inauspicio.us

Q: What to Jabba the Hut and John the Baptist have in common?
A: Same middle name.

I am a bad person for not writing since June. OK, with that out of the way:

A little racing

Pretty much a very little bit of racing this season, between being injured due by a falling couch in May and getting a new job in June (more on that later), but a resurgent attitude saw me racing and enjoying myself all over the country. In July I had the epiphany that I like racing in triathlons. It may sound a bit weird to realize that now, 13 years into my triathlon career, but better late than never I guess. I’ve always been what they call a “trainer”. I like training, like being in shape, and I enjoy the process of executing a well-thought out plan over the course of several months or years. But I have a huge amount of fear regarding racing, fear that I will underperform or realize that my efforts were misguided.
So I decided the cure for that is more races and that is what I have been doing. I am happy to report that it works.
YMCA of the Rockies Mountain Bike Triathlon, 1st
Well, it’s always good to win a race (he said sagely, having won all of maybe three races in his entire life) and I definitely won this one, with the fastest swim, bike, and run of the day. More importantly, Steph and I got to spend an awesome day in the mountains afterward. The Winter Park alpine slide has to be seen to be believed. The downside: the Winter Park jazz festival was the same day. Jazz, ugh.

5430 Half Ironman, 16th
Pictures
On one hand, I had a two minute PR at this race. On the other hand, wetsuits were not allowed, I trained 4 hours the day before the race, and I got trounced all the way back to sixteenth place. I don’t think it’s very sporting to deprive the entire pro wave of wetsuits and them lump them back in with all the age-groupers for scoring purposes, but obviously I don’t make the rules. I did this race utterly on a whim and was rewarded with a nice training day and a small PR despite mediocre performances in all three disciplines.
BONUS: Steph was there again, I didn’t pass out afterward, and we went out for cheeseburgers that afternoon.

Timberman 70.3, 9th
Pictures :: Results
Just a week after the 5430 half, and only hours before leaving for Star Island, I squeezed in this classic half ironman. I last finished ninth in this race in 2003, the year I got my pro license. This year it poured rain the whole day, which was a good test of my newfound confidence. Historically I race badly in the rain, but with saran wrap over my bike computer and a good swim warmup, I was ready to tackle this demanding course.
I had an awesome if singularly painful swim by attempting to start on the feet of Michael Lovato. My coach’s repeated assurances that you cannot ruin your race by swimming too hard were the only thing that got me back to shore in one piece. Then a pretty good bike ride for me, trying out a new pacing strategy and unfortunately not remembering to eat quite enough. Again on Paulo’s advice, I hit it pretty hard out of transition rather than easing into pace. This worked out really well until someone hit me in the face with a brick wall around mile 8. I lost a few minutes regrouping, and then chugged home in 9th place.
This was a fantastic result for me, but bittersweet because I know I could have done better. A lot of things went right – a great swim, my first decent bad weather performance in years, and a consistent positive attitude – but two or three minutes that could have gone my way if I’d been smarter about eating got away from me, and that cost me some crucial places in the last 5k. Live and learn.
My next, and last, race of the season will be at the SOMA half-ironman. I’m going to try to beat my time and place from last year. Wish me luck!

best support team ever.

i promised an Ironman Arizona race report, and even though this is my second consecutive race that went badly, i’ve got some good things to say about it. can’t go around writing depressing crap all the time.

i recovered well from the head cold i had at oceanside, and had a week or so of solid training in Boulder during Steph’s spring break, and back in Colorado Springs afterward. then, with my new bike all tuned up, i packed carefully and prayed that the baggage gorillas wouldn’t have a chance to destroy my bike again. i also tucked my brand new wetsuit (thanks, mom!) into my duffel bag. this one has long sleeves, so i will never again have to worry about being quite as cold as i was in oceanside.

