inauspicio.us

 If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your long-lost pal.

Closed out the first half of 2007 with a pair of huge races for me. First was a tough, hot, non-wetsuit day at the 5430 half ironman in Boulder. Steph came out to watch, and so did Paulo, so I was extra motivated to do as well as I could. Steph was a little nervous that she was “bad luck” after witnessing my disastrous performances in Arizona last year and at Boulder Peak in July.

But the race went quite well: I was out of the water in 12th or so, again a non-wetsuit swim, and I had a very good bike ride of 2 hours and 10 minutes for a 25.8 mile per hour average speed (!) to arrive in transition in 8th place, three minutes behind fifth. It took me until 3k to go before I moved into seventh, and 400 meters to go before I moved into sixth. I ended up crossing the line in sixth place, an excellent result for me but about 20 seconds short of fifth place and thus just out of the money. Them’s the breaks. It was still my best performance of the year so far.

After the race, I had the toughest taper week of my life as I tried to get ready for Star Island, recover from a quadricep-rending last 3k at the previous weekend’s race, and taper for the Timberman 70.3. So Steph and I flew to Boston, did some last minute shopping and with Dan’s help we made a pair of waterskis and bought over forty pounds of candy.

Then everyone else went out to Star, and I drove up to Gilford to continue the quest. They had helpfully printed everyone’s first name on the race numbers for this year’s race, but I hadn’t made it onto the pro start list in time. So in lieu of a pro number, I would get #1288, previously belonging to “Jenny”, who wouldn’t be able to make it. That was OK – my bike was racked with the women’s 35-39 age group, and they turned out to be a lot more mellow pre-race than the pro men typically are. So that was nice.

Then a decent swim had me out of the water in the second pack, and a solid bike ride brought me briefly into the top 10 before being passed by perennial bike/run ass-kicker Mike Caiazzo. I tried to stay with him, as I thought I might be able to run with him if I could just get to transition with him, but it was not to be. I ran well too, faster than I ever have on that course, to move into sixth across the line. Again one place out of the money. Then, just because not enough things have been oh-so-close, the top age grouper posted a time that would bump me back to seventh. He is a friend of mine though and I look forward to racing with him in the pro field next season.

THEN – you didn’t think that would be it, did you? – I had to get myself to Rye, NH to catch the Star ferry. I’d already missed the whole first day of the conference and I was not about to miss any more. So I pleaded with the police officer directing traffic on the bike course, and drove clear across New Hampshire without so much as stopping to change out of my disgusting race clothes. I made it in the nick of time, and managed to wash myself off in Rye harbor before catching a much-needed nap on the floor of the boat, the only extra sleep I’d be likely to get in the next seven days.

So two very good races on consecutive weekends, but the thing I am proudest of is that, after all that, I made it to the ferry on time. You have to have priorities, you know?

It’s not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.

Back in April, when I was sick all the time and having a huge stress-out, I had to schedule two races inappropriately close together. The fact that they were so close together actually made me feel better; it reinforced the idea that I can only control so much, and the best I can do is the best I can. Nothing magic will happen by following The Perfect Schedule, and there will always be things that could go more smoothly or that I could have done to prepare. But you can’t do everything, and you must have confidence in what you could do.

So with two half ironman races approaching in the next two weekends for me, I am again having a huge stress-out. I don’t have confidence that I can place well in either one, let alone both. Actually, I believe I can, but believing that it’s possible is not the same as being certain that it will happen. I cannot control times or places, how fast other people go, or weather. But I know certain things: I am absolutely capable of swimming hard for half an hour. There is no doubt whatsoever that I can ride my bike hard for two and a half hours. I am totally certain that I can run hard for an hour and a half. These are things that are up to me, and I can always do them. Working hard does not always equal going fast, but that’s not under my control.

Beyond that, it doesn’t matter. I will go out and run my race and whatever everyone else does is up to them. I will be controlling what I can control and going as fast as I can. It worked in April, May, June, and July. It’s going to work in August too.

Oh, you’d be surprised the amount of wear and tear that goes on out there in the field.

Not so quick with the race report when the race goes badly, are we? But not every hit can be a home run, and this race had its good points too.

Since the race was in town, I got to stay home in my own room. And since my wave didn’t start until 9 am, I got to sleep in until 6. While I was making my coffee, I felt a bit bad for the poor souls who were getting the starting gun at that moment. When they were done before I had even started, well, I felt a bit less bad for them.

