My big, fat, self-indulgent blog

Sun's Out, Guns Out!

2012-02-01T23:21:00.005-07:00

Those are my pasty legs, which saw the sun for the first time since one of my lackluster runs in Atlanta. At least I think I ran once sans coverings while "home" for Christmas. Anyway, I am not wearing white tights in this picture. Those are my bare sticks, bearing the brunt of abuse from the treadmill and trainer these days. My "guns," if you will.

The quote at the top is from Missoula-based pro triathlete Linsey Corbin, who adopts this philosophy in winters possibly more harsh than mine. She also rides her bike on 40-degree days with legs exposed, a length to which I will not go.

I was a little chilly when I started out today, into a relatively light southwest breeze, but I eventually warmed up. I shed my beanie around 15 minutes in, and then the gloves another 10 minutes later. It was almost like a real run, save the long-sleeved shirt. I took 48 minutes to complete a 5.8-mile, somewhat rectangular circuit on the south side of town near my crib.

http://www.mapmyrun.com/routes/view/61066138

In any event, we're back to the reality of winter tomorrow, a winter storm headed our way with snow and wind, wind and snow, driving me into the gym to save my lungs from a deep freeze.

And this is what you look like when you go swimming, put on a fleece beanie for the drive home, then get sweaty underneath a polypropylene beanie during the run. You end up with a dirty blond afro. Several strands near my forehead coalesced into the beginning of a righteous dreadlock that I scrubbed out immediately upon starting the shower. I'm a hippie at heart, but I would look silly with dreads, sillier with a single dread hanging in my face.

Music and training

2012-01-07T13:35:00.002-07:00

Count me among the rare people who can train for hours without music. At least I can do it outside. To me it just doesn't seem safe to have the sound source in my ears with asshole motorists buzzing me, so I leave the iPod at home when I head out the door.

As for races, 90 percent of the time the rules forbid earphones or "personal sound systems" of any kind, which I can respect. Racing is about being in the moment and taking in all the stimuli around you — the crowd, other races, your breathing, your footfalls or pedal turns, the day in general. Having music with me creates an environment in and of itself, and each race presents a unique environment, one I like to experience on my own terms. The more different race environments, the better.

Indoor workouts are another story. Without something in my ear other than the rush of the water or my own labored breathing, I'd want to stab myself in the ears with a ball-point pen. So music it is.

Granted, with no sound source in the pool I have to make sure I've got a song in my head (and heart, I suppose). In which case, I'll play some tunes in my living room before driving to the pool, and then I'll listen to the radio on the drive. Now, I have been known to sit in the car for a few minutes in search of a song I can tolerate in my head for the hour I'm in there. Once I had some Lady Gaga bullshit infiltrating my workout (because it was the last thing I heard before getting out of the car, and you may cast whatever aspersions you want about my listening to a radio station that would play such music) and I wanted to beat my head into the wall. Lesson learned.

The treadmills at the Y here face a wall with three crappy TVs, but the TVs are not angled for visibility. That's fine, but it means I need some sort of outside stimulus. Enter the iPod. I can stare at the white wall (and the illustration of health benefits of elliptical/treadmill/stationary bike workouts, and the suggestion box, and the sink) for as long as I have to with some nice, loud, angry music in my ears. Same thing with the bike trainer. I set it up in front my old TV and VCR with Ironman videotapes to break the monotony to some degree. Of course, the next time I go into my "pain cave" will be the 15th time I've seen each of those races, but I'll take whatever I can get.

As I said, it's loud, angry music no matter what the visual stimulus — 90s alternative, hard rock from any era, hip-hop, a little punk. However, I admit to having some dance/electronica in there as well, because it moves and it drives, a nice break from people screaming about slights real and imagined.

So here's what I listened to during today's 1-hour, 6.99-mile, 870-calorie jaunt. I loaded all my workout playlists (Yes, I have those) into my iPod earlier this week and hit shuffle when I started the treadmill...

1. "That's How You Got Killed Before," Elvis Costello with the Metropole Jazz Orchestra

2. "You Can Do It," No Doubt

3. "Blind," Korn

4. "The Choice is Yours (Revisited)," Black Sheep

5. "Teenage Dirtbag," Wheatus

6. "Stop," Jimi Hendrix

7. "Hard Row," Black Keys

8. "Keep on Movin'," DJ David Coleman

9. "Under Your Skin," Luscious Jackson

10. "Jerk It Out," Caesars

11. "Midnight in Her Eyes," Black Keys (think I might have left this album in there)

12. "Corduroy," Pearl Jam

13. "Don't Stop," Brazilian Girls

14. "Can't Stop me Now," Dr. Theopolis

15. "Sugarcube," Yo La Tengo

OT: "Give me a thousand words on Black Sabbath."

2011-11-21T00:30:00.003-07:00

I swore I'd never write again.

After my last experience as a professional writer, the process had me so turned off that I vowed I never wanted to make a living by the printed word. The thought of creating a single coherent sentence in the name of putting food on my table, clothes on my rumpled body, and a roof over my messy mop made me ill.

But then I saw a close-cropped brunette lead singer in a maroon/champagne/crimson velvet dress, black fishnets and calf-high Doc Martens screaming obscenities at slights real and imagined. I saw her bandmates rotate instruments between each 2-minute rant disguised as music.

Maybe that chick is my new muse. Maybe it was just time to let it all out. I don't know.

The pixie in the dress sang lead for DIkes of Holland. I don't know if she plays for the other team or if she's of Dutch lineage; doubtful, since those people are tall. Anyway, they rocked the Fulling Station in Bozeman for about 35 minutes. In one form or another punk rock is still alive, even if it involves a keyboard and spooky sounds emanating from same. The Dikes reminded me of punk rock by Queens of the Stone Age or White Stripes (I'm fully aware they're not punk groups per se, but if they did punk it would sound like the Dikes. There.) written for the soundtrack to Scooby Doo. Good, angry, fun stuff. Maybe if Adele were into punk she'd sound like this woman.

Anyway, they warmed up for the Sheepdogs, out of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. From the lead guitarist's Montana-themed t-shirt with three-quarter sleeves to the bassist's yellow western-style shirt and low-rise jeans to the guitar duets, it was 1975 all over again. Every influence I heard in their music was from a band of that vintage — Allman Brothers Band (they had the Betts-Allman guitar interplay more than once), Lynyrd Skynyrd, Doobie Brothers, Neil Young and Crazy Horse (another plains-based Canuck outfit). Not that it's a bad thing, though; I grew up with that stuff and these guys were faithful to it.

Just that they were an odd choice to open up for Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, a James Brown-styled Motown-esque rock band from Austin (like the Dikes). They opened with an old blues standard, "You Don't Love Me," and away we went. The horns had their synchronized moves, the bass line thumped, the guitars crackled, Joe Lewis screamed, and the drums drove the bus close to the edge but never over. I picked up a playlist after the show and it made no mention of the 10-minutes of "Louie Louie" and "Surfin' Bird," punctuated with toke breaks. They jammed, they grooved, they popped.

And they made me write, those assholes.

Update?

2011-10-06T14:51:00.002-06:00

I quit my job.

I botched an interview (see pvs).

I spent 3-and-a-half weeks drifting (aside from no travel it was the greatest 3-and-a-half weeks of my adult life).

I found and started work at one of my old haunts.

I put together a string of ... several days of working out.

I haven't been in the water since late August.

I bought a house.

I've been commuting 50 miles each way five days a week for five weeks.

I've switched my hours from 8-5 M-F to 3-12 F-Tu.

I had no idea how much it would take out of me mentally and physically.

I've treated a sore knee for a couple of months, and pondering a bike fit to remedy same.

That about covers it.

OT: "We have some concerns about your lack of stability..."

2011-08-13T15:48:00.002-06:00

When I graduated journalism school, I was told I'd likely start my career in some podunk outpost on the edge of the universe. Some of my peers nonetheless set their sights on New York, Philadelphia, Boston, D.C., et al, while I looked westward toward these small towns, like Horace Greeley suggested many years before. I just knew I'd get the "call" after years of toil in these small towns where I perfected my craft and showed I had the writing ability to hang in the big cities.

Needless to say, that's not exactly how things turned out.

I first ended up in Winnemucca, Nevada, as the sports editor of The Humboldt Sun, the only daily newspaper in a county roughly the size of Vermont. I knew I wouldn't spend my career there because there's only so much you can do with one high school in the town and one out in the county, so when I applied for and was offered a job as a sports writer at the Denton Record-Chronicle, I took it.

I moved to Denton for the chance to cover some of the best high school sports in the country, and maybe do a sidebar on the University of North Texas before perhaps taking on one of those beats myself. When the sports editor position came open, I put in for it, but the managing editor had already hired someone, telling me he didn't think I was "management material," nor did he realize I had "any inkling" of being a manager. With the glass ceiling being paved over, I had no reason to stick around in Denton.

So then I moved to Lubbock, Texas, to cover minor-league hockey and high school sports at the Avalanche-Journal. Again, when one of the big-time college beats came open, I put in for it, the sports editor hemmed and hawed, and he brought in someone from a nearby paper to do the job. The things he said (or maybe the way he said them) made clear that he had no intention of considering me for any of the high-profile college beats, so I had no reason to stick around there for any length of time.

So then I moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to cover the University of Wyoming men's basketball team; I hired on for football, then switched spots with my sports editor. I had the title of assistant sports editor, and I got a little management experience, but the thrust of my job was covering a shitty college basketball team. I burned out on it after three seasons and one near-miss of a coaching search, and after I found religion in regard to work-life balance, I headed for the copy desk...

...in Bellingham, Washington. There, I wreaked the havoc of designing a sports section five nights a week, taking game calls, the usual stuff. I bristled under an overbearing editor, a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy at a paper run like the Bush administration — this is what we're doing, and you're either with us or against us. That might work on a 20-something eager to please, but not a veteran journalist, so I moved on again.

This time, it was to Davenport, Iowa, where management had a lighter hand, and I learned a little more about designing pages. I hit a bit of a wall, though, and admittedly I muddled through my life there, taking on a second job to pay the bills, until a friend called with an offer to edit a university magazine. Onward.

I came to Laramie, Wyoming, to edit UWyo, the magazine for alumni and friends of the University of Wyoming. After two-and-a-half years, oversight of the magazine changed, my job description changed, I bristled some more, and I'm now looking to move on again.

Save for a few minor tweaks (aka "spin"), this is what I told some people at a job interview a few days ago in response to the title of this blog, a comment from one of the hiring editors. She saw my résumé a few weeks ago and never mentioned my job-hopping, until I sat in her office a little after 10 EDT on Thursday morning. Over lunch a couple hours later I walked her through it, then did the same for someone else that same day. This was the first time in my career anyone had a problem with my transience.

I would have loved to hire into the perfect situation straight out of college, a place where I got the necessary guidance and room to improve, plus management that really tried to help people succeed within those walls. It would be great to mark 15 years (or 10, or even 5) at one place and earn that extra week of vacation and the resulting raise, as well as a cake in the breakroom, a nameplate on the desk, or a place in the parking lot. It doesn't work that way, though. Journalism is transient — you have to go where you find work, as opposed to teaching or law or medicine, where you can find work wherever you go — and clearly I've embraced that transience. For better or for worse, I've bounced around.

So how many people drop into the ideal situation early in their careers and then stick around forever? How justified was this interviewer in extrapolating from her own heavily-tenured staff that everyone should have X number of jobs on their résumé after X years? And who would have guessed that my constant searching of that ideal situation, that sweet spot, would someday work against me?

Season opener(s)

2011-05-29T22:07:00.002-06:00

When not slagging the World Triathlon Corporation, you can usually find me doing their races. But once I finish and regain my soul, I feel the need to race off the beaten path (figuratively anyway) to restore the necessary balance to my universe.

That's how the early part of my race season has gone. I raced the California half-Ironman on April 2, and then the Razor City Splash and Dash in Gillette on May 7. One packs 2,000 athletes into a town that could pass for a winter escape paradise, the other packs less than 100 athletes into a town that struggles to fight off winter deep into May. One offers a sheltered bay swim, the other offers a pool swim. One cycle leg takes athletes over four righteous climbs through a military installation, the other takes athletes through empty fields dotted with oil derricks and mines. One run leg takes athletes along one of the most beautiful beaches in a state full of them, the other takes athletes along a set of railroad tracks in a glorified trailer park of a neighborhood.

The first one required some begging just get the time off, but I did it, and I'll spare another rant about my desire to take my time off when I damned well please. I flew into San Diego, which always thrills me, what with the approach amongst the buildings downtown. I stayed in Oceanside, California, with my friends Jacob and Tracy and their cat, Nixey. I owe them an incredible debt of gratitude for putting up with me and my bizarre habits for three days, and I repaid them with a pot of my mediocre spaghetti. I really need to learn to cook something else for when I'm crashing at someone's pad.

Anyway, I got all the sleep and transportation I needed before the race, and I was well-rested on race morning, if not well-trained. After my week in Tucson the shit hit the fan at work and I felt like I needed to go in every morning rather than train, and then I managed to short my training at night and on the weekends, meaning I never did more than I felt like because I had to hit trainer and treadmill for my fixes. Shit's gotta change, no doubt.

So the swim does indeed take place in Oceanside Harbor. Surprisingly, the water was fairly clean, minimal boat fuels, maximal salt content. My wave went last of 23, so I also got to swim through everyone else's pee — always a joy, when you expect the water to be quite a bit cooler, and you know why it's warmer. I hammered through about a half-mile of the 1.2-mile swim when my goggles snapped. The nosepiece, really just a piece of rubber strap connecting the two lenses, broke, and as I bobbed in the chop of the exposed part of the course, there was no MacGuyvering a repair. I tossed the goggles to a lifeguard, and after chuckling at the assurance that I had "plenty of time to finish, dude," I went on my way, sidestroking and breaststroking. Then I figured out that I could see much in the water when I had the goggles, so I closed my eyes, put my head down, and went back to swimming freestyle, opening my eyes to sight every now and then. Came out of the water in 34:40, not my fastest but not my slowest, either. I heard one of the volunteers comment that I was hardcore for going without goggles. Thanks to the salt, I must have looked like a pothead.

