more inspiration to increase the priority of triathlon training within my busy life, and to put on a more impressive showing at one of the fall or winter races. We’ll see what life brings!

Monroe Pan American Cup

2011-07-08T21:03:00.001-07:00

This past Saturday I had the privilege of racing in front of friends and family at the ITU Monroe Pan American Cup. Thanks to everybody who came out to watch the race – dad, mom, Bob, Katie, Andrew, Aaron, Zach, Vaibhav, Dave, Dave, Jen, Tracey, Kalpita, Peter, and anybody else who I’m not thinking of right now!! It was awesome for my friends and family to finally get to see one of these races in person.

I knew going in that my fitness might not be quite what it has been in past years. I’ve intentionally de-prioiritized spending time on triathlon training as I’ve focused more on my work at Microsoft and on getting GeekFit off the ground and on being there a it more for my friends and family. That said, I knew that my combination of high-intensity work at GeekFit, lower stress about training, more recovery time, more sleep, occasional hard efforts in all three disciplines and the “home crowd” could allow me to have one of my best races yet.

So how did it go down?

Swim: I got out well, but then faded rather quickly and settled onto some comfortable feet. I tried to “swim smart” and only made one bridging attempt, when the guy ahead of me lost the guy ahead of him. I was slightly disappointed to have exited the water in the last group, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that there were guys near me to ride with!

Bike: my hamstrings were *immediately* a mess on the bike. I struggled to get my first shoe on and gave up trying to get the second. I bridged to the three guys ahead of me and finally caught them 2-3km into the race. Then I tried to let my legs recover enough to allow me to hold my right leg in the 12 o’clock position and get my shoe on without inducing a hamstring cramp. Our group of four became five and then seven and eventually eleven. We worked well together at times and not-so-well at other times. My legs came back a little and I was able to surge when needed, but I never really felt “strong” on the bike. With a lap to go I started thinking about making my usual “1km to go” move to set up a good T2, but I blew it. Another guy went first and I thought about following but just ended up on the front of the group. Then I slipped to the back as I tried to get out of the wind. So I entered T2 last in my group. Fail.

Run: I knew that my run fitness was very good coming into this race. I PR’ed in the 5k back in March and I’ve had some strong track workouts. I immediately started passing guys from my bike group and was feeling good until about the 1km mark. Then my quads started twitching a bit and I knew that I could be in trouble. I tried to drink as much water as I could at each aid station, but my gait was getting roughed up by the cramps and I lost a bit of speed. I loosened up around 3km and was ecstatic. It was time to show off my running legs! I resumed reeling in the guys ahead of me… for about 500m… then my race might as well have been over. My quads locked up so badly that my “run” was now more of a shuffle. It wasn’t pretty. At one point I even tried to walk. I was almost resigned to DNF-ing… but then I shuffled a bit longer and my legs sort of loosened up. I tried to just cruise the last 5k in order to not lock up again, but I was very disappointed to see how many guys I coulda/woulda/shoulda been able to run down with even a halfway decent run split. In fact, I probably could have snuck into the top twenty and the top half of the race, which would have been very encouraging.

All of this told me that I still have enough fitness to be worth a trip to San Francisco for the San Francisco Triathlon at Treasure Island. It took me awhile to get this entry posted so I’m actually on the porch at my homestay right now. Kenny Rakestraw and his roommates were gracious enough to put up me, Andrew Lockton and Lauren Goss all at the same time. We’re gonna rock it on the island tomorrow! Whoop whoop!!

Fremont 5k & Briefcase Relay

2011-06-15T22:33:00.001-07:00

My friend Zach convinced me to join his Fremont Briefcase Relay team this year. For those of you who aren’t from Seattle, the Fremont 5k is a popular Friday evening 5k with a beer garden. But the unique part of the event is the 5-person “briefcase relay,” where you each run 1k while wearing work attire and carrying a briefcase. The briefcase must contain five cans of food that you’ll donate to Solid Ground’s Hunger Action Center after the race.

It didn’t take much convincing to get me to jump in, especially since Zach’s team won last year.

We assembled a solid line-up two weeks ahead of time, but the competitive juices didn’t really start flowing until Zach ran into Carl Winter from Club Northwest at the Wednesday night track workout and Carl started talking smack about his team! For the next 48 hours everybody got psyched!!

The race was very close, with two lead changes and less than five seconds separating the top two teams for nearly the entire race. Zach handed me the briefcase with a decent-but-not-comfortable lead and I dug deep to bring us home.

Our official time was 15:24 and the CNW guys were second in 15:31. Both times were faster than the previous course record of 15:38, set by Zach’s team last year.

Three of us attempted to run the 5k race after the relay. We were all rather thrashed from the relay, but I still managed to find decent enough legs to run a 16:22. I passed two guys in the final 100m. I never thought of myself as much of a sprinter/kicker, so that part was pretty cool!

The winning relay team gets to take home the coveted “Slug Cup.” Click/zoom on the picture below and you can see the ceramic slugs crawling up the base of the trophy. Slug Cup plus Beer Garden equals learning how much beer a Slug Cup can hold!

If you didn’t get to join us in the beer garden or at any of Seattle’s finer bars after the race – keep your eyes peeled, as the Slug Cup will likely be making a few appearances over the course of the next year.

A terrific idea

2011-05-23T20:57:00.001-07:00

Sat 23 April: My good friend Andrew Lockton calls me up to reminisce about one of our favorite races – the Avia Wildflower Long Course Triathlon. Over the course of the conversation, we realize that I don’t have any major plans for the upcoming weekend. Uh oh…

Sun 24 April: I email the good folks at Tri-California to verify that I can still register as an Elite this close to race day. I know that it is poor form to do so, as races like to promote the size and awesomeness of their elite field… but they were still gracious.

Mon 25 April: after a rather productive day at work, I check with my boss about taking Thursday and Friday off

Tue 26 April: I register for the race and cash in a free ticket on Southwest

Wed 27 April: I ride my TT bike for 20 minutes in order to make sure that there are no glaring mechanical issues. I’d been on this bike once since the 2009 Scott Tinley’s Adventures race. I had a long email thread with five friends about whether I’d be better off just riding my road bike at Wildflower, in order to be more comfortable. But in the end we decided that racing is racing and I should bring my fastest bike for that race. Possibly a mistake in my case.

Thu 28 April: fly to San Jose. My bicycle makes it there with me but somehow my suitcase does not. I decide that “Plan B” is to race in a Speedo. Luckily Andrew hasn’t left his house yet and is able to bring some extra clothes for me, too.

Fri 29 April: shakeout ride & run, race meeting, and a perennial favorite: the Elite Introductions. Julie Moss and Bob Babbitt ran the show this time

Sat 30 April: Race Day

As soon as I got away from the San Jose airport and into the rolling hills, I knew I’d made a great decision. The beautiful scenery always brings back a lot of memories of good times on the Tri-California circuit.

I had no idea what to expect on the swim or bike, but I hoped that my run would be solid. I’ve been doing my GeekFit workout regularly to build strength and aerobic capacity within my muscles, and I’ve done just enough swimming to maintain some feel for the water… but my volume was *way* down from previous years. I’d done eight or ten hard bike rides so far this year whereas in past years I’d do at least that many each month. Only my run volume is comparable to past years – mostly at a social pace, with a long run and a workout maybe every other week, on average.

Race mornings are pretty much automatic for me at this point – my bag is already packed, I instinctively know how much warm-up I need, I can socialize a bit while still being one of the first athletes into the water for swim warm-up.

Swim: I surprised myself by getting out quickly and sitting near the front of the race as we approached the first turn buoy. Things broke up a bit more over the first 1000m but I swam smart and tucked in behind another guy for the second 1000m rather than continuing to swim side-by-side. I was pleasantly surprised to exit the water in roughly 12th place.

Bike: I tried to build into the ride and to just enjoy myself. I stayed in aero on the flats & downhills but wasn’t shy about sitting on the tops for the many climbs. I didn’t worry about trying to keep up with riders who passed me. I just tried to enjoy the ride. Andrew caught me around mile 37 and we rode side-by-side until Nasty Grade, cracking a few jokes as we rode. We were totally out-of-contention at this point. I’d never rode side-by-side in a race for this long before, and it was a fun change of pace. (BTW- such positioning is completely legal in races that are following the USAT Elite rules.)

Run: I really hoped to light up the run after running 16:01 for 5k on the track back in March… but my legs and back felt *terrible* in the first few miles of the Wildflower run. The felt so bad that I thought I might DNF. But I managed to work through the tightness and crampiness and soreness and settled into a good pace, picking off a runner about every half mile for the first 4-6 miles. My quads *hated* any uphills or downhills, but I was smooth and comfortable on the flats. Sadly this course has lots of hills! I was probably running low-1:20s pace through 11 or 12 miles, but Wildflower veterans know that the last mile is steeply downhill, and my legs blew apart on that descent. I had to shuffle backwards at times just to make progress, and I got passed back by an athlete who I’d passed four miles earlier. Argh… But eventually I limped over the finish line and was done!

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my friend Jesse Thomas managed to win the race, with Clayton Fettell taking second! Jesse and I volunteer together on the PROTA board of directors and Clayton and I took part in a memorable after-party for last year’s Ishigaki World Cup.

All in all…

It was great to be out there racing again.
It was great to catch up with a bunch of friends.
It was great to be one of the few Seattlites to get a sunburn on April 30th!
It was great to find that my swim is still very respectable in spite of focusing a lot of my energy elsewhere lately.

But I did see the difference between focusing most of one’s energy on racing and focusing most of one’s energy on other things. That said, it was very validating to see that I can still have a fantastic time with a race without needing every moment of my home life to be about racing. We’ll see what the next few months and years hold for me, triathlon-wise, but I do expect to be out there at the Monroe and San Francisco ITU races with a giant smile on my face!

(Thanks to the good folks Brightroom for allowing athletes like me to use their thumbnails on our blogs, free of charge!)

Less is More

2011-03-26T20:33:00.001-07:00

I’ve been rather quiet on the ol’ blog lately, for good reason. I have been a lot less focused on training & racing since September and this blog has always been mostly about triathlon. I managed to burn myself out again, despite what I should have learned from the last three months of 2009. So after Tuscaloosa I decided to back off, mentally and physically, until it felt fun again.

I had a few other good reasons for backing off --

I agreed to take on a new role at Microsoft, and I really want to see what I can accomplish there. I’ve been rather happy with my racing efforts over the years but I’ve often felt like I could do a bit better at my “day job,” so I am making that a higher priority this year.
A friend and I have opened a personal training business called GeekFit. There is enough going on here that I’ll do a more detailed post soon, but let’s just say that GeekFit is giving me a great outlet for my passions for exercise, nutrition, wellness and teaching. If you live or work near Microsoft and you are looking for a smart, efficient workout, let me know!!
General health – I’d been slowly driving myself into the ground with my overly ambitious mix of racing & work & life. I thrive on being busy … but apparently I have limits, too. A lot of the GeekFit research told me that my lifestyle isn’t all that good for my long-term health, so I am trying to “slow down” a little and to reduce stress & inflammation.

An intriguing piece of all of this is that this lower-stress, lower-volume approach might actually lead to faster racing for me in 2011 and beyond. I thought that my past approach was very well-researched and meticulous, but I was probably piling on too much work without letting my body recover enough.

After September, I adopted an approach of “Swim/bike/run when you feel like it, if friends are going, if you’re excited about it. Otherwise, sleep in, go out, rest, work, enjoy life.”

As I hit the end of the calendar year, I started thinking about what a GeekFit-inspired training program would look like: lower volume, very focused intensity, lots of recovery… I’ve been doing our GeekFit strength workout once every 10-14 days and I’ve thrown in some very infrequent but focused/hard swims, bikes and runs. I am still trying to figure out exactly what the right structure should be, but for awhile I did a ten-day cycle with the GeekFit workout on day one, a hard swim+bike+run on day six, and everything else easy/social/optional. I really enjoy hard group workouts and my friend have been on the track a lot, so for the past ~3 weeks I’ve done a (running) track workout every Wednesday while keeping spacing to any GeekFit workouts and to one hard swim (3/21) and one hard ride (3/12 in Austin!).

Recall that in 2010 I would do 1-2 hard runs, a long run, 2-3 hard rides and 2-3 hard swims EVERY WEEK, plus a lot of easy/volume.

I raced a 5K on the track today at the Club Northwest Spring Break Open. I surprised myself by running a smooth, easy 16:01 – eleven seconds faster than my previous PR! The first two miles felt super-easy as I sat behind a guy I knew… then I took off with a mile to go, splitting something like 5:04, 5:16, 5:04 for the three 1600s. (Yes, there is an extra 200 in there somewhere.) I could have run a bit faster in that second mile. I went in with no expectations … but next time I’ll be expecting 15:45!

So I’m training less, sleeping more, focusing more on work, and (running) faster than ever! As for the swim and the bike… well… maybe next weekend?

A lot of stairs

2011-01-27T22:45:00.001-08:00

While in Colorado Springs for a recent PROTA board meeting, I decided to check out the Manitou Incline. Dave Messenheimer had told me about this epic staircase a few years ago and a friend of a friend reminded me about it at a recent dinner party. I think that conversation went something like this:

DUDE: There is this really difficult staircase in C Springs that you should check out on your trip. I used to hike up it in like 50 minutes, but I hear that it’s been done in forty.

ME: Wow, sounds tough. I wonder if I could beat forty. Actually, I think I’ve heard of that before. What’s it called?

DUDE: The Incline. The Manitou Incline.

ME: Hrmmm…

ME (via text message): Hey Mess, what’s the OTC record for the Manitou Incline?

MESS (via text message): I think [Mark] Fretta’s done it in 14:30. My best was more like 16 or 17 minutes.

ME (back at the dinner party): check this out. This guy I know did it in 14:30!!

Yeah, I can be a bit of a punk…

So anyways, after our board meeting I had not-quite-enough time to go run the Incline before taking Jesse & Rebeccah to the airport. Really, they almost missed their flight because of me. And here I said that I would stop being so self-absorbed about training during my “semi-retirement…” but this wasn’t training. This was silly masculine competition.

The Manitou Incline is about 0.9 miles long and has an elevation change of 2000 feet, for an average grade of 42%. I think that the peak grade was in the 60s. My goal was to get up there in twenty minutes. Not even close.

View of the Manitou Incline from Hwy 24, shamelessly stolen from InclineClub.com. I didn’t bring my camera up the hill.

I started off at sort of a “casual jogging” and hoped I could build into it. But after a minute I was already winded. Did I mention that the Incline *starts* at 6600 feet above sea level, and that I live in Seattle? Urgh. It hurt.

I plugged away at a pace that could only be described as “a brisk walk.” The steps were rather uneven at times, and some steps were above knee height, requiring a pretty big step up.

Oh, and there was a lot of snow up there. It was mid-January, after all.

I thought I was going to come close to my goal, only to realize a bit of a “false summit” at 20-21 minutes in.

Incline profile shamelessly stolen from InclineClub.com. See that “false summit” around 0.8 miles…

I finally reached the top at 26:45 and checked my pulse: 160! not bad for a retiree whose heart always runs a bit slowly!

View from the top, shamelessly stolen from InclineClub.com.

The way back down was painful and dangerous. I was short on time to get to the airport, and I think that I slipped and fell at least three times. Not smart. It still took longer to get down than it took to get up. The snow and ice didn’t help. My quads were sore for about four days afterwards. Very sore. Don’t run down stairs.

In other news, I’ll soon reveal my racing plans for 2011… as well as what I’ve been working on during my extended break from high-volume training!

What does it mean?

2010-12-07T23:24:00.001-08:00

Sorry, this post is not about Double Rainbows.

Back in May I stared drafting a blog post in response to an idea that had been hopping around the blogosphere. My friend Mark retweeted that Simon Whitfield tweeted that Anabel Luxford blogged that Kevin Collington tweeted that “the amount of time since an athlete’s last blog post is directly proportional to the probability that he/she is injured.”

I haven’t posted to this blog in almost three months. What does it mean? Is this hypothesis from Mark, Simon, Anabel and Kevin correct in my case? Am I injured? Sort of.

I felt like I was really dragging or struggling a lot through the last 2-3 months of my racing season, especially the final 3-4 weeks. I put in a very solid 6-month block of training from Jan 1st – June 30th, but then life caught up with me and the body started to break down. From late-June through early-October, I attended my dad’s 60th birthday party and my brother’s bachelor party, I was in two weddings and I helped to organize a training camp in Kona… all while continuing to work full-time at Microsoft and racing a few Continental Cups. Some folks can handle such a workload, but this year I couldn’t. I caught a mild head cold at the end of June and it didn’t really go away until early August. There is a lesson in there somewhere!

Through August and September, I felt tired and unmotivated a bit more frequently than I would have liked, but my numbers still looked good in races so I kept at it. Kelowna was a near miss, I coulda/woulda/shoulda been in the money at Pac Grove … but then it all caught up with me at Tuscaloosa and I just had *nothing* out there. So I decided to take a break. A physical and mental break.

After Tuscaloosa, I decided to stop “training” for a little while and to only work out socially. To a bystander it might still look like training, but from my perspective this was a night-and-day difference. Yes I raced half a dozen cyclocross races and a XC running race, and I ran a few 60-mile weeks, but all of that was cases of “Friend X wants to go here and do this, are you in?” So minimal stress. Minimal obligation. Minimal feeling of being overscheduled. It’s been a nice break!

I have plenty of funny stories to tell from the past 2.5 months but most of them have little to do with triathlon! I’ll write about a few of them and about some of my plans for racing/training/life 2011 in a future post as this one is already getting long. But I did want to stick my head up and say “hey” to the outside world again. You’ve not seen the last of me!

Pacific Grove 2010

2010-09-23T22:38:00.001-07:00

About 10 days ago I raced in the Triathlon at Pacific Grove for the fifth time. I took 7th place there in 2009 and I was hoping to have another solid result in 2010 despite a somewhat stronger field.

PG is known for the kelp forest that you have to “swim” through. In fact, that swim leg is commonly referred to as the “kelp crawl.” The kelp can make or break your race, based on a mix of sighting, kelp-specific technique and pure dumb luck.

My swim fitness seemed to be very good in the pool and I hoped to be able to hang onto a fast group of swimmers. As it played out, I couldn’t do that. The kelp can be unforgiving, and I didn’t stay immediately behind the swimmer in front of me. INstead I swam side-by-side with another guy, sharing the draft, and found myself fighting a bit of extra kelp. The margin of error proved to be small with a rather talented group of swimmers, and 500m into the swim I found myself alone.