thursday i picked up my number (my coach paulo said, “yeah i have no idea why they gave you number 9. i hope you don’t have a different colored cap or something”) and hid in the back or the pro meeting. good news, the higher-ups in the sport of triathlon are gradually working out a set of bike rules that are easy enough to understand and are still safe and fair. kudos to them. in the evening i went back to the airport to pick up steph, my mom, and my brother dan. this is the first time i have had so much family support at a race, and it was really nice. usually i just sit in my hotel room alone and marinate in my own nervousness, so it was really nice to be able to spread it among the four of us. huge thanks to all three of you, you were really helpful to me.

race morning i switched to the present tense. i go to the start early, finish setting up my transition, and chill out with my awesome support crew for a few minutes. i get in the water with plenty of time to warm up, so when the gun goes off i have no trouble getting a strong start and settling in with a group of other swimmers. just as paulo said, the pace cools off after a minute or two and i have a chance to look around. the pace feels easy, and i can see sergio out of the corner of my eye. i get out of the water with a big group in 53:37, nearly four minutes faster than i swam in florida. can i just mention that again?
fifty-three thirty-seven, cough. i am ecstatic, and surprised, with that result. a few pictures from that moment show my mouth wide open while i process the information.
my heart rate is low, and even though i am a little confused by the wetsuit peelers i manage a reasonable transition to get out onto the bike around 56:30. already i am minutes ahead of my best-case scenario.

an awesome bike ride goeth before the fall.

out onto the bike ride i feel fine and my heart rate is only a little elevated. paulo has cautioned against riding to a predetermined wattage number, but i need something for the first couple of hours. if i ride by feel at the very beginning, i will crash and burn later on, so i start out at what ought to be a very reasonable 240 watts. as it turns out, this pace is perfect. two-thirds of the way into the bike ride, i realize that i will ride right around 4:50 at my current pace. even though i feel like i could go faster, i decide that this is more than fast enough, so i stay on 240 watts and save myself for the run. this strategy, and a policy of coasting when i got above 32 mph, saw me into transition in 4:48, the fastest ride of my life. for those who care about these things, my average power was 226 watts, normalized power was 228 watts.

the transition people cocoon me in sunscreen while i take a hit from my inhaler, and i stumble out onto the run course with the clock reading 5:46. it is pretty shocking to be running this early in the day, but i feel OK and after a stop in the porta-potties i get through 5 miles in 34 minutes and ten miles in 1:08. and then … wait for it … everything slowly goes to crap. i am eating and drinking but it doesn’t help. i walk a few aid stations and try coke for the very first time in my life at the mile fourteen aid station. it tastes horrible, but i dredge up a couple of eight minute miles before the wheels come off completely. my friend shaun is at the mile 23 aid station and convinces me that i will not die. at the mile 24 aid station, i take a cup of what i think is water, and when it turns out to be coke i stop, turn around, and hand it back to the man who handed it to me.

what i am getting at here, returning to the past tense, is that the run got real ugly. what had looked like a comparably comfortable 2:58 became a very, very hard 4:02. evidently, according to people who know a lot more about this stuff than i do, that’s what happens sometimes. i finished in 9:48 for something like 46th place. i have mixed feelings about this. it was a bad result, but i am very, very happy about the swim and bike. i’ll be having another go at the distance this fall, but in the meantime look for me at shorter races :)

go ugly early

You knew another one of these was coming sometime, didn’t you. The snow isn’t off the mountains yet, but racing season has started in full force again, and I have managed two staggering losses already. And one dominating win at a training race.
At the beginning of march I lost my biggest client. (boldfaced side note: if you need VOIP, intranet, or database work, please contact me). I went to a training camp in new mexico for the hardest training week of my life, during which time I ran 65 miles, biked 275 miles, and swam 23000 yards. Might not sound like much, but you will just have to trust me. I can send you the nitty-gritty of it if you want.

Will and the terrible horrible no good very bad triathlon

A few more moderate days later I went to The Triathlon Formerly Known As Ralph’s. I seriously considered walking away from the sport after this one. Steph and I flew to California on Thursday night, and I woke up Friday morning to a screaming head cold and a bike broken in two pieces courtesy of Frontier. Bastards. We procured a replacement frame from the good folks at Leader Bikes and spent the evening building it up in their office. Got back to the hotel late that night, took a handful of advil, and hoped for the best.
Race morning, my cold was worse. It rained. The bright point of the morning was that the 55 degree water helped my sore throat a little. Swimming as hard as I possibly could, I got out of the water with the last pack, struggled through transition with numb hands and feet, and proceeded to have the slowest bike ride of my life. As a weak pro, I’m used to losing time on the bike. It’s part of life as a scrub. But I have never, until this race, lost half an hour in a half ironman. It could have been worse, certainly. But it was pretty damn bad.

