2009 in 30 words

Thanks for the idea, Tiffany!

New job, new life.
Another marathon, another Ironman, both slow.
Wrote a lot.
One wedding, one marriage; there's a difference.
Went to Phoenix, went to Atlanta.
Next year looks promising.

Cold-weather Wuss

Something happened between high school and now. Back then, I headed outside with the track team in the worst of upper midwest winters. We'd have sideways snow and bitter cold, so we layered up with t-shirts, sweatshirts, tights, sweatpants, hats, gloves, whatever else we could find in the mud rooms of our nondescript split-level homes. It was actually kind of fun, and we felt like we were doing something no one else was, notwithstanding our competition being in the same state. So perhaps I overstate a bit.

Now? I wake up hearing my screens shaking in the wind and say, hell no. I look outside at my world awash in a fresh coating of white and figure I'll just hit the treadmill after work. Oh yeah, there's the fact that the sun doesn't rise until 7:15 or 7:20 a.m., which precludes running in the morning, and it sets before 5 p.m., which rules out running after work, to say nothing of the brutal winds coming off the mountains wets of town. The streets barely get plowed and never get salted (Salt doesn't work at high altitude or when the temperature is less than 20 degrees, which it was for much of the past two weeks), so I don't want to take my chances at hitting a patch of ice and hurting myself.

None of this was ever a concern when I was at Apollo High School in St. Cloud, Minn. Of course, I had a coach telling me to get out and run or don't be on the team, and I had teammates telling me to stop being such a wuss. No wonder I'm so anti-coach now.

Some might say I'm just looking for excuses to not work out, but I have been getting in my training, just inside. Tonight I rode my bike for 1:16 on the trainer in front of the 2006 Ironman World Championship, and tomorrow I'm running in the gym for 50 minutes in preparation for 10 days of running outside in decent weather. Then again, the "scenery" in the gym is not to be underestimated, nor is running in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt in the middle of winter.

Onward I go, dodging the high-plains cold for the antiseptic indoors, still raising the heart rate and sweating out the demons of a heavier diet and the burgeoning spare tire around my middle.

OT: The Slap Shot Drinking Game

Periodically, I'll transfer some stuff from my MySpace blog, since I don't post there anymore and I want my stuff in one spot. Given that it's hockey season and I've only seen my Wild once, this seemed appropriate. And I didn't want to post it on my Facebook because of the impressionable young'uns (aka my niece and nephew) who have access to my page. Here you go.

A nod to Maxim Magazine...

Odds are, most of us have seen Slap Shot a million times already. And, odds are, we've been drunk at least 451,056 of those times. Regardless, Maxim Online has decided to make your next trip down to Charleston a little more sporting. Slap Shot is the quintessential guy movie, and anyone who hasn't uttered at least one of the endlessly quotable lines from it can no longer call himself a man. So lace 'em up, tape 'em up, put on the foil — we now pay homage to a true classic.

The Rules
We've been over this before. Get alcohol, get friends, get comfy. Break out your well-worn VHS copy, break in your new DVD copy, or find out when it's going to make its inevitable run on TV. Game on!

Take one drink when...
• Denis Lemieux slashes or jabs Jim Carr.
• Each time Hyannisport scores in the first game.
• Nick pees himself.
• Anyone else admits to being shit-faced.
• Joe McGrath offers to sell the bus.
• Anyone uses the word "pussy."
• Each time Joe simulates masturbation.
• Denis uses the wrong English word or phrase.
• Mo Wanchuk describes a sexual experience he once had. (Take an extra drink if the person he's talking to remarks how disgusted they are, or that they're skeptical)
• The song is played. You know, THAT song: "And it's all right/And it's comin' home/We got to get right back/To where we're comin' from/Love is good/Love can be strong..."
• Anyone in a given scene is wearing some puke-inducing article of clothing (A hideous shirt, embarrassing pants, god-awful medallions, etc.).
• Anyone's playing cards.
• Any of your friends remarks that Suzanne Hanrahan's nipples point at odd angles.
• The Hansons seriously abuse someone on the ice.

Take two drinks when...
• The Hansons seriously abuse someone off the ice.
• The fan yells "Frog pussy!" (Take an extra drink if you're watching the TV edit, where she yells "Frog phony!" — Dave)
• Johnny Upton actually flashes the crowd during the fashion show (listen for the screams).
• Lily Braden gets air with the van (the second hill).
• Dickie Dunn says, "I was trying to capture the spirit of the thing."
• Anyone uses the word "dyke."
• Ned Braden asks if the Hansons are brothers.
• The Hansons put on the foil.
• Johnny says, "Fuckin' Chrysler plant, here I come!"
• Reggie Dunlop gets laid.
• Dave "Killer" Carlson mentions Swami Baha (or meditates).
• Anyone uses the word "snatch."
• Jim Carr loses his hairpiece.

Do a shot when...
• The Chiefs score against Hyannisport ("That's what yer paid for, Braden! Now try winning a game for a change!").
• Jeff Hanson gets his quarter back from the pop machine (Yeah, I called it "pop." What? — Dave).
• The first time someone mentions Ogie Ogelthorpe ("Worst goon in hockey today.").
• The first time someone gets bloody in a fight.
• The organ player gets beaned by a slap shot.
• They show the twins (From the booster club).
• The Chiefs win the championship.

Realizes there are some things she'll never understand when...
• Your significant other asks "How can you watch this again?"

Uncoachable

Think about lame coachspeak. What does every coach say about his or her best athletes?

They're "coachable." Doesn't matter what sport it is, every coach says the best athletes are coachable.

And if you can read between the lines, you know what that means.

"He/she's a good little trouper who does whatever I say to do without question or lip, unlike that asshole Dave."

In other words, that's not me. Any of my coaches will tell you that. I wasn't a total nonconformist about it, but I needed a compelling reason to do 20x100 @ 1:30 besides "I said so." Suffice to say, nothing's changed.

The other day in the pool, Karl was putting us through a sprint workout. Naturally, I stroked easily through it, making sure to kick or increase my turnover on the alternating repeats. Karl still told me he wanted me to sprint and go all-out during the main set. Thought: "Go fuck yourself. When in a 1.2- or 2.4-mile swim, other than the first quarter-mile when I'm fresh, will I need to go all-out?"

I don't remember what the set was, but it ended with a sprint 100 meters. The first time through I did it in 1:28 with a finishing heart rate of 192. The second time through I did it in 1:24 with a finishing heart rate of 180. He then said he wants me doing entire workouts at 1:25-1:30 per 100 meters, and all that stirred in my head was middle-aged rebellion.

On another blog I follow, the writer said, "I didn't want to do a 100-mile ride the day after the race, but what (coach) has me doing is working so I don't even question it." Seriously? I wonder if there is a threshold for that person, a point where he/she says, "Forget it! You're going to tire me out unnecessarily/injure me!"

And don't think that anyone can break me. The other day, ROTC was recruiting in the student union, and I thought about what I told military recruiters between my freshmen and sophomore years of college when I met with them. I really have issues with blind obedience, and not even the promise of "being a part of something bigger than [my]self" will quell that streak. No one can break me, not a drill instructor, not a teacher, and certainly not a coach... regardless of how old I am/was. The harder they push, the harder I push back (employers, take note).

So I reached the conclusion that I don't need a coach. When it comes to figuring out what kind of workouts I need to do, I've got it more or less under control. Instead, I need a nutritionist and a psychologist, someone to clear the crap out of my refirgerator and determine hourly caloric intake, and someone to teach me how to nut up when my IT bands tie themselves in knots and I feel like I could go to sleep on the curb.

Humbled in the Pool

No, I didn't go swimming naked. I showed up on a tough day. Which to this point has been every day for the past month.

There's a master's swimming group at the university. For $50 a semester ($20 for students, higher for faculty/staff, like me), we get an hour at the team's pool four days week, and a coach with a whistle and a clipboard and everything. Karl works in campus recreation and has a pretty good handle on what it takes to coach swimming. We've only been doing 2,500-3,000 meters because that's what most of us can handle in one hour. The hour we get starts after the UW team leaves and before an open swim, so we've got to be efficient with our time.

Those workouts have been as intense as any I've done. My high school coach stressed quality and technique over quantity; while our opponents boasted of 5,000 yards-plus five days a week, sometimes twice a day, we topped 5,000 yards once in my four years on the team, and that was largely because we swam like shit at the conference meet and coach Stanoff wanted to make a point.

No, this time around the 2,500-meter workouts feature lots of stroke work and hard intervals. We swim 300 breaststroke in 4:30, then go straight into 5x50 freestyle kick on 1:20. Then we do a 200 IM. That's just an example. For the sake of perspective, I had no problem with 4,000-5,000 yards in my hard Ironman training cycles.

Apparently, that was because I didn't challenge myself. If I extrapolated the current workouts over two hours, I would stagger home and go to bed without dinner most nights. The last of the intervals are done with Karl yelling at us from the pool deck to push ourselves, and my arms completely numb.

This is all to say nothing of me gasping for every breath of air. Behind my office once stood a pair of outbuildings. Both were razed during September, as was a classroom building across the alley. That meant about a fourth of the air I've breathed for the past month has been dust, which turned my nasal capillaries to mush. Since getting back from Wisconsin I've been congested and (stop here if you're squeamish) expelling a good deal of blood with my snot. Only after I'd been back a couple weeks did my boss mention that she and another co-worker on my side of the building had missed work with respiratory distress brought on by the construction and moving of earth behind us. Lo and behold, there's a thin layer of dust on everything in my office, including me.

With limited breathing capacities it's no wonder I've felt alternately lightheaded and short of breath during the past couple of swim workouts. I even shortened one of them because not only was there no way I'd finish the workout in the time allotted, I couldn't lift my arms for the last interval, much less for the 200-meter cooldown. And yet the guy in my lane, who appeared to be around my age, steamrolled right through it.

Not even during the first couple weeks of high school swim practice did I feel this out of shape. To think I finished an Ironman five weeks ago...

• In a semi-related item, I made the first payment on my new bike, an Argon 18 E-112. Because Adrenaline Tri-Sport sold their last frame the day before I got fitted, Roger the ace bike fitter had to order it directly from the company. As this is the time of year to buy 2009 bikes and cars at a discount, the company was more than happy to jettison one of its models with a fairly nice price break. My ceiling was firmly set at $3,000 and we'll come in a shade under that (which means I won't eat out the rest of the year). The bike should come in this week, though I won't pick it up until the 30th — aka my next payday. The over-under on the number of times I'll get outside with it before winter sets in permanently is six.