The bike starts with a brisk criterium-style loop around the harbor before getting on to Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps installation. I pounded the flats going north parallel to I-5, not realizing a tailwind was pushing me along. That meant that when we turned toward the mountains in the base the tailwind became a crosswind, and then for much of the second half of the race, we had a headwind. That meant that for the four climbs, we were uphill into the wind, which took way more out of me than I would have liked. We were rewarded with some screaming descents, but naturally my head was out of it for all the climbing we did. I did the ride in 3 hours and something, glacial by my standards, so I was looking forward to a stellar run.

For about five miles, I had it right. Per the results I did the first 3.75-mile leg at 8:23 per mile, which felt quick but manageable. I stayed on top of my hydration on the bike, enough that I visited the loo twice out on the road, and once in transition. So I thought I could keep that early run pace indefinitely — run 8:23 per mile until I couldn't anymore. That shit came to a halt at mile 5, where I felt like crashing on the beach and taking a nap on someone's towel. I walked significant portions of the next five miles before starting the cola and pretzels at every aid station. Rocket fuel. I started running again at 10, and finished up that way, but not before clocking a 2:05 half-marathon — again, wars are fought and won in that time. Hey, at least the 5:54 overall time allowed me to maximize my time in the California sun and get a nice pink layer on the pasty whiteness of my body.

Four weeks later I was in Gillette, blowing off UW's commencement to defend an age-group title. The drive up alternates scenic (Sybille Canyon between Laramie and Wheatland) and yucky (WY-59 from Douglas to Gillette), but doesn't take long if you feel like testing the state patrol on commencement weekend, which I never do.

I saw many of the same people I saw the year before, and had that feeling of security and familiarity in a place I'd been only a couple of times. Doesn't take much when you've bounced around as much as I have. This time I split the lane with a couple of younger dudes, and we determined our order. The gun went off, we plowed through the water, and we all stayed on the same lap, amazingly. Now, when circle-swimming, etiquette dictates that one swimmer wishing to pass another tap the foot of the swimmer in front of them. I did that, and no dice. Meanwhile, the guy behind me at one point pulled out into the middle of the lane and passed me on a turn. So I learned that lap swimming etiquette apparently doesn't apply in a race situation; good to know.

I got out into the transition area in roughly seventh place. Per usual, I was glacial in transition and got passed before heading out on the bike. I enjoyed a strong south wind blowing me northward for much of the first half of the bike. Then I hit the turnaround and came to a virtual halt. By then I was in fifth, and trying to hold on to the guys in third and fourth. Another lesson became clear during the second half of the bike — if the race is not USA Triathlon sanctioned, drafting is legal. Indeed, I was in third briefly as I pulled these two guys over a couple of brief hills. Then they made a move and worked a two-man paceline for the rest of the bike while I dealt with the wind on my own.

Much like a non-USAT race I did a couple years back where I pulled a competitor through much of the bike before yielding a spot on the run on tired legs, I had no jump and couldn't bridge the gap on the run. I stayed in fifth place, but I ran a 21:48 5K (7:01 per mile). I take solace in that after fighting the wind in the countryside north of Gillette. Oddly, in terms of placing, last year I was fifth overall, fourth man (yes, I got chicked), first in my age group. This year, I was 3:30 faster, finished fifth overall, fifth man, and third in my age group. Yep, the two guys working the paceline were both 35. That's how it goes sometimes.

While there never was any rule about drafting in the prerace literature, the debate here is the letter of the law (such as it is) against the spirit of the law (in triathlon, there. is. no. drafting.). Far as I'm concerned, I raced honestly and took my medal home with a certain amount of pride in that. What could I have done, anyway, other than telling them to get the fuck off my wheel? Or hooked them (used my book to nudge them off the road)? Guess I can be content to sleep well with my principles.

Tomorrow is the 30-somethingth Bolder Boulder, a race I swore I'd always do as long as I was in this part of the country. For some reason, running a 10K in Boulder with 50,000 other people has lost its appeal, and I won't go back until I have the wheels to pull off a PR. Seriously, if I start in one of the first couple of waves, I only have a couple hundred people in front of me to shove out of the way — er, I mean, slalom through on my way from Pearl and 28th to Folsom Field. So maybe next year if I'm not ass-deep in Ironman training.

Guest bloggers!

2011-05-19T21:30:00.003-06:00

In my desire to not talk about my first two races this season, I'll let a couple of other people take over briefly. Or maybe I'll make this a habit.

I saw a couple of things this week that hit home, the most recent of which came over tonight via triathlon coach Paulo Sousa's twitter feed. Remember my comments a while back about being coachable? Well, David Wendkos of TriSwimCoach.com expands on it. The money graf:

Being coachable is agreeing to follow the guidance of another, without questioning it, without needing to first understand why, without needing to analyze it, and without trying to adapt it. It is putting full faith in the person teaching you to show you a new way of doing something, and being open to learning it exactly that way. Trying their way, without question, for long enough to properly determine its merit. That does not mean you don’t use your brain. It simply means that for an appropriate period of time, you allow yourself to be fully guided to experience a new way of doing something. By the way, this can be really, really difficult. As people, we naturally want to understand. We want to ‘get it’. But sometimes, the best way to reach our goals is by finding a teacher we can believe in, and then following their instructions without an explanation. Understanding will come . . .later.

Sorry, that's just not how I work. Maybe my lack of coachability will be the death of me, or at least the reason I never fulfill my potential. In the words of someone, I've tried things my way for two decades and I haven't accomplished what I've desired, so something has to give. And my vain insistence on living on my own terms won't allow it to happen.

The second recent worthwhile read is from my friend Molly Zahr, on training and motivation. Anyone who wakes up with snow in the ground well into May knows what it's like to struggle with motivation. It doesn't matter what carrot dangles in front of you, there are any number of excuses we can make to not get out the door for a workout. Believe me, I've used most of them, but Molly reminded me that the motivation has to come from within. Simple as that. And for that I thank her.

OT: My sports boycott

2011-03-12T14:30:00.002-07:00

With the Cubs in spring training, the Wild in sixth (or 11th, depending on the hour) place, the Orange headed for the dance, and the Texans in the offseason to end all offseasons, I got to thinking about my relationship with sport.

First of all, let's talk about language. In the U.S. we refer to the red section of USA Today as sports, while the mother tongue refers to the back pages of the Daily Mail as sport. Same thing in translation from other languages. I can go either way, since the sports I like the most originated in other cultures, yet when faced with an alternate spelling (e.g. honour, centre, faeces) I'm one of the first to say, "She's not our queen, so don't expect us to speak her English." One of the many contradictions that makes me me. Call it a push.

As an athlete I was mediocre at best. I played baseball, floor hockey, soccer, flag football — what you'd expect, I suppose. Basketball conflicted with floor hockey, and swimming later on, so I never played that at an organized level. I just didn't have the hand-eye coordination to succeed at any of the ball sports, though had we not moved from the small town where I played soccer to a town that had no soccer I might have done something (maybe played in high school or at a small college) with that sport. Fortunately I discovered running and swimming fairly young, though not young enough to make myself a robot for those sports and excel enough to get to another level.

That said, I still run, bike, and swim, and I follow the other sports, probably to an extent bordering on obsession. Thus, the satellite dish on the roof over my apartment beams my teams into the TV — when they're on a network I get. More often than not, I'll piddle away an afternoon or an evening watching such contests, and sometimes even when I have no stake in the outcome; sometimes I just want to see a game.

So look at the list of teams I cheer for. You have a college team stocked with sociopaths and miscreants, a baseball team that hasn't won a World Series since the Teddy Roosevelt administration, a hockey team that has sold out every home game in its existence without having won squat, and a football team that has yet to make the playoffs in nine seasons of existence (despite playing in a league whose rules make it impossible to suck for very long). I can pick 'em, can't I?

It wears on a guy, seeing such incompetence year in and year out, especially when there are far more worthy things to which to devote one's time. I've always enjoyed the drama of sports, especially this time of year during the college tournament, and the esoteric aspects of an individual effort sometimes blow the mind. To truly appreciate what the human body is capable of, watch an NFL running back to run through a tackle; or an outfielder throw a ball 260 feet into the equivalent of a plastic grocery sack on one bounce; or a goalie bend himself like Gumby to keep a hard rubber disc out of the net; or a tennis player hit a tiny ball while on the fly, landing it on a postage-stamp-sized piece of ground. Or to see what a group of individuals can accomplish with a clear goal in mind, watch a college basketball team with no chance of victory send a group of future NBA players back home next weekend. What, you think Congress would be a better example here? I don't know what to tell you, then.

I learned early on that every contest has a winner and a loser, which is not always the case away from sports. In a world of gray it's kind of nice sometimes to have a black-or-white distinction to that. Granted, there are judgement calls by a supposedly objective observer every minute of every game, and sometimes those calls will determine the outcome. Ultimately the actual participants decide the issue, though, which, in the words of former NFL coach Herm Edwards, is the great thing about sports. All this leads to why I'm boycotting sports for the foreseeable future.

My teams don't win. Yeah, call me whatever you want for taking my damned ball and going home. Consider again at who I root for, and you can't blame me for being frustrated. If that makes me "not a true fan," as I've been told, fine. I can live with that.

During the offseason, after a 75-85 2010, the Cubs did fuck-all. They got rid of one mediocre pitcher (Tom Gorzelanny, 7-9, 4.09 ERA) to acquire another mediocre pitcher (Matt Garza, 15-10, 3.91). Otherwise, they made no changes. In the words of one Yahoo sports blogger, why fix a fourth-place, 75-win team if it ain't broke? More to the point, if the Cubs aren't trying to win a World Series, why do they bother taking the field? Wait, don't answer that. I will. During 20-odd years of Tribune ownership, Trib ran the Cubs like one of its newspapers — give the customers a shitty product, count the money, rinse, repeat. New ownership has shown me no evidence it plans to do anything differently. Make it 103 years since the last championship. I'm done.

March 1 marked the trade deadline in the NHL. Most teams sniffing the playoffs looked for that missing element, that one (or more) player that would push them into the realm of contenders. Not the Wild. (Insert Minnesooooota accent) Oh no, sixth place is just fine. Eight go to the playoffs, right? Well, the team looks good. Why change anything now? (End Minnesoooooota accent). You make a change because the team could be better. You make a change because sometimes it takes just a player or two to make a good team great. When five points separate places 4-11, a team needs whatever edge it can get, especially one with such a loyal and knowledgeable fan base. Leave it to the cheapskate ownership to accept the status quo, and that's not good enough given that two other recent expansion teams have won Stanley Cups in the Wild's 10 years of existence. I'm done.

In 2010, the Texans were a trendy pick to win the AFC South and make their first playoff appearance, and why not? The Titans and Jaguars were down, and the Colts were racked with injuries. Nonetheless, the Colts found a running back, the Jags got lucky, the Titans did whatever they did, and the Texans choked. There's no other way to describe a season in which a team loses FIVE games on either the last play or opponents' last drive of the game. So what changes so far? Replaced the defensive coordinator. OK. Coach remains on staff. Isn't a team's performance in crunch time a reflection of the coach? The draft takes place in about five weeks but I'm not hopeful. Yet another franchise content with mediocrity in the name of a profit, which is inexcusable with the way the NFL sets up its rules for player acquisitions; the difference between 6-10 and a high draft pick and 10-6 and the playoffs (aside from four wins, smartasses) is minuscule. The Texans are the only team in the league to not make the playoffs in their nine years of existence. I'm done.

In the case of college teams, the point there is to give people a chance to further their educations while also competing for the glory of old SU. Er, something. I can't type that without wanting to barf given some of the winners who have suited up for my alma mater over the years. College sports is a cesspool of corruption, period. The news out of Ohio State this week should put to rest any questions about the motivation of college sports executives. And that's what the bureaucrats are — executives. They have as much to do with the educational component of colleges as the custodians in the classroom buildings. They have as much desire to see their charges earn degrees as they do to lose money. My alma mater's one championship in men's basketball came courtesy of a mercenary player who in one year might have spent less time in Bird Library than I did s a freshman. Part of me was happy with the result in 2003, especially since donations to the general fund surged, and applications for admission went through the roof; seriously, that's what good sports teams can do for a university. But what's the cost? Too few people are willing to examine that. I'm... sigh... done.

While in Tucson last month a friend laughed at my goal to ween myself off sports. "It's too much a part of who you are," she said. "It'll never happen." I suppose I can appreciate a good game every now and then. Last year's World Cup was thrilling, and next year's an Olympic year I'll deal with in due time, but my days of rearranging social and meal plans, fussing with my workout schedule, to accommodate games are over. I feel like I need to grow up or something, stop reading the sports page first, give up the satellite dish since all I watch is live sports (and the occasional movie on IFC). Don't get me wrong, I won't buy a house or get married or anything like that, but it's time to let this go.

Finally, I'm done.

Dateline, Tucson

2011-02-11T10:02:00.002-07:00

“Why don’t you find yourself a life that’s real/Too lazy to work/Too nervous to steal.” BR5-49

The seasons have reversed.

It’s in the mid-60s here in Southern Arizona, with bright sun and a stiff west wind. Some days, that’s a beautiful summer day in Wyoming. But it’s February 11, not August 11. Either place, six months apart, would be the perfect place to train.

Thus, I’ve fled my frigid home for the sun and warmth of Tucson, the self-described winter training capital of the world. And train I do. I brought my bike, my running shoes, my red mesh swimsuit, and nine days’ worth of workout clothes. I crash at the elegant bi-level condo of Gail and Kevin, my friends for life for nothing more than putting sheets on the futon in their guest room and laying out a comforter and a pillow. The debt of gratitude for this respite is infinite.

In the pre-dawn chill and darkness, I swam at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, where steam rises from the water surface when some swimmers churn things up. After the sun comes up (more on this later), I have breakfast, change clothes, air my tires, and put rubber to the road. Other days (or sometimes on the same day) I lace up the running shoes and put EVA midsole to the road.

Regardless, I’ve taken a week to clear my head of some bullshit and just train. Chop wood, carry water. Swim, bike, run. It’s all the same. I swam with some faster people, rode with a faster person, and have taken initiative in crushing myself on my own in the run. In between I’ve hung out with a Ph.D. student in archaeology, road tripped to Tombstone and Bisbee with same, dined well, laughed a lot, drank a bit.

