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