• Tiffany wondered if the dead person floating in Lake Monona ever surfaced. Well, at 2 p.m. on Ironman Wisconsin Day, about four-and-a-half hours after the last swimmer cleared the lake, the body surfaced. That's all I heard, and that's all I cared to know.

Change in Plans

The good thing about taking a week of vacation after an undertaking like an Ironman is you have all the time in the world to truly recover. In my case I had two days to myself before I had my friend Mindi come to visit before a weekend of wedding revelry with some mutual acquaintances in Denver. That said, I didn't run, ride or swim during that week, the better to give my body a complete break before potentially getting back at it.

The bad thing about taking a week of vacation after an undertaking like an Ironman is you have all the time in the world to ruminate on whatever the race was. Aside from my first one, which I just wanted to finish, I don't think I've truly been happy with how I did. My PR for the distance (11:42:40) stands from that first one. The next year I did Ironman Canada and was 4 minutes, 33 seconds slower on a much tougher course; very frustrating to be that close. The third one, and slowest, was Ironman Wisconsin, where I went 13:59 on a brutal day when a fourth of the field dropped out. Still, I wish I would have handed the heat better. The fourth one was Ironman Coeur d'Alene, which I finished in 12:49, three weeks after moving cross-country for a new job.

Three-and-a-half weeks ago I did Wisconsin again, this time on a slightly more favorable day. And I still came up 21 minutes short of a personal best despite having a better training cycle and a stronger nutrition plan for the race. This is what weighed heavily on my mind during my time off, especially on the long trip home and during those two days I had completely to myself.

Then thoughts turned to the future. No question, I want to toe the line at the world championship in Kona someday. I don't have a timetable, though if the doomsday scenarios are to be believed I'd like to get it done before the world ends in 2012 (hee hee). Regardless of how long it takes, I have at least two hours I need to drop from my overall time to get it done. That's about 10 minutes from my swim, 20 minutes from my bike, and 90 minutes from my run (no lie there). I can gain some time back in transition but most of it I have to get on the roads.

So then I started thinking about why I do this shit. I want to see where my body's breaking point is. I want to see what I'm capable of. And for one day, I want to toe the line with the world's best. My performances to now have been mediocre by elite standards, decent by age-group standards. I need to shed that mediocrity if I'm to make my way to Kona, and I'm convinced I'm the only thing standing in the way. The space between my ears might as well be a thousand miles, and short of seeing a sport shrink I don't know what to do.

At mile 16 in Madison, when I could feel my legs tightening, I had the same feeling as when James Loney of the Dodgers homered to tie the Cubs 1-1 in the sixth inning of Game 1 of the division series in 2008 — "Not again." Right then and there I was done. There was no way I could even jog the remaining 10 miles with a minimum of walking. It hurt less to walk, but the best athletes run anyway, knowing it takes less time and will hurt less later to run. That logic never permeated the shroud of mediocrity and comfort that hung from my psyche like a parachute. The best swear by affirmations and shit like that but I don't buy it. There's got to be something else I need to master to rid myself of the irony of having been a psychology major.

So that's what I'm going to work on next year. Originally I thought I'd do the full Vineman in Sonoma County, Cali, in early August, then do the full Silverman in Vegas 12 weeks later. But what's to be gained from plodding through two full distances within 12 weeks when I can't even truly race half that distance? Instead, I'll master whatever mental tricks I need to master at half-ironman distance. There are four points in the year where I'll race but I'm eyeing several different races. The only givens are the Pacific Crest Triathlon and the Harvest Moon Triathlon. Beyond that I'm looking at early August (four or five weeks before Harvest Moon), and late October or early November (a season-ending "A" race).

Again, I just want to get to a point where I can truly race that distance, like stay on the big gear for the majority of the ride and run an entire half-marathon off the bike. Also in 2010, I'll sign up for Ironman Coeur d'Alene 2011 — and I think you know what I'm hoping to accomplish at that race. But that's almost two years from now. Part of the change in mental focus is to worry about the now and forget about the later. As I'm fond of saying, be in the moment. Too bad I suck at taking my own advice.... another thing that must change.

Ironman Wisconsin 2009, or Why Dave Should Not Tweet

9/9/09

17:31 — Some vacation, I'm back at the office writing these short pieces on scientists.
18:43 — Boss just told me to leave. Sure, and you'll get these pieces after I'm back. Nope, she says, I need them before you go. Well, then, we have a conundrum, don't we?
20:42 — Copy filed, I'm out. On the road. Finally. Looking forward to a four-hour nap in a $100 hotel room.
21:31 — How the fuck does Burger King run out of meat???
21:35 — At Arby's, lights are off, no hours posted on the door, moving on. Way to lose some customers.
21:45 — Wendy's it is. God, I hate fast food.
23:27 — No traffic, no cops, thank goodness for small favors. Welcome to the Fairfield Inn Aurora.

9/10/09
4:00 — Sigh. It always rings too quickly.
4:09 — On the road again. Suffice to say my morning routine is quite streamlined when there's no time for breakfast.
4:11 — Imagine that. No traffic when it's still dark.
4:41 — And easy to find parking when it's not a huge travel weekend.
4:46 — People on the bus giving my bike dirty looks. Fuck you, too. What's in your bags?
4:58 — Fuck Northwest Airlines. The lady looked at the big gray box and said "Is that a bike?" Much different than everyone else, who seems to get asked "What's in the box?" That gives you some wiggle room. Yes, it's a bike. That will be not only $175 but $15 extra for being over 50 pounds.
5:15 — Hash browns, scrambled eggs, sausage patty, apple juice. Breakfast of champions. I hate fast food.
5:27 — Start metabolism with leisurely stroll around Concourse C. Shoulda flown Southwest.
5:58 — I'm on the plane! Advantage of early/redeye flights: Lots of room. Disadvantage of early/redeye flights: They're early.
6:30 — Up, up, and away. How dialed in is my normal 6:30 wake-up? I just got morning wood for no good reason.
6:36 — Aborted attempt at a nap. I can't sleep on planes to save my life. God help me if I ever go overseas.
6:49 — Breakfast, part 2: More apple juice, biscuit with grape jam, banana. Think I've covered my fruit for the day.
7:04 — This notebook is old. And I need help. Seriously.
7:06 — The kid across the aisle just took a crap. This plane will never be the same.
9:00 — Hey! Welcome to MSP!
9:15 — And we're still taxiing. Are you sure we're not at DFW?
9:30 — Sweet freedom. Holy cats, MSP looks nothing like I remember.
9:40 — Is that Vivaldi's "Summer" playing over the PA?
9:45 — Definitely time to shave. I'm scraping white crud out of my goatee.
9:50 — Two more hours. Can't take a nap or I risk missing my flight. Ugh.
9:58 — So much for local charm. The female voice warning travelers of the end of the walkway sounds like Ross's second wife (the Brit who wouldn't let him be friends with Rachel).
10:17 — The women dress far more modestly here than they do out west. Longer shorts, t-shirts vs. tank tops, hair pulled up. Or maybe the difference is between the real world and a college campus in early fall.
10:31 — I have no sympathy for people who run frantically to make flights, screaming at people to hold the door. You know you have to be here two hours before, so plan accordingly. And if you're at risk of missing a connection, you're the airline's problem.
10:33 — Better yet, the person who's cursing a blue streak right now hoofed it to not only the wrong gate, but to a flight that's been rescheduled to give him time to get there. Pay attention to the monitors, dude.
11:40 — The Midwest is and always will be a huge part of who I am, but I'll never live there again.

And that's where I stopped writing in my notebook. I don't know if I got bored or what. That is, however, about the time I got on my flight to Chicago from M/SP. It was a relatively short one, though every flight is "relatively short" when you live on the opposite side of the country from those you love.

The plan was to bust it up to Madison late Thursday afternoon to check in and get my packet, but I forgot about the abject construction around Chicago and which routes I should take. I ended up going through Milwaukee and across the ugly-flat plains to Madison, where I managed to find the hotel and get a reasonable dinner before crashing and burning at 11 p.m.

On Friday, I checked out the lake and went for a swim. I did one lap of the course, pausing to orient myself and float on my back a little. One man out at the first turn buoy mentioned he'd seen on the news that someone had drowned in Lake Monona a week earlier, and that not only had the authorities not recovered the body but the Ironman was making it hard for the searchers to dredge the lake. Lovely. I got out of the water and hung out in the sun for a bit, drying off before heading inside to check in. A Brit with an accent much like Terry Gilliam's sipped on a Coke and said, "I figure if it can take corrosion off a car battery the Coke'll kill all the shit I might have picked up in the lake." Lovely.

The check-in took longer than ever but my timing sucked. It opened up at 10 a.m. and I queued up at 10:10. It took an hour before I could get my bags into the backpack and ride (yes, I assembled my bike without alcohol Thursday night) back to the hotel to wait for my parents. They made it back at about 2:30 and we had a late lunch at Ella's Deli, an old-school kosher deli with a restored carousel out front. I continued to drink my heavily salted Gatorade and produce urine in massive volume. We took a little driving tour of the campus and watched the Wisconsin band practice for about 20 minutes (Note to self: Download drumline cadences for prerace listening). And then we headed to Mia Za's on State Street for dinner. Picked up some beer on the way home and shaved my legs and face before sleeping like a baby.

The next day we headed to town on some back streets thanks to the Badgers' home game against Fresno State and the construction that cut a six-lane main street to two lanes. We found a place to park and then headed to the convention center to drop off my transition bags and bike. In and out in 10 minutes. As I said previously, I don't do race expos any more so I chose to spend as little time at the convention center as possible. I did stop at Machinery Row Bicycles to get a couple of CO2 canisters and ogle the bikes they had.

We stopped at Jimmy John's to pick up subs and ate in the hotel. I watched Texas-Wyoming while my parents headed to the grocery store to get supplies for dinner. Mom made lasagna, which has become something of a tradition the night before my Ironmans. It's pasta, ground turkey, tomatoes and spices. So good. We watched South Carolina-Georgia until it was time to go to bed, or in my case attempt to sleep.

3:49 a.m. — Woke up to pee. It's race day, baby! Wooo!
3:51 p.m. — Put on race kit. Shorts. Heart-rate monitor. Zip top. Socks. Sweatshirt. Wind pants. Ball cap. Specs.
4 a.m. — Alarm goes off. It's 3 a.m. according to my body.
4:03 a.m. — Breakfast of champions: bagel with cream cheese, chocolate chip/peanut butter Clif bar, organic apple juice.
4:15 a.m. — Fouling up the bathroom something fierce.
4:30 a.m. — Packing special needs bags. For the bike: Two bottles of salty Gatorade, two gels, bag of tortilla chips. For the run: Fuel Belt with four little bottles of salty Gatorade, two gels, bag of tortilla chips.
4:45 a.m. — Leave hotel with long-suffering parents. I love them more than they know for far more reasons than just perfect attendance at this ridiculous hobby I have.
5 a.m. — Arrive at Capitol Square to drop off special needs. All these nervous people checking and rechecking make me laugh. You've done the training. Today is the reward. Relax!
5:05 a.m. — Walk to convention center to recheck my transition bags. Hit play on iPod (see below).