It hasn’t been all warmth, though. It’s been all sunshine, but the warmth takes its time about showing up each day. Hours after my arrival, Gail sent me off to the trails around Mount Lemmon with her coworkers Eric and Crystal. I wondered just how cold it would be at 9 a.m., so I went in shorts, long sleeves, a ball cap, and gloves. Eric wore an ear warmer and wind pants, while Crystal (native to the area) donned two pairs of tights, gloves, a base layer, t-shirt and jacket, and stocking cap. I ditched the gloves halfway through the grueling 9-mile run on steep grades and shifting ground.

The next morning, I dutifully woke up at 6 a.m. (vacation notwithstanding), dressed (if you must know, shorts, leg warmers, cycling jersey, jacket, full-finger gloves, synthetic beanie, helmet, socks, shoes), and headed out on my bike by 6:20. Within five minutes I was chilled. Another five minutes passed before my hands and feet went numb. And my concern was the lack of light, so I stood at an intersection waiting for the sun. My hands and feet lost feeling, so I went back to a Circle K and warmed up inside for about 15 minutes. Then I headed back out on my bike toward Oracle.

I turned back at Stone Loop. Fuck this, I thought, it’s too fucking cold. I’m going to Tucson, Arizona, I thought the week before, why would I need bigger gloves and shoe coverings? I forgot about the 30-degree turnaround between night and day in the desert. Gail and Kevin gave me some shit when I got back, but I headed back out in the afternoon, still somewhat bundled up and far more comfortable.

No vacation I’ve taken has been more necessary or more beneficial than this one. While I’m obviously on my computer and checking in at work, I don’t feel affected by anything in Laramie. I’ll return refreshed and ready to tackle the aforementioned work bullshit and hopefully save my job in the process.

More importantly to me, though, I’ll have a stronger training base established. The lower altitude here has allowed me to push harder than I can in oxygen-poor Wyoming, and the warmth lets me peel away some clothing layers for the sake of body movement. A five-mile run in tights, base layer, jacket, gloves, and a beanie feels a hell of a lot different than the same run in shorts, t-shirt, and ball cap. Hint: not better.

The toughest thing, aside from letting go of work, has been letting go of the Tucson summers. It’s brutally cold in Wyoming as I write this — single digits temperatures, double-digit-below-zero wind chill, stiff westerly winds blowing snow across any smooth surface — so it’s easy to embrace the warm, sunny days here in the desert. The vegetation is different, thinner than the thick evergreens that surround my office. The greens of the prickly pear and cypress trees have faded in the sun, and the red rocks stand out against the brown mountains. All those things remind me that it’s brutally hot in the summer, and that I would want to kill someone after about the third week of 110-plus degrees in May or June.

But this is a cool place. All the main roads have bike lanes, and all the bike lanes get used every day. Whole Foods is around the corner from Gail and Kevin’s; eclectic local restaurants line the strip two blocks west of the University of Arizona campus; the mountains linger to the north, east, and west; saguaro cacti seem to stretch their arms to the perpetually blue sky; palm trees (!) sway in the breezes and stiffen when the wind kicks up.

Yeah, it might be the coolest place I could never live. Because there’s no work for me here.

Blowing off the dust

2011-01-29T10:25:00.004-07:00

Wow, this thing is still here. Who would've guessed stuff on the Internet has staying power? Sometimes I wondered if there was an eviction process, where if your blog stayed inactive long enough someone would come by with papers to sign and a truck to move your stuff out; I saw more evictions in the year at the prison block in Davenport, Iowa, then I ever had and learned way more about the process than any college-educated human should know.

So where to start? How do I catch up the six of you of on three months' worth of stuff when I've been good about updating my Facebook and Twitter feeds?

A week after the last entry, I headed out for a little three-day weekend to Georgia, where I watched two nieces and one nephew compete in the state cross country meet. I knew those kids had some ability but to have Lauren, Alex, and Ryan (Samantha, 11, is a couple years away from being there herself) running in the same meet was just amazing. Even my sister Diana (Lauren and Ryan's mom) said she thought it was nuts to think Starr's Mill would make it to state, and that Lauren and Ryan would run on the same day as Alex.

While pricing plane tickets, it crossed my mind that Lauren's a junior and Alex and Ryan are freshmen, so I have another year to see them all run at state. No, it doesn't always work that way. Funny things happen in sport, and I won't get into those things here. I've seen them happen. So thanks to 40,000 United miles left over from my days as a college basketball beat writer I got to see this:

Long story short, Alex got third, and Ryan and Lauren ran well. I'm trying not to be too proud and uncle because there's more to all these kids than their athletic accomplishments, but watching them all run in the state meet was an unmatched thrill. Ryan said he started out too fast, but acknowledged he was a little fired up for his first state meet, and that happens. Now he's a Prefontaine-quoting, bona fide high school runner with three years left to chase the dream.

Lauren observed "there are 112 other people in the state faster than me, and one of them is my cousin. Pretty cool." Even cooler is that Lauren, within the last year, had intoned that she hated running. Now she's giving up lacrosse to go out for track, and gave up swimming to run through the winter. No one saw that coming.

Alex attacked a hill with less than a mile left to move into third, wearing a scowl I haven't seen before; well, there was her early childhood where, upon her mom's request that she "give me a LOOK," she'd furrow her brow and purse her lips and wrinkle her nose and put her hands on her hips, and that way only 3- and 4-year-old girls can do. No, this time was serious. Later that same night she played trumpet with her high school marching band. Awesome.

After that, I went back to discover that my magazine was financially insolvent and the UW foundation hadn't delivered the funds they'd promised (they did, in fucking January). Then there was Thanksgiving, where I brought record cold to the Atlanta area. Then at Christmas, I brought record cold and snow to the Atlanta area. Even that place looks good with snow on the ground, trees, and rooftops.

In the meantime, I've been struggling at work, but not with training consistency. There hasn't been much keeping me from doing something every day — swimming three times a week, biking and running twice each. Tucson and its resultant sunshine beckons next week for my bike and I. My friend Gail, a triathlon coach, retail person, and camp counselor with TriSports, offered up a futon and spare room for a winter-weary soul and I took her up on it. Even offered to take on some of her brutal workouts, so I'll probably need a nap when I get home. The guillotine of California half-Ironman looms on April 2, but it has kept me training through the typically brutal Wyoming winter.

Giving up on Kona, Boston?

2010-10-28T21:25:00.002-06:00

In case you hadn't guessed, two of my life goals are to toe the respective starting lines in a couple of hallowed places — Kona, Hawaii, on the first Saturday in October after the full moon; Hopkinton, Massachusetts, on Patriot's Day. Those races would be the Ironman Triathlon World Championship, and the Boston Marathon.

Seriously, I'd put those two ahead of a lot of the "American dream" kind of goals — home ownership, marriage, children, retirement, being my own boss, etc. Yes, I'd rather do an 80-mile bike ride in the rain followed closely by a 10-mile run, than mow the grass, change a diaper, or go over spreadsheets with lots and lots of red numbers. OK, bad examples, but you catch my drift.

Those goals are rooted in my childhood, which obviously was not normal. It became apparent early on that I wasn't going to fill out my frame, that I was going to be lean for much of my life, that I didn't have much in the way of coordination, so I adjusted my sporting goals accordingly. Instead of wanting to throw the winning touchdown pass, I dreamed of a four-minute mile (one more goal that never got reached). Instead of coming to the plate with two outs in the bottom of the ninth blah blah blah, I dreamed of turning the pedals in that lava desert on the Big Island. In junior high, when things got rough on a five-mile training run with my cross country team, I wondered how on earth I'd deal with the far more excruciating pain of mile 18 in the Natural Energy Lab. It started when I saw the Ironman on TV, realized I already did two of the three sports, and set that in my head forever.

So I did it many years later. I slacked off in early adulthood as I got in the groove of my newspaper career, stayed up too late, slept too late, and drank and worked too much. Once I got back into triathlons in 2002, the goal was Ironman. I did five of them over the course of six years (separated by a nice interval, of course), knowing full well most of the time that I'd finish well off where I needed to be. Whether it was crappy training or melting down mentally, every race short-circuited at some point and I'd stumble across the finish line, get my medal and shitty pizza, and go home, IT bands on fire.

Obviously, it's become cost-prohibitive as time has gone on. Ironman Florida cost me $325 in 2003, while Ironman Wisconsin cost me $625 in 2009. That's to say nothing of lodging and travel costs. There are more races, true, but they fill up faster and faster every year. The races themselves get faster, too. To give you an idea of how seriously I take this, I analyzed the finish times for the LAST Kona qualifier in my age group every year at Ironman Coeur d'Alene in Idaho. The average time for the first six years of the race (2003-08) was 10h13m46s. In 2009, the last qualifier went 9:52:41, and in 2010 he went 9:49:13.

I guess it's silly since, according to some of the Internet literati, it's just a race. At the same time, two of the stupidest things I've ever read about Kona came from Slowtwitch. The first: "Kona's really not that big a deal. It's just a race. I've been there six times and it's so stupid how seriously people take it." Then why have you been there six fucking times if it's not that big a deal? The second: "You know, it's actually kind of a boring course. You take away the wind and the heat and it's not that hard." In 30 years on the Big Island (the race started in Oahu at Waikiki), you could "take away the wind and the heat" twice — once for the Iron War between Scott and Allen in '89, once when Luc Van Lierde set the current course record. Maybe there was another one recently, but those are the prime examples. Again, a ludicrous statement, and when I get there, I want the mumuku winds, the 100-degree heat radiating off the asphalt, the 2-3-foot seas, and the flower lei around my neck at the finish.

Or maybe I don't anymore.

This has been a rough month for my goals. First, the 2011 Boston Marathon sold out the day it opened for registration. I find it hard to believe that many people met the standards, but then again the race relaxed their standards in 1996 for the 100th to let more people experience Boston, and they haven't changed them since. When I was young and first learned I had to qualify for Boston, men under 40 pretty much had to break 3 hours. You can see now that's not the case. No word on whether the BAA would revisit its standards, but if I make the 3:15 standard for men my age anyway, the chances of getting in are insanely slim now. Even if the standards tighten up and I have to break 3 hours into my 40s, again, no guarantee I'd get in if I'm not quick enough on the mouse.

For Kona, just when the World Triathlon Corporation seems to have exhausted its store of stupid ideas (i.e., the rule that states pros must finish within 8 percent of the winning time to earn prize money, otherwise you're SOL; later rescinded), they do this:

Today World Triathlon Corporation (WTC) launches an exclusive athlete membership program called Ironman Access. In addition to other member benefits, the program will offer advance registration for Ironman events worldwide before entries open to the general public. Membership into Ironman Access is on a first-come, first-served basis and will close once it reaches capacity.

In addition to exclusive, advance registration, Ironman Access will offer perks including an official membership ID card; a second chance in the Ironman Lottery Program*; two VIP passes per registered event; a one-year subscription to LAVA Magazine; discounts on Ironman partner products at shopironman.com and at Ironman’s on-site event retail stores; and a 2010 Ford Ironman World Championship NBC broadcast DVD. Membership benefits are valid for one year starting from activation date. In order to take advantage of early event registration, membership must be current. The annual membership fee is $1,000 USD.

Basically, for a grand, you get to cut the line and register for as many events as you want. You already saw what one of these M-dot branded events costs, so consider that the $1K fee is on top of whatever entry fees you pay. Since most of these events sell out a year in advance, that $1K would save you the trouble of traveling to the race site and signing up there the next day. Not a bad deal if you can afford it, though it is only a yearly thing; you'd have to renew your membership every year at that cost, likely more given the state of things.

The topic has been beaten to death elsewhere. Simply, it's a money grab. The WTC sold out to a private equity firm in 2008. That firm is beholden to no one but shareholders — not customers (like us racers), not the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who make the events work, not the towns where the races take place, not even their employees. The shareholders demand more returns, product be damned, and they come up with shit like this. For once, the company saw the error of its ways, and rescinded the program within 24 hours. CEO Ben Fertic issued this mealy mouthed statement ("If you say we're wrong, we're wrong." Suuuure.), and like a good, chastened company, wiped the original release off the site.

This is where my social conscience wakes from its slumber. I try to do right by the world — buy organic, shop local, hug trees, save endangered species, support causes I believe in. That said, Ironman is my id taking over, my selfish nature manifesting itself in exercises in masochism (as if rooting for the Cubs wasn't enough). Truthfully, I enjoy running, swimming, and cycling (in order of favorites), and this is a way to test myself on a measured, catered course. But I don't feel like I can support this company (and it is a company, make no mistake) any more when they're trying to make their races a survival of the richest. I've thrown some serious coin at this silly dream, and the odds seem to get longer by the year. As of yesterday the plan was to give it one more shot in Coeur d'Alene in 2012, then abandon if I didn't make it. Now? I don't know. I just don't know.

So my options now are the stellar Rev3 series, or the Challenge series overseas. But those don't carry the carrot of Kona spots. Ironman star Luke McKenzie wondered on twitter if anyone would do M-dot races if there weren't Kona spots attached. I'd have to say no, no matter how far off I am from qualifying.

As for my goals of 50 states in both triathlon and marathon? The plan was only one marathon in Hawaii and Massachusetts, one triathlon in Hawaii; the 50 States Marathon Club will take Ironman marathons. Now? Looks like the Maui Marathon, the Cape Cod Marathon, and whatever triathlons I can find in those places. Sometimes it sucks to have a conscience, but at least I sleep well — most of the time.

Portland Marathon, brought to you by the number 10

2010-10-13T20:00:00.003-06:00

As I said before, I wanted to do something monumental on Oct. 10, 2010. The Portland Marathon fit the bill, especially considering the original plan for the race — helping someone qualify for the Boston Marathon. See, my personal best is 3:44:34, set at Atlanta in 2006, which would get her to Boston. That went belly-up, however, and I was left to my own devices to not train and wallow in whatever it was I wallowed in. In fact, had I not bought my plane ticket in July and prepaid for the hotel room shortly thereafter, I would have bailed on the trip altogether.

The trip got off to an inauspicious beginning Friday when I left 40 minutes late. My friends Matt and Bryan, the members of Seattle band Bekker, were crashing at my place for a few days while playing shows in Laramie, and we had a fascinating discussion about writing music. However, it meant I got a late start and was rushed in getting to Denver International Airport 130 miles away. I made my flight in plenty of time, but I cut it much closer than what I feel comfortable and I breathed a hell of a lot easier when I was on the plane.