Things got a bit weird after that. I got tangled in the kelp here and there and took some “interesting” lines to try to avoid it… but I also got a bit demoralized, thinking that any chance of an in-the-money finish had just swam away from me. There is a lesson in there somewhere!

Dan MacKenzie caught up to me during the second lap, as I was swimming laterally across the course in an effort to avoid some kelp. I had made the silly decision to cut a tangent right through a giant kelp patch, then changed my mind. It was a weird swim for me.

Dan & I exited the water in 9th and 10th places but what we saw on the bike course made us believe that we were in 11th and 12th. They pay the top ten, so this is a rather critical difference! Apparently two juniors were riding with two of the elites and we didn’t get a good enough look at them to know the difference.

The bike course was four laps of an out-and-back with a *brutal* headwind on the way out, and a correspondingly rippin’ tailwind on the way back. We didn’t realize quite how strong the wind was and the first 5km were a struggle. I took less than my share of pulls as I felt super-weak whenever I was in front and figured I was doing more harm than good. We cruised during the second 5km and I finally found some legs. About 20km into the bike, we were caught by a group of three. The new bunch of five didn’t work all that well together. Two guys kept skipping pulls and one guy looked like he was about to crash at any moment – either into somebody else or all by himself! So I took a few extra pulls and felt like one of the strongest guys in the group. Coming out of the 25km turnaround, Kenny Rakestraw put in a solid effort and strung out our group. I was sitting second wheel and started feeling like the effort to just stay on his wheel was too much, so I pulled off and tried to go to the back of the group … only to find that there was no more group! The two guys who’d been skipping pulls were maybe 30m behind me and Dan was not even in sight! I sat up for a moment and then tucked in behind the other two … and was surprised to struggle to stay with them. Maybe I stayed with Kenny too long? Maybe I’m just weak? Somehow I got shed off the back and could only watch as the two pull-skippers eventually caught Rakestraw as I pedaled alone. It was amazing how quickly I went from comfortable and in-control to off-the-back. Maybe 3-5 minutes? Very discouraging.

I waited up for Dan and we rode the last lap together. The impetus was gone, however, and our lap split was 60-90 seconds slower than on all of the other laps. Ouch.

I came into this race with a lot of run fitness, too, arguably the best of my career. So I wanted to try for a new PR on the fast (and possibly short) PG run course. I’d run just over 34:00 there two years ago, so 33:30 sounded like an awesome goal. I pushed the pace right out of the gate and got a quick gap on Dan. He clawed his way back to me around 2km and took the lead for 30sec, but I thought he appeared to be struggling a bit (uphill and into the wind) so I made a bit of a countermove and got away again. I ended up holding a lead on him for the rest of the way and never came close to catching the bike threesome. I crossed the line with a 33:31 run split, which is a solid new PR for me. Can’t complain about that! But it would have been awesome to stay with that swim group or to stay with that bike group, as those three guys finished in 8th, 9th and 10th positions ahead of a fading new daddy, Kevin Everett.

So 12th place. Run PR. Moments of brilliance and moments of struggle on the bike.

After the race my host family, the Kintzes, took my friend Andrew Lockton and me to the famous Monterrey Aquarium. I’d never been in there before and was really looking forward to checking it out this year. (I thought it was kind of lame of me to have raced there four times without ever visiting the aquarium. It is practically on the course!)

This giant overhead tank was filled with sardines, mostly swimming in the same direction in a giant shimmering school.

It is hard to capture the cool lighting effects with my camera, but if I turned off the flash then you sort of get a feel for it.

Posing in front of the jellyfish:

Lots of jellyfish!

This last guy is called a Bat Ray, as in “Nana nana nana nana Nana nana nana nana BAT RAY!!”

Mark Kintz took me surfing on Sunday morning before I headed off to the airport. A few harbor seals weren’t shy about swimming with us – I almost bumped into them a few times.

Next up: USAT Elite Nationals at the ITU Tuscaloosa Pan American Cup. One last chance to try and get some ITU points this year!!

Another Close Call

2010-09-06T16:51:00.001-07:00

Here is another overdue post on the Kelowna Premium Pan American Cup two weeks ago. I’ve been on the road a lot since then, and totally slacking off in the blog department.

On August 22nd I raced in Kelowna for the 4th time. I love racing there – great hospitality, beautiful scenery, easy travel from Seattle, relaxed “vacation town” atmosphere, all the awesomeness of Canada…

After a rather rough 6-8 weeks it was great to get out and race again, and to see that my fitness is *much* better than I’d thought. I suppose that the emotional and psychological component to this sport is very significant and it can be easy to get down on yourself when you get sick or injured, or when your performance just isn’t quite what you want it to be.

I was very excited to be back in Kelowna and I was happy to have that “game time” feeling once again.

Somehow I got the very last start number for this race, 72. So I started on the far left end of the start line, as far as possible from Mr Whitfield and with a slightly longer distance to cover than any other athlete. But this outside position let me swim in clean water all the way to the first turn buoy! So I had a solid start and settled into what turned out to be the “C” pack. I didn’t get a clear view of where I stood relative to the field until the run-out, but I saw Felipe Van Wyngard’s kit at 500m and knew I was in at least an okay group. I had to work a bit at times to stay with the group, but was also able to conserve energy by staying on feet. I took a surprising crack on the nose around 1000m in. One moment I was comfortably behind this other guy and then suddenly his foot was in my face. Literally.

I exited the water in 35th position at 20:22. A lead group of 12 was at 19:00-19:13 and a “B” group of 10 was at 19:44-19:54. My group of 14 stretched from 20:12-20:25.

I rocked T1 with the second-fastest time of the day. I split 1:16 while most of the field were in the 1:20s. This left me in good position to settle into the “C” pack. I thought it was the “B” pack at the time, but c’est la vie.

We get our shoes on a bit earlier than I expected and then quickly got to work. Our first trip up Knox Mountain brought a bit of carnage. Alexandre Day (CAN) crossed wheels and almost crashed right in front of me. As I tried to get around him, he fell into me and pushed both of us off of the pavement and into the gravel shoulder. Somehow we both stayed upright and chased back on. I had to turn myself inside out on the climb in order to do so, but I was psyched to make it back into the group, and without any road rash. Then the double whammy: Jorden Bryden’s shoe became unclipped and he started swerving wildly right in front of me, almost forcing me off the pavement again and forcing me to cut speed. He managed to chase back on but I was *cooked.* I kept the group close for about a lap but couldn’t get close enough to catch. Eventually I started catching stragglers from the group and we worked together reasonably well at times.

I was glad to feel rather strong on the bike, and more importantly my biomechanics felt good. I wasn’t limited by back pain or hip tightness, so my riding power was actually a fair reflection of my strength and fitness. If only I could have avoided the crash & the mechanical issue. Grrr.

(thanks again to Chuck Perreault for taking and sharing pictures at the race)

Towards the end of the bike I failed to make my usual pre-T2 attack after being on the front with 2k to go. Four guys slipped away and I had to be content enter transition with five guys ahead of me. Getting into T2 ahead of a big group can really help your run performance.

Starting the run, the race looked something like this:

A group of eight at 1:24:40 – 1:24:28
A group of fifteen at 1:26:40 – 1:27:09
My group of twelve at 1:28:41 – 1:28:52
A group of three at 1:30:53 – 1:30:56
A group of seven at 1:31:21 – 1:31:30
A group of six at 1:33:03 – 1:33:11

I exited T2 in 30th position. Three of those five guys managed to stay ahead of me, one very speedy runner caught me from behind and I finished the race in 29th place.

I was pretty happy with my run. I threw up a bit during the first mile but buckled down and ran pretty hard the whole way. I felt like I had good legs most of the time and I did a good job of racing the guys around me. I ran with Matos (BRA) and Chernikoff (ARG) for about the first 5k and then made a solid move at the start of the third lap to get away. I could see Bryden (CAN) and Day (CAN) up the road and I tried hard to catch them, especially after their shenanigans on the bike! But I faded a bit towards the end of the third lap and Matos & Chernikoff caught me again with 2k to go. This was my biggest “dark moment” of the day, with the body feeling ready to give out and the confidence sagging… but I ticked in behind the South Americans and realized that I could maintain their pace. With about 1k to go we passed a hotel where people on balconies were cheering for us. I spontaneously made a rather fierce move there to drop Chernicoff, then 400m later I made another surprising move to drop Matos. I don’t know whether they were surprised, but I sure was! I was so beat up at that point that I expected my “move” to be minimal, but I had a surprising amount of snap left in the legs and I was able to shake both of them and sneak over the line in 29th place.

If I had avoided the bike carnage and stayed with that “C” pack, I would have had to run maybe 20-30 seconds faster in order to get into a sprint finish for 19th/20th and a chance at ITU points. So once again, I was right on that bubble.

Here’s hoping that I can find improved fitness and better luck at Tuscaloosa in three weeks. Woohoo, racing!!

As I wrap up this rather verbose race report, a quick shout-out to our awesome homestay host in Kelowna, Liz Borrett! Liz has hosted me and/or other athletes I know for at least four years and has always made us feel very welcome. We sort of feel like part of the family at this point. Liz is exactly the kind of lady that I’d like to be when I’m in my 70s – racing half marathons, climbing mountains and always socializing with friends and family! She learned to swim a month before last year’s Apple Triathlon in order to race the Tri-It length.

Back in Action!

2010-08-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

(pardon the delay in getting this July summary posted… I wrote it in mid-August and now am finally posting it in early September… I’ll try to back-date it appropriately)

July has been a rough month for my triathlon aspirations. On the flip side, it’s been a very fun month socially. I attended my brother’s bachelor party at Dewey Beach and I hosted a real barn burner of a multi-person birthday party for my 30th.

I came down with a bit of a head cold three days before Coteau-du-Lac and it just didn’t get better. I made it through that race with a decent result (23rd, inside the time cut-off, no points) and then tried to rest up and heal for San Francisco. For two weeks, I would wake up every day with a mild sore throat, it would go away during the day and then come back with a vengeance at night. I loaded up on zinc and vitamin c … but no luck. The San Francisco race was a bit of a disaster for me, as the body just wasn’t there.

Luckily I’d built a two-week break into my 2010 plan, and it arrived at the perfect time. I hoped that two weeks of light-to-zero training would be just what the doctor ordered. But the doctor didn’t order up cross-country travel and college frat house style partying during that break! So I finished my “break” with the illness still lingering.

The day after my birthday party, I felt good enough to go for a 12-mile run with a few friends … and I decided to believe that I was healthy again, whether or not I really was. I went into a pretty good training week – 45 miles of running, including a track workout, 25k of swimming, a criterium and an Olympic-distance triathlon. Not exactly easing into things, are we?

My weekend race was the Federal Escape Triathlon. I managed to squeeze out a narrow victory over Charles Rivers in a hard fought race. Charles has consistently been a solid age-group performer in the Seattle area but he’s clearly upped his game this year!

I felt pretty trashed for my evening swim after the race … and equally so for my Sunday AM long run. With two weeks’ additional perspective, I should have just bailed on both of those workouts. Ouch.

In the two weeks since that race, I’ve settled back into my regular-season training cadence: track workout on Wednesday, Seward crit on Thursday, long run Sunday, various other weekend racing, weekday morning swims, weekday evening runs … the body’s response has been mixed … but that is part of coming out of a break, right?

The second half of my season will bring Kelowna, Pacific Grove and Tuscaloosa in rapid succession, plus the possibility that I get into the Pan American Championships in Puerto Vallarta. I also have two weddings and a Kona camp during that stretch, so I’d better be really careful about recovery.

Last-Minute Deal: Kona Camp!

2010-08-13T08:55:00.001-07:00

I’ve been absent from the blog for awhile, and I promise that I have two training/racing update posts in the works. But first, a quick announcement on a sweet deal to train in Kona at the end of the month. TriFreaks is hosting a Kona camp and they have a few last-minute spots available. See details on the house here. It is right on the ocean on Alii Drive! I can’t wait!!

Here is a bit more information from TriFreaks:

Kona Triathlon Camp August 22^nd-30^th

Come join us in Kailua Kona, HI (The Big Island) from August 22^nd to 30^th for 9 days of triathlon training with Pro Triathlete Chris Tremonte and ESPY 2009 Winner Jason Lester in an informal environment hosted at wonderful 3 million dollar private luxury waterfront villa. We still have a few spots left! The cost includes your lodging, all training sessions sports nutrition during training. Your responsibility will be your flight, bringing your own bike (or renting a tri bike from a local bike shop for $30 per day), and regular meals (we will be cooking group meals at the villa and will purchase groceries at Costco in Kona where you can chip in to share the cost). Cost for the camp is a great low price of $750 per person, and is limited to 12 people total. With a total of 12 folks there, including Jason and Chris, you are sure to get lots of attention from us and have a great time.

If you are looking for a place to supplement and focus your triathlon training, or bring your training to the next level, this camp can help you reach your goals all in a beautiful Hawaiian setting! Camps are designed for all ages and abilities. Treat yourself to a train-cation with professionally coached group bike rides, swims and runs on parts of the Hawaii Ironman World Championship Course.

The Camp is designed with hands-on learning, gaining you skills about:

training
racing tactics
transitions
swim-bike-run skills
mental preparation
nutrition
injury prevention
and much more!

For those of you that decide to come, you will be able to meet, train, and get tips from both ESPY 2009 winner Jason Lester and Pro Triathlete Chris Tremonte, who will both be at the camp training and working with us.

Members of the camp can also participate in our Running On Faith Kona 5K & 10K race, and will receive a copy of Jason's new book "Running On Faith". Find out more at http://trifreaks.com/KonaROFChallenge.aspx.

The experience is sure to make for some great training, and some very rewarding experiences. Write us at info@trifreaks.com if you're interested in our specials for the camp that are only available for a couple folks at this point!

*Bonus* We’ll be doing extra activity options like group snorkeling, whale watching, volcano hikes and beach visits! (additional fees are not included in the price of the camp, however most of these carry little to no extra cost).

Traveling in French Canada

2010-07-07T20:45:00.001-07:00

I promised a write-up on the travel/logistics side of my Coteau-du-Lac trip once I could download the pictures off of my camera. My battery died on the Friday before the race, so I don’t have a ton of pictures … but here goes…

Coteau-du-Lac is a small village on the outskirts of Montreal. As the name suggests, it sits on a large lake. Most of the houses were in this cute “cottage” style … and it seemed to be sort of a summer/vacation area. The surrounding area was rural with a lot of farms. It would have been a pleasant place to stick around and ride for a few days, but I had to hurry to Las Vegas right after the race for a surprise birthday party for my father. (He was very surprised, as his birthday is still three months away!)

The Race Director was very generous in setting up lodging and meals for any out-of-town athletes who requested such support. About fifteen of us stayed at the Base de Plein Air Les Cèdres. It appeared to be a summer camp, complete with campers and counselors running around doing their camp thing. The athletes were all housed in one building with a few dorm bedrooms, showers and a kitchen. It was quiet & peaceful. There were some nice-looking trails that made us wish that we had mountain bikes.

I really like when an RD puts a bunch of athletes in the same place. It lets you get to know your fellow competitors. Wildflower and Scott Tinley’s can be similar.

There was a walk-in fridge that was stocked with snacks and plenty of chocolate milk for recovery.

About an hour before mealtime, two volunteers would show up with our catered meals.

I don’t have any other pictures from our camp… the bedrooms each had six bunk beds but no more than three athletes to a room …

I did manage to get a few pictures at the race venue. First up, I found this placement of the local triathlon club’s sign right in front of the latrine to be … well … uncommon …

I also got a kick out of the “No Swimming” sign in front of our swim venue. Such things are quite common on the racing circuit, though. We swim in a lot of places where people usually can’t swim … the river in downtown Seoul … San Francisco Bay … the Kelowna marina … various oceans & lakes that don’t have public swim areas …

The swim dock in CDL was rather sturdy, and it needed to be sturdy with our 75-man field! Anybody who didn’t dive immediately at the gun would have been forced backwards as the dock moved in an equal-and-opposite reaction to the force of the diving swimmers.

We had to run up a rather steep ramp between the two swim laps and after the second lap … but they had some super-grippy paint on the ramp and nobody slipped.

The swim course was not terribly wide and our 75-man field probably covered 75% of the width of the waterway. Carnage!!

After the swim exit, we ran up some big stairs and then had a short run to transition. They did a very professional job of preparing our run surface and lining the chute with banners:

The day before the race I saw a bunch of their road signs getting staged. Racing in other countries gives you a chance to see a new variety of street signs. My favorite:

Some of the others:

That’s all I have for pictures … as for other entertaining notes:

It was fun to see a lot of the guys that I met at Ixtapa. You travel all over the continent to race the same dudes!
Getting to Quebec from Seattle isn’t easy. I over-analyzed my flight selection and picked a pretty good one, with a not-too-early departure from Seattle and a not-too-late arrival at YUL … but of course, my Seattle flight got delayed so that I couldn’t catch my connection, and I got rebooked on another airline which charged me $200 for my bike. $200!!! And I got in to YUL three hours later than planned … and I had to wait an extra 90 minutes for the next race shuttle … at least I was able to sneak in a 30-minute shake-out jog at the airport. At 11pm. The awesome things that you do on the road.
My flights back to Vegas were a bit of an adventure, too, due to thunderstorms in Chicago. But I got to Sin City in time for the birthday festivities.
Our after-party at CDL had two phases, as these things often do. The official dinner + awards were at a hall in downtown CDL… then the unofficial gathering was back at camp. We all drank a few beers as we packed up our bikes, then many of us sat up chatting until well after midnight. The first two airport shuttles were at 3am and 5am, so this probably wasn’t the most responsible course of action.

That’s about it for now. Tomorrow I leave for San Francisco and the next Pan American Cup on the schedule.

New Toy

2010-07-07T20:17:00.001-07:00

I bet you thought that you were about to see pictures of a bicycle. Nope!

Behold, my friends, the Traeger Junior Grill:

I’ve been craving a Traeger ever since Lowell, Alton and I had some life-changing beef kabobs on Alton’s Traeger a few months ago. I did a bit of research, let the anticipation build up … and finally purchased my very own Traeger last week.

While most home grills run off of gas or charcoal, the Traegers burn custom wood pellets. This grill is really more of a grill/smoker, with temperature settings for smoking, slow-cooking or grilling.

The hopper on the left side is for the wood pellets. For our first round of grilling, Aaron & I used apple wood.

We bought a 3-pound piece of sirloin from Bill the Butcher with a decent fat cap on top. We cooked it on medium for about an hour and then dropped the heat to “smoke” until the internal temperature hit about 140 F.

