inauspicio.us

ok, the race went badly. you might have already seen the results, but as always there is more to what happened out there than just three slow split times.

i woke up at 4:30 in the morning and had some coffee, oatmeal, and endurox. breakfast of champions as well as last-place finishers. drove to the race site, set up, warmed up, body marked. as a pro, i was in the very first rack of bikes, with my space labeled: “Ronco”. just in case i forgot my last name at any time during the race, i could easily find out what it was by looking at my rack space. i was racked next to michael lovato (who would go on to finish fifth), but too frightened to speak to him. he seemed much more relaxed than i felt. also his bike was cooler. all of the other pros, in fact, had much snappier looking bikes than me. but that didn’t make me any more nervous, because i had already reached my limit of nervous.

when it was time (ok, a few minutes after it was time), i trucked down towards the water. it was cold, by which i mean freezing, at 59 degrees. i had an extra swim cap, since i hadn’t been able to find a wetsuit hat, and a wetsuit with no sleeves. the lack of sleeves would be the first part of my undoing. i have improved my swimming a lot this past winter, swimming hundreds of thousands of yards in a pool never colder than eighty degrees, except one day when it was seventy-seven, and i was too cold to swim so i got out. it was against the background of this experience that i found myself treading water with 28 of my closest friends in the middle of a deepwater marina at 640 on a saturday morning. and we started swimming. or, anyway, they started swimming. my arms had mysteriously gone numb, and i was dropped within the first few hundred meters. i came out of the water fourth from last, with the muscles across my back screaming in agony from working so hard in the cold. as i write this, they are now going back to normal.

not a moment too soon, i got on my bike. and rode alone. forever. i actually rode a decent bike split, seventeenth among pros, which was just fast enough to make sure that i was all alone the entire time. no sppedometer, no prior knowledge of the course, no company. i kept my focus as best i could and vowed to put a speedometer on my bike when i got home.

then i finally started running. no idea what place i was in, just a nagging certainty that i was still all alone. the run compresses distances a bit though, so after a few miles i could see some other people. this, combined with the fact that we were off of the marine base where the bike had taken place and back in an area with throngs of screaming spectators, lifted my spirits considerably. as you can see from the picture, i was feeling pretty good, however my nipples were still quite cold. this picture, by the way, was taken by rutger beke’s dad (rutger finished third on the day after what was, for him, a subpar bike ride), who my mom was standing with throughout the latter part of the race. my buddy zach blume, now living in san diego, made the trip up to watch me race (thanks, zach!) and i saw him several times on the run course.

so on the strength of this encouragement, i found myself smacking out the early miles around 6:10 apiece. i knew i would move up if i could hold on, which i did pretty well through the first quarter (20 minutes) and second quarter (20 minutes) and most of the third quarter (22 minutes). it was before the final turnaround, with about six kilometers left to go, that the wheels completely came off for me. i’d been alone, and freezing my ass off, for the entire day, and now i was tired and dizzy and unhappy and struggling to hold onto 8:45 miles. but i kept running, if you can call it that, and collapsed across the finish line into what is becoming my traditional end-of-race asthma attack. and i went through medical, again, and they let me out into a beautiful spring day.

zach and my mom seemed to think it was a successful outing, and even i was eventually convinced that it hadn’t been a total failure. then my mom introduced me to herman beke, who also congratulated me on a race well run (his son, on an off day, beat me by nearly half an hour) and said he’d send me pictures. then we went for cheeseburgers, visited my aunt lynne and cousin alina, and went to sleep early.

i guess it was a good trip. i got clobbered pretty badly, and definitely had a pretty rough day of it out there, but i took a couple of nice lessons (and chafe that could kill a horse) home with me. better luck next time, eh?