Having promised myself that I could drop out whenever I felt like it, I clomped out on to the run course with my nose dripping. And then, crappy as I felt, I started reeling off six minute miles. From way back in 150th place, blowing my nose into my left hand and choking down orange gatorade, I ran 1:19 for the 9th fastest run of the day. After the race, Steph and I had a relaxing few days visiting family and enjoying warm weather while we recovered from our colds.

I’ll write about Ironman Arizona, which went similarly badly but in the opposite way, in a couple days.

between star and moving to colorado springs this fall, i lost about four weeks of training and gained about eight pounds. which is not a huge deal, but it was enough fitness lost to finally push me over the edge and find myself a coach. a little looking around led me to paulo, aka smartasscoach. i sent him an email and he said, ok, why don’t you come to el paso for this training camp and we’ll see how we get along. so with four weeks of rest under my belt, i went to el paso for a sound ass kicking. here’s a tip: if you haven’t worked out for a month, maybe it’s not a good time to go train with a multiple-time ironman winner. anyway i survived, and at the end of the camp, he said that yes, he’d coach me, but did i know i was really out of shape? and overweight? we would really, he said, have to work on that. further, i would not be allowed to do ironman florida in november because i was just too out of shape. we could target the SOMA half ironman at the end of october.

so we did. i came home and regrouped, we did some tests, and then i got to work. i worked out twice a day every day from mid-september up through race day. in the process i dropped about ten pounds, and by the time i got to tempe last saturday i figured i was about ready. i’d forgotten my wetsuit so i had to rent one, but aside from that getting ready was pretty mellow. i built my bike and took it for a ride, got checked in, and went back to my hotel.

because i hadn’t rented a car, i had to ride my bike to the race start. at 5:15 in the morning in october, it’s still quite dark. but no one is on the roads, so even in a busy city like tempe riding through downtown is pretty mellow and i got to the tempe waterfront park with plenty of time to spare. i got in the water with plenty of time to warm up, and took a space near the front. my swim went OK – after the usual roughousing at the beginning when i took a pretty hard fist to the taint [i'll let you look it up, if you don't know], things settled down. it took me a little over 28 minutes to get out of the water, 29:09 to the timing mats, which was disappointing but you just never know what you’re going to get in a triathlon swim. i did swim more in october than the whole rest of the year combined and i’ve made great strides. at any rate, even though the swim was slow it took nothing out of me.

i managed a perfect flying cyclocross-style mount to start the bike leg, and then spent the next 20 miles with my aerobar pad slipping around. it was really annoying, but i thought i’d be ok with just yanking it back up every few minutes. nothing doing. i eventually had to stop, get out my bike tools and tighten it down, at a cost of about a minute. but it was better than continuing to lose time by being forced to ride gingerly with loose handlebars.
it wasn’t that big a deal. i make mountains out of molehills. the bike went fine, a few minutes slower than i would have liked but i got into transition in 2:28:30 feeling pretty rested. so that was fine. i was behind pace, but not every race goes your way, you know? i figured i’d get running and see how it panned out.

it panned out really well. i hit the mile in 6:03 and two miles in 11:55 running with a guy from a relay team. he surged and i let him go, knowing that i was running much faster than i ever had in a triathlon. and i’m reeling people in, which feels GREAT. I hit halfway in forty minutes even and prayed that i could hold on. i did hold on, even managing a slight negative split on the strength of a fast last mile. i finished in 4:19:54, just eight seconds slower than at the 5430 half ironman in august. i was ninth overall and sixth professional, thanks to a run that was a full four minutes faster than any half-marathon i’d ever run in or out of a triathlon.

even though it wasn’t the time i’d been hoping for, i’m very excited about how this race went. i’ve never been able to run well off the bike in long races, so i feel like i’ve really found a missing piece of the fitness puzzle. i’m pretty excited for next season, now. look for me at Ironman Arizona, next April.

more updates you might have noticed:

• a little redesign. cute, huh? check out the archive page
• the photo gallery is back, and it works better. you will have to sign up again. sorry.
• by popular demand, the jeff emmons song. a work of genius by my brother dan.

