Thursday, August 30, 2012

Vermont Camp Report

This past weekend was the annual QT2 training camp in Vermont.  As far as I know, this is the QT2 camp that started them all.  My first participation in this camp was in 2009 when it was scheduled as the biggest weekend before Lake Placid.  My most vivid memory is spending at least an hour sitting at a table one night with Cait and Chrissie as we composed a several-page list of all of the delicious things we planned on eating once the race was over.  I also made it up in 2010 when it was the same weekend.  Last summer it got moved to August since there were so many people doing Ironman Coeur D'Alene on the weekend camp usually fell, and unfortunately my broken foot took me out of contention, although it wasn't a bad year to miss because they had to get out of town quick before hurricane Irene came in and literally flooded the town.  Seriously, they've made a ton of progress but there are still plenty of reminders riding around of how badly that area suffered from that storm.

Anyway, that brought us to this year, where I decided to go to camp once again because, well, why not?  Currently I need all of the outside training motivation I can get even though I'm typically fine to do things on my own.  So this was perfect and easy to get to.  I headed up on Thursday after a bit of a setback when I got about thirty minutes into my drive and realized that I had forgotten my lap top.  So it took me quite a bit longer than expected to get there, but I did arrive at a reasonable hour and before they ran out of sandwiches. 

It was a very small group for camp this year.  A lot of people did the camp in Lake Placid who probably would've done this one without that option but didn't really feel the need to do both.  We all stayed in one big house which was nice and instead of sharing a hotel room with 2-4 other people as I'm accustomed to, I wound up in my own room and even with an extra bed.  On Friday we started things off with an easy swim in the lake at the state park.  It's a small lake but it's the kind of venue I love where the water is the perfect temperature and you can tell it's actually clean.  I wore a skin suit instead of a wetsuit because my wetsuit is very much showing its age and I need to save any and all future wearings to only when I really need it so as to extend its life as long as possible.  Remember when the absolute top of the line wetsuits were "only" $400? 

After the swim we changed into our run gear and headed out for the long run of the weekend.  I was glad to be getting this out of the way first because for me personally I was sure it would be the most difficult workout of the weekend, and I was certainly right about that.  In retrospect, having forgotten to eat anything all morning before probably didn't help, and the gels I took certainly didn't make up for it.  I ran with Dan, one of my teammates for a while, but after three miles or so he took off as I slowly deteriorated.  Honestly, that run was how I had expected my run in Timberman to feel, so I'll certainly trade a great run at Timberman with a crappy one a few days later at camp. 

We didn't waste much time once we got back to the house hopping on our bikes for an easy ride.  It was short and easy and the weather was great.  It left us with an uncharacteristic lull in the afternoon where we actually had some time to relax for a bit before heading to the pool for a quick video analysis.  I hadn't had one of those in a long time and I'm happy to say that my swim stroke apparently finally has a good catch.  Of course now this is at the expense of zero back end, but with swimming there is always something new to work on. 

Saturday we were back at the lake for a 1-mile swim time trial.  Given the group of people I figured I'd be swimming mostly alone, especially in the skin suit since most others were in a wetsuit (except Cait and another pro, AJ, both of whom I would only keep up with if I had some sort of gas powered motor) and I was right.  I swam a bit with this other camper, Tim (not Snow - he was off doing a 6-hour mountain bike race) and then pulled ahead and swam hard.  I finished exactly where I expected within the group, about three minutes behind the next closest and two minutes ahead of the one after me, so truly no-man's land.  But I pushed hard and was very happy with how it went. 

A little drive back to the house to hit the road for the long ride.  We split off into a couple of very small groups.  I started off with Tim (again, not Snow) but I knew once we hit this major hill that he was going to take off on me.  Just because he's a way better climber than I am.  And I was right, so I spent the remainder of the ride after the first hour by myself.  It really wasn't a big deal, I do that all the time, and I was riding six hours while a lot of people around me weren't riding as long. 

The weather had been fantastic, but as I climbed up toward Killington, the rain started.  I've ridden by Killington about five times in my life now, and it rains every single time.  Although apparently some others got hail there, so I wasn't quite as bad off as I could've been.  The ride was pretty uneventful aside from the rain.  Courtney had the van for intermittent refills, I was a little jealous of people floating down the river on inner tubes as apparently you can just go rent the things at these little road side stores and they drop you off up river and you just float back.  You could tell some places where the roads had washed out.