As we were waiting for our smoked beef to finish cooking, we got a bit hungry … so we cooked up a few bacon cheeseburgers on the old gas grill. It is rather wonderful to be a two-grill household!

Finally our beef was ready to eat. Our lack of experience showed through, though. You can see that our beef fell over in the middle of the cooking process and the fat cap was no longer on top of the meat. So not as much of it soaked through the beef as we intended … but the end product was still delicious!

Next up: a 5-pound Mangalitsa Pork Shoulder!

Coteau-du-Lac Pan American Cup

2010-06-28T09:15:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I almost scored ITU points. Again.

Coteau-du-Lac is a small town on the outskirts of Montreal. We swam in a canal, biked out-and-back six times on a road that ran along one side of the canal and ran out-and-back four times on a bike path that ran along the other side of the canal. It felt sort of like racing in an arena that had been designed for the express purpose of hosting ITU-style triathlons.

Our 75-man field spread almost completely across the narrow waterway. We knew the swim would be a violent melee as everyone jockeyed for position. I had a clean, fast start but was boxed in on both sides by the time we hit 150m. I couldn’t find a clean path forward and the pace seemed reasonable, so I sat in. Bad call. As things opened up a bit at 500m I found I could easily swim away from the guys next to me. I spent the last 1000m moving up and bridging gaps while feeling strong and efficient. But the damage was done. I exited the water in 42nd place, 1:47 down on Andrew McCartney and over a minute behind the lead group.

I got through T1 and se to work on the bike, passing a few athletes in transition and catching others early in the ride. We quickly had a group of about a dozen riders driving hard to catch the group ahead of us. We frequently caught and absorbed stragglers from up ahead but made minimal headway in catching the front group. That group swelled to 25 riders at one point but they stayed organized enough to keep the gap steady. We passed them at close to the same point on every lap, roughly two minutes down. Ours was one of the better-organized ITU packs that I’ve ridden with, but it wasn’t enough.

With 1.5 laps to go, Jordan Jones told me that he was about to attempt a break and asked me to go with him. I had just finished a pull and didn’t think that I had great legs at the moment, so I declined. He attacked out of the U-turn and got a small gap … it looked like he was going to hang out 100m ahead of us and just wear himself out, but then as the group sat up a bit on the final lap Jordan got a pretty nice gap going into T2. I shoulda gone with him!

There was a crash in the front group around this time, reducing their numbers a bit and giving members of our group a better chance at cracking the top twenty and picking up ITU points.

I made a good tactical decision heading in to T2. I sat 3rd wheel as we neared the final turn while getting my feet out of my shoes. Then I attacked just before the turn and was able to cleanly lead the group into T2. Even with a bit of a stumble while racking my bike, I still exited T2 in 5th or 6th place amongst our bike pack and quickly moved up to 3rd.

I wasn’t sure how well the other guys in our bike pack would run, but my quick start on the run gave me a chance to try to go with any guy who passed me. I did so a few times, staying with Gonzalo Tellechea of Argentina for about 400m (he worked his way up to 14th by the end of the race!) and Christopher Pons from Chile for 3km (he dropped me at 6.25km but only finished one place ahead of me). A few Canadians caught me but I sat in for a bit and then dropped them!

On the first lap I tried to count guys ahead of me and figured I was in about 25th place. I was pretty sure that Jordan was in 20th place at the time – the last guy to get points – but knew that he would likely move up a bit more. I passed a few guys on the run but still thought I was in about 23rd place starting the final lap. By now there were lapped athletes all over the place and it was hard to figure out where you stood. I counted guys who I thought were on their final lap and was encouraged to come up with a total of 19 to 21 … I passed one more athlete during the final km and thought that I might have squeaked in for points … but alas, I was officially 23rd. Oh well.

Dan McKenzie passed me at the beginning of the final lap. At the time, I was running behind a Canadian guy who had caught me. I hoped the Canadian would go with Dan but he couldn’t quite muster the speed, so I went around him but the gap was already there. Dan caught a few more guys and worked his way up to 20th – the last guy to get points.

I thought that I did a good job of pushing and really “racing” on the run. A few times I would get passed and immediately tuck in behind the passing runner, often countering 500-800m later and dropping the guy after getting a bit of a rest. I was hurting a bit at times, but I tried to just think of it as one of those hard track workouts where you just try to hang onto the guy in front of you and you don’t worry about how it feels.

All in all, I felt pretty good about my efforts on the swim, bike and run. That first 500m of the swim really killed me this time around. I need to be more aware and more aggressive early in the swim. But I did a great job of moving up during the last 1000m. Then I rode pretty strong and smart … I’m not sure how much run speed I would have given up if I’d gone with Jordan … then I ran pretty well.

Swim: 20:07 (42nd), leader was Andrew McCartney at 18:20-ish
Bike: 1:00:10 (2nd pack). Front pack went 59:30. Most of the difference must have been on the first and/or last laps.
Run: 35:18 (26th) … the 21st-place split was 35:08 … so it might be interesting to look at more numbers

The best run of the day was about 32-even, from a guy in one of the later bike groups. The race winner was in the mid- to upper-32s, IIRC.

I have a few pictures from our “homestay.” It was an interesting one. I will try to pull together a travel post if I can find the time. Thanks for reading! Next up: San Francisco on July 10th!

Issaquah Triathlon: Meet the Pro, and Volunteer!

2010-06-02T13:21:00.001-07:00

This Saturday I will be racing at the Issaquah Triathlon. This will be one of my tune-up events for the next ITU Pan American Cup in Coteau-du-Lac, Quebec, on June 26th.

I raced at Issaquah back in 2004 and 2005. The 2004 race was my first overall victory in a triathlon, so that was pretty memorable. In 2005 I finished second behind Jon Salerno. I just found a picture online from the 2004 race – it looks like I blew a kiss to the photographer! Classy!

In addition to competing in this Saturday’s race, I will also be hanging out in the expo area after the race to talk triathlon with anybody who wants to stop by. So come find me! I will have one of those big collapsible canopy/tents set up with a few chairs. I’ll be happy to talk about training, nutrition, racing, equipment, travel tips, the Olympic qualification process, life on the road, incriminating stories about other pros, … whatever you have always wanted to know about triathlon! I will have some coupons and giveaways from a few of my sponsors & friends – Brooks running shoes, Nuun and Bill the Butcher. I will have some of my racing equipment on hand for you to check out, including the latest Helix wetsuit, goggles and accessories from Blue Seventy and a set of brand-new Mad Fiber wheels. I will also have some information about a few training camps that I am helping to organize – a week-long camp in Kona this August and then also some warm-weather training camps this winter.

This is the first time that I’ve put together an informal “meet the pro” event, and if people seem to get a kick out of it then I will gladly do this again at other Seattle-area races. If you have other ideas on how to make this awesome, please let me know – chris [at] christremonte [dot] com.

On a related note: I talked to the Race Director yesterday and they could still use a few more volunteers. These events take a lot of manpower in order to go smoothly, and we racers really appreciate your help. In fact, to show my appreciation I have teamed up with Bill the Butcher to offer a $25 gift certificate to each of the next four people who offer to volunteer at the race. If you are interested, please email info@issaquahtri.com and then also email me at chris [at] christremonte [dot] com so I can set aside a gift certificate for you!

I hope to see a lot of you out there this Saturday! Woohoo!!

Ixtapa

2010-05-26T08:42:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday I races in the Ixtapa Pan American Cup. Due to dangerous surf conditions, they changed the race to a duathlon at the last minute: 3k run, 40k bike, 10k run. It can be hard to keep your “game face” on when that happens – even though you still want to go out and race your best, you trained for a swim-bike-run race and you planned/hoped to drop some of the best runners during the swim.

I was pretty confident coming into this race, even though my training since Ixtapa has been a bit spotty. (I am working on another post about that spottiness.) The start list looked a lot less intimidating than the start list for Ishigaki, or the list for any of the Continental Cups that I had done in the United States. There were sixty guys on the list, but I felt like a top-20 finish would be very reasonable and that a top-10 could be possible if I raced well. But the run-bike-run doesn’t let me show off all of the swim training that I’ve done this year. Oh well…

The first run went off at a surprisingly reasonable pace. I didn’t take any splits, but the whole pack stayed mostly together until we hit the turnaround. Except it wasn’t the turnaround. The 3k out-and-back hadn’t been part of the original race course, so many of us had run it during warm-ups … but most of us didn’t see the right turn that took us up a rather gnarly hill. So instead of turning back towards transition and cruising down a gentle hill, we had to shift gears and charge up a somewhat fierce hill. I lost a few meters at the real turnaround when a few guys in front of me cut the corner and I didn’t. The downhill was steep enough that it was hard to let loose … the bricks/cobbles didn’t help, either! But I slowly reeled my way back into contact with the runners ahead of me.

Entering T1, I saw that Francisco Serrano was not far ahead of me, so I knew that I had a chance of catching the big mass of bikes. I had some trouble clipping my helmet on, though, and my transition was ten seconds slower than that of the fastest two dudes. Not normal for me. But everything else about my T1 and my first 5k of the bike was pretty smooth. I chased up to a group of 5 or 6 guys and sat on a wheel while I got my shoes on. We negotiated a few tight corners and stayed within sight of the growing main field. I took a long, hard pull and got us within 100m before wiggling my elbow for another rider to pull through. Nobody did, so I kept working … but after another 10-15 seconds I started to tire so I waved my elbow again. Nothing. Crap. I tried to pull off and they all just followed me. Ouch.

Without knowing it, my pull had whittled the group down from 7 guys to 4, and the other 3 were pretty gassed… so finally Felipe van de Wyngard from Chile took another pull, even though he had just been on the front before me, and the two of us took turns until the turnaround at 10k. But the impetus had been lost and as we neared the turnaround we could see that the main field had opened a distressingly large gap. Crap.

On the way back to town, Van de Wyngard dropped out and Leif Baradoy from Canada has a mechanical mishap (broken seatpost!), leaving me and James Bales from San Antonio. James wasn’t feeling all that good on the bike, so I did most of the work while keeping him around to spell me from time to time. I was hoping that the main field would ease up a bit and give us a chance … but it was not meant to be. We lost 6 or 7 minutes to the main field. Ouch.

By the time we started our run, the leaders were already finishing their first 2.5km loop. I was able to stay close to a few of them for the first 1.25km and I still felt pretty good until about 4km … then the wheels sort of came off the wagon for a few km. I was dumping ice water over my head every chance that I had – I forgot to mention that it was 90+ degrees with 60-70% humidity! The run was a battle of attrition! But sadly I wasn’t invited to the battle. I was able to pass a few guys who were a lap up on me, and I caught two struggling runners from the main bike group … but finished the race in 32nd place, 13.5 minutes behind Sean Jefferson.

If I had ran my same not-all-that-great run split from the main pack, I would have been 22nd. If the competition of being in the main group had pushed me to a better performance then I could have broken the top twenty. You’ve gotta keep looking for that silver lining, right?

Looking back, it was surprising and encouraging to see that I may have been the strongest man in that bike group. Felipe was likely stronger and just gave up a bit once the main group was out of reach … but I am accustomed to being on of the weaker cyclists on the circuit and I now know that this isn’t necessarily the case. I also learned that you can’t count on your group to finish a chase for you. When you get that close, you’ve gotta just have that killer instinct and close it yourself if need be. A bit of hesitation likely cost me.

I have a bit more to say about the non-racing parts of the trip, but this post is already rather long so I will save that for another day.

Cultural Learnings…

2010-04-26T23:18:00.001-07:00

You can buy all kinds of awesome products in Japan. I am sort of fascinated by the posters and product packages over here.

My first night in town, I saw a rather large Pocky and Pocky-knock-off section at the 24-hour convenience store. My favorite item was the Toppo “for men!”

Outside of my hotel in Okinawa, there were a few garden beds with this posted warning sign:

I am unsure about whether they dislike the meat, the bun, the condiments or the whole package … but keep your cheeseburgers out of the No Cheeseburger Zone!

Next up: the pants press. My very small hotel room in Okinawa had very little floor space that wasn’t covered by the bed, but they found enough room for a pants press. The hotel rooms in Ishigaki were a bit bigger, but the entire hall had to share a pants press… luckily triathletes don’t wear a lot of pants?

If you are a crab and you like to ride the monorail, be careful around the doors or you might damage your claw. The vast majority of warning signs and advertisements in Japan seem to feature cartoon animals.

There was also an ad on the monorail for a show called “The Opening of a New School.” I thought that maybe it was a play being performed in Naha/Okinawa, but we later saw these characters on TV in Ishigaki. So our best guess is that it is a Japanese knock-off of High School Musical. I found something about each of these characters’ style and posing to be really intriguing…

Upon arriving in Ishigaki, I was ready to grab some lunch but I had a hard time finding a place with an English menu. So I just went with the “point at something that looks tasty” method.

The upper-right beef/soup/noodles was a good choice. Unfortunately it looks like somebody didn’t avoid those automatic doors on the monorail and their claw ended up in my miso soup!

Ben and I managed to find a restaurant with an English menu for dinner that night. It was called the Garlic House, or something like that. We had many creative and tasty garlic dishes, but the most memorable had to be the deep-fried roasted garlic. Check out Ben’s faux-hawk that he decided to rock for Monterrey and Ishigaki.

The English-speaking menu must have attracted another popular trend that we saw in Japan: t-shirts with collections of English words that didn’t really make grammatical sense to us. You can’t quite see this girl’s entire shirt, but it says something not-quite-sensical about winter fading into spling. Not “spring,” but “spling.”

On Thursday three of us went for an ocean swim near the Intercontinental Hotel. Their bike parking area was a bit far from the beach and close to the main road, so we asked if we could leave our bikes closer to the office. They let us leave them on this rubbish pile. There are at least $15000 worth of bikes in this picture:

Our hotel in Ishigaki had room service, and they also sold a few a la carte items at the front desk. The Ishigaki Beef Chips sounded very tasty, but I was especially curious about the “TBCL NUTS & CRACK.”

Next to the Max-Valu grocery store in Ishigaki, we found a little slice of home: KFC! Complete with a life-size statue of the Colonel himself, standing outside to greet visitors:

Inside the grocery store, there were too many wondrous products to ever possibly document here. But we did find this intense display for xylitol mints. Dave Messenheimer used to love picking up these mints or gum in Asia since you can’t get it in the US.

The best section had to be the beer section. There we found such popular brands as “Zero Life” and “Relax.”

But our favorite type of beer had to be Okinawa Prefecture’s own, Orion. Not just any Orion, but the Orion in the special commemorative Ishigaki Triathlon can:

We also snagged a delicious red pineapple to snack on back at the hotel.

At the welcome party on Friday night we got to watch traditional dancing and music performed by local high school students.

We also got to taste sweet potato ice cream for the first time.

I could go on for days, but I should probably wrap this up before I start posting pictures from the afterparty … well, okay, one picture from after the race: a tasty treat called “Crunky!” You must do your best to look crunky while eating Crunky!

The night only got more Crunky from there on out! International Karaoke Madness!!!

So Close?

2010-04-26T10:45:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I raced in the Ishigaki World Cup. The ITU has posted a short article and video here.

My big goal for this race was to finish within the 5% time cut-off and to therefore earn ITU points. My stretch goal was to also finish in the top twenty places and to therefore earn partial travel reimbursement from USA Triathlon. An even bigger stretch goal was to finish in the top ten, as this would get me a paycheck and would also get me closer to qualifying for USAT funding. A smaller goal was to make it out of the water with any reasonable swim group and to therefore not ride alone.

I didn’t really accomplish any of these, other than my swim being almost decent.

I exited the water in 26th place of 38 guys, at 17:52. I was 13 seconds behind a six-man chase pack and 20-30 seconds ahead of what would become the next chase pack. I had a quick T1 but couldn’t chase down the group ahead of me. The bike course included a U-turn at 1k so I could see the next chase group forming behind me. So I made a smart decision to ease off just a bit, get my shoes on and grab a drink before the pack caught me. The alternative would have been to continue working hard in order to get caught a bit later, and to be more tired.

The chase group was really cooking. Michael Poole (NZL) was driving the pace. I had to work a bit just to catch onto the tail of the line. The first few corners were a bit discouraging – a few of the guys in the middle of the line were slowing down and the six-man group was having a small accordion effect. This was causing me to have to sprint out of each corner in order to keep up, and there were 10 corners on each of the 7 laps. Early in the second lap I hit a patch of sand while taking one of these corners and I lost my nerve just a little and grabbed a little too much brake … and I was gone. I couldn’t close that gap. Dropped. Ouch.

The rest of the bike leg was a fight just to not get lapped. I rode one lap with Tim George (AUS) but I was just too cooked to keep up … I rode the rest solo. The main group did ease off a bit on the last three laps and I found that my gap was staying about the same, but I was already a few minutes behind by then. Adding another level to my frustration, the chase group that dropped me did eventually catch back onto the main field at the beginning of the last lap! If I had stayed with that chase group, then I should have been able to stay within the time cut-off. 29 guys finished the bike in that group. Two DNF’ed and 26 of the other 27 stayed within the time cut-off. Ouch.

My run was painful. I didn’t have much to run for, other than pride, and my pride was pretty much shattered at this point! But luckily the large and enthusiastic crowd gave me a lot of support, even as I limped to a 38-minute 10k.

If I had stayed with that group then I should have scored points. I was right there … although at the time, I didn’t think my group would catch the main field. I was wrong. I fought hard to stay on but could I have fought harder? Do I just need to train harder/more/smarter? Being stronger on the bike never hurts your chances, right? But a bit more swim strength or even navigation skills could have gotten me into the next chase pack, which caught the main field much sooner.

A Long Journey

2010-04-22T05:27:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week I travelled from Seattle, USA to Ishigaki, Japan in order to get ready for this year’s Ishigaki World Cup. Seattle and Ishigaki are not terribly close to one another. In fact, Ishigaki is not even particularly close to mainland Japan. It is much closer to Taiwan.

My itinerary had me leave Seattle at 1:30pm on a Monday. The non-stop flight got me to Tokyo at 3:30pm on Tuesday, thanks to the International Date Line. I had a two-hour layover at narita before continuing on to Naha airport on Okinawa. Then I had to stay the night in Okinawa before continuing on to Ishigaki in the morning.

Here is a really big airplane with Mt Rainier in the background. This proves that I was still in Seattle, more or less, when this picture was taken:

Once I arrived in Tokyo, there was a huge crowd of teenage Japanese girls that were very excited to see me. They were all waiting for me when I got through customs. Some of them even had homemade signs welcoming me to Japan.

If you are able to read any of their signs in these pictures … “Bieber” is Japanese for “Tremonte.”

