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.