On the way back of course it rained at Killington again and I heard some scary thunder as I got closer to the house but I survived intact and made it back to change and head out for an easy transition run.  And then finally I was done!  As always for these camps, we were very late for our initially planned dinner reservation and wound up in a different restaurant because of it, although it was the restaurant we had always gone to in the past anyway. 

For the final day we started with an easy ride down to the bottom of Tyson Road where we would be doing a 6+ mile time trial, mostly uphill.  We had climbed it the day before and I wasn't really looking forward to it, though not dreading it either.  We lined up in the order we had finished the swim and took off in whatever intervals we had come in during the swim.  So, since I was three minutes or so behind John Spinney in the swim, I left three minutes or so behind him.  Tim started off two minutes behind me and I really thought he was going to catch me.  I had a hard time getting my heart rate up even though I felt as though I was pushing fairly hard, but given it would take nearly thirty minutes you can't exactly sprint like crazy from the beginning.  I didn't get caught and kept my place in line and was happy with the effort.

Then all we had to do was ride home nice and easy, go for a little one-hour run and another camp had come to a close.  I'm glad I went to this one.  I probably won't be able to go to as many camps next year so I'm glad I got these in.  This week has been a bit crazy with cramming a lot of the bigger training into the earlier part of the week because I'm doing a sprint race this weekend.  It is the fifth annual Circle Triathlon in Ashland, and right down the road from my mom's house on the lake so how can I not do it?  Besides, I have to redeem myself from last year, being beaten by my cousin Jeff while I competed in the boot.  No boot this year!  And some actual training will probably help, too.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Timberman... Ten Years Later

This past weekend was the annual Timberman 70.3 in Gilford, NH.  I was actually able to participate for the first time in several years.  They've gotten at least some of my money the past couple of years but last year I was unable to participate thanks to a broken foot and the year before it was decided that I was in such a bad place as far as training went that really no good could come from my racing, so I watched instead.  The year before that I participated on the bike as part of a relay which was a lot of fun.  I believe they took away relays for a couple of years after that, but they've since been reinstated.  Probably because the race has failed to sell out the past couple of years. 

It's crazy to me to think that it was ten years ago I did this race for the first time, as my first half and second triathlon ever.  I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.  My training consisted of, "I'll just swim, bike and run sometimes," my bike was my dad's old road bike with no aero bars and which I even wore bike gloves and socks to ride, I took a camelback on the bike because I didn't understand bottle hand-ups, and my race nutrition included, among other things, Wheaties for breakfast (how can you go wrong, right) a banana, a little bag of gummi bears (sort of like those Gu chews, right?) and a Rice Krispie treat.  I remember thinking I was very clever about all of that.  I have no recollection of where I got those ideas from, I probably read some random stuff on the internet.

I know I signed up two months before when I discovered there was a half in New Hampshire and thought, why not?  Uh, why not?  Maybe because you have no idea what you're doing?  And it's not like the concept of online coaching was so wide spread back then.  Not that I could've afforded it.  At the time they still allowed you to sign up for a first-timers wave, which went off last.  The sprint was also held on the same day, so I came out of the water with mostly people from the sprint because me, the terrible swimmer with a terrible sense of direction on a swim course (had to be redirected toward the finish by a kayak) and without a wetsuit, took about 45 minutes to complete the course.  Once I had biked past the sprint turnaround, I felt like I was on a training ride all by myself.  Definitely not like the course is now. 

The bike went pretty well and upon my return I'm sure that people were finishing the race as I headed out on the run.  Did I mention it was about 96 degrees that day?  The gummi bears cannot save you when it's that hot out.  I'm sure I ate all sorts of random crap from aid stations like cookies and chips and pretzels, in the hopes that things would get better.  I still spent most of the run wanting to curl up in the shade under a tree and take a nap, but I kept going.  Somewhere around mile 9 I remember hearing a car honking on the road going the other way and discovered through the haze of late-race confusion that it was my cousin and her boyfriend (now-husband) who had already completed the race and was going home.  That was not encouraging. 

I remember reaching the finish line and thinking that was by far the most difficult thing I had ever done but at the same time was already wondering how I was going to do better next time.  After a dip in the lake where I swear I heard my skin sizzle, I took a look in the food tent that was devoid of pizza and left with mostly a few abandoned bagel halves and some empty jars of peanut butter and instead my parents took me out for ice cream.  I think that brownie sundae at Sawyer's still sticks out in my mind as top five ice cream experiences.