My Aunt Sara and Uncle John, in Portland for their grandson Trey's 5th birthday, picked me up at the airport, drove me to my hotel, and then took me out to a lovely prerace dinner at Sideline's Sports Bar and Grill (no relation to Sideline's Sports Bar/Meat Market in Casper). After some salmon, rice, sweet potatoes, veggies, and two pints of Alaskan Amber, I headed back to the hotel and got some sleep.

Saturday morning I was supposed to be looking at provided photos for a story for the magazine, but instead watched ESPN's Gameday and the Hawaii Ironman on the computer. As I mentioned before, this is the race I would rather have done, but at this point it's going to take a miracle for me to get there; frankly, it'll take a miracle for me to land on the start line in Hopkinton on Patriots' Day. It was supposedly all part of my motivation. At least that's what I kept telling myself.

Later Saturday, my friend Mindi came down from Seattle to take me downtown for lunch and packet pickup. We ate at a New York-style kosher deli called Kenny and Zuke's, not that a six-inch-high club sandwich and fries is the best prerace meal. Then we hit Safeway and picked up a couple friends of hers who were attending a dinner at the Hilton where we had to pick up our packets. Let me just say that with 13,000 runners spread between a 10K, half-marathon and full marathon, the Portland Marathon has a monumental task to get all these people in and out of a prerace expo in reasonable order. That said, while they did a good job of herding us through (literally, if you saw the labyrinthine pattern of hallways, escalators, and warehouses saved for the expo) I determined that I'm not doing any more big-city marathons. I can achieve my goal of 50 states while avoiding the big ones, really.

At Safeway I got a frozen meal to stoke the stove for Sunday's race, and called it dinner — that and 22 ounces of flat Pepsi left from an earlier 32-ouncer. I also had the bananas and Clif bars for dessert, as well as for my prerace breakfast. Sleep never comes easily the night before a race, so there's no point in talking about it. Part of it is being keyed up for the race, but the other part is the fear that I oversleep and miss the race; every Ironman competitor has that dream during the training cycle. In fact, I opened my eyes for some reason, and no more than two minutes later my alarm went off.

I had the breakfast of champions, fouled up my bathroom, and then headed downstairs to catch the shuttle to the airport, where I caught the Max/train downtown for the race. It started raining sometime Friday night and certainly hadn't stopped by race morning, so I steeled my resolve to get soaked — and stood under an overhang near where my wave would push off. I listened to my loud, angry music and eavesdropped on various conversations before dropping off my dry clothes bag. So intent on avoiding the rain was I that I waited until the gun went off before leaving the entryway to a building.

The plan was to be very conservative throughout the race, because my training would not allow for me to push myself. Indeed, a big-city marathon forces no other strategy, because even though 90 percent of the people were in the proper waves, somehow a few joggers and walkers snuck into the first two waves and the rest of us had to dodge them, or get slowed down. Fine with me, since I knew anything less than 4 hours (around 9:10 per mile) was a pipe dream.

The 3:50 pace group passed me early on, and then the 4-hour pace group passed at about mile 4. The rain stopped briefly, then resumed at that point. That's also when my cool technical t-shirt started chafing some sensitive protuberances on my chest, necessitating a vaseline stop at the 4.5-mile aid station. Don't mind me, I thought, I'm just reaching under my shirt and groping myself with vaseline, saving me some major pain later on (that was a lie, because I knew the postrace shower was going to hurt in a major way regardless of how well-lubricated I was). I had to reapply every half-hour at the nearest aid station, and I ended up with two gooey blobs on my shirt.

Lots of people passed me and that bothered me for about those first four miles, but then I realized for once in my life that I was running my own race. The course took us through the industrial part of Portland — not what you think of when you think "Portland." Seriously, we passed loading docks, warehouses, train yards, and more warehouses. Surely the course could have taken us to Forest Park or through the Rose District rather than the train yards north of downtown. The only cool thing was seeing the fast people running in the other direction, and in my case wishing I could click off 6-minute miles for one-tenth the distance.

My iliotibial bands are a well-documented bane of my existence in this space. Sunday was no exception. It was worthy of note that the halfway point for the marathon was front of an all-nude revue place, located conveniently across the street from some shipping warehouse along the Willamette River, and that kept my mind occupied until mile 14, when my IT bands completely tied up. That makes sense, since I figure my longest run this year was in that range. I was sort of prepared for it, and I ran through it anyway. I was one of the few people plodding out 9:30 miles on average to run all the way up the one hill, from mile 16 across a bridge to mile 17 at the middle of the bridge over the Willamette. Holy Christ, the downhill was brutal. But I kept running.

In fact, I think I ran more in this marathon than I ever have, and that includes my PR in Atlanta four years ago, when I walked much of the last five miles. Well, I jogged, anyway. My refueling plan of 24 ounces of grape Gatorade worked like a charm, so my only folly was my shredded IT bands. I ran next to a woman who said she trained for the marathon with Crossfit, meaning her longest run was 3 miles; they believe anaerobic power in short bursts builds aerobic fitness, and that elite endurance athletes train incorrectly, because Crossfit is The Way, The Truth, and The Light. I held my tongue and left her behind at 22.

There was another long downhill before mile 24, and then a brief uphill to another bridge over the Willamette, and then back downtown for another downhill off the bridge. With my IT bands screaming for mercy — actually, no, that was me screaming for mercy because of those damned things — I mercifully made a series of turns through the tall buildings and finished the damned race, as raindrops exploded all around me.

I got through the food line, put on my dry finisher's shirt, wrapped myself tightly in my space blanket, and stood in line for a half-hour for my dry clothes bag (another reason to never do another big-city marathon). There was no place to stand, and I beat bricks to the Max station and the ride back to my hotel.

That night I had dinner with my cousin and her family, as well as my aunt and uncle. It was great to see them, and to see Mindi the day before, so I guess I can take that away from my lost weekend in Portland. The time wasn't important (4:11:55); I knew that about a month-and-a-half back. It was time to see that part of the family and to run my tenth marathon (five standalones and five Ironmans) on 10-10-10.

Guess I'll have to come up with something big and legitimate for 11-11-11.

Three days out

2010-10-07T20:58:00.002-06:00

Marathon No. 5 takes place Sunday, 10-10-10. I liked the idea of doing something semi-monumental on a numerologically significant day, so I decided on the Portland Marathon. I was supposed to have some company but, alas, it was not to be.

Thanks in part to that issue, plus a few other things bringing me down, I've done three 2-hour runs in the past three months, and that stands as my distance training. It's been all I can do to do something every day, much less get in the running I need for a good marathon. Sunday, I'll settle for a shitty marathon. Seriously, it'll be a death march. In fact, had I not purchased my plane ticket four months ago, or secured a prepaid hotel room, I'd probably bail on it and focus on swimming.

This might be one of the stupidest things I've done, but at least I'll see a new part of one of my favorite cities — the industrial waterfront. Goody. I'll see my aunt, uncle, and cousin and her family while I'm there, too, as well as a dear friend who's running the half. I'll bring my computer so I can veg out and watch the Ironman coverage from Hawai'i (aka the race I really want to do this weekend). So the weekend won't be a total waste.

And I'll still shave my legs.

Did I shave my legs for this?

2010-09-08T22:04:00.005-06:00

With respect to Deana Carter, I have been shaving my legs on a monthly basis. Like football players taping their ankles over their shoes — provides no real stability, but it's force of habit and part of gearing up for competition — I invested in discount girl razors, no doubt to the amusement of the clerks at Safeway. I've either got a deep, dark secret (which I don't, other than... the incident) or I drew the short straw from a significant other (which I didn't). It makes me feel faster, especially lying in bed the night before the race and sliding around like an Olympic luger. And with my season in a tailspin, I'll continue the habit in hopes of at least feeling fast if I can't actually be fast.

On July 8, I found a sock I'd been missing for more than a year-and-a-half. It was the other race sock from a set I bought at the Austin Tri-Cyclist in 2002, and I designated as my race socks — black with orange stripes and yellow smiley faces. Maybe, if I get it together and figure out this digital camera thingie, I'll take a picture of them and post them here. Anyway, I pulled a t-shirt off the massive stack and out rolled this sock, presumed missing at a Davenport, Iowa, laundromat in late 2008. I thought that would be the break I was looking for, since shit's been kind of stinky in 2010.

Alas, I rode the wave for a few days. On July 11, I won my age group at the Cheyenne Sprint Triathlon, with the same time as in 2009 on about half the training. I had a brief upturn in mood, since it felt like the $3K I spent on a bike was worth it. For a while, anyway. I bagged the Headwaters Triathlon in Montana because it would have put me on the road for a long time right before I went on vacation with my parents, so the next race would be the Rattlesnake Triathlons in Aurora, Colorado. That was to be a back-to-back weekend, with an international distance race on Saturday and a sprint on Sunday. I did Saturday's swim in a decent 26:16, then hopped on my bike, grooving along the shittiest roads in Colorado — rural Arapahoe County, in case you're wondering. I stayed on the white line because the roads were open to traffic when I looked up in time to see the white line disappear into gravel.

I successfully kept the bike upright but the loud pop told me there was more to worry about. Not one, but two flat tires. I changed them in about 20 minutes, but my mental state went south with every passing minute. There goes the 1-hour, 10-minute goal for the bike, the 1:15 goal, the 1:20 goal, the 2:30 overall goal. After a while I just stopped and reset my watch, figuring on being a tourist. Once I got the tubes changed (tossing the spent tubes in the ditch with the beer cans and cigarette butts), I went for the CO2 dispenser and learned the hard way that if you put a CO2 cartridge in there, it slow-leaks. I was deflated as those tires, and started walking with my bike toward the turnaround for the bike. I was done, even if somebody — like the official in the red pickup who ultimately gave me a ride back to the transition area — had a pump. My mental state was shot and I'd already checked out.

In fact, I bailed on the sprint the next day, choosing instead to run for an hour in hopes of boosting my ego, followed by retial therapy, Dave-style — the clearance racks at Sports Authority, Big 5, Dick's, Running Wild, and Performance Bike, because you can't have too many pairs of running or cycling shorts, or CO2s, or tubes, or pullovers, or synthetic, wicking shirts.

So that was the last time I rode my bike, choosing instead to get into a groove with my master's swimming group, and shore up the run miles in advance of the Portland Marathon. Meanwhile, we got another issue of the magazine to the mailboxes of our alumni, donors, and friends, and the come-to-Jesus meeting with my boss was tolerable, resulting in weekly progress reports, instead of the bi-weekly ones previously assigned.

The latest setback is health. I've been lucky so far, not being sick since last December's bout with vertigo, but over the Labor Day weekend I picked up a head cold (Warning: graphic description). For about 24 hours, there was this baseball-sized piece of phlegm stuck to the back of my throat, too far back to force up, and my throat felt like it had been sandpapered. I worked through it for a while, but ultimately got tired of walking down the hall to the bathroom repeatedly, so I called it a day at noon today. My cold solution is to drown it in fluids, hoping the liquid loosens things up. Pepsi, Gatorade, water, V8, apple juice, soup. Then pee, rinse, repeat.

The Harvest Moon Triathlon is Sunday, and I have a prepaid hotel room and everything, but between the lack of bike miles over the past month and this week's illness, there's no way I can fake a half-Ironman. A shorter race, certainly, but a half-Ironman would be the most excruciating six hours of 2010, this side of a stint in the doctor's office. In case you've lost track, I signed up for eight triathlons, DNSed four of them, DNFed one, and finished three, winning my age group twice. The offseason can't get here fast enough.

So the plan is to go down, stay the night on an unfamiliar bed, collect the Marriott points, and help out at the race.

And I'll still shave my legs.

Crisis of motivation, crisis of confidence

2010-07-08T21:54:00.003-06:00

These days I spend much of my time staring at a blank page on a computer screen, waiting for inspiration to strike. After a while I realize the pointlessness of that exercise, so I transcribe some minutes of the hours upon hours of interviews I have in my recorder. Between sentences, I idly surf the internet, and wonder what would happen if the university knew it was paying me a handsome sum of money to spend my days this way.

Outside of work it's not much different. I idly surf the internet, wondering if I should go back in to work or if I should get out on the bike, or if I should have a beer and make dinner. I also wonder if I should email the girl who's not interested in a long-distance relationship to let her know I understand and hope we can remain friends — or whatever line of bullshit people in that situation feed each other. When I wake up in the morning, the guilty feeling that I should be at my desk by 6:30 overrides the necessity of training, so straight to the kitchen for breakfast, then off to work after the morning ritual.

Let's go back to June 12 and the Boise half-Ironman. I was as undertrained for a race of that magnitude as ever, and one guy I talked to at the hotel said, "That's great. You don't have any expectations." Indeed. Still, my personal best of 5:09:13 from my first half-Ironman has been on the books for too long, and every time I toe the line in a race of that distance I hope for a PR. Boise was no exception. Still, the race started at 2 p.m. and because of the limited access to the swim venue we had to be there two hours before the race. There was no shade and as the sun beat down on us, the energy seemed to evaporate in the 80-degree warmth, about 10 degrees warmer than anything I'd trained in.

My swim was four minutes slower than it needed to be, despite feeling as good as I could have hoped in my restrictive neoprene sausage casing while cutting through the chop. The bike was where the wheels came off (no pun intended) as a 30 mph wind made it feel like I was wearing a parachute. Everybody had to deal with it, though, so aside from wasting mental and physical energy fighting the wind I had no excuse. The first few miles of the run went well, until I depleted my salt stores and felt heavier and heavier. I walked much of the last two miles and jogged across the line in 5:46.

I spent not only much of the 10-hour drive home pondering my future in the sport, I've done that for much of the past month. I want to qualify for Kona, which was the reason for starting this shitty blog in the first place, and I want to qualify for Boston. But 22 years since my first triathlon, however, there's far too much I'm still figuring out — nutrition, how to get out of my wetsuit with numb hands, how to adjust my effort when it's hotter and windier than I'd anticipated, nutrition, how is far is too far to drive for a race, how to best execute flying mounts and dismounts from the bike, and nutrition.