Journalist: “So Laurent, how are you going to do the TT tomorrow?”
Laurent Jalabert: “With my bike”

I raced at the 5430 half-ironman yesterday, and I finished 18^th with a personal-best time of 4:19:46. That’s a full seven minutes faster than my previous best time, set last fall while I was getting ready for Ironman Florida.

pretty good swim: the bike racks weren’t empty

Mercifully, the swim went well for me. I’d prepared for it by swimming almost every day since Boulder Peak, and getting a new, better-fitting wetsuit. Aside from getting punched in the face in the first 150 meters it was uneventful. So uneventful, in fact, that I became bored shortly after the 1 kilometer mark. It was nice to realize that I was bored – it gave me a little confidence in my pacing – but it was boring.

I was out of the water in around 27 minutes – 27:59 to the timing mats, which were up the beach at the entrance to the transition area, and off on my bike just under the 29 minute mark. I decided to trust my powermeter again, and picked 250 watts as a nice round number I could probably hold for a couple of hours. In fact it was pretty mellow and I could probably have even gone a bit faster, but I rode a perfectly paced 2 hours 20 minutes and five seconds, with laps of 1:10:15 and 1:09:50.

Aside: Non-drafting triathlon is conducted under an extra, pro-only rule in the United States called “stagger”. Anyone familiar with triathlon knows that “stagger” traditionally refers to the run, but this rule is designed to make legal riding possible near the pointy end of the field. Here is how it works: normal bike rules specify a “draft zone” two meters wide by ten meters long around each cyclist, and that cyclists must always ride on the right. In order to make passing possible under these two oherwise conflicting rules, a third rule exists, specifying that athletes may move to the left for up to fifteen seconds in order to pass slower moving riders.

However, professionals race under a slightly modified set of drafting rules.

cruising

Although the “draft zone” is still nominally the same two by ten meter box, the rule on staying to the right hand side of the road is eliminated. The modified rule says, effectively, that the “draft zone” of each cyclist extends back all the way to the cyclist immediately behind them. That is, you must always ride two meters to the side of the next cyclist ahead of you on the road, if you are racing pro. This eliminates the safety problem of having pro riders weaving through hundreds of age group riders. It doesn’t alleviate the safety problem of having the top age group riders weaving through hundreds of slower age group riders. Even more dangerously, it takes an otherwise perfectly safe situation – two riders, separated by hundreds of meters, riding on the right hand side of the road – and makes it unbelievably dangerous. In such a situation, the trailing rider must ride two meters out into the road at all times. No fifteen seconds to move over, even to let traffic pass. During the bike ride I contemplated how USA Triathlon can possibly allow such a braindead rule on a course that is totally open to traffic. It would not be that difficult to solve: either close one lane (easier than it sounds, since virtually all the roads out here are four lanes wide), or allow riders to move in to let traffic pass.

Anyway I had a good bike ride, entirely without incident despite my fears, and charged out onto the run with my timing chip gradually wearing a tiny hole in my ankle. “Charged” is probably too strong of a word to use. I suppose I charged gradually out onto the run course. I slogged through ten and a half kilometers in 42 minutes and in my excitement, forgot to eat anything. At mile 7, I finally remembered to eat a gel, but it was too late. Everything went very dark and heavy for a few miles, and I remember struggling to keep running. I remember wanting to lie down. I remember forcing myself to drink gatorade, and I gradually came back from the brink. Sadly, that was near the 12.5 mile mark, so I had only a little time to claw my way back to pace.