You know, that stupid race probably ruined my career in the film industry?  Two weeks later I moved to Los Angeles and at the age of 23 I had what I thought was going to be my dream job, working on movie sets.  Not that it's super glamorous to be a production assistant, whose jobs included things like standing in the background of a scene making sure nobody walked through while they were shooting, writing down when the gaffers went to lunch, supplying wetsuits to the production staff for the water scenes, watching crap get blown up or trying to stay out of the way of the cattle they are trying to get to stampede through the fake South American town re-created north of LA (tip you may never need in life: cattle really don't want to stampede, even with ranchers chasing them on horses with whips while yelling, "Yee-haw!") or getting blueberries and yogurt for "The Rock" for his breakfast. 

The point is, I had become hooked on the whole, stupid triathlon thing and working sixteen hours a day was vastly cutting into my training time.  I'd run during the week and go ride the Pacific Coast Highway on the weekends, but I didn't want my life to be all about work, so I eventually left.  Timberman was my favorite race for a long time and is probably mostly responsible for my falling in love with the sport.  I did it seven years in a row, and the last time I completed the whole course was in 2008, when I hit what was at the time my lowest point in triathlon.  It is I think the only time I have cried on the course. 

Okay, that was a long enough tangent, so why don't we talk about this year?  I was not excited about the race.  I wasn't not excited, either, as in I wasn't sitting around thinking that I didn't want to race at all, I just wasn't thinking much about it.  For starters, I had three people I coach racing Ironman Mont Tremblant.  Two were going for their first Ironman and the third has completed a few but had suffered from DNFs lately due to nutritional issues.  I'll just skip to the end there and tell you that they all had great races, one got a Kona slot on his first try, and I got to watch them finish online. 

The other strange thing was that I was alone before the race.  That was usually the case in the beginning, but Timberman had become a big event with some of my friends and we'd all race and yet for some reason this year there was just hardly anyone I knew who raced.  I was staying at my mom's on the lake, but since one of my cousins was visiting at my grandmother's from out of town, there was nobody at the house.  All that alone time and not training gave me a bit too much time to think and I had a bit of an emotional lead-up to the race based on things that had almost nothing to do with the race at all.  Among other things I had remembered going out to dinner with my dad the night before the race, two weeks before he died.  Or a couple of years before that when all of my friends stayed at the new house and the night before the race was the first night we ever had dinner on the big dining room table my parents were so excited to have found.  So, Timberman has a lot of memories for me. 

Anyway, enough about that and let's get on with the race and stuff, right?  I went to bed nice and early and slept really well.  My alarm went off at 4am as I had decided to leave nice and early to get a parking spot right at Ellacoya.  My friends used to make fun of me for wanting to get there so early to get a parking spot since you could just take the shuttle from Gunstock, but let me tell you, having your car right there and not having to deal with that stupid shuttle plus getting your bike back to the car afterward is definitely worth it to me.  You have to get up early that day anyway, right?  Might as well get a good parking space. 

I arrived just after 4:30 and had gotten a bit of a head start on my breakfast on the drive over.  It's at times like these that it's a good thing applesauce is basically drinkable.  Ugh.  Of course in the dark I felt as though I'd gotten most of it down, only to park the car and realize I still had at least half to go.  The other nice thing about early arrivals is the clean porta-potties with no lines.  Fortunately I had also remembered that in the middle of August it's kind of dark that early in the morning so I remembered my head lamp.  It was also pretty darn chilly. 

I got my transition set up at #890 (the first time I did this race I was #892 - so close!) and then actually went and hung out at my car since there was nothing better to do and in a strange twist really nobody I knew around to talk to.  I had run into my friend Lauren a couple of bikes down from mine, but that was it for the morning until I finally lined up with my swim wave and saw a couple of other people.  I finally put on my wetsuit, then had to take it off for one more bathroom stop, and then it was time to eat my gel and get in the water. 

I was still not excited, but not dreading it.  It was just like, a process I had to follow.  I lined up toward the front and told myself I was going to have a good swim.  I have always been notoriously slower than normal on that swim.  Not quite the 45 minutes of that first year, but always about two minutes slower than I felt I should've gone.  I had nothing to lose, so I decided to go in with the mentality that things would go well.  It was a bit crowded to start but I was on the inside and stayed there and followed the course easily.  It got a bit rough at times with some boat wakes, but not as bad as prior years.  And there was one spot about halfway through where it seemed every wave in front of me had bunched up to collide into one massive human obstacle course, so things got a bit slow there, and then again on the way in when I tried to follow the feet of someone who seemed insistent of going off course, but then I could see the exit arch in the distance and had no trouble following a straight line in to the finish.