I ran into Barrett and Manny Huerta at Narita. We were all on the same flight to Okinawa. It was a little bit challenging to get to our hotels because none of us speak enough Japanese and none of the cab drivers spoke enough English. But we were able to get one of the Tourist Info girls to translate a bit, and we were all on our way.

Once we got into the right neighborhood, my cabbie called the hotel for exact directions. Of course, we were a block away from the hotel when he called! Apparently the Best Western Naha Inn just changed its name a few months ago, and they didn’t tell anybody who works at the airport.

I got inside the hotel and was greeted with this sign and an elevator:

I used my amazing powers of deduction to figure out that I was already on the second floor, at street level, and that check-in was on the third floor.

The room was quite nice, albeit small. The one English-speaking girl who worked there explained that you have to put your keycard into this slot just inside the door in order for the room’s power/lights/AC to function.

The room was also equipped with a pants press, in case I wanted to press my pants:

Down at the end of the hallway, I saw my first of *many* Japanese vending machines that are stocked with cold canned coffee. Apparently Santory Boss Coffee has a stranglehold on this market.

In the elevator, I learned that the hotel also had a beer vending machine up on the eighth floor:

I took a short walk around the neighborhood to see if I could find some dinner, but not much seemed to be open. I did find an outdoor noodle stand but I wasn’t feeling ambitious enough to try and figure out a reasonable dinner without knowing any Japanese. My camera has a “night” setting that worked pretty well:

The next morning, I took the subway to Naha airport. It cost 260 yen, versus 1700 for a cab the night before!

At the airport, I was charged 2000 yen to check my bike box. This seemed a bit lame since I was still technically on the same itinerary … but I had somehow avoided getting charged the $200 in Seattle so I didn’t complain too much. I had read online that ANA doesn’t charge for bicycles, but if you really want to argue your case then you should probably learn Japanese … otherwise your right (and ability) to complain is severely limited.

Once I got past the check-in counter, I saw that I was in the middle of another press event. I thought that maybe Justin Bieber was coming to Okinawa, too … but this crowd was a bit different. I never did figure out what this was all about:

Flying in to Ishigaki reminded me a bit of my Nevis trip in 2008. In fact, a lot of this trip reminded me of Nevis – small island destination, many connecting flights, an overnight layover … here are some pictures of other islands that we flew over:

As I was walking into the terminal, I was psyched to see a welcome banner for the World Cup athletes. Welcome to the big time, kiddo!

At baggage claim I was greeted by Phil from England, a race volunteer who was picking up athletes at the airport. He even had a sign with my name on it! Although it was pretty obvious that he was there for me, since we were the only two non-Japanese people at the airport.

So now I’m in Ishigaki, trying to lay low and to prepare myself for my FIRST WORLD CUP!

These posters are in every other shop window… no chance to forget why you are here!

Training is Hard

2010-04-14T22:15:00.001-07:00

I had a really solid week of training last week. I think that I am still recovering from it, to be honest. In a five-day span (Wed-Sun) I did three bike races, a running race and a very solid track workout. Great prep for Ishigaki, as long as I let myself recover a bit before race day!

Monday 5 April: easy 5000 yard swim

Tuesday 6 April: AM very hard swim, incl 5x(50 sprint, 150 chill)@3:00 going 29, 29, 28, 28, 27 for the 50s… then tried to go 15x100 @ 1:10 but was too beat up from the sprints, and had to bail after 10. Easy run in the evening – an hour in Bridle Trails with Andrew & Travis.

Wednesday 7 April: easier-than-usual swim with Dave, saving something for the evening. PM – track workout. 4xMile on 90 seconds rest. 5:10 5:12 5:14 5:10. This was my best track workout of the year (so far) and I really needed it in order to bolster my confidence heading into Ishigaki.

Thursday 8 April: easy 2200 yard swim in the morning, then a Seward Park crit in the evening. I think that I finished 11th in the Cat 3/4 race. Solid. My power file showed that the race is basically 25 intervals – each time up the hill I had nice 5-second, 30-second and 60-second power numbers, then a short recovery, then do it again.

Friday 9 April: recovery day. ez 3100 yard swim in the AM, easy run at Bridle Trails in the PM

Saturday 10 April: two criteriums at Volunteer Park and a short brick run … then 2-3 hours of mountain biking at Duthie Hill, just for fun!

Sunday 11 April: Seahawk / Valley Medical Center 5k with Andrew and Travis. We ran the whole race together and finished 1-2-3. Andrew was 1st in 16:25, then me at 16:29 and Travis at 16:31. We added on some easy miles afterwards to get in a 12-mile “long run.” I went home and took a two-hour nap, then dragged my tired butt to the pool for an easy 5000 yard swim. Very tired…

I tried to back off a bit on Monday and Tuesday (an easy swim, an easy run, a hard swim) then got back into it today with a tougher AM swim and an evening track workout. I was a bit weaker than last week, running 5x1200 on 90 seconds rest in 3:51 3:51 3:55 3:55 3:55… so a similar average pace but with shorter work segments on the same rest as last week … but I was definitely more fatigued going in, so I’m okay with that…

Ishigaki World Cup!

2010-04-05T21:54:00.001-07:00

Check out the start list for the Ishigaki World Cup, on April 25th.

In three weeks I will be racing in my first ITU World Cup. I was hoping to get into one before the end of this year but I had been targeting Huatulco in November. Then the ITU moved Huatulco to the same weekend as my brother’s wedding! So I am glad that I was able to get into Ishigaki instead.

The ITU will be posting live text updates to this page their website and to their Twitter account. They will also post a race recap video a few days afterwards.

The top 50 finishers can get ITU points as long as they are each within 5% of the winner’s time. How many finishers end up within the cut-off is heavily influenced by whether there is a breakaway, how big that breakaway is and how much of a time gap they can get. I can’t chase a break alone, so my likelihood of getting points will depend a bit on the efforts of other racers. Last year a strong break made it so that 23 guys got points, all running 33:15 or better. In 2008 the break was smaller and 35 of 38 finishers were within the time cutoff. In 2007 nearly 50 guys scored points, while there were 16 DNFs. 2006 was another tougher year, with 23 of 36 finishers scoring points.

I’ve heard that World Cup races are “ridiculously hard” and “the most pain you’ll ever feel for two hours,” but it should be a fantastic experience. There is minimal room for error, especially in that critical first half-hour of the race where you need to make a strong bike group. A mistake in the swim, in T1, or early in the bike can torpedo your whole race.

This will be a bit sooner than I was planning to start my ITU season, but my fitness is feeling quite good across the three sports. My splits in the pool have been as good or better than I’ve seen since college. My bike numbers have been good in shorter stuff and questionable in longer TTs, but my on-the-bike performance in pack situations has been better than ever. This bodes well for ITU racing. My run is a bit of a question mark. I’ve done 4 track workouts so far, with solid if unspectacular numbers … but most of those workouts have been after hard swims, so I know that I have another gear in me.

I did a bit of race simulation on Saturday. It was so hard that I almost threw up a few times, but it was great to go through the motions and get mentally dialed in. The simulation:

Set your running shoes out on the side of the road as if it were T2.
Ride about two miles away.
Lean your bike against a street sign. Make sure that your shoes are clipped to the pedals and your helmet is situated for a fast T1.
Walk 100m away … get ready!
Drop to the ground and do ten push-ups. If the lake weren’t 48 degrees this would have been a swim & run-out.
Immediately jump up and sprint down the road to your bike in bare feet.
Put on your helmet.
Grab the bike and run about 50 yards, flat out.
Do your best flying mount.
Ride at 350-400W for at least a minute before putting your shoes on.
Once your shoes are on, continue at 300W+ for four more minutes.
Get your feet out of your shoes, then do a nice cyclocross-style dismount when you get close to your shoes.
Run the bike the last 20 yards and lean it up against … whatever …
Put on your shoes while taking off your helmet.
Take off at near-sprint pace for 400m, then settle into 10k pace or a bit faster for an additional 600m.
Cool down completely.
Repeat as desired!

Seattle RainMan Indoor Triathlon

2010-03-30T22:44:00.001-07:00

On Sunday 21 March I volunteered at and raced in the Seattle RainMan Indoor Triathlon. Highlights of the day included:

Learning exactly how an Indoor Triathlon is organized – I’ve done over a hundred outdoor races but this was my first indoor race
Running into Ray Maker somewhat unexpectedly, as we were 2500 miles away from his home
Leading the crowd in a rousing rendition of Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer as the final wave hit the halfway point in their bike leg
Giving the pre-race briefing to most of the waves of athletes in the race
Kicking off my own tri season with a good hard effort

Ray’s post does a great job of describing how the race was organized, so I won’t repeat much of that content here.

I did most of my volunteer work in the bike area. We had 24 indoor trainers set up to handle two heats of 12 simultaneously. The timing of the heats was such that as a participant, your trainer would be in use by another participant when you started your swim. It was up to the volunteers to move the bikes and transition gear around so that everything would be ready for swimmers exiting the water.

The setup and logistics for an indoor race seemed a bit more challenging than for outdoor races. There is less of a course to set up and marshal, but there is more ongoing work that continues throughout the race. For example, at an outdoor race you would do the pre-race briefing once whereas with the indoor race we briefed each of the 25 waves individually. Also, each bike had to be moved into and out of the trainer area by volunteers. Lots of work, but it made for a new/unique experience for many racers and also for an otherwise impossible opportunity to race a triathlon in Seattle in March.

As for my own race … we decided around noon that there would be enough space and enough volunteer bandwidth to let me jump in and race. I had been on my feet since 6:30 and I’d raced my bike at Tour de Dung the day before … but I was eager to see what kind of splits I could throw down.

Swim: you swam as far as you could in 15 minutes, then your time was converted to a pace and then into a virtual time for a half-Olympic race. (Other indoor triathlons have been scored on arbitrary points, but I made up this approach and the TriFreak folks thought it sounded good, so they used it. Go me!)

I picked my head up to see the clock after 700 yards and saw that I was just past the halfway point – 7:33. You didn’t get credit for uncompleted 50s, and I didn’t feel that I was likely to negative-split the swim that day, so I eased off just a little and swam 650 yards in the second half. I finished with about 8 or 9 seconds to spare.

Bike: after walking to my bike and jumping on, I tried to settle in around my estimated threshold wattage … but I had a hard time maintaining the number that I wanted to see. I knew how far Ray had gone so I tried to stay on pace to beat his total, but I came up short by maybe a third of a mile.

Run: I had a rather quick T2 and walked outside to start the loop around Green Lake. We figured out that the loop was 2.95 miles including the sidewalk between the pool and the lake loop. I tried to push it as hard as I could the whole way. I didn’t feel great, but I didn’t feel terrible either. I split a 17:04, including T2 … so maybe 16:45 or 16:50-ish for the 2.95 miles. Not quite where I wanted to be, but as my first race-pace brick of the year … and on tired legs … I’ll take it.

Overall: I had the top swim and run splits and the second best bike split, for an overall “virtual time” of 59:28 for the half-Olympic course. Ray was next at 1:02:19 and Stephanie Ewert was third at 1:08:05.

break it down: Mazatlan

2010-03-30T22:16:00.001-07:00

I didn’t race in Mexico ten days ago. But lots of other guys did. My goal this year is to get ITU points at multiple races and to get a World Cup start next year, so I am rather interested in seeing how the races are going and what I can learn from them.

I raced at the Pan Am Champs in Mazatlan in 2008. The ocean was really rough and the run was very hot. Ben Collins and Matt Chrabot slipped away on the swim and exited 15-20 seconds ahead of the main group. The main group was rather strung out at the swim exit: it was a continuous flow of dudes for maybe 30-45 seconds. This led to a critical first lap on the bike, as everybody was racing to see what group they could get into. I eventually ended up in a pack of about five guys and this was the first pack that didn’t make it into the main field. We were caught by one group from behind, swelling our group to 10-ish. Up ahead, Matt & Ben extended their lead to 2-3 minutes over a very large group of guys who didn’t want to work together. Great runners like Jarrod Shoemaker wanted to catch the break but didn’t want to overwork themselves in the process. Guys who didn’t think they could outrun Jarrod, like my friend Dave Messenheimer, tried repeatedly to bridge the gap but didn’t want to bring a better runner with them. So the main pack muddled along – not fast enough to catch Ben & Matt but just quick enough every now and then to stay away from my group. On the run, Matt ran a solid enough time to win the race. Jarrod & Francisco Serrano and a few others raced each other for second. Ben struggled in the heat and DNF’ed.

So anyways, on to 2010. What can we figure out from the results? I may have to ask around a bit to learn “what really happened,” as the numbers rarely tell the whole story.

The Full Results are on the ITU website, so I won’t copy them all here … but I will pull out some pieces to analyze.

Francisco Serrano won the race in 1:53:35. He only had the third fastest run of the day, 40 seconds behind Jarrod. So he must have been in a breakaway.

Cam Dye took second in 1:53:46. His run was 74 seconds slower than Francisco’s, so he must have been in a faster break … and Francisco only beat him by 11 seconds, so the pass was probably around a mile to go … maybe even later.

Jarrod was third in 1:54:12, with the fastest run of the day. So he outran the main bike pack … and also passed all of the other guys who rode with Cam and/or Francisco. Let’s see how those packs played out…

Looking at the swim, there was a six-mean lead group between 18:46-18:51: Eder Mejia (MEX), Christian Ramos (MEX), Cam Dye (USA), Tsukasa Hirano (JPN), Kyle Leto (USA) and Leonardo Saucedo (MEX). Kudos to the Mexican team for putting three men in the break! We typically think of that country having a lot of strong runners but few great swimmers … that seems to be changing.

It is sort of hard to see how big the next pack was. There were six guys between 19:20-19:27 (including Jarrod and John Dahlz), then six more at 19:32 (including Serrano and Americans Matt Wisthoff and Barrett Brandon) … then a 19:34, 19:36, 19:45, 19:51 … those guys trailing off the back *could* make the bike group if they really rail the first few miles. But unfortunately for them, the guys ahead of them will also be sprinting so they’ll have their work cut out for them.

After those two groups, I see another cluster of six with times from 20:06-20:13. This group includes Victor Plata and Andrew Starykowicz, two guys who I have raced many times. Andrew is very strong on the bike, so I would expect him to be able to catch the “B” pack. Victor, on the other hand, is nearing the end of his pro racing career and has been working tons of hours at his law job. But he’s been known to get in shape very quickly once he starts his serious training.

Behind the Starky/Plata pack, I see four guys between 21:48-21:56. They The spacing for the next fourteen guys is hard to figure out, stretching from 21:19 to 22:24 with gaps as large as 14 seconds. Finally I see am American I know (Cyrus) at 23:24 and an Israeli who I don’t know at 25:59. Both of these guys are in serious trouble at this point, since they’ll have nobody to work with on the bike and the Mazatlan course is eight 5k loops. Each loop only takes 7 or 8 minutes, so if you exit the water alone and already a few minutes behind, you will almost certainly get lapped out. This was Cyrus’s first ITU race, and he took the experience in stride. He’ll be back!

On to the bike leg … again, only looking at the times, so it will be hard to say when the groups formed, whether anybody bridged or got dropped … or whether a heroic attack/break lasted for 3 or 4 laps and then got caught … I can’t say who chased or didn’t chase a break … or whether the pack sort of let a weaker runner slip away … but with those caveats, let’s take a peek.

The strongest bike time of the day was Cam Dye at 1:00:31. Since he was also in the swim break, he must have been solo on the bike. Wow. Francisco had the next best split at 1:01:10. So he might have bridged up to some other riders. After that I start seeing a cluster of times.

To really get a feel for the bike leg from just times, you want to look at Swim+T1+Bike times.

First Dude: Cam Dye, 1:20:04

Second Group: Serrano, Saucedo, Leto, 1:21:22 (+1:18)

Third Group: Ten guys including Jarrod and Wisthoff, 1:22:47 (+2:43)

Fourth Group: The Starky Express, towing six other guys including Barrett Brandon, 1:23:07 (+3:03)

Fifth Group: twelve or thirteen guys including Americans Jordan Jones, Justin Park and Matt Balzer, 1:23:48 (+3:44)

Sixth Group: six guys including Americans Jimmy Archer and Henry Hagenbuch, 1:26:15, (+6:11)

Stragglers: four more guys came in solo, at 1:26:34, 1:30:39, 1:31:46 and 1:31:51. Only one completed the run.

Lapped out: five guys … five more finished the bike but not the run, including the three mentioned above

Finally, let’s see what happened on the run.

Cam Dye ran strong out of his one-man break. His 32:53 was the 11th fastest run split, within 77 seconds of every runner except for Jarrod Shoemaker. But he also lost 15 seconds in transition to Francisco Serrano. Francisco outran Cam by 74 seconds … just enough to take the race win. Cam held on for second.

Jarrod ran up into third place from that large third bike group. His 30:53 was the best run split in the race by a rather large margin.

The other two guys from the second bike group – Leto and Saucedo – faded to 12th and 15th with splits of 34:41 and 35:20, a bit slower than the median.

Others from Jarrod’s group who ran well included Eder Mejia (32:03 to finish 4th), Crisanto Grajales (32:37 to finish 6th), and Arturo Garza (32:58 to finish 7th).

Danilo Pimental and Matt Long ran up into the top ten from the fourth bike group. Eligio Cervants ran up from the fifth group into 9th place with a 31:59.

Henry Hagenbuch (31:36) and Sean Jefferson (31:46) ran impressive splits from the sixth bike group but their six-minute gap to Cam and 2.5-minute gap to the fifth pack made it tough to move up all that much. They finished 23rd and 24th, just outside of the top-20 cutoff to get ITU points.

Next up: I still owe you a post about the RainMan race, an update on recent training, and maybe a similar “break it down” post about last weekend’s Mooloolaba World Cup.

Febtober in Review

2010-03-02T22:18:00.001-08:00

Two months of 2010 are already behind us! It seems to be a good time to take stock of how things are going so far. At a high level:

Injuries: doing reasonably well … my back is less of an issue than in years past … some run- and swim-induced overuse issues seem to have abated without becoming major issues.
Fitness: feeling strong on the bike and run, rediscovered by feel for the water with a 30,000-yard week last week but still not feeling FAST again there, yet
Stress & Sleep: staying ahead of things so far
Austin Endurance Ranch was a blast!!!

And now the fun part – training details. Let’s compare volume & intensity for January + February over the past six years.