The pre-race playlist
"In Too Deep," Sum 41 (Not a good start)
"Big Time," Peter Gabriel (Much better)
"Cut the Cake," Average White Band
"Small Town," John Cougar Mellencamp (Good one for a Midwestern boy come home)
"Hungry Heart," Bruce Springsteen
"Draw the Line (live)," Aerosmith
"One Mic," Nas
"Hurts So Good," Mellencamp (All too appropriate)
"Flood," Jars of Clay (Not cool to hear a song about drowning at this point)
"El Paso," Old 97s (Nor to hear a song about dying for love)
"Feel Like I Wanna Feel," Bella Fayes
"The Only Way to Be," Save Ferris
"A Little Less Conversation," Elvis Presley, remixed (The one from the "Ocean's 11" soundtrack)
"Learn to Fly," Foo Fighters
"Middle of the Road," Pretenders
"You Get What You Give," New Radicals

6:15 a.m. — Get up from moment of repose in transition near my bike to meet parents upstairs. Start pulling on my neoprene sausage casing.
6:30 a.m. — Meet the parents, snap a picture, leave my post-race bag with them, head downstairs to the lake.
6:35 a.m. — Walking down the helix to the lake is as close as a weenie like me will get to walking through the tunnel at (insert football stadium here). Spectators on both sides, wetsuit-clad people strolling slowly to their doom, music playing, ann announcer pleading with racers to get in the lake NOW.
6:40 a.m. — At the lake's edge I pause. More color in the sky to the east. Better finish squeezing myself into my wetsuit.
6:43 a.m. — Heart-rate monitor registers at 99 as I slide into the water. Checking and rechecking my goggles. It would suck out loud to get them kicked off.
6:50 a.m. — Pop! The pros take off. I'm still treading water, looking up at the sky, checking out the crowds on shore and on the various levels of the convention center, and wondering what I'd do if I discovered the body mid-race.
6:59 a.m. — National anthem done. Watch in proper mode. Let some water in the wetsuit. Let's get it on!
7:00 a.m. — Fifth Ironman under way.
(All times approximate from this point)
7:15 a.m. — Making the turn at the first buoy. Holy traffic jam.
7:33 a.m. — One lap down, one to go. Wonder if I'll pass anyone on their first lap.
7:38 a.m. — Let's try to get to the buoy line.
7:39 a.m. — What the fuck??? Cut off by someone swimming away from the buoy line?? Well. There's a worse navigator than me in this field. Who knew?
7:46 a.m. — OK, made the turn for home. Let's try this again.
7:47 a.m. — You've got to be kidding me! Cut off again? Fuck it, I'll stay to the outside. Hello, 2.6-mile swim. Christ.
7:58 a.m. — OK, I've taken care of inadvertent hydration during the swim. This water is not yummy.
8:06 a.m. — All right, out of the water. It was fun while it lasted. Where the hell is the zipper thing?
8:07 a.m. — Wetsuit strippers rule. They found the strap, got me out of the suit, and sent me on my way.
8:10 a.m. — Getting up the helix sure took forever.
8:14 a.m. — As did getting out of the changing room, having a piss, getting my bike, and rolling down the other helix to John Nolen Drive.
8:16 a.m. — OW! Fill your goddamned potholes, Madison!
8:17 a.m. — Ah yes, salty Gatorade. The first couple ounces of 96 for today.
8:30 a.m. — Finally in the country. Good to know beforehand that it's all false flat out to Verona.
8:40 a.m. — Here's Verona. Or at least suburban Verona. Hey, can I grab my special needs bag now?
8:50 a.m. — Why the hell does my watch say 2:50 and not 1:44? Time to drink anyway...
9 a.m. — Oh yeah, it's entirely possibly I didn't hit the lap button after all. Annoying, nothing more.
9:15 a.m. — Sign on the road: "Did you know that muskrats used to be as large as bears???"
9:30 a.m. — Screaming downhill. Let's pedal a bit and gain some speed.
9:32 a.m. — Back uphill. I just used 14 of my 18 gears in a span of two minutes. God damn.
9:45 a.m. — Sauk Lane was not as tough as last time. The shade helped but it just didn't feel as steep. I sat down the whole time. And there was no Satan following me up the hill. Must be hydrating properly.
9:48 a.m. — The next hill, however, was no joke. I mustered the breath to make fun of the guys with the Notre Dame flag, though.
10:50 a.m. — Fair Verona. I heard my parents yell "Go Dave!" The masses are out in force today. More water.
11 a.m. — Two more bottles of salty Gatorade. Damn, I can't wait until this race is over and I don't have to drink this shit any more.
11:01 a.m. — Knock it off. Now! Too far ahead. Let's just worry about the next bottle. Settle.
11:15 a.m. — Starting to pass a few people. Still switching gears every minute or so. My derailleurs will beg for mercy.
11:30 a.m. — Sign in Cross Plains: "Hurry up. Packers start at 7:20."
11:45 a.m. — Sign at Mount Horeb Township fire dept.: "140.6 miles until I get my boyfriend back." Sounds like a healthy relationship to me (Eyeroll).
Noon — Am I going too conservatively?
12:15 p.m. — Now people are passing me, all of them in the big gear. Sigh...
12:30 p.m. — Keep drinking. Keep drinking.
12:45 p.m. — Chips taste better with green salsa. Doubt green salsa would carry well in special needs, though.
1 p.m. — First NFL games are probably a quarter in.
1:15 p.m. — What's up with the police car? Is this guy still on his first lap? Geez, he's going to have a tough time of it.
1:30 p.m. — Sauk Lane again. Out of the saddle briefly. Love the crowd. Can't read the chalked messages.
1:45 p.m. — Saddle sore. Ow. Shit. Damn. Few other choice words. Why do I get one now???
2:00 p.m. — Home sweet home, for now. Look at that. It's the Alliant Energy Center parking lot.
2:08 p.m. — Up the helix. Smallest gear. I'm not tired. I'm not tired. I'm not tired.
2:09 p.m. — Last Ironman on that bike. Be gentle with it, volunteer who took my bike and complimented me on my goatee.
2:11 p.m. — Why the hell did the sunscreen on my neck sting so bad? Ow. Oh yeah, could be those gashes from my wetsuit and necklace. Ow.
2:13 p.m. — Sweet relief in T2. Might have to do that again at some point.
2:14 p.m. — Hey, mom and dad made it back from Verona! Hope I don't look like ass.
2:15 p.m. — Sweet. Beat the winners... OK, let me clarify, I got out of T2 before the winners finished. Tiny victory.
2:20 p.m. — Nice, easy jog. Keep drinking. Don't check the watch, just beat the sunset.
2:30 p.m. — Love State Street. Good part of the course. Hard to believe the run turn is a few blocks away.
2:35 p.m. — This railroad underpass is new. I like it better than the pedestrian footbridge of 2005.
2:40 p.m. — Running next to this guy in the Illinois kit is fun. Heard so much "Go Illini" I had to ask him what the deal was. "I figure Wisconsin's been kicking our ass for a decade, [the spectators] figure it's the least they can do."
2:47 p.m. — Circling the field at Camp Randall Stadium. The synthetic grass feels good after less than an hour of pavement. Someone just yelled "Go Blue!" in the empty stadium. And Justin Daerr of Fort C just passed me, one lap ahead and on his way to sixth place.
2:50 p.m. — Hillary Biscay passes in the other direction. Swoon. Go Hillary.
3:15 p.m. — There are mom and dad at the turn. Can smell fried things. Getting tired but holding it together.
3:30 p.m. — Odd. I'm pounding the salty Gatorade but no urge to pee. Bad sign?
4:15 p.m. — There's the finish line I can't cross yet. Come on, hold it together.
4:25 p.m. — There's Amy Marsh, heading for home. Way to rep Austin.
4:45 p.m. — Oh shit.
4:46 p.m. — Why won't my legs move? Goddammit anyway...
4:47 p.m. — And my IT bands have registered their opinion of the whole mess.
4:48 p.m. — And my brain has seconded the motion to make the last 10 miles of this shit a fucking death march. Fuck you both.
4:50 p.m — Walk. Run. Walk. Walk. Walk. Jog. Trot. Walk. God damn it.
5:05 p.m. — We're jogging through Camp Randall. Period.
5:08 p.m. — And we're walking up the ramp out of Camp Randall. Shit.
5:30 p.m. — A girl plays violin along Lake Mendota. Sweetest thing I've heard all day.
5:50 p.m. — The turn on State Street. The plaster has set on my IT bands.
6:10 p.m. — She's still playing. Save her a spot in the Chicago Symphony in about 15 years.
6:15 p.m. — A man in a Michigan State kit and a man in a Michigan kit run side by side.
6:30 p.m. — The sun is now in my eyes. At least I'm not thinking about my ITs. Oh wait, I just did.
6:55 p.m. — Sorority girls on their balcony have been cool all day. Thanks, ladies.
7:00 p.m. — OK, there's the Capitol. We're running it in.
7:03 p.m. — Hey, I've got the finish line to myself. And Mike Reilly pronounced my name right.
7:04 p.m. — Finish-line catcher escorts me straight to the food. Say that much. At least I've never needed medical intervention.
7:05 p.m. — But first, there's my mom. Who says she lost my dad. Whatever, go find him. I'm hungry.
7:06 p.m. — Sam's Choice pop. Seriously? For $550 we get Sam's Choice instead of Coke or Pepsi?
7:07 p.m. — At least they have Papa John's pizza.
7:15 p.m. — There's my dad. And he has my dry clothes bag.
7:30 p.m. — In the queue for a rub. I'm envisioning a passage from "Running With the Buffaloes," where a runner describes a massage therapist working on his IT bands. He said it felt like the guy reached inside his leg and forcibly straightened them out, like curling wrapping ribbon by pressing on it with a pair of scissors. Said it hurt worse than any workout.
7:40 p.m. — Dad found the Pepsi machine. How did I know it was there?
8:15 p.m. — OK, lady, do your worst.
8:30 p.m. — Olive oil doesn't burn open sores. Whew.
9:30 p.m. — Leftover lasagna and unsalted Gatorade. Dinner of champions.
9:45 p.m. — AAAAAHHHHHHH! Water. Soap. Gashes on my feet from shoes. Gashes on my hips from race number belt. Gashes on the back of my neck. BURRRRRRRNNNNNNN!
10:30 p.m. — Back at the finish line in the dark. Aloe is panacea. As is grande java chip frappuccino from finish-line Starbuck's.
11:55 p.m. — Last official finisher. And I head back to the drawing board.