I exited the water in just over 33 minutes, which again, for me on that particular course, I was very happy with.  I think that's the fastest I've done that one and at 5th in my age group out of the water, definitely not a normal spot for me.  So in spite of the ups and downs of the past couple of years, my swim of all things has actually improved some, so I was glad to see the day begin on a good note. 

Transition was way too slow but now it was time to bike.  I had no crazy aspirations of blowing the bike course away or riding as hard as I could.  Lately, the focus has been on staying in control so that I actually have the tiniest chance of having a good run.  Normally this would mean me holding back on the bike to the point where it was almost painful not to be pushing harder, but my legs were not cooperating and for some reason I just didn't feel that great, so staying "in control" in this case kind of meant pushing as hard as I could under the circumstances.  But with zero goals going in, I just took it for what it was, did what I could and ate and drank like I was supposed to while being occasionally annoyed when little groups of 2-3 guys from the waves behind would blow by, quite obviously working together in their little draft packs.  There wasn't a ton of that, but it's just annoying that you can't do a race without seeing it. 

I tried to pick it up in the last ten miles which was good and finished in a decent time, though probably about ten minutes slower than I've done on my best years there.  Given the circumstances I'm all right with that.  But, then it was time to run.  Do you know what it's like to get off a bike in a triathlon, put on your run shoes and just expect imminent disaster?  I do.  It's like waiting for the time bomb to go off, but you can't see the timer.  You don't know when it's going to blow, but you know it will at some point.  Of course this wasn't always the case, but I've gotten quite used to this feeling in the recent past.  It's almost disappointing when it only takes me thirty seconds to put on my run shoes and take off my helmet, sort of like, wait, now I really have to go try and run?  Crap.  But off I went. 

Amazingly, I didn't feel too bad as I set off on the run course.  I held my head up high and tried to at least look like I knew what I was doing.  I changed my watch so I could only see the heart rate and had been instructed to keep it stimulated, basically anything higher than what it was on the bike, and I was at least succeeding at that, doing my best not to look every mile when it beeped and would show me how slowly I had just run that one.  My tendency over the past few races is to hit that, "Oh, crap, this is going to be really rough," feeling sometime within the first mile and a half.  I'd already be thinking about walking aid stations... and pretending those aid stations went on for at least a quarter-mile, or risk not being able to "run" at all. 

Somehow, the feeling didn't creep in.  I ran through the first aid station thinking, maybe I'll walk the next one.  But then I still felt okay at the next one, maybe just thanks to some snow they were handing out, so I ran through that one, too.  Well, then there's this nice, big downhill so that's easy to run down, and then you're almost to the first turn around to come back and hey, this isn't so bad.  Maybe I'll walk up that really big hill I ran down, but, well, I don't feel that bad so I'll run slowly up.  This sort of thing continued and before I knew it, I had run the entire first loop. 

Okay, this may not sound like a big deal to anyone, running a whole six-and-a-half miles or so, especially for someone who used to have zero issue with that sort of thing and blow through it at a pace I currently probably couldn't run a 5K race in.  But based on recent memories, this was by far the best I've felt on one of these in a long, long time.  To venture a guess, I'd say the last time I felt any better for a half was Mooseman in 2009.  But I still started that second lap expecting to fail.  A good first loop had built up the confidence a little, but not enough to completely erase the nagging doubt and the expectation that eventually I'd fall apart. 

Regardless, of course I didn't feel as good heading out on the second loop, but I was still running and only slightly discouraged that my Garmin seemed to be telling me I'd hit another mile about three tenths before I'd see that mile sign on the road.  I think it was around mile 8 when I finally decided to walk one of the aid stations, but I didn't feel the same sort of thing where I wasn't sure if I'd be able to run much anytime soon or I wished the aid station went on another half-mile so I'd have some sort of excuse.  It was just like, ok, walk a little, hydrate some and... well, I guess I'm fine to just keep going again. 

I won't say I felt fantastic the entire time, but that feeling of totally falling apart that I'd been fearing all day never seemed to materialize.  Three weeks ago I did a half where that feeling arrived within the first three miles, so this was definitely a surprise.  I actually think I got a bit too cautious with the aid station walking and the walking the last big hill because after mile twelve I decided I still felt pretty good and could pick up the pace, so I did.  That has literally never happened before, even when I was running really well.  I might say, hey, let's pick it up to the finish, but even if I felt like I was running harder, it wasn't really any faster.  Well, not the case on Sunday.  So in truth, I probably should've run a bit harder from the beginning. 