Year	2005 (AG)	2006 (AG)	2007	2008	2009	2010
Swim	17.7	26.1	29.4	44.0	31.6	40.3
Bike	85.6	89.5	56.4	75.2	60.5	89.6
Run	11.3	16.4	41.0	28.2	27.1	39.0
Other	16.8	14.1	19.8	16.6	8.6	4.9
Total J+F Hours	131.4	146.1	146.6	163.9	127.7	173.8

So what is interesting about the numbers above, other than that Chris must be a bit obsessive-compulsive in order to even have all of these numbers written down?

My high-level training approach in Feb/Mar is “swim/run volume with one day of intensity, minimal bike volume but three days of intensity.” In January I was more focused on just getting into a routine again, so I had volume everywhere with minimal intensity.
2010 volume is also a bit inflated thanks to the Endurance Ranch
During my last two Age-Group winters, my bike volume was high (riding with a cycling team) but my swim & run volumes were much lower than once I got established racing Elite. I got my Elite license in April 2006.
In 2007 I had a huge run focus. I built up to 74.9 miles in my biggest week ever (31 Jan – 6 Feb) and developed a stress reaction and strained a tendon. Who would have expected that? Seriously… I did a “slow” build-up, never adding more than 5 miles/week and never adding for more than two consecutive weeks, but when you step back and look at my monthly totals I had been over 11 hrs/month only once before that build-up, and that “over” was a whopping 13-hour month, so just over 100 miles in a month. Then starting in November 2006 I did 15.8, 26.8 and 31.0 hours. Obviously a bad idea. But since then I have averaged 13.6 hours/month including injuries and time off, with a 20.0 a 24.2 and a 25.4 mixed in. So if I can get into the neighborhood of 20 hours/month consistently then I should be able to achieve a balance of improved fitness and avoidance of injuries.
I had a big swim focus leading into 2008. 2008 was my best year of racing, with the in-the-money finish at Lake Stevens and also some strong ITU races where I almost earned points. I am happy to see that my 2010 swim numbers are close to those from 2008 in spite of the shoulder issues.

Volume is easy to analyze objectively. What about intensity?

Swim: I had one test set before my shoulder got too sore to swim: 4x200 @ 5:00 from a dive. I don’t have a lot of comparable sets in the past, but 2:03-4 seems rather strong. A longer test set like 20x100 @ 1:15 would have been nice to see, too.

Bike: I have felt biomechanically strong and I have been happy to find a lot of seated-climbing power. No test yet, though.

Run: Two track workouts so far: two weeks ago was 5x1200 @ 2:00 rest targeting 3:51-3:54, last week was a 3.5-mile cut-down targeting 5:40, 5:32, 5:24 by mile, then 5:16 pace for the last 1/2 mile. I felt smoother and easier during the first of the two, but maybe that was a metabolically easier workout?

Energy Legs!

2010-02-28T23:00:00.000-08:00

For the past three years, intermittent lower back pain has turned the bike portion of my races into sort of a crapshoot. But after years of repeated bike fit work, physical therapy and technique work on the bike, I think that I have finally figured out the right formula to stay comfortable on the bike. I hope I’m not jinxing myself by saying this!

The key things for me have likely been:

yet another bike fit check-up, realizing in the process that my saddle had slid backwards a full inch
more time on the road bike, minimal time on the TT bike, given my ITU focus this year
switched over to the ISM Adamo saddle
two years worth of back/core strengthening work with lots of functional movement
targeted exercises for my hips & glutes
when things get difficult on the bike, be sure that I stay forward on the saddle and use my hips instead of my back … often using a higher cadence and spinning rather than mashing

All of this has added up to some confidence-enhancing rides at Whidbey Island, on the trainer and at RCR team rides.

So in honor of my new-found energy legs, here is the infamous PowerThirst video. Note that there is one item of foul language about 40 seconds in.

Making a Fashion Statement

2010-02-18T11:49:00.001-08:00

As I may have said previously, this year I am not racing with a triathlon team and am therefore free to make up my own racing kit. Seeing as I am mostly self-funded and that my sponsors don’t have stringent uniform rules, I would like to make up some kind of ridiculously awesome kit to race in this year.

When I race ITU races I will need to wear a kit that complies with their regulations – name and country in a certain place, ITU logo, sponsor logos limited to certain areas, etc. …

but I don’t think that they have strict rules on what a “sponsor logo” can be. For example, I could be my own sponsor, a la Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights:

My buddy Steve and I were joking about whether I could put his name or photograph on my kit in exchange for him giving me some frequent flyer miles, and I don’t see any reason why this isn’t possible. Or maybe I should work with Bill the Butcher and put a big steak on my kit.

And while ITU racing may be my primary focus in 2010, I will have about half a dozen races that are not ITU races – Pacific Grove, maybe Cap Tex, and any of the local Seattle-area races. At these non-ITU races I can wear pretty much whatever I want. Maybe I could take a page out of the Norwegian Curling Team’s book?

Or maybe something a bit more understated, yet still stylish, like the old Garmin-Slipsteam kits:

What I do know is that I don’t have a lot of style sense myself, so I need some help from you guys. Give me some awesome ideas via comments or email. Anyone whose idea makes it into the kit gets a prize pack including some Endurance Ranch shwag and maybe other assorted shwag from the ol’ Prize Box.

What a pain in the neck…

2010-02-17T13:12:00.001-08:00

I’ve been training pretty hard for just over six weeks now and I am starting to have a few aches and pains and minor setbacks. My friend Andrew’s college coach would tell them that it is normal to always have some little nagging aches and pains when you are training hard, and I suppose that is a reasonable state of mind: sometimes you just have to push through. That “push through it” mentality can be an endurance athlete’s best friend of their worst enemy. It can be hard to differentiate between “push through it” pain and the pain that you listen to (overuse injuries).

Here’s a run-down of what might be ailing me at the moment:

My lower back was a huge issue last year but I think that we’ve finally found an answer: it has been a combination of physical therapy, bike fit, massage & acupuncture, and awareness while on the bike. Now if my back starts getting sore I immediately slide forward on the saddle, drop a gear, and focus on spinning from my hips. So far, so good.
My right foot has had a whole host of issues over the years – a collapsed arch in college, which led to knee problems; then a stress reaction and a tendon strain two years ago … a history of problems here makes me especially wary of “new pain in an old spot.” But I noticed some soreness here after my first 4-5 forty-mile weeks so I backed off a bit. After a few days of rest (by which I mean swimming and running “only”) the pain seems to be mostly gone. Sweet. I also had this checked out by my army of medical support personnel.
My neck and shoulder started getting tight as I built up my swim volume in Austin. I worked through a period of low motivation and rediscovered my love of swimming, then strained my neck/shoulder in what feels like an overuse incident. Lame. Once again I am backing off on some specific aspect of my training and trying to do all that I can to let it heal.

I like to think that we all get injured sooner or later and that our mental and physical responses to such injuries are an opportunity to outperform our competitors, as they will surely face their own share of aches and pains, too.

Tonight I will hit the (running) track for my first speedwork of the 2010 campaign. I hope that my neck and foot and back don’t give me too much trouble, thereby letting me focus on the trouble being dished out by the other guys on the track. Yay!!

2010 Race Calendar

2010-02-10T08:46:00.001-08:00

(updated 8 March 2010)

This year I am narrowing my focus in an effort to improve my results at ITU points races and to start working my way up the rankings for the 2012 cycle. Here is my plan for what I’ll race in 2010. Some of these are still tentative right now. The bold races are my opportunities to earn ITU points

Sunday 21 March: Seattle Rainman Indoor Triathlon (volunteer)

Saturday 1 May: Wildflower Long Course Triathlon (tentative)

Saturday 22 May: Ixtapa ITU Pan American Cup

Sunday 30 May: Capital of Texas Triathlon, elite race (tentative)

Sunday 6 June: Brad Lewis Memorial Criterium

Sunday 13 June: Gangweon Long Distance Triathlon Asian Championship

Saturday 26 June: Coteau du Lac Pan American Cup

Saturday 10 July: San Francisco ITU Pan American Cup

Sunday 18 July: BRI Triathlon at Seafair

Saturday 31 July: Federal Escape Triathlon

Sunday 22 August: Kelowna ITU Premium Pan American Cup

Sunday 29 August: San Francisco Triathlon at Alcatraz (tentative)

Wednesday 1 September: Mercer Island Aquathlon -- 1k swim + 8k run or 500+5k

Saturday 11 September: Triathlon at Pacific Grove

Saturday 18 September: Kirkland Triathlon (tentative)

Saturday 25 September: Tuscaloosa ITU Premium Pan American Cup, USA Nationals

Saturday 2 October: Scott Tinley’s Adventures Long Course Triathlon (tentative)

Sunday 3 October: Puerto Vallarta ITU Pan American Championships (tentative)

Saturday 13 November: Roatan ITU Pan American Cup (tentative)

Training is going well so far. I did a lot of volume while I was in Austin and now I am starting to add a bit of intensity while cutting down on volume. Hanging around an office for eight hours/day doesn’t leave much time for 100-mile bike rides!

Endurance Ranch: Week Two

2010-02-07T17:31:00.001-08:00

Here is a delayed summary on our second week at the Austin Endurance Ranch. We are so busy being awesome that it was hard to find time to finish this blog post. But here goes…

Monday 18 Jan: A few drop-offs at the airport – sad to see the guys go but happy to meet the new folks. AM swim at Stacy Pool including some weight belt work and push-ups! Former pro Rip Esselstyn was at the pool and joined us for the push-up set. Morning ride to S MoPac, including a stop at TacoDeli where they hooked us up with free breakfast tacos! Evening “fun ride” with a subset of the group on Old San Antonio Rd. Chris/Nick/John got a bit excitable at times and the pace was quicker than it needed to be!

Tuesday 19 Jan: Longhorn Day. AM swim at Stacy Pool, then French toast and scrambled eggs and bacon at the house. Longhorn 70.3 bike course plus a little out-and-back that took us on a fabulous dirt road. Ask Kate and Victoria how fabulous the road was!! Okay, so maybe it was a bit rough, but at least we got to ride with a horse and some goats and a bunch of other animals. Brick run on the Longhorn run course.

Dinner at the house including pork, rice, kale, salad and cookies.

Wednesday 20 Jan: Long ride to Enchanted Rock State Park. Almost exactly 100 miles. One wet creek crossing, a few inches deep. We were again accompanied by our awesome Endurance Ranch van with its forward-facing speakers. Sadly this was our last ride with Chris’s van before she started having some issues. Luckily John’s van was also available and very capable at filling in.

We had dinner at Rudy’s Country Store & BBQ, a no-frills establishment where you order everything by the pound, you might get mocked by the staff, and you can wash your hands in a state-of-the-art sanitizer.

Amy’s Ice Cream for dessert!

Thursday 21 Jan: Omelets for breakfast, then swim-run multi-bricks at Stacy Pool and Stacy Parks. Each camper did swim & run distances that were appropriate for their goals, like (600-yard swim + 1.5-mile run) six times through. John Kenny was the big winner with 12k of swimming and 12 miles of running. I did about 8k of swimming and 14 miles of running. I also got a bit of chafing from running in my speedo. Somehow I traveled to Texas for three weeks’ worth of tri camps and didn’t bring any tri shorts. Ooops.

Thursday evening we went to the Alamo Drafthouse and watched the "Old School Quote-Along.” There was a keg in the theater, a chugging contest beforehand, kegstands afterwards and a bit of gunpowder-powered pyrotechnics during the movie. A good time was had by all. The Alamo Action pack guys added subtitles for their favorite lines so that everybody in the theater could quote along.

Friday 22 Jan: Gingerbread pancakes and scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast. One lap of the Couer d’Alene bike course on the CompuTrainers at Austin Tri-Cyclist, plus a brick run. Movie night at the house: Superbad.

Saturday 23 Jan: A few of us did the Austin Tri-Cyclist shop ride in the morning. Then we all went for a swim at Stacy Pool and did a very hilly evening ride in northwest Austin. We climbed up Courtyard, Jester, Adirondack and Mt Bonnell. It was a bit of the cold side, but sunny. Dinner of ground turkey and greens and rice and all that.

Sunday 24 Jan: Morning long ride around Town Lake. Migas for breakfast. Optional afternoon “chill” ride on Old San Antonio Rd while some folks went souvenir shopping. Visits to Austin Tri-Cyclist, Mellow Johnny’s and Whole Foods.

Monday 25 Jan: AM swim at Stacy Pool, then breakfast tacos from Torchy’s. Staff outing to the Alamo Drafthouse for Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash.

Endurance Ranch: Week One Summary

2010-01-25T17:17:00.001-08:00

Our first week at the Endurance Ranch is now over, and it has certainly been a memorable week. Ben Greenfield took a bunch of video clips at many of our activities, so you can check out this awesome video summary below:

For those of you who are more into “thousands of words” than pictures, here is a summary of what we did all week:

Monday: camper arrival, “chill” 30-mile ride including Shepherd Mountain climb, Turkey Dinner at the house

Tuesday: Longhorn 70.3 Day – morning swim at Stacy Pool, breakfast tacos at the house, ride the Longhorn bike course with support from the Endurance Ranch van, run one loop of the Longhorn run course, soak the legs in Lake Walter E Long – a chilly 50-something degrees. Of course John Kenny tried to swim some laps:

Tremonte Family red sauce for dinner:

Wednesday: swim at Deep Eddy, run on the Ladybird Lake trail and a bit of the Barton Creek Greenbelt. Chill afternoon ride south of town on Old San Antonio Rd. Homemade pizza for dinner.

Don’t be deceived by the color of the pool right now – there is a bit of grime on the walls but the spring water in the pool gets refreshed every other day:

Thursday: long ride, accompanied by our sweet Endurance Ranch van – Marble Falls and Cedar Park, 115 miles, lots of hills! Snack at the house afterwards, then off to the Alamo Drafthouse for dinner & a movie. You really have to see the van to believe it. We temporarily removed the grill in order to mount the speakers, but we’re working on a fancier approach to mounting them:

Friday: run to Barton Springs, open-water swim practice at Barton Springs, run home from Barton Springs. Brunch at the house – vanilla cinnamon raisin French toast, scrambled eggs, plenty of bacon. Evening swim at Stacy Pool. “Pre-race Dinner” at the house – catfish, yams, kale, spinach.

Saturday: Austin Tri-Cyclist Saturday morning group ride (30- and 50-mile options), brick run. Tacos from Izzos for lunch. Drive out to Hamilton Pool for a quick, cold splash and a look around. Dinner at the Salt Lick.

Sunday: 2-hour run on the Barton Creek Greenbelt. Amazing omelets at the house. Afternoon activity – Chicken**** Sundays at Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon. Evening technique swim at Stacy Pool. Dinner at the house – two types of chicken breast, two green salads, sauteed peppers & onions, brown rice, …

Here is somebody else’s video from Ginny’s. We took a few that should be posted soon.

Monday: morning swim at Stacy Pool, 30-mile ride, camper departure

A Few Endurance Ranch Pictures

2010-01-22T18:17:00.001-08:00

I haven’t been able to find a replacement cable for my camera and I’ve been super-busy with Endurance Ranch activities, but here a few quick pictures that I took with my cell phone this evening. Camp has been *fantastic* so far and everyone seems to be having a great time. Yesterday we did an epic 115-mile ride to Marble Falls and Cedar Park. Our Endurance Ranch van has exterior speakers mounted in front, so the riders get to listen to music while they ride. I’ll have some pictures of that to post in the next few days.

First up, here is the sign on our front door. It is one of the Phil Liggett quotes that decorate the Phil Liggett Bedroom and a few other places in the house:

Next up, here are a few shots of our Endurance Ranch van. I forgot to snap one of the rear or one of the speakers, but here is a taste:

We’ve been going through a lot of delicious and nutritious food here at the house. Here is my shopping cart halfway through tonight’s trip:

Our ride yesterday (115 miles, 8 riders) used up every water bottle we could find, plus a few gallon jugs and a ton of bars and gels and sandwiches and bananas and … afterwards we needed two loads in the dishwasher to wash everything:

If you happen to get bored at the Ranch, we have a selection of biking- and running-themed books. You can’t see “Born to Run” on the table right now because somebody is reading it at the moment. But in general the books haven’t been used as we’ve been busy training, eating and learning from one another.

Finally, a reminder of pacing yourself that each athlete sees when they exit our front door. Again, this quote is courtesy of Phil Liggett:

Much more to come, once I get my camera cable. You can see a bit of running commentary about this week’s camp on Twitter here.

Austin Endurance Ranch: Day One!

2010-01-18T21:58:00.001-08:00

I can’t seem to find the right cable to upload my pictures, but here is a quick update on how things are going so far at the Austin Endurance Ranch. Everybody is resting peacefully right now (except for yours truly) after a satisfying first day. Those of us who were in town early enjoyed a swim at Stacy Pool and a run around Ladybird Lake this morning. Then once the rest of our campers arrived the whole gang (except tonight’s chef) went for a 25-30 mile ride to check out the view from atop Shepherd Mountain in northwest Austin.

Tonight’s chef was the talented and gracious John Kenny. He stayed home during our ride in order to prepare a fabulous turkey dinner for the group – turkey with a brown rice stuffing, cranberry sauce, a mix of sauteed peppers… it was all fantastic! He also made soup from the leftovers.

We picked up our campers from the airport in our super-sweet Endurance Ranch van. I took a bunch of pictures today and I will upload them as soon as I can find the right connector cable.

The house looks great right now and I’d like to upload some pictures of our themed bedrooms.

The weather has also been fantastic so far. Our swim was under party-sunny skies and then it was mostly sunny for our ride with temperatures in the sixties. The forecast for the rest of this week looks very nice, too, with highs in the 70s most days. In fact, as I write this at midnight the air outside is still 60 degrees. Awesome.

I hope to post a bit more tomorrow, including some photos and some video from our handlebar-mounted camera.

Ten days in

2010-01-10T17:22:00.001-08:00

I “officially” started my 2010 season on January 1st. What a creative choice of a day to start! I am trying to “ease into things” a little but I can be a bit excitable … so there have been days of totally overdoing it intermixed with days of remarkable sanity. Here is what I’ve been up to:

Fri 1 Jan: ez hour on the trainer; some light core & strength

Sat 2 Jan: 3hr bike ride with Recycled Cycles team; 70-minute brick run with Andrew at Redmond Watershed. This felt like a bit much. About 40 minutes into the run I really ran out of gas. Afterwards I ate a burrito and tried to take a nap … I slept for 15 hours!

Sun 3 Jan: 14-mile run with Shelby’s group at Redmond Watershed; 10,000-yard swim with Stephanie at UW. The “10k” swim is a bit silly, especially when I’d only been in the pool *once* in the last 7 weeks… but this “10k” workout is one of my new ideas for 2010 and I figured as long as I go easy I should be okay. I started out a bit too strong and slowed down quite a bit … but I survived!