So after a bagel and a cup of coffee Steph and I cruised over to the race, a whopping seven minute drive. I had a nice warmup, zipped into my not-technically-a-wetsuit, and lined up with the largest men’s pro field it has ever been my pleasure to share a starting line with. They announced all the race favorites, and then at the last minute, they announced my name too, because my friend Tanya Kensley asked them nicely. Cool!

As I’ve mentioned before, when you start in the pro wave you commit to starting hard. For me, this means giving everything I have in the first 250 meters or so to get with a good group. If the group surges at 400 meters, I am not likely to be able to respond. If it waits until 600 or 700 meters, then maybe. But the group I was trying to hold on to surged again at 400 and I lost them. I tried to limit my losses by holding a strong, steady pace, and I mostly succeeded. I got out of the water about 45 seconds behind them and maybe 2 1/2 minutes down to the leaders. Very good for me in a non-wetsuit swim.

I had a fairly brilliant transition, for me, and tore out onto the bike course. I’d pre ridden the course about a dozen times leading up to the race, and had an exact plan of how to mete out my effort. Out of transition, there is a false flat for about six miles, then about a mile and a half of climbing. I commited to riding as strong as I possibly could to the top of the climb, taking the subsequent descent to recover. That went well – I averaged about 310 watts from transition to the top of the hill, and the radar camera on the downhill flashed 50 MPH at me as I went by. So far so good.

I tried to hang on for the second section that I’d identified as a “key effort”. The last ten miles are gently rolling, and I thought I could muscle through them as well. It turns out that although I’ve made significant improvement, I’m still pretty bad at pacing myself over gentle rollers. I still rolled in with an excellent bike time, for me, of 1:02:33.

So I rolled in to transition around 11th or 12th, pretty confident in the way I was racing so far. And then I proceeded to run slower than I have run in any race except ironman since mid 2005. So that was weird, I gave up a few places on the run and crashed across the line in fifteenth place. It does not feel good to hurt that much on the run!

Anyway, as I said, I finished fifteenth (nineteenth counting four AGers that went quicker, which is not 100% fair in this race, but them’s the breaks) in 2:04:58. Which is actually a little faster than I went two years ago. Hmm.

And I just want to mention about that picture above … check out my calf!  Whew!

So the other day I raced at the Thursday evening “stroke and stride” race out at the Boulder reservoir. I had a decent race: after a lousy start (what was I thinking starting in the second row? note to self: if you want to swim in the first group, don’t start in the second row) I swam quite well, for me, and was out of the water third.

Then I had the worst transition in the history of ever, and then ran an OK 5k. I was passed by 1 person in transition and passed 1 person on the run to finish third, which was pretty good. I was seventeen seconds behind the winner at the end, and his transition was exactly seventeen seconds faster than mine. Ah well, it was a good way to learn that I need more practice.

The kicker was this: after the race, a guy comes up to me.
“How old are you?” he asks me.
“Twenty-eight”
“Oh, good. I saw you pass me on the run, and when I saw your gray hair, I thought you might be in my age group,” he said.
“Really,” I say, “what age group is that?”
“Fifty to fifty-four.”

(And results are here)

Jonnyo calls an experience like this “a huge confidence” which is a phrase I like. Confidence is a Thing you can Have; you cannot quantify it but you can have a lot or a little of it. When you have A Confidence you keep it until something takes it away, which could be soon or not for a while. I had a Huge Confidence at the Lone Star races, but I spent it trying to get healthy in April and May. When I got to Boston I tested my fitness and health by running – and winning! – races on consecutive days, made the more challenging by having the recovery period between those two races consist of falling asleep at 2 am on the ground with my head on an old, charred campfire log. This was a good confidence for me; the 30 hour training week that followed was testing but also a confidence of its own. It helped during my taper last week when my workouts went progressively better but I felt more or less awful at all other times.But during that taper I knocked out repeat miles in five minutes flat and had life best 1 minute power on my bike and 1500 LCM swim. Those were soft PRs, easy to break, but a PR makes me feel awesome and I wanted to practice feeling awesome. I read Golf is not a Game of Perfect, which made me decide that choosing my mental state wasn’t enough, and that I would have to practice it. So I structured my workouts in such a way to help me practice feeling awesome, to have the confidence going into the race that I would be able to feel awesome.