screaming with, um, happiness

I turned the corner with 100 meters to go and saw 4:19 and some seconds, and I ran out whatever I had left. You can see how excited I am to be finished in this picture. I tried to dive in to a bucket of ice water before some helpful people brought me to the medical tent and gave me an IV. Stephanie, soul of patience that she is, waited with me the entire time. We checked out the results – I was 9^th in the pro division and 18^th overall – and went home. Via Starbucks.

an accurate description

Executive Summary: I finished 9th after a subpar swim

On Saturday I did an easy triple just to shake out. I rode my bike over the Old Stage hill, so I could practice descending a bit, and noted with some satisfaction that I am becoming less of a wimp about riding down hill. It saddens me to work so hard to gain time riding uphill only to lose it again riding back down. So all of the hill riding in the past month or two seems to be helping. I nudged 45 mph coming off of Old Stage, not blazing fast but pretty good for me.

Sunday morning I rode my bike over to the res in time to see my friend from Star Island Andrew Kensley start. Then I puttered around with my transition setup and warmup. I saw Steph and she wished me the good luck that I knew I would desperately need. Had a little bike ride, a little run, a little sunscreen, and a little swim. Just before I hit the beach I ran into Anrew’s wife Tanya, and their daughter Ella, who had arrived to watch him. I commiserated briefly with Eric Schwartz about swim times. Little did I know.

The Swim: Knowing I couldn’t expect to keep up with the leaders, I tried to go out with the second pack. After about 200 meters, it became clear that the second pack was destined to consist of me. I had my own rowboat, and I suffered in my own little private hell for 24 minutes. I was completely alone the whole time. Worst. Swim. Ever.

catching and passing the motorcycle

cruising uphill at 6 mph

The Bike: Since I am now fully geeked-out with a new powermeter, I decided to use it to my best advantage as a pacing tool. I figured I could pretty much sit on 300 watts, and ride a decent bike split. Since anyone who I might want to pace off of was three minutes up the road, I didn’t have too much other choice. So I managed to hold myself in check over the first few miles, and nudged 48 miles an hour on the descent off of old stage road. Thanks to my early restraint, I was even able to pick off a few people toward the end of the bike ride. Sadly, I didn’t have time to have anything to eat. You win some, you lose some. I rode 1:04:27, which included the slowest shoe-putting-on of my life. Seriously.

feeling like crap, early in the run. my left quadricep says hello

The Run: I started the run with a stomach cramp and feeling a little hungry. The pro run course was a triple out-and-back with a hill in the middle. You might not have noticed the hill if you weren’t as tired as I was, but by the third lap it was really a very, very big hill. The long course athlete in me started to assert himself after about five miles, and I managed to pick off a few more people on the run. I ran 35:27, an excellent time for me on any course, and an extra-special bonus on a difficult,technical course like this one.

I ended up in ninth place among pros, a pretty good showing for me. Actually, it was an excellent showing given how horrible my swim was. I’m going to have another go ath the 5430 long course triathlon, coming up on August 7.

PS. Someone out there sent me a really nice pair of Pearl Izumi tri-shorts. I don’t know who it was yet, but whoever you are, thanks!

Following gentle reminders from my friends and family, I am posting a mass update or training and racing news. In order to confuse the reverse-chronological nature of these postings, I will proceed in chronological order.

• 
  note the drool

  Powerman Ohio saw me get well and truly clobbered on the bike while putting up some middling run splits. Don’t be taken in by the alleged 25:00 opening five mile run, as I was 22:10 at the four mile mark. The bike course was two loops of steep rolling hills, which is a very difficult sort of terrain for me. I try and try, but there is only so much you can do when your skills are crappy and your accelleration is nonexistant.

  I did manage to salvage a respectable second run, which surprised me. It was very hilly and I felt like butt, so I was pleasantly shocked to find out, after the race, that I had posted the day’s fourth-fastest closing run split. You have to take these small victories where you can get them, you know.

  After the race I packed up, shipped my bike to Boulder, and flew directly to Florida to do some on site work for a company I’m doing intranet and database development work for. By the time I finally got back home I was ready to give up permanently on all forms of travel.