Mon 4 Jan: ez 5–mile recovery run with Andrew in Bridle Trails

Tue 5 Jan: AM shakeout ride on trainer: 15x1min targeting 290-300W on the trainer w/ 1min rest; brick run with Andrew in Bridle Trails – about 7.5 miles.

Wed 6 Jan: nothing. My Wednesday schedule will eventually include a long AM swim w/ Dave and a hard PM run on the track … but I felt like I might be starting to fight off a bit of a cold … and I knew that the weekend was a bit much … so I took ‘er easy today.

Thu 7 Jan: early meetings at work … so after work I did an hour pf ez biking on the trainer and an hour of easy running alone in Bridle Trails

Fri 8 Jan: rest day. I would have liked to get a swim in over lunch or after work … but work was rather busy and by the time I wrapped up there I was rather tired. Is this the type of game-time decision that I should be making? I could be convinced that I’m better off skipping workouts when tired than just pushing through like I’ve always done in the past. Hrmmm…

Sat 9 Jan: another RCR team ride – 4 hours this time. I felt strong for 3 hours then faded a *lot* after Snohomish. I ate a decent amount early on, then ate a lot more in Snohomish but my legs just started saying “no” as we climbed up Broadway. Y’arrrr… I took maybe 60-90 minutes between workouts – snack, clean-up, errands … then went to the gym to run on the ‘mill and watch football. I wanted to run an hour but got into the game and ran like 12.5 miles at an EZ pace – about an hour & forty minutes. A bit much?

Sun 10 Jan: 14-miles run with Shelby’s group at the Watershed, then another “10k” swim workout, this time solo at the Pro Club. The first 2000 yards were pretty tough. My body was shot from the run, and from yesterday’s work. But I just tried to stay smooth and relaxed and eventually I found a bit of a groove.

In total:

Swim: 2 sessions, 20200 yards, 5.5 hours. Avg 10-day period in 2007/2008/2009 was 5.1/5.8/3.9 hours.
Bike: 5 sessions, 180 miles, 10.25 hours. Avg 10-day period in 2007/2008/2009 was 9.0/10.0/11.2 hours.
Run: 7 sessions, 69 miles, 8.5 hours. Avg 10-day period in 2007/2008/2009 was 4.4/4.8/3.5 hours.

So my swim and bike volume are reasonable but I should try to get in the pool a bit more often. I am running a lot more than I typically have for long stretches of time … but those yearly averages are a bit misleading as they include tapers and rest periods.

So I had two Saturdays and two Sundays where I went NUTS, then two rather mature “unplanned rest” days during the week. As I get into the meaty part of the season I will move to more of a focus on intensity and less of a focus on volume … but as I break out of my offseason, I figure volume is a good thing … at least it would be if I could do it within reason. Reason is not yet my strong point this year, but the body is holding up pretty well so far.

Next Thursday I head to Austin to set up for the Ranch. Sweet!!!

Get fit in the new year!

2010-01-03T19:07:00.001-08:00

For those of you in the Redmond area who would like to add some core strength and conditioning to your fitness routine – my friend Melissa is now teaching Boot Camp classes in the Redmond area. She has a few years’ worth of background in fitness and nutrition coaching. Here is a bit more about what she’s doing:

Join us in Redmond every Thursday night and Saturday morning to help you build your endurance base, shed some winter pounds, and show you how to get the most out of your training! We combine core and plyometric exercises to work on key muscle areas that are crucial to an effective triathlon/running season or just looking good in a swimsuit this summer. The circuit stations in our class are designed take you from your current fitness level and help you reach your goals for 2010, all in a supportive, non-intimidating environment. Unable to attend one of our classes? Then sign-up for a personal, one-on-one Boot Camp designed just for you! For more information please contact Melissa at melissa@onlinefitnesscoach.net or call 714-329-0520.

Our New Year class includes a full nutrition and fitness package:

nutrition tracking log with healthy recipes

DVD exercise program to use at home to supplement the classes

your choice of a nutritional protein shake (with fiber!)

group exercise class every week (Thursday night 7pm and Sat mornings 10am) plus the option of one personal training one-on one session!

A GREAT WAY TO START A HEALTHY NEW YEAR!

I may help out a bit with some of the triathlon-specific skills once I get back from Austin.

Back in Action! Sort of…

2009-12-30T21:45:00.001-08:00

I officially start my 2010 training on 1/1. How appropriate. But this week I am starting to get moving again and ease into things, and I can barely contain my excitement! I am limiting myself to one workout a day, more or less. 14-mile run at the Watershed on Sunday, 10 mile run in Bridle Trails on Monday, 1-hour masters swim yesterday, 2hrs on the trainer today … hour-ish run tomorrow morning, maybe hit the pool Thu or Fri … then a Recycled Cycles team ride on Saturday and a long run on Sunday! It begins!!!

My swim yesterday was rather rough. I had been out of the water for 46 days (not counting the ocean in Costa Rica) and my form and fitness felt ROUGH. But it was kind of pleasant, really… I mean, I haven’t allowed myself to get this out-of-shape in at least five years, and I truly believe that this is a necessary form of letting the body recover. I think that in the past I haven’t periodized my training enough … I’ve been so afraid of losing fitness that I’ve never let my body recover enough to truly peak at the big races. This year will be different. I hope.

To 2010!!

Perspective

2009-12-21T15:57:00.001-08:00

I suppose it’s about time for me to mention why there haven’t been any training posts here lately. I had some bloodwork done at iNewMed at the end of the season and figured out that I’m basically overcooked in a few different ways. They advised me to take the rest of the year off. And so I am doing that. Taking time off. Not training. I can’t recall the last time that I took more than a few days off. Even my attempts at “end of season breaks” have always been more like recovery weeks than complete weeks off. So this is a new experience.

I have to say, it hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as I would have expected. I’m not going crazy. In fact, it is actually rather pleasant to be able to sleep in, work more and go out more, all at the same time!

But I am very much looking forward to getting back into my regular routine on January 1st. I’ll be focusing on ITU Continental Cup racing in 2010 with a goal of getting enough points to earn my first World Cup start at Huatulco in November. That in turn is a critical step towards Olympic Eligibility in 2012. The exact details of the Olympic selection process are still in the works, at the ITU and USA levels … but it is clear that the first step is to get into the top 140-150 on the ITU points list and/or the Olympic Qualification points list.

I am hoping that this extra-long end-of-season break proves to be the Secret Ingredient that was missing from my approach in the past!

Caffeine and Cramping

2009-12-16T13:13:00.001-08:00

I drank some coffee this afternoon. Be glad that you’re not within range of a caffeinated Tremonte.

Now my calves are twitching a bit. I generally attribute cramping and twitching to a few things:

dehydration – by far the most common cause … frequent issue in races (see: that year that Lake Stevens 70.3 was really hot) … also possible for me today, as I went to a concert last night and got a bit dehydrated
electrolyte deficiencies – sodium and magnesium are the most common culprits
fatigue – hard workouts and races play into cramping … I also frequently cramp in a swim if I ran or biked immediately beforehand

I am now wondering whether caffeine is also a factor on its own. I suppose that as a diuretic it contributes to dehydration, and it may also contribute to electrolyte balance … but have any of you heard that caffeine is a possible direct cause of cramping?

Fajitas!

2009-12-11T20:01:00.001-08:00

Last night we did another Austin Endurance Ranch prep dinner. This week’s main course was fajitas, including meats from Bill the Butcher and tortillas that we made ourselves, from scratch. We also had a bit more Tremonte & Son’s Fine Ale, a giant salad, chips and salsa, margaritas and a few desserts. Good times.

Ashwin handled the cooking of the flank steak:

I got to demonstrate the proper technique for dividing dough and rolling tortillas. At the height of our tortilla-rolling frenzy our little sweatshop had five forced laborers working for their dinner:

We need to work on using that “red eye reduction” setting on the camera… Myk looks like he is about to come for your soul.

Courtenay and Loren worked on the salad:

Two of us are hard at work. One of us is hard at work opening his beer:

No Pomerians were harmed in the cooking of this dinner. “No, I didn’t bring the Pomeranian bowling. I didn’t rent it shoes. I didn’t buy it a beer. It’s not gonna take your turn!”

All of the rolling and cooking took a bit longer than expected, so by the time the food was ready everybody was very eager to eat:

We finished off with a variety of desserts. Ritz made these oat-berry bars and Ashwin brought some fresh berries and a chocolate cake.

Sadly we didn’t get a photo of the awesome salsa that Nat made for us. We put it out with the chips as an appetizer and it disappeared quickly, despite the generous portion. It was a green salsa with a delayed but powerful kick. Tasty!

Loren wears his sponsor gear everywhere he goes, just in case. Sort of reminds me of Barrett and Andrew and their PowerBar Team Elite gear that they wear *everywhere.* The first day that I met Andrew he was ironing PowerBar patches onto everything that he owned.

Ben discovered the “creepily lit self portrait” settingon my new camera:

He also discovered the “two goofy guys gazing off into space” setting:

Of course, nobody could be as goofy as that goober in the pink hat. But check out his awesome t-shirt! It is made of bamboo!

If you haven’t booked your Austin Endurance Ranch trip yet, you are missing out on some mighty fine grubbin’.

Pizza Night

2009-12-06T21:23:00.001-08:00

This past Thursday we did another Endurance Ranch rehearsal dinner. Our main course this time around was pizza with your choice of homemade crusts and toppings. I made a whole wheat crust and an almond meal crust so that gluten-free and low-carb folks would have options. For toppings we had fresh mozzarella, basil, three colors of bell peppers, mushrooms, pepperoni, pancetta, and parmesan cheese. Of course we also included a big salad with a homemade dressing courtesy of Courtenay Brown.

This feast was accompanied by frothy glasses of Tremonte and Son’s Fine Ale. My dad and I brewed up a batch of a hoppy reddish ale, following a recipe from my sister’s friend Ben.

On to the photographic evidence:

Lots of pizza:

Salad with mixed greens, strawberries, pears, red/yellow/orange bell peppers, bleu cheese crumbles and fresh dressing. It may be hard to tell how much salad is in this picture – this is a large, party-sized punch bowl.

Delicious Beer!

If you would like to eat victoriously with us in Redmond, let me know!

If you would like to eat and train victoriously with us in Austin this winter, also let me know!!

Costa Rica!

2009-12-02T22:17:00.001-08:00

Last week I took a vacation to Costa Rica with my friend Vaibhav. There was no race in Costa Rica. This was not a training camp. It was a bona fide vacation. Highly unusual, I know, but it seemed like a good idea.

I hope to do a few more detailed posts but here is an overview with some of the greatest hits.

Volcan Arenal near La Fortuna de San Carlos

Arenla is supposedly one of the most active volcanoes in the western hemisphere. We got foggy/couldy weather and couldn’t see the lava … plus the volcano has been a bit quiet lately after a recent earthquake. But it was still cool to hike around an active volcano.

We saw some howler monkeys and leafcutter ants and cows … and the howler monkeys made a lot of noise.

This plant can hide from grazing animals by shrinking away whenever anything touches it.

Baldi Hot Springs

Some of the rivers near the volcano are naturally heated by the magma. Baldi has a lot of artificially-heated water, but the pools and waterfalls and waterslides were still a lot of fun.

My new Olympus Stylus Tough camera let me take all kinds of pictures and videos from the pool and the ocean with no worry about getting wet. Check out this video that I took while going down one of the waterfalls. It is rather dark but you sort of get the idea:

La Fortuna Waterfall

The big waterfall is about 6km from La Fortuna. You can take a cab there for about 3000 colones ($5.50) or you can walk/hike/jog. The road is rather rough so the cabs can’t go very fast. You pay about $10 to enter the park and hike down to the waterfall, but it’s a pretty big waterfall with a small but choppy pool at the bottom, plus a calmer swimming hole downstream. I tried to snap a picture of this school of fish from underwater, but the water was a bit cloudy.

Waterfalls look a lot cooler in videos than in pictures:

I was able to swim around behind the waterfall and take a few videos from behind/underneath.

I bought coconut water from a guy on the side of the road while jogging home from the waterfall. I had to wake him up from his nap on his hammock, but then he grabbed a coconut out of his pile and whacked it open with his machete. 500 colones.

Jeep-Boat-Jeep

There are three ways to get from La Fortuna to Monteverde. You can rent a car. Insurance is expensive, roads can be sketchy and you don’t meet as many people. Lame. You can take the public bus. This option takes about six hours as you have to backtrack to the nearest major town even though the distance between La Fortuna and Monteverde is like 30-40km.

The most popular option is the “jeep-boat-jeep” tour. You pay about $20-25 to take a combination of two shuttles and a boat to take the direct route. The roads are rough but the scenery is great, and we covered the distance in two hours and fifteen minutes.

Since we were “on a boat” in the middle of this jeep-boat-jeep journey, we had to do a bit of Lonely Island. I’m sorry. You really shouldn’t waste your time watching this video:

Cloudforest

Vaibhav and I visited the Santa Elena and Monteverde Cloudforest Reserves. The “cloudforest” is a toursity name for a high-altitude rainforest that gets more moisture from clouds than from rainfall. The mosses on the trees pull moisture out of the air.

Part of the forest in Santa Elena was consistenly windy. The trees don’t grow as high here because of the wind. You can hear the wind whipping through the trees in this video.

Canopy Tour

One of the most popular tourist activities in Costa Rica seems to be the cloudforest Canopy Tours. A few companies offer them but we were adivsed to go with the “Extremo” tour, which includes a tarzan swing, a rappel and the famous “superman-style zipline” where you are suspended in a superman position instead of the traditional sitting position.

Here is a video of Vaibhav departing on one of the ziplines. There were a total of 15-17 ziplines, IIRC, with the longest measuring over a kilometer. The tarzan swing was probably to most intense of them all – you jump off of a platform and are practically in free-fall as you swing forward. The superman zipline was also very cool – you could just about convince yourself that you were really flying high above the valley below.

Cooking

Our hostel in Tamarindo had a good kitchen so we cooked a few meals and snacks there. I’ve been wanting to learn how to cook maduros (friend plantains) so I looked up a recipe and give it a go here:

Playa Conchal

We took two local buses and two short walks to get from Tamarindo to Playa Conchal. The beach is composed entirely of broken shells instead of sand, and the waves make a cool sound when they hit the beach. I took a few videos and posted one of them.

The video:

Another Night of Eating Victoriously

2009-11-12T23:10:00.001-08:00

Tonight’s Austin Endurance Ranch preview dinner was once again packed with good times and good company, and featured the following menu:

Brisket -- brined and smoked by you-know-who, then finished at home according to his instructions

Couscous & Fruit Salad -- recipe from Lindsay Cotter, but substituted quinoa for couscous

Romaine/Tomato/Feta Salad -- our Minister of Salad was a bit under the weather and had to bail, so we had to do this ourselves based on her instructions

Sweet Potato and Cabbage Coleslaw -- another Lindsay Cotter recipe

Collard Greens -- I found a vegetarian recipe online with no hamhocks

Cornbread -- following the mix/box on this one. I've gotta cut corners *somewhere!*

vegetarian baked beans from a can at the grocery store

Brownies and Tiramisu -- courtesy of Susan and Dave

Mac & Jack's African Amber -- 2 growlers, picked 'em up yesterday at the brewery

We have a few friends bail at the last minute, leaving a lot of extra food for our crowd of five people … but everybody pitched in with preparations and we sat down to eat very close to 8pm.

The main course:

The collard greens were a crowd favorite. Here are the before and after cooking pictures. You can actually see the edges of the pot sneaking out from under the raw pile o’ greens:

Giant salad. It is hard to grasp the giantness in this picture. This salad is in a party-sized punch bowl:

Gluten free corn muffins with a honey butter dipping sauce. My cell phone camera can’t quite capture the awesomeness that is honey butter. Check out that glare!

Quinoa with fruit and almonds and all that awesomeness:

The sweet potato and Savoy cabbage slaw gets a bit of a kick from the jalapeno:

Vegetarian baked beans. You can’t eat BBQ without baked beans!

A tasty liquid accompaniment to our meal, brewed right down the street in Redmond:

Dessert! Brownies and tiramisu!

I am exhausted after another awesome early-morning workout, a busy day at work, and an awesome evening of cooking/eating/conversation. Time to go to bed.

If you like what you’re seeing foodwise, join us for a training camp in Austin this winter. Yay!

Training is Hard

2009-11-10T09:49:00.001-08:00

Woke up at 5:30am today. Awesome!

In the water at 5:49am. 5500-yard workout. Lots of focus on distance-per-stroke. Last week it was really hard to lengthen my stroke, but today it already felt a lot easier. I made up this workout last night. Pretty basic:

Warm-up: 200 free, 200 back, 200 pull, 200 kick, 4x50 descend @ :45, 100ez. All w/ <=15 strokes/length.

Main Set:
5x200 swim DPS descend on 3:00, 14-16 strokes/length, 2:26 2:26 2:25 2:25 2:22
5x200 pull DPS w paddles, descend on 2:40, 12-14 strokes/length

Drills: 3x{100 fist drill, 50 swim, 4x50 drill/swim by 25 – 6 kicks/side, catch-up, R-arm, L-arm}

3x200 descend, hard, worry less about DPS – 2:22 at 15-17 strokes/length, 2:15 staying long but not counting, 2:09 just going for it

about 250 EZ

10x25 on :30 shooting for 12 or less strokes/length. Managed to do 11 strokes on each while holding :17s.

cool down 250

I think that adds up to 5500.

Then I rinsed off, put on my street clothes, drove home again, changed into bike clothes and went into the Training Lab (a.k.a. my garage). I pulled out a few of Matt Dixon’s workouts last night as they helped me greatly improve my power numbers and efficiency last winter. Today’s adventure included lots of Z2 work at elevated cadences and Z3 work at uncomfortably low cadences. It was a 90 minute ride with a lot of muscular fatigue but a bit less cardio stress.

I made it to the office in time for my 9:30am call, and now I have about 8.5 hours to change the world until it’s time to get back in the pool for swim #2 with the Pro Club Masters.

A busy, physically and mentally taxing day … but I wouldn’t have it any other way!

We have a house!