So I wonder how much effort I'm willing to put in for a lost cause. From my best Ironman time of 11:42 on a dead-flat course in ideal weather, I need to drop about two hours to qualify definitively, and an hour-and-a-half to have a reason to show up for the Kona spot rolldown the day after. I was told months ago that, in the words of a certain Nike commercial, everything [I] have is inside. If that's the case than I'm missing some parts. The girl said it's time for me to hire a coach, because I've been doing things my way for this long and it's obviously not working. If I could retain a nutritionist and a psychologist for the same monthly price as a coach, I'd be fucking golden. But I'm still looking up a mountain at a lofty goal, and all I see is the storm building over the peak. The space between my ears might as well be a thousand miles wide.

If my hobby is in that bad of a state, my work is even worse, and more urgent because it is my livelihood. A couple weeks ago our designer was laid off and for that two weeks we were a ship without a sail. Thankfully, he's back in a freelance capacity, but it created some drama and uncertainty we didn't need.

Personally, I feel completely bereft of creativity. The interviews, for the most part, are done but I can't write. I feel like warning my boss to expect straight AP shit on the cover story. Thankfully, a freelancer has stepped in to take one of the 1,000-word features off my hands. The last issue came out and has gotten positive reviews. A couple of my friends told me they loved the cover story. That praise does me good.

But now? I don't know. In addition to the aforementioned time-wasting (add to the list strolling all the way across campus to get coffee, and strolling across campus for no reason at all) I spent time wishing for a job at a widget factory, something that requires no brainpower and still provides a steady check. I lived on shit wages in newspapers, so no salary is too small. I just want to do my job and go home, and I don't want to end up tearing my hair out or going insane over the accomplishment of those duties. That's not the case here. I'm worried about my ability to get my stories done, edited, and laid out in a timely manner. I'm worried about my boss discovering just how far behind I am. I'm worried about which steps in getting the magazine to the printer I'll forget. I'm worried about one of the four remaining delinquent computer scientists not returning my email before I need to write the cover story. And I'm worried about a dry creative faucet when it comes time to write.

So I haven't been motivated to work, and I haven't been motivated to train. For the first time in years, all I've been motivated to do is love, and that didn't work out. It's affecting me more than I thought it would, but I can't use that as an excuse. I guess I have to press on, no matter what.

OT: Nothing in particular

2010-06-27T21:28:00.003-06:00

Once again, I've gone quite some time between entries. One reason/excuse is my frustration with my triathlon-ing. I can't seem to motivate myself to get out there every day, so I'm wondering if I should make my goals a little more realistic, i.e. give up on Kona and Boston and just do a few races for the sake of finishing. Or just try to do a triathlon and marathon in each of the 50 states without regard for performance.

The other reason/excuse is my love/hate relationship with writing, and I've been leaning toward the latter lately. The last magazine hit the streets a month late, and I did every bit of writing except for two of the 20 or so stories, so I was about sick of it. And then another magazine has come up, and again, I have no help with the writing. Guess $200 a story isn't acceptable, even in this buyers' market of an economy. So I really don't care much for writing professionally, let alone as a hobby, and I daydream of finding a nice widget factory in need of an overeducated widget maker for $10 an hour.

It looks like I'm back on the market again, if I was off the market in the first place. Second straight relationship where it seems I was taking it more seriously than she was. Live and learn, eh? Long-distance isn't for everyone, no doubt about that, and apparently it wasn't for her. I was willing to give it a shot but I respect her feelings and won't press the issue.

Finally, I offer my thesis on a mid-30s man dating in a college town. Basically, it's impossible, and here's why:

• First, let's rule out the coeds. They're batshit crazy, and I'd seriously question the psychological makeup of an 18-22-year-old woman who wants to get down with a 36-year-old man. There's no amount of agreement about the, uh, nature of the relationship that would clear things up, so there's no point in even trying. I'm sure Steve McNair would confirm my theory but he's not around anymore, thanks to... a 20-year-old woman who offed herself after sending him to the great gig in the sky.

• The next group of women to rule out is the post-grads (post-docs, grad students, professors). But first, an anecdote. A friend of mine living in Lawrence, Kan., was dating this guy she'd met at the campus there, and after five months together he got in to law school at the University of Michigan. She told me, in so few words, that she was not moving from her home state unless there was a ring. I told her to be careful what she wished for, because she might get it. Sure enough, she got her ring, they went to A-squared, and lived happily ever after.

The point here is that no one comes to Laramie for post-graduate studies without a significant other because everyone knows what I know — it's a dating wasteland, unless you swim in the university pool, which might or might not be the best idea. Men can't bring their significant others without a permanent arrangement, and women won't come here without a dude in tow, whether permanently arranged or not; a smart guy will follow a smart girl anywhere, regardless of his own prospects for employment.

• So that leaves the townies. Like most small, rural, college towns in red states, there's a bit of resentment toward the campus among the townies, never mind what the campus means to the town in terms of culture, population, and economy. So even if I did chat up a townie woman in some situation, she'd probably bolt upon finding out I work at the university.

Further, at my age single women tend to have kids, and I'm not raising someone else's kid. In small towns like this one, there's something wrong with you if you haven't married by 25 (maybe younger here in sort-of Mormon country) and procreated by 30, so the woman do those before realizing the lack of wisdom in that course of action. Anyway, in my experience the "real" dad is not too far off, and I want nothing to do with that drama. Single moms are tough, admirable, courageous people, and I have nothing but respect for that path, but I wouldn't go that way myself.

So there you have it. I've pondered this quite a bit on many a run and ride (or walk home from work in the dark), and this is the first chance I've taken to put it on a screen. Really, it doesn't concern me that I've iced my love life in the name of a (sigh) decent job, but if I had any desire for a love life I wouldn't have moved here because I knew what I was getting in to, notwithstanding my friends' imagery of "all that young college-girl [action]." Half-Acre Gym is indeed like a museum — nice to look at what's there, but touch at your own risk."

Not as long in coming

2010-05-11T20:47:00.003-06:00

Oddly, days after I updated you on my swim season and marital status, I did my first triathlon of the season, the Razor City Splash and Dash. Nervously, I watched the weather forecast throughout the week for lovely Gillette, Wyoming, about four-and-a-half hours north and east of here. A guy on the Facebook triathlon group said it snowed for last year's race, and it did snow in the days preceding. By the time I showed up at the Campbell County Aquatic Center it was in the 30s and sunny, and the only snow was in the shadows of the trees.

At any rate, I ended up wearing more clothes for this race than I ever have. We swam in the nice, warm aquatic center, where I covered two Wyoming girls' state swim meets a few years back. It was cool to swim in this pool where I'd seen one of the most exciting sporting events of my 12 years in newspapers. For some reason, the pool was like bath water, not at all conducive to swimming competitively, only recreationally. Yuck.

The pool is Olympic-sized, 50 meters by 25 yards. Though the high school short-course (25-yard) season ended a while back, the pool still was configured for 21 25-yard lanes; the summer club season uses "long course," or the 50-meter configuration. If they'd taken the bulkhead out (a narrow plank, about 18 inches wide and 4 feet deep, separates the eight main competition lanes from the rest of the pool), they'd have had another one. So there was plenty of room for all 70 of us. I swam circles in a lane with two other guys, and they were kind enough to let me go first after watching me turn a couple of warmup laps. I must look intimidating.

The race started after about a 20-minute meeting, during which I heard the following: "There's no snow, so we lucked out on that." Now, the swim was 900 yards, which is as close to a half-mile (880 yards) as you can get in a 25-yard pool. Each competitor was responsible for counting his own laps, all 36 of them, or 18 (down and back equals one) if you prefer, which I do, because it's a lower number. Didn't stop me from miscounting. I do it in my workouts, too, and I end up looking at the clock to try and figure out where I am in a long swim. Saturday was no exception, as I hit the wall at an unacceptably fast time for what I thought was 18 laps. I said out loud, "That can't be right," and did another 50 yards. The time was far more realistic.

In the prerace meeting, the race director recommended putting some clothes on before running outside into the 30-degree chill, wet and semi-naked. So I put on tights and an UnderArmour mock turtleneck while frantically drying myself. To put it in perspective, I spent 3.5 percent of my total time of the race in the first transition, trying to put dry clothes on a damp body, before running outside.

At my bike I added socks, gloves, a skullcap, my helmet, shades, and shoes to the ensemble. I mounted up and headed out for my first ride on my new bike. The 15-mile course was an out-and-back into the countryside north of Gillette, not as far as Montana but I felt like I could see it from there; the Montana-Wyoming border is 51 miles north of Gillette. Now, I knew a bunch of people passed me in transition, but I figured I could get them back when it came down to actually competing. The goal was to not let anyone pass me on the ride, though that didn't get to the turnaround, as one guy passed me. Still, the ride went well save for a balky derailleur that will be dealt with before the next race. It was a rare course that took us downhill on the way out and uphill on the way back, as Gillette sits on a plateau. That's fine with me, as I can spin up hills and still have something left for the run.

Which I did, to a point. I ditched the bike and my tights in transition, as the tights would have cooked me on the run. I set my sights on the lead chick and the guy who passed me on the bike, but I got passed one more time on the run. Those three people were in front of me, in view, the entire 5-kilometer run, but I couldn't muster the jump necessary to catch them. So I pushed as best I could, didn't get passed again beyond the first mile, and even had a small kick at the end.

Lo and behold, I won my age group and finished fifth overall. My time was six minutes behind the overall winner, and the three people I mentioned were within a minute of me, so I could have gotten second overall if I had a little more speed. Alas, that's why I do sprints, to enter a different kind of pain and see what kind of speed I have. Furthermore, my placing was the result of a weak field. Had to be. No way I'm at the top of my age group, even in a small state like Wyoming, and I expect to get stomped at the Cheyenne Sprint later this summer.

In the meantime, it's on to the Boise Half-Ironman (I refuse to call it a 70.3 as the World Triathlon Corporation wishes). I'll swim twice a week and skate on the residual fitness from the season, while hitting the bike and run as hard as I can. I neglected them for too long during swimming (a 22:42 5K is good enough to win my age group, ugh), and I'll have to address those issues before heading up to Idaho.

Long time coming

2010-05-06T13:47:00.002-06:00

When last you left your protagonist, he was bitching about a coach yelling at him, and bitching about the weather. Not surprisingly, things haven't changed much in more than two months.

Let's see, since the Loveland Sweetheart Invitational, I took a trip to Portland to see a special lady-friend, who remains very special to me. While there I rode my bike with her three times, got in three really strong runs, and three decent swims (the swims were solo, as getting this chick in the water is like pulling teeth). And we had some fun in the city. So I like the woman, I like the city, and I'm starting to see why there's such turnover in this department. Hmm...

I did learn that I could get faster in the water. Six weeks after the Loveland Sweetheart Invitational, I competed in the Colorado state masters meet, my first time competing in a state meet of any kind. That's because I didn't have to qualify; all I had to do was fill out a form and write a check (my kind of championship). So you see my times below from the Loveland meet. Now compare them with the COMSA state results, bearing in mind that I was shaved and tapered. I was not thrilled to have to skip the 1,650-yard freestyle for a work assignment, but I was thrilled to finish the 400-yard individual medley for the first time. Everything after that was easy, though I got smoked in the age-group standings. A loving, dear friend pointed out the difference between swimming in a triathlon with people who dabble in swimming, and swimming in a masters meet with swimmers who dabble in triathlon. Point taken.

The next task was to address my neglected cycling and running, which has happened all too infrequently since the first of the year. And not much has changed in the four weeks since the state meet. I had another couple weeks of swim practices, but told the coaches I'd be in and out because of my newfound desire to run and bike — at least when the weather allowed it. Seriously, my training plan is at the mercy of the dodgy spring weather here on the high plains, meaning if it's not snowing or unmercifully windy I'm out running or cycling. Bad way to do it, but training here is what it is. And I'm still out of shape.

Last weekend I went to St. George, Utah, to watch the inaugural Ironman St. George. Normally, it's mid-80s and windy there this time of year but race day was cold (mid-60s) and calm. My kind of day! Meagen competed and finished with no problems, despite her prophecies of doom and gloom and truncated training process. Long story short, the course is an absolute bear, which guarantees the Ironman masses will stay away and the marketers who run the WTC won't renew past the initial five years. Nonetheless, I was proud of her and her Phoenix crew for getting it done. Tough day all around.

The day after I attended my second awards luncheon/dinner (the first was Ironman Canada, when I happened to be in town and had nothing to do). First thing I noticed was the number of age-group winners/Kona qualifiers from northern parts of the world — Salt Lake City, Denver, DeForest, Wisconsin; Colchester, Vermont. Either a lot of people have friends in the south for training weekends, or a lot of people are exponentially mentally tougher than I. I'm opting for the latter. I told Meagen that means I have no excuse for not training through the brutal Wyoming winters, and she reminded me of it a few more times before we parted ways.

During the 12-hour drive home (took the scenic route through the Colorado Rockies), I wondered if I really have what it takes to achieve that ludicrous goal of qualifying. I ask this question now as the morning's snow melts and my bike sits on the trainer, waiting for me when I get home. And I'll continue to ask it throughout the year as I come up with more and more excuses not to train.

Oops, I did it again

2010-02-07T22:41:00.004-07:00

I swam too fast. Did that last semester and the coach dialed up my intervals. Despite having taken several weeks sort of off, I was faster in Saturday's team time trials than I was in October.

That includes a 2:23 200 freestyle, 2:37 in the 200 IM, 1:03 for the 100 freestyle, and a 27.1 for the 50 freestyle. If you're not familiar with swimming speed, don't worry. I'm not in the same area code as the Olympians, nor am I as fast as I was in high school. I determined I'd have to give up everything else to be that fast again, and that doesn't appeal to me right now. But both coaches said I'll be doing harder workouts from here on out, for better or worse.

It's fun being a competitive swimmer again.

Start the madness

2010-01-31T21:17:00.002-07:00

You'll notice the schedule for 2010 has been posted. That's to signal that I start training officially tomorrow. The training program of my own design starts with a swim-heavy period to accommodate the masters swimming group; including Saturday's time trials I'm doing three meets this winter before the Razor City Splash and Dash in Gillette. That includes the Colorado State Masters Championships, where I plan on doing the 200-yard butterfly, the 400 individual medley, and the 1650 freestyle to earn a cool t-shirt. No one said I wasn't motivated, right?

Oh yeah, there's a t-shirt at stake for August's Rattlesnake Triathlon, the "Crazy Back-to-Back Challenge." I've done an Olympic-distance and a sprint in consecutive weeks, but consecutive days is something new. Probably no different than consecutive big training days. We'll see.