My Mom and I drove to Maryland on Friday, which took three hundred hours. Saturday morning we went to registration and met George Altieri the pro coordinator and Rob Vigorito the race director, who were both awesome and helpful. Mom took the opportunity to see if I still embarrass as easily as I did when I was 14 by bragging to them about what a Swell Young Man I am turning out to be. Then I took a couple of easy workouts, fussed over my race numbers, mixed a couple of water bottles, and turned in early. The last think I did before bed was try one of those Nuun tablets Khai St. Khai told me about at camp. Suddenly I had a wild party, right there in my mouth. They are supposed to be dissolved in water, it turns out. I slept well, quietly burping up lime Nuun every couple of hours.

In the morning I had two cans of Red Bull and a bagel with more butter than my Mom eats in a fortnight. Changed into my race kit and the present tense. Racing in the Present is the other thing, along with feeling awesome, that I am learning how to do.

No bike warmup is allowed; in my opinion this is excessive micromanagement but I am not in charge of these things. It does leave me plenty of time for a relaxed run and swim warmup. Half the mens pro field borrows my bike pump and I get in the water for about 800 meters. Thanks to a solid overanalysis of several swim workouts, I have learned that when I swim As Hard As I Can I actually go slower than if I just focus on swimming strong and (you guessed it) feeling awesome. It would be nice to be able to make use of all of my fitness, but I am not a good enough swimmer. Yet. In the meantime I do manage to make the main chase group of swimmers. I am flummoxed to see 22:30 on the clock when I get out of the water but I take it as the awesome gift that it is and get to focus on getting out of my cursed wetsuit.

Onto the bike I am into my zone 3 power, which feels way too hard. I know I can maintain it though so I hold onto it and wait for my hips to stretch out a little bit. After ten miles or so I pass the women’s leader, Pip Taylor, an ITU racer who put all the long coursers to shame in the water. It takes me a 350 watt surge to get around her within the allotted 25 seconds but she – and every one of the other half-dozen or so people I saw during the whole bike ride – is riding very clean. The age-group race might have been too crowded for truly clean riding, but everyone I see is spaced out 20 or 30 meters at least. At one point I space out enough to yell to a bunny by the side of the road: “Bunny!”

Around mile 30 or 35 a widely spaced train with Mike Caiazzo and Pat Evoe goes roaring by me. I work my tail off to keep them in sight, but the gap goes from 50 to 100 meters to 500 meters to Quite A Lot. I start to feel Quite Tired and my thoughts drift to the run and possibly a drink of something other than Gatorade. I have to remind myself to come back into the moment by asking myself, “What are you doing now?” “I am riding my bike, as hard as I can. And I feel awesome. I have practiced feeling awesome while biking as fast as I can, and this is what it feels like.”

After about a year I reach T2. Socks, a cap, a little bag of salt pills, and sunglasses (well, you never know if it might get hot out or something, but in hindsight this was excessive. at least i didn’t stop for a sandwich or something. but the T2 needs work i know) and I am out on the road. Pat Evoe is eighteen seconds ahead of me. He stretches it out to thirty or forty in the first mile while I get my legs underneath me. I have five minutes over Andrew Hodges out of transition, which does not seem like enough. I have biked really hard, and I am not nearly the runner he is even on my best day. But I realize this is a negative thought. I decide that I am going to run 1:17, so he will need a 1:12 to catch me, and if he can run that fast then more power to him. I am running as fast as I can and I feel awesome. What he or anyone else does is not something I can control.

At the turnaround I count that I am in seventh place, with second through sixth pretty close together and not too far ahead. But I am already a bloc and going as fast as I can. I will either catch them or not, but they will have to run fast to stay ahead of me, because as I have mentioned I feel awesome. I have to remind myself of this a lot. Then at mile nine or ten I get some Coke. Actually what I get is some Coke in my mouth, some in my eyes, some up my nose, and some all over my fabulous blue singlet. But it makes me feel briefly like a superhero. I run from mile ten to eleven in 5:35 and then I start to feel like a superhero who has to take a dump real bad. So I run from eleven to twelve in the five thirties including a brief slow-down for a hearty clench. I realize I will probably not catch Pat up ahead of me, but I do not care. I am having the race of my life and I want to enjoy it. The last mile in the 5:30s, some hand slaps in the finish chute – including my Mom, who I am surprised to be able to pick out of the crowd in the confusion – and I am across the line 3:56:58. Andrew does not catch me (my run is actually a 1:16) but with the fastest run of the day he comes real close and is across next after me. In the meantime I fall on the ground in happiness. I am aware of voices above my head: “Is he okay?” “Yes, just happy.”