I got 13.4 miles on my Garmin and crossed the finish line feeling pretty good.  Astonishingly, I only lost two places in my age group on the run.  Sure, the run was far from a good time, but I think I can finally take it for what it was, a step in the right direction in the name of progress based on where I'm headed and not compared to times in the past when I've run nearly thirty minutes faster or whatever.  It went well based on where I am right now, and that's what I need to keep in mind, so I was very happy with the outcome. 

I saw a couple of people I knew afterward but eventually it became apparent that there wasn't much reason to stick around, so it was probably the earliest I've ever gone home after that race, but I didn't really feel like sitting around by myself for at least another two hours waiting for awards or whatever.  So that was my weekend.  Timberman is always a bit bittersweet because I know the end of summer is coming.  The weather has been absolutely incredible so it's going to be sad to see it go.  But I did get home in plenty of time to watch some people finish their first Ironman in incredible times and I'm happy to be able to say I can be there to coach someone through their first experience there. 

I'm still sore and sunburned but there were no blisters and now I've got Vermont QT2 camp this coming weekend.  Then there will be a sprint race Labor Day weekend, a couple of weeks later a training camp in Tempe, then a race in Orange County, a trip to Hawaii and finally an Ironman in Arizona.  It's going to be a busy couple of months but I can say that the big step in the right direction this past weekend has given me a much better outlook as far as how it's all going to go.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Yeah, Olympics!

I really enjoy watching inspirational things on TV.  I enjoy inspirational books as well, but right now I'm just overwhelmed with inspiration by watching constant coverage of the Olympics.  I swear, there is a real shortage of inspiring television these days.  For some reason it has become much more likely for us to "celebrate" idiots like people on Jersey Shore or Real Housewives.  I really don't understand why everyone is so fascinated by watching people who do virtually nothing with their lives aside from basking in their moronic past times.  Too harsh?  Sorry, sometimes I get a bit worked up that reality show stars are filthy rich just because they agree to share their idiotic lives on TV.  I mean, didn't Snooki even "write" a book?  Who are these people who care in the slightest what she has to say?  To be fair, most of my Snooki knowledge comes from the guy who plays her on Saturday Night Live, but I'm guessing based on that I know everything I need to know.

Anyway, that got a bit off track.  The point is that it's awesome to just have days on end of amazing athletic accomplishments available pretty much whenever we want it.  I've been watching a lot of swimming of course, as though hoping I can somehow absorb their fish-like abilities through some form of osmosis.  Based on recent workouts, it hasn't worked as of yet.  It's especially frustrating when watching the distance events.  I swear some of the people in the 1500 kick as little as I do while looking like they're barely working hard and I still probably wouldn't be able to beat them if I tried to swim half the distance in the same time.  And it's not like I'm the worst swimmer ever, they're just inhumanly fast. 

Another fun race today was the women's 10,000 meters on the track.  The woman who won took off on the last lap like she'd hardly been running the previous 24.  62 seconds.  Again, I couldn't run 50 meters at that pace.  I've seen a decent amount of water polo, both men and women.  I think from a swimming standpoint I might be decent at it, but not so much on the trying-to-drown-each-other-under-water side of things.  Perhaps this is the kind of training we all need for triathlon mass swim starts. 

Did anyone get to watch white water kayaking?  They actually built rapids for the games.  My question becomes, what do they do with that course once the Olympics are over?  I somehow doubt there will be a line of people waiting to take their kayaks down for fun.  But then again, they might do things differently in England. 

And who doesn't love a good badminton scandal?  But seriously, if it is to anyone's advantage to lose matches on purpose in order to gain better placing later on, then I think that the system is flawed and it needs to be set up in a way that ensures that they will always want to win. 

Handball is kind of weird and I don't quite get it. 

A woman on the US volleyball team is named Destiny Hooker.  That seems kind of unfortunate but at the same time she has obviously risen above it given the fact that she is an Olympic athlete. 

Speaking of indoor volleyball, why does one player on each team wear a different colored jersey?

In spite of the fact that I did not absorb any swim skills by watching swimming, I'm still sort of hoping for the same when I watch the track events. 

That's all for now.  But it's just a lot of fun to be able to watch so many inspiring athletes and it's sort of incredible how many different sports there are and how many different things you can specialize in.  I'll try and remember to be inspired on my long ride tomorrow.