There are three half-Ironmans on the docket, the better to gain some speed and strength before going long again next year. The Boise race might prove to be my undoing if the winter persists beyond April, but I'm hoping to have a good swim and ride there, since those two disciplines are least affected by the weather. Believe it or not, it's easy to get on the trainer when my world remains covered in snow, and since I train in the pool anyway I'll be ready for the first half of the race. The second half is mostly to check off the state of Montana, and what better race than a two-year-old half-Ironman with less than 50 entrants? I did Harvest Moon in 2003 and it remains my fastest half-Ironman overall, and though the course has changed since that's one PR I want to wipe off the record books.

Now, you'll notice I'm doing the Portland Marathon four weeks after the Harvest Moon Triathlon. That will be an interesting balancing trick, to mix training for a fast half-Ironman with training for a decent enough marathon. I said I wanted to go for a PR for the half-Ironman distance but I never said at which race I would attempt it. It might be at the Headwaters triathlon, which will be followed by six weeks of run-heavy tri training before four weeks of really heavy run training. The plan is to do a 15-16-mile run up in the mountains every week starting in May, then an 18-miler the week before Harvest Moon, then a 20-miler the week after, followed by a three-week taper. I'll need to rely on muscle memory from previous marathons, as this won't be an ideal training cycle.

Then again, if I PR in Portland, and manage to push myself in the process, I'll throw everything I know about running out the window and train the same way again for the next marathon. And if I end up sustaining debilitating injuries, well, I heard about an opening in the International Couch Potato Union.

Square One, Part 3,620

2010-01-20T22:17:00.002-07:00

One of these days I'll learn I can't take months off at my age. Until then, I'll be content to:

• Crap out on the bike after an hour or so, though doing climbing drills and yanking my rear axle out of the trainer doesn't help matters.

• Barely get three miles done on the treadmill at 8:34 per mile, when a year ago I was knocking down 3 miles at 7:27 pace. Granted, last year I had a bit of a head start with marathon training but it's still tough to know how far behind my pace I am.

• Destroy my elbow ligaments in a 1,900-yard swim workout. Serves me right for really neglecting my swimming during a six-week holiday hiatus. I returned to the masters team tonight and it kicked my ass. I'm supposed to ride the bike again tomorrow but I feel like I need to get two swims in this week no matter what. And if I swim I won't get home until nearly 8 and I damn sure won't feel like waiting another hour for dinner to be ready. Decisions, decisions.

The next decision I make will be writing a training plan that involves no time off after my "A" races in the fall. This crap is ridiculous.

2009 in 30 words

2009-12-31T15:25:00.001-07:00

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

2009-12-17T21:07:00.002-07:00

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

2009-11-15T17:35:00.002-07:00

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

2009-11-10T19:41:00.002-07:00

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

2009-10-18T19:01:00.002-06:00

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

2009-10-06T21:34:00.002-06:00

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

2009-09-18T09:23:00.006-06:00

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

2009-09-08T23:55:00.002-06:00

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

2009-09-03T21:42:00.002-06:00

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!

2009-08-30T15:53:00.005-06:00

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

2009-08-15T13:43:00.003-06:00

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

2009-08-07T19:57:00.003-06:00

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

2009-08-05T21:16:00.002-06:00

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

2009-08-03T20:46:00.002-06:00

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!)

2009-07-24T20:59:00.004-06:00

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

2009-07-14T20:37:00.003-06:00

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

2009-07-06T19:49:00.003-06:00

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

2009-07-04T20:56:00.003-06:00

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

2009-06-24T08:16:00.002-06:00

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.

Home-course advantage, my butt: Laramie Duathlon

2009-06-15T08:06:00.002-06:00

OK, so maybe I am only posting when I race. That's easy to do when you're racing four consecutive weeks. Let me say that though I'm not traveling a lot for these races -- four straight weeks of racing with no overnight stays? Score! -- I can't imagine crisscrossing the globe for ITU races the way the pros do. It's hard enough to get rebooted for shorter events within two hours' drive. Mt hat's off to those boys and girls.

Saturday's Laramie Duathlon represented the second-shortest I've ever gone from front door to start line. The top honor goes to the F.E. Warren Triathlon, which took place on the F.E. Warren Air Force Base, just outside of Cheyenne. That was about two miles from my house but I did have the added bonus of explaining to the guard what a triathlon was, since there was no advance pub for this race at all. Saturday, I rode my bike 3.5 miles to Kiwanis Park in West Laramie for the duathlon.

But before I did that, I rode my bike for 45 minutes, just to get the blood flowing. Then I rode the 3.5 miles over the railroad tracks and under I-80 to the park, where I got my number, set up transition, and went for about a two-mile jog. Because this race was so short and I was doing it for nothing more than a measured brick, I thought it would be good to get in something resembling a workout beforehand. Overall, I benefited from the extra miles but my race suffered.

So the transition area was set up on a dirt parking lot. Because it's been a rainy spring I would either be brushing mud off my feet or kicking it out of my cycling shoes for the first part of the ride. Eh, I'll run in my cycling shoes, briefly.

Now, the literature for the race -- namely the Web site (cyclewyoming.org/du.htm), such as it is -- called the first run a 2-kilometer run. That was the case the night before when I checked the site to confirm what time I needed to be there. The course map still said 2 kilometers though the course was changed for some reason. So when the race director yelled "go," I was all set for a 2K run. Thus I was a little shocked when people seriously took off sprinting. Turns out it was a 1K run so I picked up the pace after the first turn, and then promptly dialed it back when I felt like the bear jumped on my back (high school track runners who ran a 400, ever, know what I'm talking about).

I was at a jog when I strolled into transition, already thinking "bike." I yanked my feet out of my shoes and with the right one came one of the insoles. Fun. I tried stuffing back in and I'm pretty sure about 20 people passed me in that first transition. That's fine, I thought, I'll just crush the bike. It was a rare windless day so any of the legions riding mountain bikes were ripe for the picking. Indeed, I lost track of the number of people I passed on the 25-kilometer, out-and-back cycle portion, so I focused on keeping my heart rate reasonable. That is, when I wasn't trying to pass more people. The two were mutually exclusive, however.

Anyway, I was about 15th when I made it back to transition for the 5K run. Got my feet into my running shoes with no problem, surprisingly, and I took off on the run, though about three people got places on me in transition. My transitions are glacial and need work.

Oof. Again, the lactic acid set in within a few strides so I dialed it back, reminding myself that this was just a workout, and then end result was not as important as... other things. I felt like I was jogging and my heart rate was in the 180s for much of that second run. What the hell? I finished with a time of 23:35 for the 5K, 2:35 slower than six days prior. The cooldown jog, in barefeet around the three little-kid soccer fields, actually felt better than any point during the race.

Anyway, I got third in my age group and brought home a white ribbon. Now, while I've gotten age-group hardware the past two weeks, this Saturday's Loveland Lake-to-Lake will be entirely different matter altogether. It's Colorado's de-facto state championship and I expect to get my clock cleaned quite nicely. From this race I'm just looking for physiological gains. And maybe some faster transitions.

Need some cowbell: Greeley Triathlon report

2009-06-08T15:58:00.002-06:00

Don't get the idea that I'll blog only when I race. It's just worked out that way recently, between a work trip and a tiny bit of training despair. Plus, this is the month where I do four races in a span of 21 days, or if you count Bolder Boulder, five races in 35 days. So there will be at least one blog a week between now and then. Bitchin', right?

So yesterday was the first triathlon of the season. I did the Greeley Triathlon in the eponymous town in Colorado in 2003, while my parents were visiting. I don't remember a whole lot of the course other than the swim at Centennial Park's pool. It was short and it hurt like a MF. Since then, the race is under new management and the course is different. It's still short, though, and it effing hurts.

Mind you, my training breaks down like this: I hadn't swum in two weeks for one reason or another; I hadn't biked for a week while I was at Yellowstone for work, though I paroled it from the shop and took it out for some hills Friday, followed by a 2:15 wind-fest on Saturday; and I ran once while at Yellowstone, though I hiked around five miles a day on average. I was racing purely because I signed up. And because I wanted to race, I wanted to get the synapses firing, I wanted to have my body respond to my number being written on me in toxic magic marker, and I wanted to match up with the rest of the world (or northern Colorado, as it were). However, I decided I wouldn't wear a watch, as both my old-school and new-school Timex Ironmans have dead batteries and I haven't bothered to fix them. My heart-rate monitor has a strap that wraps around my chest, and I haven't figured out how tight I can get it to stay on during a swim without suffocating myself. So I would be competing on what Colorado cross country coach Mark Wetmore calls "sensory data," going as fast as you feel comfortable.

The night before the race, I shaved my legs. Those who know me well know I'm militantly anti leg-shaving for guys because I don't think it serves any purpose other than fashion, and I've never been one for aesthetics. If shaving legs stood between me and a spot in Kona, I'd think about it. Might even give up beer and Pepsi before mowing the blond lawn on my legs. But on Saturday I was bored and there was a pool swim, and thanks to my years of high school swimming I know for a fact there's a distinct advantage when gliding through the water with smooth legs. Sunday, I figured I'd need every advantage I could get. Fortified by two bottles of Sunshine Wheat, a little bit of Bailey's on the rocks, and nearly asleep with boredom, I grabbed the Sensor Excel and scraped away. They look pretty good, if I do say so myself.

My sleep ended up being a four-hour nap. I never get much sleep the night before a race because I'm always so excited to line up and go. That's why, the night before the night before, I blow off the alarm and slumber away (learned that in HS track). So after my four-hour nap that passed for sleep, I loaded up the car, secured my newly cleaned and tuned-up ride (thanks, Pedal House in Laramie!) to the roof of my Honda Civic Hybrid, and headed east and south. I caught the backside of a fairly serious thunderstorm with hail, and clutched at the thought of my bike getting pelted with frozen ice balls. Fortunately, no damage was sustained. Whew.

I did a longer warmup than normal, as six years of Ironman training has finally made me realize I need to be sweating with a rapid pulse before a sprint. Half-irons and irons offer a nice, long warmup in the form of a swim. Sunday, a hard 500 meters wasn't going to cut it so I did about 20 minutes between the three disciplines.

With the pool swim comes the most creative solution for getting everyone on the course in good order. Entrants provide a predicted swim time for the 500-meter swim, and the race numbers reflect this. For example, the fastest predicted swim time gets No. 1 and so on. I was No. 48, though I predicted my swim time when I had been in Laramie for two months and was still gasping for every breath of pool air. Nine minutes seemed reasonable at the time. Every 10 seconds a competitor pushed off the wall, though the race director increased the interval when things got bottlenecked. I got to see the first couple of guys leave the pool, and I observed that almost everyone ahead of me did flip turns; I was at last among friends.

So I pushed off and my shorts rolled down my waist. I'll call out the brand name because this was why I stopped swimming in them regularly. Louis Garneau tri-shorts have a looped drawstring that loosens and tightens at will. The problem is you can't knot them because not only does the drawstring congeal like cement in the water, now you have to figure out how to get them on. I knotted them somewhat loosely late last year and did pool work in them, but got tired of them almost falling off with every push-off, so I saved them for races. Well, this was a race, so I wore them. And I ended up having to shuffle off the wall instead of truly pushing to spare the crowd a shot of my white ass, and possibly my fellows.

I passed four people ahead of me in the water, hammered the last lap, hopped out of the pool (Christ in a cartoon, it's cold!) and ran to my bike. I had some trouble with my top but you try putting a dry top on a wet body. Off I went for the 11.8-mile bike ride. I took the bottle cages off my bike for the short race, thinking I'd just hydrate well beforehand and grab drinks in each transition, which worked too well. It was a two-lap course so I spent the first lap just hammering on my big gear and doing recon for the second lap. I caught this guy on a much nicer bike and we went back and forth for a bit before I managed to get into a groove. On the second lap I used my knowledge and picked up the pace, dropping off the big gear for a minor climb and the turn to the transition area.

There weren't very many bikes but I took my time and found my rack easily, as opposed to rushing through it. My feet found the shoes nicely, I grabbed my shades (it was overcast but I was thinking positive), and dashed off. The guy on the sweet bike beat me out of transition by a few seconds so I figured I'd have a pacing point. I stayed with him for a while but fell back because the tiny bit of fluid I drank before the race was sloshing around in my stomach. And I was starting to hurt a bit. Wah. I just kept it steady, took a little water halfway through the run, and picked it up when I made the turn for home.

The results came out about 20 minutes after I finished. Well, a draft of the results. They had me second in my age group, men 35-39 years old, arguably the toughest in the sport at any race. No, I thought, that won't last. There are people still on the course. Another 20 minutes passed and some more results were printed. Still second. I talked to the guy who started right before me in the swim. He was second in his age group, too, after riding a flat tire for five miles of the bike. He said there would have to be some serious cyclists and runners still out there, and to just accept the results and be glad. No, that's not in my nature. Where are the other 35-39 males today, I asked? There was a sprint at the Boulder Reservoir Saturday, so some of them might have done that. And they couldn't re-boot a day later for another sprint. Wussies.

The last finisher crossed and the awards started. Lo and behold, I went up and accepted my prize, a big, red cowbell. Bitchin'. First hardware in a triathlon since 2005, when I was the third Wyoming finisher in the Best in the US race at the Loveland Lake-to-Lake Triathlon. At that time I told people that was all they needed to know about the lack of triathletes in Wyoming. Once again, I fall back on having finished well in a weak field. But as my friend Gail said, all you have to do is beat whoever is there on that day rather than worry about who didn't show. Brilliant.

Done, done, on to the next one...

Hell of a start, eh? Bolder Boulder report

2009-05-26T13:36:00.002-06:00

There's not much to say after running my slowest standalone 10K ever. Seriously, I've split faster on the end of triathlons than I did at the Bolder Boulder yesterday. And, appropriately enough, the story at the Boulder Daily Camera (http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/may/25/bolder-boulder-kicks-cool-dry-weather/) refers to "No-excuses weather."

