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.