• So a little over a week later, I flew to Boston with Stephanie. Memorial Day weekend is a great time to be in Massachusetts. Steph came with me to a race in Falmouth, and proved herself again to be the soul of patience while I fretted about everything from tire pressure to shoelaces. It was an exciting race, with four of us coming off the bike within twenty seconds of each other (me last of the four, naturally, I don’t know how I got so much weaker on the bike this spring). I managed to run the other three down though, the last one only in the last 500 meters or so, to win by a handful of seconds. It was nice to race back at home again, and of course it was a huge confidence boost to win after my mediocre showing in Ohio.Steph and I proceeded to Truro where we met up with the youth group, who had taken the morning ferry to Provincetown. She hadn’t really ridden a bike since early childhood, but took to the 30 or so miles with relative ease, being a) good at pretty much anything and b) willing to put up with ideas that are based more in enthusiasm than good sense. After the bike trip it rained for most of the weekend, although it did eventually clear enough for us to have a campfire and toast marshmallows. After getting back to Boston, we even managed to sneak in a brief sailing excursion in a small boat one of Amy’s friends had left on her back porch.

• 
  my new nephew!

  While we were biking along the beaches of Cape Cod, my sister Tracy had one of the most adorable babies ever. His name is Sebastian, and he says hi.

  This picture is part of a powerpoint amalgamation of his first few weeks. Cute, huh?

• Finally, I got back into training in June. It’s been a rough month of riding my bike in the hills to attempt to build at least a little strength, but hopefully it will pay off with a decent finish at the boulder peak triathlon, coming up this Sunday.

I went up to the horsetooth half marathon again this past weekend. I hadn’t had a n awesome week leading up to it, but I felt OK and had a good 16 mile run / 3000 swim on friday. I was feeling primed for a Sunday race when I looked online to check the schedule and noted, to my dismay, that it was actually on Saturday morning. Sigh. So much for taking it easy the day before.

Steph was here for the weekend, and I managed to cajole her into not only coming up to watch, but also driving all my running stuff to the start while I biked the 50-odd miles to Fort Collins. I left at 6 with my Mr. Blinky Light and she left around 7, in the car. After getting only a little lost (I have never gone to this race without getting lost, it’s like searching for El Dorado) we arrived with plenty of time to register and go to the line.

I figured I would run steady to tempo, like I’ve been doing out at the res, and see how I held up. Figured I could run around 1:20 and boy, was I ever wrong. I might have gone 1:20, or even 1:18, on a flat course, but this race has hills. Big hills. Steep hills. Lots of hills. Lots of big, steep, hills. Actually it’s not that bad. I got through the first five flat miles in 31:00, including a pee break, and six and seven in 6:00 each before the hills started. I haven’t run up a hill since last October, so they really took it out of me.

So I slowed down. And continued to pass people. I’d gone from 20th at the mile marker to 10th or 11th at the bottom of the hills, and even though I slowed down to roughly 1 mile per year in the hills, I still managed to move up to 7th by the 12 mile mark. Then from 12 to 13, which was mercifully a steep downhill, I ran a 5:14 mile to get myself into 6th place. That’s where this picture was taken.

Anyway, I wound up with a 1:24 flat for 6th place, which wasn’t great but wasn’t too shabby. It was definitely the fastest time of all the people who had ridden their bikes fifty miles to get to the start line. Then I rode home with Mike Ricci, who told me entertaining stories about getting lost in New England and getting chased by a bull (not at the same time). To my delight, he also mocked the legions of dorks out for saturday afternoon bike rides with enough gear to sustain an antarctic expedition.

It was about a 7 hour day all told, and a nice workout. And a fantastic bonus to have Stephanie at the race and so supportive. And even though I didn’t do very well, it was nice to get in something like a race this early in the year. And hey, now at least my clock is clean.

Not bad, Rookie

I did my first-ever ironman triathlon on saturday, a nice way to finish my first season as a pro and probably the single most physically demanding thing i have ever done in my life.