2009-11-08T21:27:00.001-08:00

I am proud to say that we have locked down on our house for the Austin Endurance Ranch this winter. The house is located in the Travis Heights neighborhood in South Austin, and is very close to everything that we wanted to be very close to:

Stacy Pool is 2-3 blocks away -- a short walk!
South Congress Ave is 0.7 miles away
the nearest point on the Ladybird Lake running trail is 1.1 miles away
our bike shop partner, Austin Tri-Cyclist, is 2.3 miles away
the famous Sixth Street entertainment district is 2.6 miles away
the flagship Whole Foods Market is 3.2 miles away
the nearest grocery store, HEB, is 1.0 miles away
the back entrance to Barton Springs Pool is 3.1 miles away
Austin-Bergstrom International airport is 6.2 miles away

We have ten beds plus some inflatables for the staff, four bathrooms, a nice kitchen and (of course) wireless ethernet!

Exterior pictures:

Kitchen and dining:

Living areas:

If you have questions about our training camps, check out the website or drop me an email.

A New Tradition

2009-11-06T17:56:00.001-08:00

Last night we had an excellent dinner featuring an old family recipe as well as some new ideas.

The central piece of the meal was my grandfather’s recipe for pasta sauce, or “gravy” as the Italians call it. There are a few keys to this sauce:

Start with beef neckbones, or whatever bones your favorite butcher has on-hand
Simmer for as long as possible, at least three hours … if you can make the sauce the day before serving and then let it sit in the fridge overnight, even better
No stirring after you add the spices. There is some dissention within the family about this point, but my grandfather’s rule was always that you sprinkle the spices on top and then “let them percolate.” You can and should scrape the sides of the pot periodically, to keep things from sticking. But don’t stir!

The finished product:

As I said the other day, this sauce was served over your choice of Zone pasta or fresh local pasta. I also made a fresh loaf of bread in my bread machine. It was a bit salty. Oops.

Courtenay Brown once again assembled an excellent salad.

A last-minute addition to our feast was this excellent Italian-seasoned tri-tip that I got from Bill the Butcher. We broiled it fat-side-up for 10-12 minutes, then flipped it over and baked it at 400 degrees for another 5-7 minutes. We removed the meat for a moment, poured some red wine over it, then threw it back into the oven to make its own “reduction.” We sort of forgot about the meat for a little while after that, as we finished cooking the other courses, but the tri-tip still came out of the oven mostly medium.

For dessert we had a small pile of strawberries with vanilla yogurt. The berries were surprisingly tasty for being out-of-season.

What’s Cookin’, Good Lookin’

2009-11-03T22:31:00.001-08:00

As we prepare for this winter’s edition of the Austin Endurance Ranch I wanted to run through all of the planned recipes, so I’m inviting friends over every Thursday night to be my guinea pigs.

For our first effort two weeks ago, Courtenay and I made enchiladas and a salad while Ben “worked” on his laptop. Here are the results:

Cooking the enchilada filling:

Filling the pan:

Salad in a pot, salad on a plate:

The finished product:

Ben helped eat:

This week I’ll be following the old Tremonte family recipe for pasta sauce. This will be served over a choice of Zone or Cucina Fresca pasta, along with some fresh bread, salad, dessert… good times!

I may try to throw in some Chicken Parmesan, too, if Bill the Butcher has some scavenger chicken in-stock tomorrow night.

Emerald Sprints

2009-10-29T09:13:00.001-07:00

I picked up an Emerald Sprints flyer at one of the bike shops and I finally got around to checking out their website over breakfast this morning. Check out the video from their “Pedal to the Metal” night last May. Intense!

For the uninitiated – they have a nifty setup with two instrumented Kreitler rollers, which lets two bar patrons face off in a head-to-head sprint. The fastest riders cover their course in about 18 seconds. The bikes appear to be fixed gears but I can’t identify the gear ratio. It is small enough to spin up quickly and also small enough that maximum cadence becomes a factor. Just watch the video.

No word yet on when their next event might be…

Shutting ‘er down

2009-10-22T17:49:00.001-07:00

After much thought and consultation on the topic, I have decided not to race at this Sunday’s Longhorn 70.3. I will still be there on the sidelines, cheering my friends along and taking pictures. I will be wearing my US Pro Tri tech tee from Mt Borah Custom so I should be easy to find if you happen to be at the race.

After a year where I probably traveled and raced a bit too much despite a few injuries, it recently became clear to me that I’m not in position to turn in a good performance at Austin and I am better off getting an early start on my off-season break. This will let me jump into 2010 training that much sooner!

I *love* to get out and race, especially in my adoptive hometown, so this will be quite hard for me. But I think it is a good growth experience for me, and hopefully a sign of maturity.

Don’t worry, everybody, I promise that my behavior will remain as immature as always!

This is the Endurance Ranch

2009-10-18T22:18:00.001-07:00

Today we are happy to release our first two "This is the Endurance Ranch” video ads. We hope you like ‘em. Tell all your friends!

More are on the way. Next weekend we’ll shoot a few on location in Austin, TX and at Longhorn 70.3.

Scott Tinley’s Adventures

2009-10-05T21:48:00.001-07:00

I was fighting a cold for about 9 days leading up to the Long Course race at Scott Tinley’s Adventures. As late as Thursday I wasn’t even sure if I’d race … but I feel like the sickness was gone by Friday and that I was therefore clear to race on Saturday. Sweet. I went in with a pretty good attitude and an uncertain physical state.

I stayed with my friend Chris Stehula in San Luis Obispo. He convinced me to go for a run on some gorgeous trails around a hill near town immediately upon arrival. My head cold was nearly gone at that point and I could tell that it wouldn’t be an issue on Saturday. Friday we went for an easy ride and I could feel that the sickness was gone.

In the past, Tinley’s has been an Olympic-distance non-drafting event with a deceptively hilly bike and a less-deceptively-hilly run. I should make it clear that the run is quite hilly but does not deceive you in any way. There is a brutally steep climb each lap. This year Tri-California altered the course to make it a “long course” race – 1.5mi swim, 48mi bike, 9mi run. So we got to run up the hill three times.

We had a rather small pro field – 13 guys and the top ten get paid – so Stehula and I both hoped/expected to make it into the money and to have a good chance at the top five if we had a good day.

We didn’t.

I never felt terrible in the swim but I just didn’t seem to have as much “go” when I needed it. I did feel sort of terrible when I exited the water 60-90 seconds behind guys that I usually swim with…

On the bike I just tried to stay within myself and to let the legs come to me, knowing that there were still a few guys behind me. With the back issues that I’ve had all year, I was hoping to ride just hard enough that my back didn’t flare up and to pick up the pace as the race went on and as the others came through. Nick Thompson caught me around mile eight and Stehula caught me around mile 10. I tried to stay near each of them for awhile but I each of them slowly pulled away.

I was far enough back on the run that I just tried to stay smooth and relaxed, pushing it enough to catch anybody who exploded.

So all in all, it wasn’t a great day for me but I figure that I was probably a bit off physically after being sick … so I’m glad that I was able to get out there and race and kick-start my next big training block.

A Busy Weekend

2009-09-22T22:10:00.001-07:00

My friend Dave “The Man with the Moustache” Messenheimer visited Seattle this weekend to visit some friends and to race Starcrossed. We packed in a lot of activities. Here’s a quick summary.

Wed: AM long swim, PM track workout with Tony, Andrew and Paul, late-night airport pickup

Thu: sleep in, cyclocross practice at Marymoor, dinner at Gordito’s

Fri: AM swim, PM cyclocross practice at Marymoor, dinner at Ivar’s, Girl Talk show at the Showbox SoDo

Sat: packet pickup for Kirkland Triathlon, race at Starcrossed, prep our TT bikes for Sunday.

Sun: Kirkland Triathlon, volunteer at the Brooks Outlet semi-annual sidewalk sale, afternoon snack at Dick’s Drive-In, check out the Colonnade, dinner at Sushi Land

Mon: easy ride on CX bikes, Pearl Jam show in the evening

Tue: awake at 4:30am for the airport drop-off, then a quick nap in the car before a 7am swim with Ben and Courtenay

The cyclocross race went pretty well for me. It was my second time racing CX on a CX bike and my first time not double-flatting, and I managed to finish in the top ten! I didn’t get off the line very quickly and had to work my way up from 30th or 40th, but it was very encouraging to be able to do so. My weak-but-improving handling skills didn’t hold me back all that much and my TT power helped me move up on the straightaways. It was cool to watch the elite races later in the day, especially once the rain started falling.

The triathlon on Sunday brought out an impressive field for a local sprint race – Ben Collins, Rusty Pruden, Dave Messenheimer and I were the top for finishers, in that order. My splits were a bit slower than the last time that I did this race, back in 2007, so I was a bit disappointed about that. But it was fun to get to race against such a solid field without having to travel. I was second out of the water behind Ben but I was surprised at what a large time gap he was able to open up during the swim. I picked up some time in transition but he just buried us all on the bike. Dave and Rusty caught me about halfway through the bike. I stayed with them for a bit, gained some ground on the big hill but then they slipped away on the flats. Lame. I started the run feeling strong but faded a bit after the first mile. My form didn’t look terribly smooth, either. I think that I need to pick up my run volume a bit once my PG blisters fade away.

But my biggest offseason training focus is going to be my swim, at least until January. While I need plenty of work in all three disciplines, I can’t really “race” draft-legal without swimming my way into that first pack. I’m going up to six workouts a week for awhile to see what kind of impact that has.

Austin Endurance Ranch

2009-09-15T21:27:00.001-07:00

I am proud to announce that this winter I will be hosting the best “training vacation” that you’ve ever experienced at the Austin Endurance Ranch. Our staff will help you get away from your cold, rainy winter to beautiful Austin, TX. We provide full support so that you can focus on your training – a comfortable bed, nutritionist-designed meals, a spacious house, airport pickups, ground transportation to and from the airport, access to spring-fed outdoor swimming pools and dirt running trails, ground transportation to any workouts that don’t start from the house, mechanical support, a sag/support vehicle on long rides, a few fun non-training activities … and every training session will be led by our team of professional triathletes!

We are currently offering camp dates from late January through mid February but may add more dates if there is adequate demand. We expect many folks to take advantage of our special Monday-Monday pricing but you can also pay by the day in order to suit your schedule.

Learn more about what we have to offer at www.enduranceranch.com. Feel free to ping me with questions at chris@enduranceranch.com or use the comments below. Happy Training!!

Triathlon at Pacific Grove – Extras

2009-09-14T09:25:00.001-07:00

Here are a few more items from Saturday’s race.

Race video, courtesy of my homestay hosts, the Kintzes.

Chris and Friends at P.G. Tri, 2009 from The Kintzes on Vimeo.

Splits, as shown on the Tri-California website:

Swim:
First Group: Fleischmann @ 19:59, Leto @ 20:00, Dahlz & Brandon @ 20:03
Second Group: Piland @ 20:53, Stephenson @ 20:54, Huerta @ 20:58, Brown @ 21:07, Tremonte @ 21:09
Third Group: Balzer @ 21:24, Plata @ 21:26
Young @ 21:59
Lockton @ 22:38
Rodic – not listed

T1: Dahlz @ 1:04, me @ 1:05, Flash @ 1:09, everybody else @ 1:11+ … I really made up some key time here

Bike:
First Group: Fleischmann/Dahlz/Leto @ 1:22:25
Second Group: Huerta/Stephenson/Brandon @ +2:00. (Barrett had a rough T1 and lost the lead group.)
Third Group: Balzer/Tremonte @ +3:30
Piland @ +5:10
Fourth Group: Piland/Lockton @ +6:50
Plata @ doing his own thing
Rodic – not listed

T2: Leto @ :24, most of us @ :28-:32, a few above that

Run:

Run times looked a bit slower than usual, possibly due to fatigue after a windy bike … and possibly due to the wind continuing while we ran. I felt pretty smooth/relaxed/fast out there but my time was 2:40 slower than last year.

0:32:36    Fleischmann, Brian
0:33:50    Brandon, Barrett
0:34:21    Leto, Kyle
0:34:27    Huerta, Manny
0:35:39    Dahlz, John
0:35:40    Stephenson, Jamie
0:36:45    Tremonte, Chris
0:36:46    Young, Scott
0:37:37    Brown, Brett
0:38:04    Piland, Jeffrey
0:38:05    Balzer, Matthew
0:39:58    Lockton, Andrew – stopped to deal with a hamstring cramp
0:50:45    Plata, Victor

Pac Grove

2009-09-12T17:28:00.001-07:00

After a rough August and an especially sad effort at Chicago it would have been easy to get down on myself. But within hours of the finish I had decided that Pacific Grove would go well. I knew the course. Tri-California races are practically “home” races for me. I knew I was fit even if I couldn’t show it in races. Then I saw that only 16 guys were registered. They pay 10. I decided that I would finish in the money. Somewhere in my heart and mind I had some doubts but I just tried to push them away and say, “PG will go well.”

It did.

I had a great start and made the early swim break with Brian Fleischmann, Kyle Leto, John Dahlz and Barrett Brandon. I took a knock in the head about 200m in and almost lost my goggles. I didn’t stop to adjust them at all and the kelp kept grabbing at them. So eventually I skipped a stroke or two to make sure that I wouldn’t lose my goggles altogether and then lose a minute or more while swimming blind. I was in no-man’s land for a bit but just kept my stroke long and relaxed, and figured some guys would catch me. I actually stopped and secured my goggles once I saw that I would get caught. Good call #1.

Jeff Piland and Jamie Stephenson caught me and I swam comfortably with them for the rest of the first lap and almost half of the second. Then I went into some kelp that Jamie missed and Brett Brown (who had been right behind me) passed me like I was sitting still. Don’t mess with the kelp. It means business. I lost Brett a bit on the way back in as we took different lines through the kelp, but we came back together just before the swim exit.

I got my wetsuit off quickly and got out of transition cleanly. I passed Brett in transition and almost caught back up to Jeff and Jamie and Manny Huerta. I quickly bridged up to them on the bike and we started a rotation. Things were a bit jumpy and I kept having to close gaps and catch back on … another rider let a small gap open up and I couldn’t quite close it down.

So rather than kill myself to bridge back up, I tried to relax a little and catch my breath. In my past few draft-legal events (San Francisco and Kelowna) I’ve buried myself early on, trying to catch onto a group, and then a group would catch me from behind and I wouldn’t be able to keep up. So I kept looking over my shoulder and hoping to see the third group, but never saw anybody. My former group caught Barrett Brandon and I was still alone. Oops. But when I hit the turnaround I could see a that a hard-charging Matt Balzer was the next guy on the road. Woohoo! Matt is very strong on the bike.

I sat up and waited for Matt, pedaling a bit easier and trying to ensure that I would recoever enough to be able to go with him. Good call #2. I got on Matt’s wheel and we worked together for the rest of the bike ride. I was diligent about getting through 1.5 bottles of CeraSport but I didn’t get into my gels. Matt is definitely stronger than me on the bike but I was able to contribute a bit here and there.

Matt “attacked” a bit coming out of the turnaround at 25km and I had to work hard to get back on his while. I “retaliated” by refusing to pull through when it was my turn. My explanation at the time was a bit more colorful, but all in good fun. I resumed trading off once he had served his time. We caught and passed Jeff with about 10km to go, putting us in 7th and 8th place in the race.

My T2 was quite efficient, too. I got out ahead of Matt and tried to find my legs while expecting him to come flying by. I was happy to find that my legs were right where I’d left them – securely attached to my hips – and I felt really good for the first mile. I was in seventh place on the road. I would almost certainly finish in the money. I thought that I had some chance of catching 6th or 5th, too.

The rest of the run wasn’t terribly eventful for me. I continued to feel good for almost the whole run and kept pushing the pace while trying to stay light on my feet. I was sad to see my friend Andrew Lockton disappear on the final lap after charging hard for the first 5km. Apparently his hamstring cramped and he had to stop to loosen it up. He would have made the top ten.

I will post splits, pictures and video once all are available.

Next up – Scott Tinley’s Adventures and Longhorn 70.3. Keep your eyes peeled for a big announcement from me on Monday or Tuesday.

I will write down and back-date a Chicago report one of these days, too.

Air Travel

2009-08-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

I travel a lot for my “work,” and I’ve picked up a few air travel habits that would probably be useful to share. You’ll certainly have heard some of these before, but others might be new. I find it ironic or at least odd that an athlete’s routine in the days leading up to their biggest races is often about as different as possible from their regular daily routine. Here are some ideas to help take the bite out of flying:

Stay well-hydrated. If you do nothing else, do this. The pressurized cabin is much drier than you’re accustomed to. Bring an empty water bottle through security. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a half-full one and have had to chug it at the security checkpoint. Or you can just buy a bottle for like $4 once you are through security. For a cross-country flight you probably want two bottles.
Compression tights. I still think that people who race in such things are silly. Loren. (I suppose that was just a training run, but I’ll call you out anyways.) But many of us “pros” wear tights under our jeans when we fly. It helps with circulation in your legs and helps keep them from getting that dead feeling after arrival. Compression tights designed for runners are great. Right now I am wearing some white surgical socks that I bought at the drugstore when Ben Collins and I were on our way to Seoul last year. Really. White surgical socks from the drugstore, cost maybe $30.
Get up and walk around during the flight, especially if it is longer than about 90 minutes. C’mon, you know that sitting at your desk/computer all day is terrible for you, too, but it is even worse in one of those “spacious” airplane seats. I like to go to the most open area in the aisle, usually near the bathrooms, and do about 15 lunges on each leg, along with some squats, then a few stretches. It is a great conversation starter! I’ve switched from a “window guy” to an “aisle guy” in order to accommodate this habit.
Bring a snack. You’re getting ready for your big race and you’re about to starve yourself for four hours, or rely on airplane food for nourishment? C’mon … you’re spending $300 on your ticket, $100-500 for your race entry, hundreds more on the hotel, rental car, etc. I recommend bringing something low-glycemic for your snack, as you won’t be in a post-exercise recovery state. Some of the protein bars are good. Or some trail mix…

I thought that I might have more to say, but those are the main points. I am being asked to turn off all electronic items, stow my carry-ons, and return my tray-table to the upright and locked position as we prepare to land at O’Hare. Buh-bye for now.

That b’ar must have been hungry…

2009-08-25T23:26:00.001-07:00

… ‘cause I just got eaten again. Am I carrying on too long with the Stranger’s classic line from The Big Lebowski?