Fired up, ready to go

With a glass of water by my side, I offer my last screed before Ironman No. 5. Unlike the broken promises of brief posts prior, this one will be brief. I'm sleepy, but I wanted to make sure I was packed before I head to work tomorrow. The bike is all broken down and packed in its plastic case, the suitcase is loaded with whatever provisions I'll need for the next four days (except for my toothbrush, which I will use in a moment), and the transition bag is packed with my bike helmet, sandals, magazines, cell phone charger... you get the picture.

I'm not taking my computer, first and foremost because the bag gets heavy after a while. In addition to the laptop, there's the power cord, iPod, cell phone charger, plus all the other crap I listed for the transition bag above. And I still have to find a place for my wetsuit. Other than the bike, I don't want to check anything. Odd that I would check the one thing I can ill-afford to not have in Madison, while bringing in the cabin with me things easily replaced.

By the way, Northwest will make an extra $175 off the shipping of my bike. Unless I try to lie about what's in the box, or I'm vague about it ("It's sports equipment"), or they just forget to charge me (stop laughing). I get sick of hearing about how people dodge the airline fees with boxes identical to mine, but I'm not willing to tempt karma. I'll ship it home via UPS for around $70, and next year I can ship my bike well in advance of the race because I'll have TWO bikes, a spare to ride when the nice one is getting shipped.

Finally, I'll tell you three what I've been telling anyone who asks. I'm in better shape for this one than I was for any of the other four. I don't know if I've been eating better but I've been getting better quality sleep, and I've trained much smarter for this one. My PR is 11:42:40 (Florida, 2003), and anything slower than that will disappoint me to the point of suicide, but I won't act on those impulses because there will be more opportunities for me to get better.

P.S.: There's coverage at the above link, or at UniversalSports.com. I'm No. 797, which likely will be a Boeing number in 10-15 years. Now I need Boeing or Airbus or someone else to get me to the damned race.

Birthday set: A day late, but not the least bit short

This year I learned about the birthday set, a piece of swimming lore that has the potential to be worse than a birthday spanking. It never came up when I was a high school swimmer, though there was no lack of teammates with birthdays in season.

I've heard two different versions of the birthday set. Pro triathlete Hillary Biscay, who swam collegiately at Southern Cal, described a workout over the summer on the occasion of her 30th, where she did 100x100 — for you non-swimmers, that's 100 swims of 100 yards apiece, separated by a rest interval of some kind — and called it her birthday set.

But on Slowtwitch I read more than once that the birthday set was yearsx100. What to do?

Well, considering I have Ironman Wisconsin in 10 days, I didn't think it would be a good idea to double my longest swim workout of the year with 10,000 yards and thus unravel my rotator cuffs. So I decided on 36x100 on approximately 2 minutes, meaning I start another swim every 2 minutes. That interval was cake as I did the freestyle swims and pulls in 1:20-1:25. I threw some kinks into it with some IM, some kick, a couple of them backstroke, and one of them breaststroke. On some of the freestyle I varied my pace by length and on others I just cruised.

I thought I was going to write something profound for each one, remembering how I changed it up with each 100, but that didn't happen. Not that the workout was drudgery; I love being in the pool. But in a somehow appropriate challenge to the day, the nosepiece for my goggles broke after the first five intervals, so I got my alternate pair of goggles. They too broke. I MacGuyvered a solution by tying together two pieces of the broken nose straps and went on about my business, but it's somewhat symbolic because I don't think I've had to replace chlorine-worn nosepieces since 2004. All good things must come to pass.

I think the 100x100 is from elite high school and college programs, because swimmers at that age can't even challenge themselves with yearsx100. I mean, we did 30x100 during a practice my senior year, and not that it wasn't a challenge because of the steep intervals (1:30, 1:25, 1:20 by 10s), but the average high school kid turning 17 wouldn't be challenged by 17x100, unless he or she did them all butterfly. Or underwater.

My excuse for not challenging myself further today is my A-plus race sitting 10 days away. This is why you don't cram for exams the night before — you only end up hurting yourself. Maybe I'll try 100x100 next year when I'm between Ironmans, or during the "offseason," when I have nothing to lose.

Whoa, 10 days. I'm a single-digit midget as of midnight. Better get some rest...

Taper time!

People have reported feeling irritable, tired, hungry and generally crappy after the reduction in training in anticipation of a big event. I've never felt that way during my tapers, mostly because my tapers end up feeling more like stopping training — I blow off a few workouts for one reason or another, continue with a reduction in volume on the workouts I do, and call it good. Oh yeah, I continue eating as normal, thinking my body still is used to working like a coal-fired locomotive and burning calories faster than I replace them. Sound about right?

Further, I'm already starting to pack for my September 9 departure. The plane leaves at 6:30 a.m. September 10, but I'm crashing at a hotel in Aurora, Colo., the night before so I don't have to leave Laramie at 3 a.m. to make my flight. After my 59-mile ride today I took the big Polar bottles off my bike frame and tossed them in the sink. Immediately I realized I won't need them again until the race September 13. Same with the aerodrink thing between my handlebars. I took that off and set it aside, ready for its interminable journey in the big bike box. The list of things I won't need until race day promises to get longer as the week goes on.

Two weekends ago I took an aborted Saturday bike ride, then muddled through a five-hour ride on Sunday. Last weekend I was in Illinois for a wedding, and the morning of the ceremony I ran 20 miles along the Des Plaines River Trail in Lake County. The rides were crap but last week's run was far and away the best long run I've ever had in training for anything. Part of it was because I ran for an hour before getting in the car and looking for another access point, part of it was an abundance of oxygen, part of it was the trail being a hard-packed dirt surface, which beats the hell out of the concrete Laramie River Greenbelt. Nonetheless, I had a good run and wasn't even sore that night, so I had no excuse not to dance a bit (which might or might not have been the reason I went home alone).

The three-week taper is a staple with me, ever since high school. My senior year, the swim team had a collectively shitty conference meet two weeks before sections (the state qualifier). There always was that two-week break and we used to taper for the entire two weeks. Not this time. We showed up for practice and were shocked to see a 7,000-yard workout. Now my coach believed in quality over quantity, so we rarely topped 5,000 yards. Of course that 5,000-yard workout would go down in an hour-and-a-half so we knew how to hurt. That week after conference, coach didn't say a whole lot to us; he just posted the workout and went to his office, and we were left to our own devices. We swam 40,000 yards that week, topped off by 10,000 yards on Friday (including a set of 30x100, which we'd heard about at a meet earlier in the year). The next week, we swam 5,000 on Monday, 3,500 on Tuesday, 2,500 on Wednesday, starts, turns and sprints at the section meet pool across town on Thursday, then section prelims on Friday. Everybody on the team set PRs over the weekend, and we even qualified a couple of guys for the state meet. I know I had the meet of my life, so to this day I don't taper for more than three weeks because I feel like one more down week will compromise my fitness.

So I'm not concerned about my volume. I only did two five-hour rides and one three-hour run, which is the least I've done in any Ironman training cycle; normally you want four or five rides and two runs of the aforementioned lengths. Since this is my fifth time through this, I decided to go shorter and add some intensity. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I put my training plan on a spreadsheet and tried to keep up with it over the past 12 weeks. I missed more workouts than I'd planned, and altered the plan to suit my life, so much so that I have the original training plan in one spreadsheet and what I actually did on another spreadsheet. Quite striking.

In my concession to being silly during the taper, I've shaved my legs and grown a gnarly, two-inch goatee. OK, that's not entirely true. Rewind to the first race of the year, the Greeley Triathlon. With a pool swim and a strong swimming base (i.e., I was a competitive swimmer and can beat more than 75 percent of any triathlon field in the water), I figured I'd push the advantage as far as I could. Armed with Gillette Edge gel, one of my Sensor Excel razors, and two bottles of Rolling Rock, I smoothed out in a big way. It took 45 minutes because the forest on my legs necessitated multiple blades. I re-shaved a couple of times over the summer (to coincide with swims that wouldn't require a wetsuit), and did so again last week, this time with a Venus Embrace girly razor after my friend Kim told me the Gillette disposable girly razors would carve my legs like a Thanksgiving turkey. So yeah, I'm nice and somewhat smooth now, and I'll mow the lawn again the night before Ironman.

To understand how big a step this is, you need to know I've long thought it was pointless for men to shave while doing triathlons. This is notwithstanding a couple of skin-shearing bike mishaps, which cyclists and triathletes alike say is a compelling reason to stay smooth. Still, I've long maintained that my three biggest vices are Pepsi, beer, and hairy legs, and when the study comes out identifying those as my limiters, I'll give up two of them. All it took was feeling like an eel at the Greeley Municipal Pool for me to get on the sheer bandwagon. I feel fast, period.

The goatee, which probably cancels out any aerodynamic advantage of my shaved legs, is something I've done before three of my previous four Ironmans. It's kind of a point of focus, like a hockey player's playoff beard. Actually, it looks more like St. Louis Cardinals closer Ryan Franklin, only not as huge. Along with the leg hair, I might shave it off the night before the race, since I'd rather gunk up a hotel bathroom sink than my own. Or I might continue on with it as a point of focus, since I seem to need focus in the later stages of races.

Finally, I think I'm eating enough. Possibly. Maybe. I went with the extra salt in my Gatorade and it tastes... tolerable. It's a teaspoon of salt in each 24-ounce bike bottle of the stuff. My mom reminds me I grew up in a house where the head cook used NO salt in her cooking, so if I eat (or drink) something very salty, it's very obvious. As for what it'll do my insides, this is one of those things where I'll only know for sure in Madison, when I get off the bike and I have to run a marathon. Will I still feel like taking a nap in the air-conditioned ballroom at the Monona Terrace Convention Center? Or will I charge out the door ready to beat the sunset and set a PR?

Stay tuned. It could get interesting.

Call me Mr. Sodium Depleted: 5430 Triathlon

When you look at the smorgasbord of maladies afflicting the majority of obese people in the U.S., it's hard to believe someone can not only grow up in this society with a deficiency of sodium, but live with a history of heart disease in the family. Somehow, I've succeeded. The 5430 Triathlon (so named for Boulder's altitude) bore that out for me quite nicely.