Executive Summary:

Swim: 57:08

Bike: 5:05:12

Run: 3:15:51

Finish: 9:23:24

18th Pro Men, 35th Overall

The Long Story

I’ve been pretty single-mindedly devoted to this one for the past few months, which is why you haven’t heard from me. I started school in September, and did two other races in the fall, but the focus was always on this race. I fiddled with different energy bars, gels, drinks, yoga, massage. I trained upwards of thirty hours a week and slept like it was my career. I adjusted my bike and tested my power output in a dozen different positions. I did bike workouts in my kitchen with the oven door open to prepare for Florida’s heat. In the first part of september, I rode my bike over 1000 miles without leaving the big chainring.

All the focus cut into other parts of my life. Forced inside by the cold weather, I twice answered the door in spandex, dripping with sweat. I used the phrase “after I Windex the pee off my bike” in normal conversation. I fell behind on my schoolwork, and I ate enough to sustain a small family.

And I reached new levels in training. Sunday runs that were previously done at a slow, steady pace shifted to end with five miles at six-minute pace. Weekday distance runs went from ten miles easy on the flats to fifteen miles steady in the hills. Weekday bike rides went from 70 miles to over 100. Sometimes I was so tired that I would just sit on my kitchen floor and cry. I got great advice from great coaches and great athletes, and I got a lot stronger.

Then, the tuesday before I left for Panama City, I was hit by a car while riding my bike to class in the morning. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but i was scraped and bruised, and a little shaken. In hindsight, I must have had some solid focus going, because the thought that it might affect my race never seriously occured to me. I did the only thing that seemed natural: went to the university health center for gauze bandages, voted (note: my guy lost anyway, but my team won the world series the weekend before, and you can’t win everything), and went back to class. I still have some angry road rash on my left hip as a souvenir, but the remaining soreness is mixed up with my post-race soreness so that’s kind of a crapshoot.

Flew to Florida on Wednesday and rested.

Thursday I picked up my number (57), took a short bike ride and a run, and swam briefly in six-foot surf in the gulf. Bodysurfed.

Friday was the same, 20 minutes swimming in diminishing surf, short bike and run. Then the pro meeting, where i suffered an extreme attack of the in-over-my-heads, and into bed at 8pm. woke up once, to turn off the ringer when my friend karen called (karen: sorry i didn’t answer the phone. i had a big race the next morning).

Then up at 4:15. Oatmeal. Coffee. My mom and I went to the start and i struggled into my wetsuit. I stretched and fidgeted, and my mom took many unflattering pictures of me, and diagonal pictures of the beach. And then, at 6:50 in the morning, the cannon went off and we had to start swimming….

Swim: 2.4 miles in 57:08

We started ten minutes ahead of the age groupers, which was a mixed blessing. On the plus side, I didn’t get pushed around. On the minus side, after 200 meters (which, I conservatively estimate, was covered in 1 minute 11 seconds) I swam completely alone. My best-case scenario on the swim was 57 minutes, which, like all my other time goals, was pulled totally out of thin air. So I soldiered on, occasionally turning left, until I got back to the beach. And that was a shock.

Imagine this – you are floating peacefully, with your head under warm water, for half an hour, hearing only the (mostly) rhythmic splash, splash, splash of your own arms and trying to remember to keep your elbows high. Then a wave crashes around you, you wash up on the beach, and 3000 people are there screaming. Big shock. For me, an even bigger shock when i see 26:55 on the clock and realize I am far, far ahead of pace. This is heartening but I worry about having gone out too fast. I decide to dial back the effort on lap two.

Back out into the water, alone. I have time to relax and am generally quite successful at slowing down. I try to stay positive. Rahter than dwelling on the fact that I have no draft, I distract myself by counting the orange buoys and looking for fish. Around the first turn buoy, my biggest theme of the day, peeing, begins to make itself apparent. I think I peed in my wetsuit three times on lap 2 of the swim alone. So, that was good. Lap 2 took me 30 minutes almost exactly, and I got out of the water feeling rested at 57:08. Whoo! Bang on my arbitrary best-case time goal!

Running up the beach, more people screaming. A man yells at me to lie down. He and a woman standing next to him rip my wetsuit off and hand it to me. Thanks, guys. I ran into the changing room, put on my socks, bike helmet, glasses, and ran out. People are directing me to the medical tent and I am confused. “But … I feel fine!” I yell to them. There is no convincing them. Not until I am in the tent do I realize that I have to run through it to get to my bike. Feel really smart.