This past Sunday I raced in the ITU Kelowna Continental Cup in beautiful Kelowna, BC. I’ve done this race 4 times and I expect to keep doing it for a number of reasons:

Beautiful scenery … the view of the lake and the mountains and the town from my friend Liz’s porch is amazing
Friendly folks … a bunch of volunteers in the town of Kelowna have been putting on their Apple Triathlon for over 25 years. I even found mention of the race in a “History of Kelowna” picture book that was published in like 1987.
Kelowna is only a 4.5- to 5-hour drive from Redmond – not having to fly makes the trip rather inexpensive and hassle-free

I picked up a mild stomach bug on the Wednesday before the race but figured it would work its way out by Sunday. I was wrong. I didn’t really feel it until the run but then, boy, did I ever feel it. I almost had to stop and walk a few times due to the intense pain in my gut. Wow… but I can’t blame that for my poor finish – I had contact with the race well before the run started. I finished 26th of 28 finishers, although about ten dropped out. Let’s go through it chronologically:

Warm-up: thought I did well here … plenty of time on the bike, a bit shorter run than normal, then did my swim warm-up in the wetsuit. The water in Kelowna was 21C, just above the wetsuit cutoff, and I’ve gotten a bit cold/tight between warm-up and the race start in past years.

Swim: My run-in was great and I established a decent enough position. I worked steadily without burying myself and stayed comfortably on the feet in front of me. I looked up a few times to ensure that I was still with the main group, and I was. I was basically on the back of this group when guys started getting dropped, but luckily they were all behind me! The top five or six Canadians got away on the swim, but I was more concerned with staying in the big group. Being on the back of the group made the run-out tough and I had to work a bit to get back into the group. Things got a bit quicker on the second lap and I felt like it was too risky to stay on the back, so I tried to move up … but apparently I didn’t try hard enough, so I just stayed next to the back two guys. Then I drifted right a bit, corrected, got back on their feet, drifted left a bit, corrected, got back on their feet … and with about 250m to go I was dropped. OUCH. I swam solo the rest of the way in and could see the big group exiting transition as I ran towards T1.

Bike: I rode very hard for the first bit of the bike, hoping to catch a few riders up the road. But I coudn’t catch ‘em, and then I got caught from behind and wished that I had built into the bike a bit more. I didn’t feel weak or helpless on the bike, like I sort of did last week, but my best efforts just weren’t enough as I would ride with each group for a few Ks and then get dropped. Very lame. I should have been able to do better. Two of the groups were riding pretty hard but I felt quite comfortable in the third group and just fell asleep at the switch, a little, and got on the wrong wheel and then couldn’t bridge when he got gapped. Lame.

Run: Let’s ignore the terrible pain of laps two and three and instead focus on two silly things that I did during the run:

On lap one I was slowly reeling in Leduc from Canada but couldn’t quite close the last 10m. Then I heard Simon Whitfield coming up behind (yes, I was getting lapped) and I hatched a rather silly and sub-optimal idea: I should go with this guy for as long as I can, and see if I can settle into a faster pace. I went with Simon for maybe 15 seconds and then settled into a slightly faster pace than before … and then fell apart, more or less … then I did the same thing when Tichelaar, Jones and McMahon came through together – I picked up my pace to try and match theirs but could only do so for 15 or 20 seconds, and then ended up worse off than when I started. But hey, when you’re already getting lapped you may as well have some fun out there. Provided, of course, that you don’t get in the way of the guys who are still racing for $$, which of course I didn’t.

The other piece of tomfoolery on the run came in the last 200m. My stomach started feeling miraculously better on the fourth lap and I picked up my pace a *LOT.* If my final split was 38:45-ish then I must have been going sub-35:00 pace for that last lap. I was reeling in Mike Adams of GBR and finally caught him with 150 or 200m to go. I tried to pass quickly but he’d seen me coming and was ready to respond. He sat behind me for 100m and then tried to blow past me with 50m to go. But I had heard him back there so I was ready to respond. I had a mental picture of the sprint between Chris Lieto and Crowie at Boise 70.3, but for some reason I was identifying with Lieto at the moment. I put in a pretty good surge but Adams had more in the tank than I did and he nipped me at the line.

“Man, aren’t we a bunch of idiots,” I said. Sprinting for 25th place out of 28 finishers, long after the race had been decided. But hey, honor is honor.

I collapsed into a nearby chair, drank about three bottles of Gatorade and thought to myself, “this clearly not your best day, but you gave it your best effort” and I felt surprisingly good about that. Minimal self-flogging. Time to look forward to Chicago, Pac Grove, Kirkland, Tinley’s and Longhorn.

Sometimes you eat the b’ar…

2009-08-18T22:12:00.001-07:00

… and sometimes, well, he eats you.

I had a rough race at Lake Stevens this past Sunday. My swim was fine but I couldn’t find any kind of rhythm on the bike. My friends said that my position looked a bit off and I felt like I was fighting the machine most of the way rather than feeling like rider and bike were one. I was far enough back starting the run that there wasn’t much to look forward to, but I tried to put in a good effort and managed a respectable 1:23 split.

Last night I lowered my saddle 13mm and the bike feels a good bit better now. I also measured every conceivable dimension of this fit against the corresponding measurements on another bike for which I recently had a professional fit done. I’m hoping that this position change will fix a lot of my issues on the TT bike.

Thanks to Shawn Burke for taking a few pictures at the race!

I decided to sport my summer haircut this time around, after having trouble keeping my cap on at Wildflower and at Treasure Island. I am happy to stay that the cap stayed put this time!

In spite of my rather disappointing race performance, the race weekend was still a good time. Andrew Lockton and Justin Park stayed at my house and we got to hang out and eat a LOT. Justin has this theory about eating a *huge* meal the night before the race. We each bought an oversized “Muy Grande” burrito and a dinner salad at Acapulco Fresh, then drove straight to Jimmy Johns to also buy sandwiches. We hit Whole Foods for some side items even though each burrito already came with a bag of chips. (Chip, bro?) Then we spread out everything on my table before starting the Eating Fest.

I will award a prize to the first commenter to identify the sexy man on the cover of the running magazine on the sofa. Bonus points if you *are* the sexy man on the cover of the running magazine on the sofa.

We discovered that Andrew has a previously undiscovered talent for high-volume eating. He easily packed away all three of his dinners before Justin and I even hit the halfway mark.

The basic idea of this “one massive meal” approach is to get the calories in ~12 hours before the race and to then eat *nothing* the morning of the race. I wasn’t able to eat nothing in the morning, but at shorter/faster races there is a high probability of GI discomfort if you’re still digesting your pre-race meal. I know that half-Ironman sounds long, but the races seems to be getting closer and closer to short-course pace. Justin certainly raced well off of this plan, finishing third overall.

A final positive note about the race – I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who told me that they read this blog! (It wasn’t all that large of a number, but it was still cool.) I’m glad to hear that folks are getting a kick out of these blog posts. It can be challenging to find the time to post regularly, but finding that people really read and enjoy these posts is good motivation to keep posting. Feel free to leave comments or questions!

On my old Community Server blog I was able to pull traffic reports but I haven’t found a way to do that for my Blogger blog. Are any of you “lurkers” familiar with such a method? Does Google expose a traffic report that I just can’t find? Or do I need to go with some third-party analytics package? Or would I start getting traffic reports from AdSense if I enabled ads on my blog? Any help is appreciated!

TIME Cover: Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin

2009-08-12T21:52:00.001-07:00

I saw this cover story today on a Time magazine in a waiting room: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-2,00.html. The subtitle on the paper copy was a bit more intriguing: “The Myth About Exercise. Of course it’s good for you, but it won’t make you lose weight. Why it’s what you eat that really counts.” (emphasis mine)

Could it be that the science behind our Paleo/Primal/Atkins approach is finally going mainstream? I just read a line last night in Hunter Thompson’s book about Hell’s Angels where he has something to the effect of “Publication X tries to propose new ideas whereas magazines like Time are more about capturing and documenting the conventional wisdom of the current time.” So if Time magazine does a cover article about what you eat being more important than how much you eat, that would imply that this line of thinking is going mainstream. Yay!

But is that what they’re really saying, or did they have a different perspective?

Main points that I see in the article:

Exercise has other health benefits other than weight loss. Regardless of what the author says about obesity, he is not denying that exercise helps reduce risk for heart disease, diabetes, cancer, … cognitive function in the elderly, chronic back pain,
In a recent clinical study of 464 overweight women, exercise didn’t influence the amount of weight lost.
He talks of two types of “compensation” – eating more or reducing activity at other times in the day. (This is very consistent with my understanding of caloric balance, eh?)
He still thinks a lot in terms of caloric balance, i.e. “… you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight.”
Humans fatten more easily than other animals because we have very little “brown fat.”
A study in Plymouth, England, found that youngsters at three different schools expended about the same amount of energy in spite of having widely varying amounts of organized activity in PE class. (This is also consistent with my understanding of caloric balance.)
He implies that organized/planned/structured exercise stimulates your appetite whereas other activity (which I would call NEAT) does not.
In a diabetes study, a healthy body mass index is more important than being aerobically fit.
He even mentioned Taubes at the end!

But the only advice that he provides on losing weight is “eat less.” How can you mention Taubes and still push for caloric balance?? Despite the subtitle, he never talks about what you eat and the influence that this has on fat storage and use. I was disappointed but not surprised.

He mentioned that caloric consumption tends to be proportional to energy expenditure. This seems to contradict caloric balance theory. So I think that there is room for an excellent follow-up article that goes into why some people attain unhealthy weights and what approaches can work to get them back to a healthy weight.

I continue to believe that insulin resistance by far the most common cause, affecting 80-90% of obese people. Let’s see an article about that in the mainstream press!

Redmond Reporter Article on 2-Time Seafair Triathlon Winner

2009-08-09T21:24:00.001-07:00

This article came out in the local newspaper while I was somewhere in Oregon or California. Luckily I was able to find it in our recycling bin when I got home.

Click on the image below and it should blow up to a large enough size to read.

Back in the Pool

2009-08-05T14:26:00.001-07:00

A quick break from bike trip write-ups. On Tuesday night I went to the Pro Club masters swimming workout for my first swim in 13 days. I expected to feel a bit out of it but I turned in some time splits that I was very happy with. I certainly emptied the tank in each of the two main sets, but it felt good to go fast.

Warm-up: 300 swim, 200 kick, 200 pull
12x25 as 3x(fast-easy, easy-fast, fast, easy)
3x200 fastest possible average on 4:00
12x50 fastest possible average on 1:30

I managed to go 2:08, 2:08, 2:10 for the 200s and almost all :28s for the 50s. (short-course yards) … some guys I race against are much faster than this and some are much slower, but for *me* those are good times. I’m not a terribly good sprinter, so :28 from a push for 9 of 12 50s is pretty sweet. I even dropped a :27 in there once!

Day Ten: Stillwater Cove to San Francisco

2009-08-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

It was very foggy between Stillwater and Jenner … the park ranger has warned us that Bodega Bay is notoriously foggy and often the fog doesn’t burn off. We rode a few winding climbs and descents in the morning before our breakfast stop.

On the run-in to Jenner we passed this estuary that had some really killer current coming in from the ocean. I wish I’d taken a south-facing picture as we descended into Jenner. It was very scenic.

We ate breakfast at the coffee shop in Jenner. We chatted with two guys who’d lived in the area for many years. We even talked a bit about HealthVault!

11:05am: leaving Jenner we saw a guy on the side of the road selling smoked salmon. I figured my dad would get a kick out of this sign.

11:23am: more scenic beaches

12:30pm: large group of cyclists from Marin doing a century and a double century in Sonoma County

1:30pm: countryside

Shortly after this, my phone ran out of batteries. I tried to recharge it at lunch but I must have picked a bad outlet, so I was phoneless and cameraless for the rest of the day. I was able to steal a few pictures from Vaibhav. This is me during the run-in to Point Reyes Station.

We ate lunch at a market in Point Reyes Station that advertised the presence of burritos and tortas on a large sign outside. They were showing a NASCAR race on a big screen TV inside. It seemed a bit out of place.

After leaving PRS, we had one final “climb” on the Sir Francis Drake parkway. Once again, the pictures in the guidebook made it look a lot worse than it really was and soon we were on the gently downslope to Lagunitas. The road was very rough in this area but our friends in San Francisco said that the alternate route (staying on Route 1 through Stinson Beach) included some crazy-steep hills. Note: if a hill seems crazy-steep on your regular bike, then it will likely be hell on two wheels with a touring bike.

We got to Lagunitas and rolled on through the Marin suburbs – Fairfax, Mill Valley, Sausalito… eventually we found ourselves on roads that I’d ridden before. I did an easy 2-hour spin after the San Francisco Triathlon. I’d also ridden to Tiburon with Loren last year when he lived there and I was racing something-or-other in SFO. Jessi and I had ridden a tandem over the Golden Gate Bridge and into Sausalito while in SFO on vacation a few years back, too. All that experience with the local roads helped as a few of the intersections near Mill Valley didn’t have bike route signs.

We stopped for a few pictures before and after the bridge, plus one shot mid-span as we passed the San Francisco City Limits sign,

And finally, a picture of me biting my lower lip so that you don’t see how badly sunburned/windburned it is after riding 1000 miles in 10 days! WOOOHOOOO!

Day Nine: MacKerricher to Stillwater Cove Campground (Ocean Cove, CA)

2009-07-31T22:00:00.000-07:00

After packing up camp on Day Nine, Andrew, Vaibhav and I headed in to Fort Bragg for breakfast. We ate at the Wizard-of-Oz themed Eggheads Restaurant. The food was quite good but we had to wait a very long time to get a table. We felt a little silly waiting that long when there appeared to be other options in town, but it was the kind of situation where you’re reluctant to give up after already waiting a bit.

I ordered my usual two-plate breakfast – bacon and eggs on one plate, French toast on the other. In my defense, we did share the French toast this time around.

After breakfast, Viabhav and I rode on while Andrew stayed in town to meet up with some friends from Ukiah.

We rode over a few small bridges on the way out of Fort Bragg

Noon: random coastal shots

12:40pm: some big rocks on the beach, just visible through the fog

12:50pm: we pulled off at a bed and breakfast in order to get a closer look at this arch just off the beach

1pm: We passed a sign for a rather intriguing bar that was only open on Fridays and Saturdays.

Vaibhav and I stopped for lunch in Point Arena. The burrito place that was mentioned in my guidebook wasn’t open anymore but there were three or four organic markets and lunch places to choose from. My guidebook said that Point Arena was once a haven for hippies who left San Francisco to pursue alternative lifestyles.

We grabbed an assortment of snacks and some sandwiches and ate a hearty lunch while looking at old banners from the city’s centennial.

As we wrapped up lunch, I laid down for a moment on the bench in the market and actually fell asleep. I was DONE.

But the short nap did me well. Or maybe it was the bottle of fresh, local apple juice and the large quantity of chocolate chips that I ate with lunch…

The run-in to Gualala (last town in Mendocino County) was fast and pleasant, with an encouraging tailwind.

5:08pm: welcome to Sonoma County!

We rode through more dense fog in northern Sonoma County. It felt a bit dangerous with the lack of shoulder and the somewhat fast traffic. I’d read about a Eucalypt Grove in one of the guidebooks and hoped that there would be less fog there.

6:30pm: we the grove. The heavy smell of the Eucalypts reminds me of racing at the Escape from Alcatraz. Eucalypts are a non-native tree (they’re native to Australia, of course) but they seemed quite common in northern California and I didn’t sense a lot of desire to get rid of them, although they must be displacing some native species and the animals that would use them for food and/or shelter.

Around 7pm we rode into the town of Ocean Cove. There were four campgrounds in the immediate vicinity of the town – two in the State Park before town and one immediately after the town, plus a commercial car-camp in town. The camp past town (Stillwater Cove) had showers and hiker/biker sites so we went there. We saw signs at the first park that outlined the rules and limits for mushroom gathering. Apparently Salt Point State Park is a great place to find mushrooms. We even found one in our campsite.

In town I met some kids from Sacramento who ride BMX bikes back home. We sat around a bit and talked about bikes before rolling out.

At Stillwater Cove they gave us so much wood that we needed a wheelbarrow. (All of the California campgrounds sold firewood for $7 per bundle.)

This was the only night that we were all alone in the hiker/biker area, but a family of car/RV-campers with lots of toys was in the next site. They had a canopy to eat under, an RV, two very large tents, …

8:45pm: A few more shots at the campground:

We were visited by a raccoon before going to sleep but it was too dark to take any pictures.

Day Eight: Burlington Campground to MacKerricher State Park (Cleone, CA)

2009-07-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

The day after my birthday, we slept in a little and then grabbed breakfast at the coffee shop in Myers Flat. That’s where the barista filled us in on the area’s history.

The next town that we road through (Miranda) had a bit more life and Garberville was surprisingly large.

The highlight of today’s ride was the big climb up Leggett Hill – about 4-5 miles at about a 5% grade. Vaibhav had been talking about it all week after seeing it from the car a few weeks earlier. After that descent, we had to tackle a shorter but steeper climb at Rockport – maybe 2 miles at 6-7%.

We stopped in the small town of Leggett for pizza and a burger and fries (chips?) before tackling the hills. There was a drive-through tree near Leggett whcih we thought about checking out … but with the hills looming we figured the prudent thing was to head straight to the hills.

The climbs turned out to be a bit less intense than expected – sure they were long and uphill, but they weren’t ball-breakers. The descents were a lot of fun – lots of switchbacks.

This was another day where I didn’t get to charge my phone until late in the day, so most of my pictures are from the evening.

6:40pm: Here are some shots after descending the second major climb and getting back to the coast:

6:58pm: the view from Westport State Beach. We strongly considered staying here for the night – it was very pretty, it was getting late, and we had ridden 70 miles with two big climbs … but there were no hot showers or hiker/biker sites, so we rolled on to Cleone and MacKerricher State Park.

The ride from Westport to Cleone was very scenic as we followed the coastline, but the road had lots of ups and downs that were a bit too sharp to qualify as “rollers,” in my opinion.

7:20-8:00pm: views along the coast

8pm: near Cleone we went through this forested area that looked a bit like a tunnel

8:07pm: I wholeheartedly agree with this sign.

This bridge was about the fifth time that we thought we were 4-5 miles from the campground. I think that we were finally right this time.

We arrived at the Cleone market just before dark. I bought a steak and some bacon to cook over the campfire. The fire pits at the California campground all had built-in grills! I learned that it is quite challenging to cook bacon over a grill without running into a variety of trouble:

Your bacon falls into the fire.
Your bacon catches fire.
Your bacon gets stuck to the grill.
You cook your bacon and remove it from the grill without making any mistakes, but it just doesn’t taste the same without sizzling in a puddle of grease. Next time I’ll buy some aluminum foil.

As Andrew and I rolled out from the store, we thought that Vaibhav was right behind us but we got to the park entrance (half a mile away) without him. He entered the park from the other side and had a very hard time finding us, as the hiker/biker site at MacKerricher was just another numbered site.