The day before the race I ran a few errands and spent as little time at a prerace expo as I ever have; I guess after 30-plus races over 21 years I don't "do" race expos anymore. Plus, I didn't want to spend any more time in the atomic Boulder sun than I had to so I got my packet, made sure all the numbers matched and got out of there. I stopped by my friend Jen's condo to make sure I remembered where it was, then headed off to Loveland to get a suit for next week's wedding in Illinois. Once that transaction was taken care of, I headed back to Boulder, where Jen had left me the key to her place; she was off for a motorcycle road trip with her dad.

Through all this, I managed to not have lunch. In other weeks I'd pack a PB&Honey sandwich, some chips, some cookies and a piece of fruit. Didn't happen. Shame on me. I managed to drink quite a bit of ice (splashed with Pepsi) and munched on these really good focaccia bread sticks, while eating a banana and a couple of cookies. That wasn't enough. That night I had my salad and an organic frozen meal with several glasses of water, which might have been my folly.

The next morning, I stuck with the usual — bagel, banana, Clif Bar, 32 ounces of Gatorade. Sometimes I have water if there's a drive to the venue but since I had so much on Saturday I stuck with Fierce Grape Gatorade. Got to the Reservoir with no problem, set up my transition, got written on, jogged a warmup, sunscreened (thus wiping out the number on my arm), used the restroom, and struggled into my wetsuit. I missed the pro start while standing in line for one more pee, but I still had plenty of time to make my wave, if not get into my neoprene sausage casing properly.

For once I seeded myself in the middle of things in the swim. I knew I could get to the inside line behind all the fast dudes because I heard people talking about how shitty their swims were (a rant from an ex-swimmer for another time), so I prepared for a little rubbing. After the start I kicked like mad and stroked hard, and then found my rhythm, though no feet to help me along. The only time I had any contact with anything other than buoys was when I overtook swimmers from previous waves, and even then it was nothing more than a gentle nudge or a paw at the feet. When I came out of the water my watch said 32 minutes and something (Yet again, the run to the transition area was part of the official swim split), so I was disappointed. I was even more disappointed that I got my right arm stuck in the wetsuit and had to put my foot on it to pull the arm out. Ultimately I freed myself and went on my merry way.

The plan for the bike was to keep things comfortably hard and then give it all I had on the run. Comfortably hard on this day was spinning up the false flats in the first five miles and then coasting on the downhills while crushing the inclines. The roads of Boulder County are in perfect shape, though I later heard some grumbling about the cracks in the shoulder. They need to ride Wyoming 230 with me while dodging the inch-wide crevasses that threaten to take your spine out of alignment, so it was nice to not have to look up as much; I could, in theory, just put my head down and go.

The fueling plan was to take Gatorade on the odds (10, 30, 50 minutes) and water on the evens (20, 40, 60 minutes), with a gel at the top of every hour. I followed that plan to the letter and managed to pee at the second aid station on the bike, around 40 miles in. Problem was my diet and my race fuel didn't put enough salt in my stomach. Salt helps the absorption of electrolytes and endurance athletes generally do whatever they can to take on salt — salt their Gatorade, take salt pills, eat pretzels or tortilla chips. Gatorade Endurance Formula, which is what Ironman races have on course, is fortified with salt so it's worked well when I've taken it in. The weak Gatorade you get in stores does not have that, and here I was, trying to drink 48 ounces of the stuff during a 2:39 ride.

I ended up drinking 36 ounces of it, plus about 50 ounces of water, plus two gels, which I thought would be sufficient to fuel eight-minute miles on the run. Consider that this is the Boulder Reservoir, a place where there's no shade once you get away from the parking lot. I heard the announcer mention Joanna Zeiger (the reigning half-Ironman world champ who lives in Boulder) running past the finish line for her second run lap, so I was surprised to see her lying face-down in front of a car along the run path. Considering how I react to heat, I immediately assumed that was the cause of her malaise (she actually dropped out because of vertigo-related symptoms) and adjusted my attitude accordingly.

I did fine for a couple miles, then I felt... tired. I had to pee again at about 3 miles, and I never recovered from that potty stop (In advance, it was seven hours before I used the bathroom again, notwithstanding pounding water and Pepsi in huge doses while having lunch with friends later). I felt like I wanted to take a nap, then finish the run later. The fueling plan for the run was water out of transition and at the even miles, Gatorade elsewhere (they had Endurance Formula), gels at 4, 8 and 12. The gel at 4 went down like a brick so I scrapped the gels for the rest of the run — probably not a good idea. No amount of Gatorade, water over my head, or ice down my shorts helped. what I had taken was no collecting in my stomach and sloshing around.

I walked a lot of the run, for which my split was 2:04. Total time was 5:23, and all I wanted to do was eat a lot and go to sleep. Doubly frustrating was that the weather shook down perfectly. There was little wind and aside from the relentless sun, no element of heat whatsoever, a "no-excuses day" as one story on the Bolder Boulder said in May. Both the men's and women's course records went down, and the times were crazy fast all the way around, meaning I should have had a personal best were it not for my crappy fueling plan and generally weak state of mind.

To give you an idea of how screwed I was, the clock read 4:35 when I passed the finish line. That clocked started with the pros at 6:30 a.m., and my wave was 20 minutes later. For some reason I thought to add 20 minutes to get my running time, and it never occurred to me to subtract. While thinking 4:55 had elapsed (I'd long since stopped looking at my watch, not even for the heart rate data) I again adjusted my mentality accordingly, and not for the better. If I can't do a simple math problem like that, I need to change the fueling plan, and possibly my diet.

So I consulted with my friend Gail, a triathlon coach in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Our chat yielded a diagnosis of sodium deficiency and a prescription of a teaspoon of salt in each of my 24-ounce bottles of Gatorade, plus some extra salt on the food I eat every day. I've always wondered how minor the wall was between me and some decent races, so we'll find out in the next few weeks if I was just a couple grains of salt away from being better.

• I thought the better of stalking two-time defending Ironman world champion Chrissie Wellington. "Hi, I'm a big fan of your work, I think you're pretty keen, I'd apply for whatever position (hee hee) is open in your organization, and you beat me by an hour and fifteen minutes today." She lost by less than two minutes anyway, to yet another world champion in the field, reigning off-road world champ and fellow lymie Julie Dibens, so I'm not sure how amenable she'd have been to some advances — certainly not advances as lame as those.

OT: End of some eras

A friend observed it's been a bad last 12 months for pop-culture icons. Well, it's been a bad year for icons period. Some big names have checked out to the great klieg lights in the sky.

And some have meant more to me than others...

• Anyone who asked Paul Newman his favorite role was shocked at the answer. Was it the alcoholic lawyer in "The Verdict?" Was it Butch Cassidy opposite Robert Redford's Sundance Kid? How about Brick in the equally iconic play-turned-movie "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?" Or maybe the role that earned him his one Academy Award — Fast Eddie Felson in "The Color of Money?" No, no, no, and no. It was the alcoholic, lecherous, profane hockey player-coach Reg Dunlop in "Slap Shot." He learned to skate for the role, and movie critics and sports writers could easily get him off the topic at hand by quoting Maxim Magazine's Ultimate Guy Movie. "Slap Shot" is in my top ten, and one of the greatest actors of all time made it worthwhile.

• No, Walter Cronkite didn't make me want to do journalism. My family never watched an evening news show, and Cronkite retired when I was 7. So when I headed out into the cold, cruel world of journalism in 1996, my parents sent me with a copy of his autobiography. I learned that his way was how it was done. Early on in his career, when he was working at the now-defunct Houston Post, he was the go-to guy when things were breaking on deadline. Of the copy he filed he said, "It wasn't literature but it was fast, and it was accurate." It's a lesson long since lost to the immediacy of the internet, the accuracy part, anyway. And his is a model to which all of us purveyors of information should strive.

• Obviously, I wasn't around for the Beatles. But I imagine the hysteria over Michael Jackson called to mind the frenzy the Fab Four caused when they struck their first chords. My sister had the "Thriller" record, which we played as loud as we could stand during the summer of 1983, right before she headed off to college. Her little brother adored her and if she grooved to MJ, so did he. So thanks, MJ, for showing me how little rhythm I really had early on.

• My bedtime didn't allow me to stay up for "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson very often, but when I did, Johnny's sidekick, Ed McMahon, drew as much of my attention as Johnny himself, whether he was laughing on cue at Johnny's jokes or — well, that's pretty much what he did, eh? There also was the draw of dapper bandleader Doc Severinson, but that's another story. Ed big voice also provided the soundtrack to "TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes," which could also have been a journalistic influence for me; where else could you see usually polished and composed celebrities come completely unglued? Ed, please laugh when I fail at getting St. Peter to approve me.

• Of all these icons to leave this mortal coil, I don't think any of them meant as much to me — nor did their death hit me as hard — as John Hughes, for the things he brought to my life.

I bring up my sister Deb again. She was eight years older than me, so to put things in perspective, I was 10 years old the last time she lived at home. As years went by, it seemed like she subconsciously didn't accept that her little brother was going up, so occasionally we butted heads. You know where we found common ground? The brilliance of John Hughes' movies.

Our family took epic car trips where sometimes things deviated from plan, so we guffawed at "National Lampoon's Vacation." Again, in the case of traveling I've seen some crazy shit happen so we both nodded knowingly the first time we saw "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" together. I think I woke up hung over from her wedding party and said "The Donger need food," and she laughed. Hughes' movies defined the 1980s for my sisters and I, though I needed them more with Deb to bridge that eight-year gap.

His movies also seemed to separate our family from others. Deb went to see "Vacation" close to its nationwide opening in the theatre with a group of friends. She came back and said she was the only one in tears from laughter. Her friends chuckled but Deb said it would have been nice if the projectionist could have stopped so she could compose herself, she laughed so hard. The reason? No one else's family took epic vacations like we did. Years later, when I saw it, I did have to stop the DVD to pull it together.

I saw "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" in the theatre on the second run, with a group of friends. Mind you, I was 13 at the time but got into that R movie because the owner just never checked. Same thing happened. I was in hysterics but my friends didn't really get it. The reason? Because I'd logged more travel miles at 13 than the rest of the group combined, and I'd already seen late planes, rental cars not being there, people getting bumped, finding alternate modes of transit, etc.

Point being, regardless of whether the movies age well (Vacation and Planes are two prime examples of timeless movies), Hughes got it right. Anyone who has traveled at the holidays, anyone who has taken a family vacation by car, anyone who has been in high school can relate to the things he put on screen. It's a stretch to say he had his finger on the pulse of the human condition, but he was close.