You’ll have to pardon my coarse language at this point: Holy SHIT. I have never realistically imagined that I might go this fast. Even with a swim that is a couple minutes fast and perfect conditions. I have learned to race happy and it feels awesome. I feel even better when I find a porta toilet a couple minutes later.

For the second time this season I have had the race of my life. I already knew that training works; now I know it works that much better when you learn to feel good. I already train because I love it, and it took me years to learn to suffer. But now I think about it a little differently. Training is not all in your muscles. For sure it is in your muscles, since all the positive thinking in the world won’t get you to the finish line without fitness. But, at least for me, it’s not about learning to love suffering; it’s that part of the suffering is learning to feel awesome when you are working as hard as you can.

“Please tell me this is automatic.”

“Sorry, no, it’s powered by morons.”

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

I am just about ready to put this week to bed. I can tell that I am feeling the effects of An Appropriate Training Stimulus – I am crabby, tired, hungry all the time, and have missed only one workout. Yesterday it was supposed to rain. In Colordo when it rains it gets quite cold, so I wore long underwear, a hat, and a windbreaker. Then, because in actual fact it was eighty-nine degrees and humid, I had a thirteen mile run in my own private Hell greenhouse. So far this week I have fallen asleep:

• In the backseat of my car in the grocery store parking lot.
• Leaning against the fireplace in a rental cottage on Cape Cod
• Lying in the dirt next to a campfire, head on an old charred log.

The final indication, to me, that things must be going as planned is the following actual excerpt from an email I sent to Paulo:

“That swim workout was hard – I threw up in my mouth a little – but I got through it”

A full race report is forthcoming on these pages, but in the meantime I have an observation to share:

When you lead a race wire to wire, the photographers have a ton of chances to take pictures of you. And they use them all. So, wow, lot of pictures of Will. Maybe I can send one to Amy’s friend from InKind.org, who gave me that awesome, hideous racing shirt.

The quick race report is, I ran a big PR of 1:16:05, which somehow made it into the official results as 1:16:46. There was a very exciting motorcycle escort. My mom and I were back at the church retreat well before lunch, and today I am still a bit sore. More later!

I cruised down to Falmouth on Saturday morning, having spent Friday unpacking and trying to re-route the rubber bands on my powermeter.  Good times.    Three days in a row with less than five hours of sleep left me feeling pretty ordinary, but I stopped on the road somewhere in southern massachusetts for two cans of red bull and some advil and pretty soon I felt halfway human again.

I got to the race early and had a mellow warmup.  I was feeling the pressure of having won this race in each of my last three attempts and really wanted to make it four.  So I had a bit of a reconnoiter, with a lap of the bike course and a lap of the run course.  The latter had changed since ‘05, when I ran something like 8:42 for the opening “2 miles”.  Then some water, since it was hot as hell, and a nice chat with Paul Miller who was racked next to me.  A very nice guy, he noted that he’d spent Friday moving and I figured we were more or less even on that score since I’d spent Thursday doing the same.  Then they delayed the start for half an hour, and we were off!

As I’ve mentioned before, the pacing strategies on display among age-group men are interesting and almost certainly suboptimal.  But we all race for fun, and it is for sure important to do what feels right pacingwise.  For optimum performance, it might be a good idea to try to make an even pace feel right, but I know that optimum performance doesn’t correlate perfectly with optimum fun, so “correct” pacing will be a little different for everyone.  Paul and I mopped up the early leaders a bit before the mile mark and then I took a small gap into T1.

I got a bit flummoxed leaving transition but otherwise had a decent time of it and even got my shoes velcroed pretty quickly.  Then – and this was a real weird experience for me – I built a huge lead on the bike.  Awesome!  I got into T2 with about a minute and a half lead and more or less held that to the finish.  The official results have me about 35 seconds slower than my actual time, for some reason, which I mention only because it would become something of a theme during my weekend.

After the awards ceremony my mom drove me up to Truro to meet the church youth group.  I got one of them to wear my pointy superhero helmet, but no pictures yet, sniff.  Colleen had me dog the lead group of boys on my fixed gear, which was a nice challenge, especially going downhill.  A great day, great race, and a great ride.  I stayed up with the yoots and their campfire until about 2am, and then crashed.  You know, because I had to get my beauty sleep for a race the next day.