Right, no excuses other than my own shoddy training. I've run seven times since the St. Louis Marathon, and while that time was (supposed to have been) spent reacquainting myself with the bike and the pool, I still should have had a little more jump than I did, given what my final time was. For the record it goes in the books as a 48:34, exactly six minutes slower than I ran in 2003. Yesterday it was low 50s and cloudy with no wind, while six years ago it was mid 70s and sunny. There's the fact that I started in the third wave of the day in 2003, meaning I had no more than 600 people on the course ahead of me, but I know how to run in thick crowds, which I did in 1995 when I ran a 46:07 while starting in one of the last waves (I signed up two days before the race).

I stayed the night at my friend Jen's condo, located a 10-minute drive from the start line. We parked at her office and had a little jog to the start line. The starters this year were University of Colorado athletics director Mike Bohn and 2008 Olympic steeplechaser Jenny Barringer, a CU alum. My wave started and I stayed to the outside because the first two turns tend to be pretty crowded. Naturally, I couldn't help but be caught up in the energy of the pack and I easily ran 7:25 for the first mile. After the race, Jen and I looked at an elevation profile of the course and, surprise, the first mile is all downhill. There's maybe 200 feet in variation between the course's lowest point (at about 1.25 miles) and the highest (around 5), but there's still going to be gravity conspiring with momentum to jack with my intended pace.

Onward. I slowed down quite a bit for the second mile as the race turned into north Boulder's residential areas. That's where some hills start. So, really, I didn't need to slow myself down as I had gravity helping me out. And I had my own muscle rebellion to help out. The last two miles of the race felt like the last 300 of an 800-meter run. Even on the last two hills, up into Folsom Field for the big stadium finish, the muscle fibers wouldn't fire. As Phil Liggett would say, channeling "Star Trek" while calling the Tour de France: "Control to engine room, we need more power. Engine room to control, there's nothing to give."

The start I'm referring to is the official start of my Ironman Wisconsin training. While I've long since accepted that a Kona spot just ain't happening this year, it's still discouraging to know how far I have to go. Granted, a flat-out 10k is in no way an indication of what it will take to roll through an Ironman marathon, but it's discouraging nonetheless.

Where do I go from here? The open roads...

Cycling sucks

2009-05-14T08:28:00.003-06:00

Hate is a strong word. Life is too short to hate anyone or anything. I don't hate Walmart or KMart, but I won't shop there for a number of reasons. I don't hate American cars but the one I've had crapped the bed way too soon and I'll never buy another.

So it should come as a shock to learn that I hate cycling. Maybe.

Swimming and running are pure. You put on your suit and goggles, hop in the water, and go. If something hurts, change how you swim. Or grab a kickboard. Or pull buoy. Or fins. Or you put on your shoes and go. If something hurts you walk, or stretch, or stop.

"Only the bicycle is pure in heart," wrote Iris Murdock. She has a point. To a point. The bicycle involves moving parts that need maintenance -- lubrication or adjustment or replacement. It's key to know when those things are needed, either by looking at them or by feel. I know my own body inside and out, but this extension of my body, 22 years after I bought my first one, remains a mystery.

Distance-wise cycling comprises roughly 80 percent of an Ironman, 112 miles of 140.6. Time-wise, that figure drops to around 56 percent. In my PR of 11:42:40 (Florida 2003), my bike split was 5:42 and something, less than half the time I spent out there, attributable to hitting the wall on the run. But in my goal for Ironman Wisconsin this year, my goal split of 5:36 is around 55 percent of the 10:45 I hope to be out there. The split goal looks arbitrary but that's 20 mph for 112 miles. And to meet that goal I'd better get cracking. Sigh.

It's no secret why triathletes like T.J. Tollakson and Jordan Rapp are tearing things up. They both have degrees in engineering, and they spend every fiber of their expertise making their bikes faster, from shaving ounces off the weight of their chains to debating the drag coefficients of 10 different kinds of wheels. None of that shit interests me. Since seventh grade, when Mr. Kannegeiter suggested I just don't have the mental faculties to do math, I've been more than happy to fulfill that prophecy (witness the mental gymnastics to figure out my pace in St. Louis, at least until I mailed it in the last 5.2 miles). Mechanical things puzzle me, and my seven-year-old bike, like most everything that's seven years old (including humans) requires more attention than I can muster. Beyond lubing the chain once a week and changing tubes, however, I have no idea what to do. And I have no idea (beyond general fitness) why I feel so damned slow and cumbersome on it.

Cycling in the sustained 30 mph winds of the Laramie Valley can be frustrating at best, dangerous at worst. You think you're headed straight into the wind and then it shifts 45 degrees, blowing you either into traffic or into the ditch. Or maybe it doesn't shift and you spend an hour-and-a-half in your third-smallest gear, spinning into the zephyr, only to turn around and spend an hour coasting back to town. Is there any real aerobic benefit to that? Let's not forget that the only viable north-south route (guaranteeing an equally dangerous crosswind) is a U.S. highway favored by drunk motorists and methed-out truckers, and reputed to be a 65 mph graveyard.

All this is to say nothing of the ridiculous culture divide between cyclists and triathletes. Cyclist culture is one of conformity, from their packs and arcane rules of etiquette to the attire, matching the jersey to the shorts to the socks. Triathletes are just out to ride, to get from the swim to the run in the most efficient manner possible, and it doesn't have to look pretty. Put me in the "just ride, baby" camp, which of course runs counter to the local culture. Fuck that noise.

So there. My bike leans against some shelves in my interior hallway, ready to go. I lay in bed and wait for the alarm to go off. When it does, I go to the bathroom, pass my bike, return to my bedroom... and get dressed for work.

Cycling... or not

2009-05-02T15:20:00.002-06:00

The bike made its outdoor debut on Monday. I took it up Roger Canyon Road north and east of town, giving it a climb I wasn't aware was that steep. It was the one day out of about 20 that the wind blew out of the east; normally it prevails from the west off the Snowy Range, picking up speed on the 32 miles of savannah between a wide spot in the road called Centennial and Laramie.

But I'll brave that another day. Point is, it's May and I've had my bike outside twice. Twice. Granted, some of that had to do with my hopeless run focus, but the weather has kept me on the trainer in front of endless Ironman videos for much of what's passed for spring. The bike-focused Ironman training will either come as a huge shock to my system or it'll be a welcome change from the pounding of marathon training.

Perhaps both.

Breaking the fast

2009-04-27T18:12:00.002-06:00

"I don't know if it'll make any change. But I guess it's time I started playing ball."

Back to the pool I went. There's a thermometer high on the wall above the five-lane pool at Half-Acre Gymnasium. I still haven't figured out if it's the air temperature or the water temperature but it read 82 degrees. Neither one would surprise me, and I now know a bottle full of frigid water is mandatory to keep me from overheating. When I took off my cap (yes, I'm about four months clear of my last haircut) the water trapped inside felt like soup as it tumbled down my neck.

Anyway, I stumbled through 2,000 yards, missed about three flip turns, and probably stared a millisecond too long at the babe in the lane next to mine. Some things never change.

The BFSIB gets even more SI

2009-04-23T14:38:00.008-06:00

Here are the photos. I've never bought my pics and I'm not starting with this race.

I can't get this damn thing to link, so if you're curious enough to copy and paste, tip o' the hat to ya.

http://www.runphotos.com/browse.cfm?race_id=153&bib_number=331&searchword=&subFind=Find+Photos

Feet like lepers: St. Louis Marathon report

2009-04-21T11:18:00.002-06:00

Before running a marathon in the rain, my feet take the prize as the most disgusting part of my body. First let's get something straight.

I don't have body image issues. I've long since accepted the world prefers buff, bulky men that fill up a shirt, work as bouncers, and get car repairs for free by merely stating that intent. If I were built like that, I would, too. That said, I've accepted my lean, lithe figure, and embrace the fact that, 17 years after graduating from high school, I weigh five pounds more than I did then and I can still wear the same size clothes. So I don't worry about the fact that some supermodels have the same height and weight as I.

Back to the topic at hand. Certain things happen when you spend your time elevating your heart rate at regular intervals. Yes, your legs tone out and your resting pulse descends and your entire cardio system works more efficiently. Admittedly, however, certain parts of one's body take a great deal of the impact, the nasty stuff. For a runner, that would be the feet.

If were to do the metrosexual thing and get a pedicure, I could see it going down like this. Pedicurist comes out of the back, takes one look at my feet, throws her apron on the floor, and says, "Hell no. I'll quit before I touch those things with someone else's hands." Seriously, the pointer toes boast nails in various states of decay. I lost the left one training for my first marathon in 2001 and it never grew back properly. The right one has been black for almost a year. My heels crack and split like chapped lips. My big toes are calloused but still blister. And the tops of my feet have veins like pipes as well as scars from where I screwed up while tying my shoes, or from the Bass dress shoes I didn't vet thoroughly enough before purchasing.

With this as a backdrop, I'll say in advance I ran through a lot of rain on Sunday. There is no amount of protection my synthetic socks could provide with that kind of moisture all around. No clue what the measurements were but it rained during the first and last seven miles; the first seven were no big deal because I was settling in and impervious to the conditions but the last seven sucked because I had gotten used to being dry. Ugh.

Liz and Elisa headed out to separate gatherings, leaving me behind to attempt a staredown with Rontu. No problem there, that was part of the plan. They came home a half-hour or so apart, walking past my slumbering corpse on the couch, both before midnight. The next morning, I woke up and had my meager breakfast at 4 a.m., and read some more of "Summer of '49." Elisa followed an hour and a half later and gave me a ride to the start line. I suggested she drop me off and head back home to finish sleeping, advice she took. If it hadn't been raining, she might have hung around and taken pictures (she's a ridiculously talented artist) but I wouldn't have asked anyone, family or friend, to stand out there in the rain and wait for my sorry ass to finish this nonsense.

I hung out for about an hour, stripped down to my shorts and Cubs shirt (in advance, I got a couple of compliments and a minimum of grumbling), and stood in the rain for about 15 minutes before some guy with a microphone said "go." There were 15,000 people signed up for the marathon, half-marathon and marathon relay, and while logistically things went smoothly for me, I might be done with big-city marathons, at least for a while. It just felt so cramped and crowded, and I'm just not a fan of taking 2:40 to reach the starting line. Yes, I realize it'll take 10 times as long if I ever do Boston, and some races involve hours getting to the start line. Simple solution: With the exception of Boston (and the Bolder Boulder, or any other race that seeds its participants in waves), I'll avoid any race with more than about 1,000 people in it.

Anyway, I started really slow. Strategically this probably is the best marathon I've run, between starting out slowly and gradually increasing my pace over the course of the first half of the race. I hit my fueling and never felt out of it physically or mentally until mile 21. Aside from briefly trying to chase a cute Asian woman between miles 6 and 10, I ran my own race and didn't worry about anything else around me.

There was just rain, though.

It rained for the first seven miles of the race, which didn't bother me because I was dialing in my pace and trying to get enough to drink, while trying to avoid the nasty-deep puddles. Plus, I live for racing in shitty conditions, but as long as those conditions are on my terms; that eliminates extreme heat and wind. The rain and temperatures in the 50s were a nice departure from the extended winter we've had here on the high plains, but perhaps my theory was proven again: Humidity neutralizes altitude.

At about mile 8 it stopped raining. At mile 10 for the marathon the half-marathon course split from the marathon one and suddenly there was about one-tenth the amount of people on the course. "Now it gets lonely," one runner said. "Yeah, and we lost that brunette with the nice butt," was the reply. One, lonely running is redundant; two, most male runners are pigs, true, but because it's a lonely pursuit we are somewhat self-motivated. So we kept moving forward.

There was a clock at every mile marker and I occupied my mind by doing the math of my pace. This definitely was higher math because I had to subtract 2.67 minutes from the time on the clock, which I assumed started when the guy said "go." Then dividing and figuring the pace. I calculated that I did one mile (around 14) in close to eight minutes. Surely that didn't derail my race but it didn't help. What helped was me getting drier the longer it went without raining. At mile 19 my hat, shorts and shirt were dry and I was steeling myself for the last push. Run to 20. Run to 20. Run to 20.

About that time it started raining again. I ran to 20. It rained harder. I ran to 21. The rain stayed constant. I felt the skin on the ball of my right foot folding and rubbing. The blister on my Achilles' heel ruptured and stung, and the scrape on the top of my left foot pinched. By mile 21.5 I was on a long, gradual hill and walking for the first time. After just a mile-and-a-half of rain my shirt was sticking to me again, and the water was falling off the brim of my hat. I don't need to tell you what my thighs felt like. And that about did it.

The last four miles were a constant up-and-down, both emotionally and geographically. Walk up a hill only to pound my legs and feet on the way back down. Drink water, then Gatorade. Watch the crowd get thicker, feel another piece of skin fall off my foot. Look at the watch and continue to calculate what you must do to get across the line in 3:45, 3:50, 3:55 (after the bib-designated leader of the 3:50 pace group passes you).

A wheelchair competitor nearby was excoriating herself over her effort, struggling up the hills and coasting on the downhills. "I'm such a wimp," she said. Not sure where I have room to complain, eh?

Anyway, the finish is down a slight hill, and takes a quick S-turn. I saw the clock and it said 4:02:20-something when I looked up. Quick calculation: I broke four hours. I think. Did I add pi and divide by sigma?

Official time was 3:59:34. I squished through the finish chutes, got my medal, a glass of lemon-lime Gatorade, and then some food. This was all on well-trod grass, which by the time I got there was mud. First thing I did when I could sit down was take off my shoes and socks. The damage was nasty -- blisters on both big toes, folds of skin on the bottoms of both feet, the aforementioned Achilles' rub. And I could barely sit or stand. And it was still raining.

27th mile: What pissed me off the most was that someone at the expo said there would be orange Gatorade on the course. So I got a bottle of fierce grape because of my longstanding aversion to all things orange (notwithstanding my choice of college). All I saw on the course was yellow Gatorade. Dammit. I carried 24 ounces of liquid for nothing. ... I can't thank Elisa enough for carting me around at oh-dark-thirty on her day off. She met me at City Hall after I texted, then we went to Pi for some of the best pizza I've ever had. I bought lunch but I still don't think that's enough. ... My celebratory meal 24 hours later: Jack in the Box. Large chocolate shake, bacon-cheddar potato wedges. When I got home, it was tomato soup and two bowls of cereal. ... I was the only finisher from Wyoming. At Cincinnati's Flying Pig Marathon, that earns me some special treatment. ... The plan is to take this week off and hope to God that I don't enjoy it so I can at least get on the swimming and cycling next week. ... Thanks for reading this far, you masochist. Maybe I'll reward you with a picture of my feet.