By the way, Deb's friend Sue was in "Sixteen Candles." She attended Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Illinois, where Hughes matriculated, and where he filmed all of his high school scenes. Sue was in the drama club so she was an extra in the school dance scene, right there over Molly's shoulder. Anyway, Deb came home for Christmas one year while she was at college and demanded that we rent "Candles." She popped in the tape, grabbed the remote, and slow-motioned the scenes from the dance, pointing out Sue dancing in the high school gym, blurry behind the movie's stars.

Also, Sue told me she served time in the breakfast club. Of course, she never told her parents what it really was, so they thought it was an extracurricular she was doing to pad her résumé for colleges.

OK, one more story. The Quad-City Times did its all-star teams for the 2007-08 basketball season by designing movie posters with the starting five. For the boys, designer Nate Bloomquist did a "Goodfellas" knockoff, and for the girls, "The Breakfast Club." One of the girls, a 16-year-old sophomore who wouldn't have been a glimmer in her father's eye when "Club" came out, quoted chapter-and-verse the "Eat my shorts" confrontation between Bender and Principal Vernon — while our cameras rolled, recording the occasion for online use. Someone else want to say these movies don't age well?

Don't eat this at home

One of the perks of participating in endurance athletics is being able to eat a lot. I won't say "whatever you want" because you still have to be smart about what you eat, but the stomach turns into a coal-burning stove once you start burning calories by the thousands. Naturally, I don't buy in to the "carbs are evil" school because carbohydrates are energy for me, and while my brother-in-law did two Ironmans on the South Beach Diet, a diet devoid of or reduced in carbs won't work for most endurance athletes.

That said, consider the 101-mile ride I did on Sunday. I ate a bowl of Cheerios before I headed out, and that was burned up in the first 40 miles. After an out-and-back to the north, I headed west, and by the time I made the turn I was going straight into a 20 mph wind. The plan was to ride to mile marker 29 along Wyoming 130, aka Snowy Range Road. That marker is a couple miles west of Centennial, a wide spot in the road with four or five bars, two gas stations, one church and one school. Starting at marker 27, the road goes up at an 8 percent grade, so when I got there, not only was I fighting gusting winds I was fighting gravity.

After two stops to catch my breath on the way up, I turned around at the marker, prepared for a screaming descent. The only screaming that happened was me, uttering 100-decibel expletives and prayers as I enjoyed a tailwind, then turned to the right to make a crosswind, and held on for dear life as I did a death wobble at 35 mph. I stopped again to steady myself before I pointed the bike back toward town.

When I got home and sat down to eat, I looked at my heart-rate monitor to see that I'd burned 3,466 calories. As I've mentioned before, the American Medical Association recommends 2,000-2,500 calories a day for an average adult, so I burned a day-and-a-half's worth of calories. And so I set about replacing them...

During the ride I had three Carb-Boom gels (apple cinnamon), 50 ounces Gatorade, 74 ounces water
Afterward I had...
Three more bowls of Cheerios, with a teaspoon of sugar on each and 1 percent milk
One banana
6 ounces of apple juice, plus multi-vitamin
(Break for shower, because my nether regions hurt)
One glass, six ounces Pepsi, eight ounces ice
Peanut butter and honey on wheat
A couple handfuls of tortilla chips
Two kosher dill pickles
Some 1 percent cottage cheese
Two chocolate chip cookies
(Break to call my parents, walk to store to get more groceries and newspaper, read paper, clip coupons, watch Cubs)
Four leftover pancakes with syrup
One glass of water
One salad with arugula, mushrooms and four cherry tomatoes
Pepperoni pizza
One glass, six ounces Pepsi, eight ounces ice
One bottle Rolling Rock
Two chocolate chip cookies
Two chocolate fudge Pop-Tarts

It was like tossing toothpicks on a campfire.

No friends on the start line: Iron Horse Triathlon

Because I live in such a small state, I'm sensitive to seeing the familiar combination of brown and gold, and the bucking horse with rider logo. Meaning, I get kind of fired up seeing the imprint of my employer extend beyond the state's borders. I'll strike up a conversation with anyone wearing Wyoming colors, because there usually is a cool story with how the person acquired the article of clothing.

Before Saturday's Iron Horse Triathlon in North Platte, Neb., Ryan from Gothenburg, Neb., strolled up and chatted with me. He was wearing a UW sweatshirt while I wore my UW baseball cap. He graduated from UW about the same time I graduated from Syracuse, and was doing his first triathlon that day. He's a swim coach at the high school there, so I knew I'd have my work cut out for me in that respect, and as our heat (the swim took place in a pool, with racers separated into heats based on predicted swim times) approached, we joked about how the swim meet was about to start.

In the days leading up to the event I looked at previous years' results. Based on the splits I saw the thought of winning the event overall entered my mind, though I quickly chased them away. You can't think about stuff like that, even if no one shows up. Facts are facts, though, and I could see myself bringing home some more hardware.

The race director gave a little spiel about how proud she was of anyone showing up that day, which led me to believe the race was more about getting people out and active than lauding the winners, which I think is awesome. They still allow smoking hotel rooms in North Platte, and my dinner the night before was laden with grease despite my best efforts, which tells me all I need to know about the local culture; kudos to Trudy and her crew for putting together not only this race but the other eight events (!!!) in the series.

Participatory the event might be, I was still ready for some action. In my heat each swimmer had his own lane and it looked like the best swimmers were older dudes like me; no high schoolers fresh off state club meets or anything. When the whistle blew I saw him to my right going out really quickly. No problem, there are two more disciplines, I thought. I hit every flip turn, which is not always a given in a pool swim triathlon, not sure why that is. And I felt like I was making pretty good progress, thanks no doubt to my freshly shorn legs; go on and laugh, but when you're a former competitive swimmer going without a wetsuit for any reason, you'll take any advantage you can get.

I hit my watch when I got out of the water, and it read 7:45. For 500 meters that's pretty damned good for someone without much in the way of speed. I caught Ryan in transition and led him out. Literally. For the first 10 miles of the 15-mile ride, we took turns being in front — he stayed within a couple of wheel lengths while I'd retreat pretty far when it was his turn to pull. In triathlon, drafting is illegal as the individual nature of the sport mandates that each competitor do his or her own work. But Ryan seemed like a nice enough guy, and it was his first triathlon, and this race wasn't officiated by USA Triathlon, the governing body for the sport. So there was no chance of anyone getting DQed and certainly need to turn around and tell him to get off my fucking wheel. Or some such. Besides, the one hill on the course broke us up, and I figured I'd put some time into him over the last five miles of the ride.

No such luck. Ryan came into transition a couple of seconds behind me, and with fresher legs thanks to his strategy and my stubborn individuality. I strode out of transition after a 41:50 bike (22 mph?) feeling all right, not great but not bad either. Thanks to doing no runs of less than six miles for the past two weeks I had no idea what kind of speed I'd have, and that's what it would take to get ahead here. I led the first mile-and-a-half before Ryan threw in a surge for which I had no answer at all. He maintained a lead of about 20-25 seconds the rest of the way, and though I thought I saw his stride slacken ahead of me, no amount of surging of my own closed the gap. I increased turnover, lengthened my stride, did both at once, took no more than a splash of water, but to no avail. I saw him after the finish and we thanked each other for the push.

If he wanted to be real good at this sport, he could, but I imagine the three kids who jumped all over him just beyond the finish line — and the wife holding an infant who sicced them on him — probably would object to the amount of training time required. Good on you, mate. Don't ever draft me again.

So I finished in 1:27:11, 27 seconds behind Ryan in the men's 30-39 division, fifth overall. I hit my watch when I started the run and my watch said 35:19 for the five-mile run, but the results say 36:54. Oddly, my watch and the results agree on the overall time. My theory is the timing system added my transitions to my swim and run while giving me an "honest" bike split. I do like the idea of running 7:04 miles, though.

Better still, I competed. There's an ongoing debate in the sport, especially at the iron and half-iron distances, of "competing" vs. "completing." If it weren't for recreational athletes, this sport wouldn't exist, so I feel the sport requires all kinds. On Saturday they had "competitive" and "fitness" divisions within a sprint and a super-sprint (200m/9mi/2mi), but when you think about it, every race has those divisions within it — some people are there to race and to see what their bodies are capable of, others just to get from the start to the finish. Again, it takes all kinds and I've certainly been in both spots (like Ironman Wisconsin 2005, when a fourth of the field bailed on a brutally hot day and I pressed on because DNFing was not an option as long as I was upright).

Saturday, I had a guy who pushed me from the starting whistle (not a gun). For a little less than 90 minutes I wanted more than anything to beat him with my slowtwitch-dominated body, but he had a little burst that I didn't. Still, I'm glad he was there, and I've got the first round if I'm ever in Gothenburg, Neb.

Moving parts (Rated R!)

The chain was on the little ring and wouldn't budge after I got to the top of Roger Canyon, but I didn't know I'd done any damage until a short uphill on the return trip. That's when I tried to go back to the little ring and instead the cable along the downtube went slack.

At home Tuesday night I tried to tighten the front derailleur, but it still seemed to hang from its braze-on clamp by a thread. I walked it up to Fine Edge, located in a nondescript strip mall about three blocks from my place, and got a diagnosis: the front derailleur, seven years old and part of a sturdy original set of components, was shot. Done. Dead. The cables I replaced two years ago were fine but the front derailleur was toast.

Next order of business: Get another one. Fine Edge didn't have one, and as the wrench's boss was out of town, there was no ordering one, at least until he's back in the store next week. The one I have is a Shimano Tiagra, a group Shimano discontinued in recent years, so it's a hard-to-find model.

He recommended I go to Pedal House, located downtown, the place where I had my bike's mojo restored before the season started. No problem, I thought, those guys seem to have it together. Right, I should point out this is the place that didn't have a single road bike tube or CO2 canister when last I visited. Oh well, getting desperate...

Pedal House had one front derailleur, a nice Shimano Dura-Ace thing that costs $200 or so. Not the kind of money I want to crank into a lame-duck bike, so they offered to order the Shimano Tiagra front derailleur. I agreed, and then the wrench informed me that orders can only be placed on Tuesdays. Did I mention it's Wednesday at this point? Well, it's Wednesday at this point. So they'll order it next Tuesday, and, in their words, it might be in on Friday. Might. That means it might get in Thursday, and it might get in Saturday. I have a race next Saturday. Fuuuuuuuuuck. I told them to place the order.