Bike: 112 miles in 5:05

People talk a lot about making sure you take the bike out pretty easy, about feeling like you are going REALLY slow in the first 50 miles, etc. etc. etc.. This advice does not work well for me. I have to work pretty hard for the first couple of hours, then I can get into a groove and I feel pretty good after that. I was passed by nearly 2 dozen people, nearly all of them age-groupers (who had started ten minutes behind me, that was demoralizing), in the first 50 miles. I also peed in my shorts three times and ate a bunch of gu and powerbars. I kind of got into a groove after that.

Around sixty miles there is a short out and back section. There, I peed in my shorts again, and saw that there were two large packs of about 25 riders each about three minutes behind me. I decided I could not let them catch me, and this is probably what saved my bike ride. I knuckled down and started passing people. Not many, but I took back a few of the places I had given up in the early part of the ride.

So in retrospect I actually think I should have taken the bike out harder. My heart rate monitor didn’t start giving me real readings until right around the 50 mile mark. A strange thing that it does in windy weather is give ludicrously low readings. So according to my heart rate monitor I was below 100 beats per minute for the first 50 miles. And that was definitely wrong. But then my heart rate monitor started working well, and I got into my ride-drink-pee groove and got back into transition pretty strong. I missed my arbitrary time goal of 4:55, but what can you do? Ride faster next time, I guess.

Run: 26.2 miles in 3:15

Out onto the run I realized two things: I feel like crap, and I left my heart rate monitor attached to my bike. Damn. Immediately I shift my strategy from closely monitoring effort based on heart rate to Just Running. As if I have a choice.

I only actually remember a few things about the run. I took water at every aid station, and gu every so often. Stayed away from the Dreaded Orange Gatorade (yuck!), and remembered to dump ice into my shorts to stay cool. Just for the sake of consistency, I kept up the peeing in my shorts every five miles or so. This was actually the biggest challenge of the whole run, since the aid stations kept coming up every mile.

At the end of run lap 1, I got my time split – 1:35 for the first half. Not bad, and I dare to hope for a negative split since I feel pretty good and I have practiced all my long runs that way. I took my run special needs bag, and had the same realization I had with my bike needs bag – “What the hell am I going to do with this crap?” Dropped it. Kept running.

At the final turnaround two things happened that I remember:

1. A huge blister on the bottom of my left foot popped. This hurt like hell. For some reason, I was convinced that my shoe was filling up with blood. It turned out that it wasn’t, but it sure did hurt. Slowed down my last 10k considerably.

2. I dropped my number at the mile 20 aid station, and had to stop, bend down, and pick it up. Cramps shot up and down my legs and back and I screamed in pain. I heard from the aid station “Oh my god, he had to bend down to pick up his number” “Oh, ouch”.

I have heard a lot of people talk about how awesome the last couple miles of an Ironman is. Now that I have done it myself, I think these people are full of shit. I went through the last two miles with no clear idea of where I was or how much longer I had to run. I saw mile markers and was unable to deduce how much time it would take me to run to the end. Coming into the chute, I high-fived a few people, took off my hat and glasses, ran across the finish line, and burst into tears. Some nice volumteers helped me find my inhaler and dry clothes, and after a few minutes in medical with some hot chicken broth and several blankets I was fine.

Epilogue:

It was four days before I could walk normally. I had chafe in the most unlikely places and the most uncomfortable places, deep chafe that would weep like road rash for nearly a week before it scabbed over.

I missed my arbitrary time goal of 9 hours, a time I chose in the first place because it was a nice round number, and my place goal of top 20 overall. I did get in the top half of the pros that started – top half of the pro finishers is another goal for another day.

It was nice to note some improvement over the course of the year – in April I was 17 minutes out of the top ten at ralphs half ironman, and in November I was 21 minutes out of the top ten at a race twice as long. Also of note: I was the 12th US finisher.

In summary, thanks for being with me this season.

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?