In my desire to keep my dollars local it never occurred to me to check the shops in Fort Collins, a little less than 70 miles to the south. I spent part of my Thursday doing that, starting with Lee's Cyclery, a place where I'd spent a fair amount of money over the years. They were the affiliate bike shop for the Northern Colorado Triathlon Club, of which I was a member briefly. Nothing. They then referred me to Peloton Cycles, another affiliate of the NCTC, now with a branch in Fort C after years with one spot in Loveland. The guy on the other end said "Yes, we have a Shimano Tiagra."

This is where it gets interesting. Because there are so many options for bike parts, I ran down the taxonomy of this part — Shimano Tiagra, road bike (because the part also exists for mountain bikes), double chainring (because some road bikes have triples for spinning up mountain passes), front derailleur (as opposed to a rear), nine-speed (because they come in eight- and 10-speed models). Got all that? I thought I did.

At work, our admin headed off on vacation at 3 p.m. With my immediate boss already on vacation, I can't say I was too motivated to stick around with a bike part waiting for me in Colorado. I left about a half-hour later. Another hour-and-a-half later and I was standing at the service counter at Peloton Cycles. The wrench went to the stack of boxes and pulled out a rear derailleur. Nope, I need a front. Next to the cash box was a front derailleur. Shimano Tiagra. Nine-speed.

Triple chainring.

I swear I said I needed a double on the phone. I was ready to fling my bike through one of the big bay windows. Holy shit, was I pissed. Next stop, Performance Bike Shop on College Avenue. I had no plan for what to do if they didn't have the part. I guess I'd head back to Pedal House, tell them to order the fucking thing, and place my faith in FedEx or UPS. Lo and behold, Performance had an Ultegra to fit my bike, which is two steps up from the Tiagra. They charged me $50, which was a guess because this particular Ultegra had been discontinued as well. Nice of them to cut me a break; it listed for $59.99.

Now, to get it installed. They could get me in Monday. Fuuuuuuck. I decided to buy the derailleur and take it back to Fine Edge to install, and when I put forth that option the wrench there nodded her head and mouthed the words "That's what I would do, too." Today (Friday), the wrench at Fine Edge told me I could bring it by Sunday and watch the process.

Why would I want to watch the process? Because my oldest sister has been giving me shit about doing bike repairs myself. "You can find instructions anywhere online," she says. Her husband piled on, too. I counter that I did not inherit dad's gene for tinkering/fixing things/patience with moving parts, which is why I've "wasted" hundreds of dollars on repairs and installations over the years. Deb and Kevin think that's nonsense, that anyone can learn how to fix anything (at the risk of making a scene at Thanksgiving I'll ask if they change their own oil and rotate and balance their own tires, since you can "find instructions to fix anything online"). Even if I can find instructions for putting things together, I follow them to the letter and still find a way to fuck it up. That's all right for assembled furniture, but my bike is not something I'll leave to chance. I'd rather have it done right by a pro and be lighter in the wallet than do it myself and possibly make the situation worse.

Take what you've just read, a week before my next race, and put it within 48 hours of a race. Now do you see why I'm such a basket case about this shit?

Nine weeks out = nine harsh truths revealed by the Boulder Peak Triathlon

1. I have no mental toughness at all, and there were two instances that betrayed this. First, in the days preceding the race I had some issues with flat tires, and I was committed to correcting these issues in Laramie. First bike shop I tried had NO road tubes at all, but I was told I probably could stuff a bigger MTB tube into my tire. They also had NO CO2 cartridges. The second bike shop had what I needed, so the first one might have lost my business. On Saturday morning, the planned three-hour ride got cut in half because I flatted again, this time working a piece of glass all the way through the tire. So I stopped at a place in Colorado to get a new tire — which turned out to be the wrong size. I did a 180 and went back to exchange it, which the shop did. I spent Saturday night after dinner working the tire on to my wheel, not what you want to do the night before a race, because mechanical issues piss me off and drain my mental energy.

2. As if worrying myself into a frenzy over my mechanical didn't betray my lack of cool, the weather during the race did. Sure, it was around 75 degrees when I was on the somewhat flat, unshaded run, but that's about 20 degrees warmer than it is when I train outside (5:30 a.m. or thereabouts). And because it's been very cool up here, I wasn't prepared for the heat despite having drunk a pool full of Gatorade, water, Pepsi and juice in the days preceding the race. On the run, I actually put ice in my hat, much to the amusement of those around me, and I walked briefly at three of the five aid stations. Everyone raced in the same conditions, though, and I couldn't suck it up, something I'll have to do at Wisconsin, where it was a brutal 92 degrees the last time I did the race.

3. No matter how strong a climber I fancy myself, I still have to regulate my output of energy on the really gnarly hills. The first eight miles of the Peak's bike course are uphill, the first seven of which gradual, the last mile a double-digit grade up Old Stage Road. With nearly 2,000 athletes out there at any time, there are some people unprepared for that kind of climbing so that means rows of four and five cyclists across the road, crawling at a snail's pace. About two-thirds of the way into this climb, I saw an opening in the masses, so I got out of my seat and dropped the hammer, much to the delight of a few spectators up there. Seriously, with about five or six angry pedal strokes I passed about 30 people strewn across the road, finding a seam like a great running back. Of course, that left me spent for about 10 minutes, five of which was spent climbing. Still. Thank goodness for the ensuing descent at 35 mph.

4. My heart-rate monitor betrayed me, and I learned that I can't rely on it. I've trained with my mind and my body since high school but I got curious about what my heart was doing so I got a heart-rate monitor last year. This is the first year I've used it and I'm getting some interesting feedback; I'm just not sure what to do with that feedback (and I'm fully aware that certain people get paid to interpret that data to my advantage. Anyway, I was prepared to use it on Sunday, planning on putting it on just before getting in the water for a warmup, thinking the moisture from the Boulder Reservoir would activate the transmitter. Wrong. Despite letting all kinds of water into my wetsuit, I never got a signal and I spent the entire race seeing readings of 00, 233, 158, 182, and 51. So on the way home I got batteries for both my Timex Ironman watches. The Polar HRM officially is on notice, and I'll go back to the Timex(es) if it screws up again.

5. Despite serving as an integral part of my training diet for more time than I've been legal, I might have to curb my alcohol intake. I had two beers with dinner on Saturday night, and while I'm not blaming my performance on the carbs-and-hops confections I don't think they helped. Thanks to some loud assholes outside my room, the two bottles of Rolling Rock damn sure didn't help me sleep.

6. I mentioned the wetsuit before. I wore the Orca full suit because I assumed the heavier-than-average snowfall and milder-than-average spring would keep the Res nice and cool. Wrong. According to a sign posted on the pro racks the water temperature was 77, one degree below the wetsuit threshold for amateurs. I still have my QR sleeveless and that would have done nicely, but the water temp was not posted anywhere on the Web site in the days leading up to the race so I had no idea how warm it was. I ended up boiling myself like a crawfish, the temperature no doubt slowing a lot of people down. So I need to do better research of the course.

7. You should have seen my feet after the run. They looked like raw hamburger. For any triathlon run 10K or shorter, I forego socks. Never again. I blister too easily for an endurance athlete and those hotspots make it very difficult to concentrate on the task at hand, so I'll have to wear my socks from now on.

8. My transitions are getting faster but after watching the pros switch from bike to run, mine still seem glacial. There's no amount of observation that leads me to anything I can do to be quicker between disciplines, so I might as well stop comparing my apples to Matt Reed's squashes, to use a phrase.

9. When I do a race with more than 150 people — especially one in triathlon's Valhalla — there's no point in sticking around for the awards, or even looking at the results posted on the side of the timing truck. No coincidence that I got my ass kicked in any race with a decent number of people and quality of field. And in the face of this beatdown I have to maintain perspective, that in the grand scheme of things the Boulder Peak is not my focus, that there are bigger fish to fry, and far more important things to master beyond an Olympic distance race I might not do again.

With 10 weeks to go, 10 things to ponder

1. To speed my recovery from the cold, I rode 174 miles in three days — 40 on Friday, 56 on Saturday, 78 on Sunday. The Sunday ride featured a sprightly pace, 3 hours, 45 minutes for that distance, which is around 22 mph. Would have been faster were it not for 22 miles of chip seal that felt like riding on sand.

2. Thanks to my heart rate monitor, I learned definitively that I'm not eating enough. During Sunday's ride I burned 2,500 calories, which according to the American Medical Association, is the recommended daily allowance for the average male. Granted, my demands are a bit more substantial, but it's an interesting bit of perspective.

3. Anyway, to the point. Not only am I not eating enough each day, but my refueling is inadequate. Of those 2,500 calories, I replaced 1,000 of them between nutrition during the bike (one 25-ounce bottle of Gatorade and one 25-ounce bottle of water) and breakfast when I got home (two bowls of Cheerios with 1 percent milk and sugar, a quaker chewy bar, a couple swigs of apple juice, and my multi-vitamin). That's got to change, though I am aware I don't have to replace all 2,500 calories at once. After hitting the wall late in my race last year in Phoenix, I had a feeling I wasn't doing enough nutritionally. Sunday's ride brought that point home.

4. Thanks to the ridiculously mild summer here on the high plains (five 80-degree days this year), and because I'm training for a race that has the potential for serious heat, I have to create a microclimate for myself. On 60-degree days with no wind, I'm still wearing leggings, long-sleeved jerseys and gloves, which draws some strange looks from the shorts-and-short-sleeves set with which I share the roads here. Even on runs I'm bundling up with long-sleeved shirts, though I do wear shorts as my one concession to the season.

5. On Sunday I rode to a wide spot in the road called Rock River. It has about 300 people and is located less than 300 feet lower than Laramie, per the green sign at the city limits. It's not the most cosmopolitan place in the world, being 39 miles west of Laramie and about 70 east of Rawlins. So maybe it's not a surprise that a minivan pulling up to the post office at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday was blasting "We Want Eazy" by Eazy-E. Maybe in another 15 years they'll learn Eazy died of AIDS a few years back.

6. My swimming environment changed as Half Acre Pool undergoes annual maintenance. Instead, I now get to swim in the competition pool at Corbett Hall. It's an L-shaped setup with 25 meters one way and 25 yards in the other direction. There are no seats in the pool save for bleachers at one end of the 25-meter orientation, just a classroom on the other side of a large window parallel with the 25-yard orientation. Interesting place.

7. Oh yeah, we swim on the 25-meter side, and you never realize how dialed-in your stroke is until you try to turn laps on a slightly different measurement. Last Wednesday, my first day in the water at Corbett, I missed a couple of walls and almost hit my head a few times, in two cases on the same stinking lap. Want to know how I figured out the length of the pool was different? My times were 15-20 seconds slower for a set of five 200s. I knew the pool was 25 meters in one orientation, but I wasn't sure which way it was. All it took was two of those 200s for me to figure out.

8. The pool situation gets even more interesting August 10-23, when the steam is shut off on campus, meaning both pools are closed. That will drive me to the Laramie Recreation Center, where I'll be doing my swims at 5 a.m., followed by whatever other workouts I can manage. This is the same place that shows a lap swim Saturdays from noon to 5 p.m., and the one time I went there on a Saturday, they took my $5 and then proceeded to tell me there was no lap swim because they were putting the fucking inflatable iceberg in the lap pool.

9. This morning I ran for the first time in eight days. Between shaking off sickness and my desire to go nuts with bike volume, there just wasn't a chance to run. I thought about doing a brick after each of my rides over the weekend, but once again my shitty fueling scuttled those plans. On Sunday, for example, I fueled for a 78-mile ride, not a 78-mile ride followed by a 4-mile run. I'd have bonked myself silly if I'd tried to run.

10. People think I'm nuts for waking up at 5:30 each morning to run or bike. This afternoon illustrated the reason why perfectly. It was 75 and sunny when I rode my bike to the pool at around 5 p.m. An hour later, it was 62 with 30 mph winds, blue skies, sun, rain and thunder. The weather's too dicey in the afternoons for me to do anything outside, and while I love training, I'd rather not die while doing it.

Homecoming race: Cheyenne Sprint Triathlon report

And in one more oddity, I finallly report on my most recent race on the weekend when I don't race.

On one hand, this race was going to be a fun homecoming. I used to live in Cheyenne and I ran and biked on the course all the time. When I ran on the path around Lions Park, I'd look at Sloans Lake and wonder if there could be a race there. When I left I told a couple people I had an idea for a race, and one of them handed me a flier for the "First Annual [sic] Cheyenne Sprint Triathlon." Someone stole my idea, and I couldn't have been happier.

The race involved a 600m swim, a 13-mile bike (though I saw 16 and 14 miles listed as well), and a 5-kilometer run. It also offered a pool swim option, as the municipal pool is near the park; it's easily the most disgusting pool I've ever used (85 degrees, no runoff gutters). While my race would have had a 1-kilometer swim, the 600-meter swim used every bit of the lake so they got that right. The 13-mile bike ran along Bishop Boulevard, which is a frontage road for I-25; again, a road I biked and ran many times. The run was around the block on the other side of the street from the park with a partial lap around the park. If nothing else, my knowledge of the course allowed me to figure out where to change gears on the bike and where to make moves on the run.

So yeah, it could have been a nice welcome-home lap for me, but then it became the Best of the U.S. race for Wyoming; in effect, the Wyoming state championship. This program tries to get the best male and female triathlete from each of the 50 states to a championship race at the end of the year. It's an interesting concept, though I doubt the best triathletes from Wyoming would even be among the top 100 from, say, California. Be that as it may, I thought I had a chance to do some damage because, four years ago, the Loveland Lake-to-Lake was the Wyoming race and I was the third finisher from Wyoming. In advance, I'll say that despite being in better shape now than I was four years ago, I was the sixth-best finisher from Wyoming.

Still, I was positive going into the race despite fighting off a cold. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I had what felt like a tennis ball-sized knot of phlegm in my throat, too far back to try and hack up. So I drowned myself in water, Gatorade, juice and Pepsi, then did it again. Then I peed about every 60-90 minutes for six days straight. Oddly, my little cold cleared up in time for the race, allowed me to do the race, then came back with a vengeance Monday morning.

In the meantime, I took advantage of my clear airway and hammered through the swim. Or so I thought. Because they started everyone time-trial style (one every 10 seconds), in reverse order of age, I took the most inside line on the buoys I could manage so I wouldn't tangle with anyone. And I kicked and stroked hard. Got out of the water in 10:32 (I stopped my watch when I left the water), which is a minute-and-a-half slower than I thought I'd go. Then, like last week in Loveland, I had to negotiate an interminable run to transition, which was part of the official split. I saw no reason to spike my heart rate so early so I jogged it in.

For once I actually looked forward to the bike ride. It's the one discipline helped by familiarity, and I steamrolled past a whole bunch of people. I spun up a couple of deceptively steep grades, and managed to keep it straight on the downhills. I recognized early on that we had a tailwind on the way out, so I marshaled my energy so I could keep rolling on the way back. Like the previous sprint-distance races I did, I didn't take any water with me, choosing to fuel up before the race and quickly in transition.

Finally, the run, which felt for most of the way like I was sprinting. And yet the split didn't reflect that. I got passed a couple of times by people who started after me, young'uns with those fresh legs and fast twitch muscles. The only people I passed were women who started in front of me, including the chick who was the first Wyoming finisher. I managed to put up something resembling a sprint and crossed the line with little fanfare.

With a 22:42 run split, I was second in my age group. The guy who won my age group was 13 minutes ahead, a guy who I've seen in USA Triathlon's All-American listings on an annual basis. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't win, but there were some fast dudes there, per usual. I jogged a cooldown and stood in the lake as the rest of the people finished. Later, I got to stand on a real-live podium to get my medal, which always is cool.

Nothing really outstanding to report from this one, other than being absolutely exhausted. Between my cold and being tired from four straight weeks of racing (four in 21 days, to be exact), I blew off two days of training after the race. I came back with 2,500 meters of swimming on Wednesday, then another day off Thursday before throwing down a huge bike weekend. It's nice to not have to bust ass to get somewhere more than an hour away, but I'm back at it July 12 with the big, bad Boulder Peak.

It also was truly great to race on some familiar streets. The Laramie Duathlon was nice because I lived four miles from the start, but I spent some good years in Cheyenne and stormed around some familiar paths. That's been the case all this month, with two other races I've done before and the duathlon in my new hometown — traveling down some familiar roads.

Only now do I realize this whole year is about treading familiar ground. Aside from the North Platte (Neb.) Triathlon, I've done my three remaining top-priority races, eliminating the need for course review.

Starting to come together: Loveland Lake-to-Lake report

On the drive to Loveland, Colo., for the Lake-to-Lake Triathlon, I felt kind of like Georgia State's basketball team taking the floor against, say, Duke. While I don't get caught up in age-group placings and such, I have gotten spoiled, what with taking home a little hardware in my first two races of the season, including last week's race, a day when I didn't feel particularly good. At the same time, I show up for every race hoping to beat a few people and truly compete, something I've done the past two weeks.

So the Lake-to-Lake, contrary to what I reported last week, is not the Colorado qualifier for the Best of the U.S. competition. That distinction is the Rattlesnake Tri Series No. 3 in August. But the Lake-to-Lake is USA Triathlon's Rocky Mountain regional championship so there were some fast MFs there. As I told people beforehand, I anticipated getting my clock cleaned. I thought finishing in the top third of the field and having some decent transitions would be a realistic goal, and I was right.

But first, I arrived later than I'd anticipated and I still managed to forget the heart-rate monitor strap. That's unfortunate because I put out a very good effort and would have loved to have seen the feedback during the race. Oh well. And because I arrived later than I'd planned, the transition area was almost standing-room only. An official directed me to a rack in the "back" of the transition area, which put my bike steps away from the back entrance. Score! I jogged a warmup and started getting my stuff together when I heard the siren designating the start of the first wave.

Amazingly I wasn't rushed at all. I worked my legs into my Orca sausage casing/wetsuit as I walked to the beach; it was 6:30 and my wave didn't leave for another 20 minutes. It was 6:45 when I finally zipped up my suit with my arms dangling at my side like gymnast Shawn Johnson. This thing is that tight. Some witty banter with other guys in my wave followed, as did the exit of the first swimmer (18 minutes for 1.5 kilometers!), and then we were off.

This race puts us in a 62-degree in-town lake, fed by runoff from the mountains. Thus, I was glad to have two swim caps on. Once I got wide of the field I got in a rhythm and didn't get assaulted in the water, a novelty. Now, time suspends itself when I'm in the water, partially because I love to swim (unlike a lot of triathletes) and partially because I can't look at my watch. I generally get out of the water with no clue as to how long I've been in, except to see the different colored caps of the waves ahead of me, and I noticed quite a few green, blue, yellow and red caps around me as I got out of the water. That meant I was catching up to people who head started as much as 15 minutes ahead of me so, harsh as it sounds, I knew I was beating some people. I then looked at my watch to see 23:48.

Or something. I just noticed the 23:XX. That would be by two minutes my fastest swim of that distance. I pumped my fist once before remembering I had to peel myself out of my wetsuit, and that the swim finish timing pad wasn't until just outside the transition area, about a 150-yard jog. I walked along, unzipping the suit and pulling my arms out before I started running. When I got to my bike I slipped out of the suit in what passed for no time; you have no idea how hard it is to get out of this thing. And before long I was on the bike.

The bike leg in Loveland is 30 miles and takes you into the foothills above Loveland and Fort Collins. While the first lake in the name of the race is Loveland Lake, the second one is Horsetooth Reservoir. It takes quite some time to get to Horsetooth and an awful lot of it is uphill. You can spend the first 20 miles of the ride in your little chainring, which is what I typically do. I'm a spinner (like Lance, as opposed to a masher like Jan Ullrich) so this course sets up nicely for me. I passed a lot of people on these slight grades but was cautious on the screaming downhills that followed. You have to see this course to believe it, it's so beautiful. Downhill hairpin turns, some flat hammer territory, suburbia -- Loveland Lake-to-Lake has it all.

I made it to T2 in time to see the winner finish. Told you there were some fast MFs here. I jogged out of T2 but settled into a pace pretty easily. Had no clue how fast I was going until after the turnaround, when a guy I had passed caught up to me again. He said we were running 7:30 miles, which again, felt comfortable. It felt good to actually race a guy, even if he had a 20-minute head start and I was going to finish ahead of him in the results. We ran side-by-side for about a mile-and-a-half, until I slowed to get water at 5 miles and he sped off. Good on 'im. He had it in that last mile and I didn't.

There wasn't much of a sprint to the finish but I did pick up the pace a little bit, a true sign that I need to do some speedwork. I crossed the line in 2:37:40, a PR for this course by about a minute, and thinking back to 2003, when I raced this place for the first time, I'm in better shape now than I was then. The 10K run was 45:54, more than 2:30 faster than the standalone 10K at Bolder Boulder.

So along with faster transitions, I learned I can race a bit. That will come in handy this weekend at the Cheyenne Sprint Triathlon.