T-Minus 22 hours and change: Planes, trains and automobiles

2009-04-18T07:23:00.004-06:00

Dateline: St. Louis.

Kudos to my boss for advocating that I go to Denver on Thursday night. Because, as I've learned this month, winter on the high plains extends deep into April. This time, I drove down after a communications department retreat on Thursday afternoon, and instead of the weather clearing upon crossing into Colorado it got worse. There was a nice layer of ice underneath the slushy snow and that helped me take two hours to drive to Fort Collins. Of course, it was all rain in Colorado, in some spots raining so hard that I couldn't see more than a quarter-mile in front of me.

I got a hotel room I couldn't afford, ate leftovers microwaved in the breakfast room downstairs, and got a good night's sleep, falling asleep in front of FitTV (Gabrielle Reece interviewing Barry Zito about his regimen of yoga, stretching, surfing and guitar-playing; and then Gina Lombardo, fitness trainer to the stars, talking to pro football players sitting in ice baths and to ex-volleyball players about warming up their rotator cuffs).

When I woke up Friday, the first thing I did... OK, second thing I did was check my flight status. My flight to St. Louis was cancelled. The one leaving early in the morning was on time. The one leaving an hour after mine was on time. But mine was cancelled. I had planned on hitting the treadmill for a half-hour but I had to get to the airport. They rebooked me to St. Louis through Chicago and, eventually, I got here. I took the Metrolink train to the arena here, picked up my packet, and made my way to my friend Elisa's crib in the Shrewsbury section of St. Louis.

We had dinner, went out out for a drink, tired out her dog in the backyard, and then went to sleep at a somewhat reasonable hour. Now I'm figuring out how to bury the day before a race. I've never been to this city before and I want to see as much of it as possible, but I also want to stay off my feet some. Or I could be a true tourist and chalk up tomorrow's race as a loss. We'll see.

I forgot to mention Elisa's dog, Rontu, a 75-pound SIberian husky. He's very sociable and has not shown one iota of hostility toward me, a guest in his house (though Elisa's roommate, Liz, aka the owner of this house, would have something to say about that). I was awakened by the jingling of tags and the hard padding of large clawed feet across hardwood floors, followed by a wet nose on my forehead. No problem, though; there was no malicious intent. I've thought about getting one of those for myself, but Elisa says they're kind of high-maintenance, and my concern would be how the cat would react to an interloper. Then again, 12-year-old, 6-pound Lucy might own that dog after a couple of days.

The weather here? It was 72 and sunny when I emerged from the main terminal at Lambert International Airport. It's going to be 70 and cloudy today. For the sake of perspective, I think I've seen 60 once this spring, and that preceded snow or something. It'll be "cooler" Sunday, according to the national weather service, with temperatures in the upper 50s. There will be much water and Gatorade consumed today.

Oh yeah, the race. I've followed through on my thread of purchasing a Cubs shirt to wear. And they're playing the Cardinals in Chicago this weekend. What timing! And I'll wear my lightweight shoes, after reading an article in the latest Triathlete about the perils of wearing heavy motion control shoes. While you're not supposed to try new things for a race, my training regimen dictates this race could be all about experimentation. God help me if I get a PR.

T-minus seven days

2009-04-12T15:53:00.002-06:00

Actually, it's less than seven days from this moment, as the marathon starts at 6 a.m. MDT. Be that as it may, the proverbial hay is in the barn. I'm in full taper mode, though in looking at my training log it could be argued that I started tapering weeks ago. The training plan called for roughly 472 miles of running (in 12 weeks, including speedwork and warmups and cooldowns for same), and I'll finish next week something like 100 miles short of that. On the plus side, it means I can use my current running shoes for another month or so.

Saturday's 10-mile run was the best I've had in a couple of weeks, so I'll have some momentum heading down to the Loo. Granted, I'm running another 16.2 miles but I'll remember that 10-miler when things get rough. Perhaps I'm getting used to the training, or the altitude, or I'm just getting tougher. Who knows? We'll find out Sunday.

Here ends one of the most boring blog posts in human history...

Oh yeah, the race

2009-04-08T16:19:00.002-06:00

With a thin layer of ice and snow under foot, I set off from downtown Littleton toward somewhere south of downtown Denver with 1,300 (OK, 1,138 finishers) of my closest friends. We had bright sun and 20 degrees with no wind, but I was still surprised to be in a distinct minority of those people not wearing something covering their legs. Yes, mine are pasty white but still pretty damn ripped. And I've got to start getting some color on them somehow.

Anyway, I kept my pace reasonable, took a glass of water at every other aid station, monitored my heart rate (averaged 171, maxed at 176, no doubt in the final quarter-mile), and actually put up a little bit of a kick at the end. Final time was 1:39:23. I finished 142nd overall, 35th (I think) in my age group and first finisher from Wyoming. Gotta hang my hat on something.

During the race, I chafed the insides of my thighs something terrible. Afterward, I walked over to the first aid place and asked for some vaseline, which they provided. When they asked where I chafed I just kind of looked down at my shorts, and the ladies all nodded knowingly. One of them, who wasn't there when I silently indicated that I'd cowboyed the hair off that part of my thighs, offered to rub it on me. I replied, "No thanks. Besides anyone rubbing me down there has to buy me dinner first." The remark was taken in the spirit in which it was intended.

Now, on to the marathon after a brief taper.

OT: Things we remember

2009-04-04T21:04:00.002-06:00

Dateline: Littleton, Colo.

Per usual, the weather changed my plans. Another blizzard coats the high plains in white, so I decided to come down this afternoon. I-80 was closed from Rawlins to the Nebraska border, covering about 200 miles of road in Wyoming, but U.S. 287 was open from Laramie to the Colorado border. It's reportedly one of the deadliest highways in the country on a good day, but today it was whited out. I used the reflective sticks at the side of the road as my guide, it was so hard to figure where the road ended. It took an hour to cover the 26 miles from my house to the Colorado border.

When I crossed into the Centennial State, the sky didn't part but the roads cleared. The snow and ice clinging to the asphalt stopped at the border. Swear. The rest of the drive — the destination was Runners Roost on South Colorado Avenue in Denver — took around two hours, with a potty stop in Fort Collins. And I got close to 50 mpg, thanks to the 30 mph breeze blowing me (and several inches of snow) into Colorado.

I've taken up residence at a Fairfield Inn in Littleton on County Line Road. It's about 15 minutes from the start line, but that's not what stands out to me. As I was driving along County Line, things started looking familiar.

This was where Mun and I shared a few moments in the summer of 2005. She was the D.C.-based triathlete I signed up for Ironman Canada. She was working in Denver for an IT company when we dated for a few months that year. She discovered this bike trail that runs along C-470, a six-lane monstrosity that parallels County Line, and we did a few rides along that trail. And afterward we'd head to Wahoo's Fish Taco in some strip mall nearby. Pretty close to the perfect date, repeated several times... Hey, I'm a gentleman. That's all you're getting.

You could say I spend a lot of time living in the past. I've lived a lot of places and I love retracing my steps on occasion. It's amazing how the littlest thing triggers a flood of memories, and in this case it was taking a right turn and seeing that path. Tonight, I spent some time thinking about one of the best summers of my life (odd given the vicious north wind and horizontal snow), but realizing full well it won't happen again. I'm cool with that. Everything happens for a reason.

On to the race...

A race preview, more weather bitching, lesson learned

2009-04-02T21:32:00.004-06:00

Seeing a half-marathon on the race calendar for Denver the first weekend of April made me happy. I became especially happy after sending in the entry form. For $40 I get a point-to-point course, train fare from the finish line back to the start, a long-sleeved technical T-shirt, lunch, and a gauge of just how far I've fallen out of shape.

For the sake of perspective, I ran 1:31:25 at the Quad-City Half-Marathon in September 2007, 49 seconds short of a PR. It's roughly 19 months later and if I'm within five minutes (or 30 seconds per mile) of that time, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Amazing how my standards drop like a stone in the river, but I could call myself a victim of circumstance. Last October I did a half-iron in Arizona, then planned on taking a little time off. "A little time" became the better part of two months, as I relocated for a new job, then took weeks to get used to the change in terrain and altitude; 7,200 feet above sea level is a world of difference from around 500 feet.

Even before the relocation, I signed up for the St. Louis Marathon. My roommate, Tripp, offered to procure lodging and transportation; i.e. we were going to drive the Great River Road to the Loo and crash at his friend's place. Want to make God laugh? Make plans.

So the moral of this story is, don't sign up for April races if there's any chance outdoor training will suck. Now, Molly (mollyzahr.blogspot.com) lives in New Hampshire and has done a psychotic amount of training on her bike trainer and has toughed out gobs of snow-blown miles on the run, in anticipation of Saturday's Half-Ironman California. Good for her. If I had one-tenth her mental fortitude... well, I tip my cap her way. I wish... And as I said, I'm never signing up for an April race.

Why? Because the winters on the high plains extend deep into April. I had no idea how the winter weather would wear on me. I did a tempo run in the gym on Tuesday, as I walked home in snow showers and determined the best thing would be to run inside. I wore my shades as I walked across campus to the gym later that day. Today I rolled through nine miles on the streets of the Gem City in 1:16, and it felt... tolerable. Looking ahead, this is what I have to deal with for the weekend:

ANOTHER LATE WINTER STORM WILL AFFECT SOUTHEAST WYOMING AND THE
NEBRASKA PANHANDLE FRIDAY NIGHT INTO SATURDAY NIGHT
.A STRONG STORM SYSTEM WILL MOVE INTO THE CENTRAL ROCKIES THIS
WEEKEND...SETTING THE STAGE FOR A POSSIBLE HEAVY SNOWFALL EVENT.
THE BULK OF THE SNOW WILL FALL FROM LATER FRIDAY NIGHT THROUGH
SATURDAY EVENING. STRONG NORTH WINDS WILL ACCOMPANY THE SNOW...
CAUSING CONSIDERABLE BLOWING AND DRIFTING SNOW.
WYZ059>070-031100-
/O.CON.KCYS.WS.A.0007.090404T0000Z-090405T0000Z/
CONVERSE-NIOBRARA-SOUTHWEST CARBON-NORTH CARBON-SNOWY RANGE-
NORTH LARAMIE RANGE-LARAMIE VALLEY-LARAMIE RANGE-PLATTE-GOSHEN-
CHEYENNE FOOTHILLS-PINE BLUFFS-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...DOUGLAS...GLENROCK...LUSK...RAWLINS...
HANNA...MEDICINE BOW...CENTENNIAL...GARRETT...LARAMIE...BUFORD...
HORSE CREEK...WHEATLAND...GUERNSEY...TORRINGTON...CHEYENNE...
PINE BLUFFS
346 PM MDT THU APR 2 2009

WINTER STORM WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM FRIDAY EVENING
THROUGH SATURDAY AFTERNOON
A WINTER STORM WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM FRIDAY EVENING
THROUGH SATURDAY AFTERNOON.
SNOW...POSSIBLY HEAVY AT TIMES...WILL DEVELOP FRIDAY NIGHT AND
CONTINUE ON SATURDAY. STRONG NORTH WINDS WILL PRODUCE BLOWING
AND DRIFTING SNOW ALONG WITH REDUCED VISIBILITIES. BY LATE
SATURDAY AFTERNOON...NEW SNOWFALL AMOUNTS OF 5 TO 10 INCHES WILL
BE POSSIBLE...WITH THE HIGHER AMOUNTS MAINLY IN THE MOUNTAINS AND
EAST OF THE LARAMIE RANGE.
A WINTER STORM WATCH MEANS THERE IS A POTENTIAL FOR SIGNIFICANT
SNOW...SLEET...OR ICE ACCUMULATIONS THAT MAY IMPACT TRAVEL.
CONTINUE TO MONITOR THE LATEST FORECASTS.

Happy spring, indeed

2009-03-23T08:09:00.003-06:00

At least the bad stuff rolls in after I get my shitty 22-miler in the books. Long story short, if I were to be a homicide victim, the ideal death would be strangulation by my IT bands. They were inflamed at 18 miles, dipped in concrete by 19, so really I ran 19 miles and walked the last three. Somehow I'll get through the marathon in 27 days -- I always do. It'll just be as painful as every one before.

Anyway, here's what's going down in the Cowboy State today.

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE CHEYENNE WY
434 AM MDT MON MAR 23 2009

A MAJOR EARLY SPRING STORM WILL PRODUCE SIGNIFICANT SNOWFALL
AND STRONG WINDS TO THE AREA TODAY AND TONIGHT
.A INTENSE SPRING STORM SYSTEM WILL MOVE ACROSS THE CENTRAL
ROCKIES TODAY AND THEN EAST AND OVER THE CENTRAL PLAINS
STATES BY SUNRISE TUESDAY MORNING.  THE STORM SYSTEM WILL
PRODUCE SIGNIFICANT SNOWFALL AND STRONG NORTHERLY WINDS
OVER SOUTHEAST WYOMING AND THE WESTERN NEBRASKA PANHANDLE
THROUGH TONIGHT. BLIZZARD CONDITIONS WILL RESULT OVER
MUCH OF THAT AREA CREATING
HAZARDOUS TRAVEL.
WYZ059-060-064>070-232200-
/O.CON.KCYS.BZ.W.0002.090323T1200Z-090324T1200Z/
CONVERSE-NIOBRARA-NORTH LARAMIE RANGE-LARAMIE VALLEY-
LARAMIE RANGE-PLATTE-GOSHEN-CHEYENNE FOOTHILLS-PINE BLUFFS-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...DOUGLAS...GLENROCK...LUSK...GARRETT...
LARAMIE...BUFORD...HORSE CREEK...WHEATLAND...GUERNSEY...
TORRINGTON...CHEYENNE...PINE BLUFFS
434 AM MDT MON MAR 23 2009

BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM MDT TUESDAY
A BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 AM MDT TUESDAY.
SNOW WILL SPREAD OVER ALL OF SOUTHEAST WYOMING BY 8 AM AND
WILL CONTINUE THROUGH TONIGHT. THE SNOW WILL BE HEAVY AT
TIMES TODAY AND EARLY TONIGHT. ACCUMULATIONS OF 12 TO 18
INCHES IN EAST CENTRAL WYOMING WITH UP TO 20 INCHES IN
THE NORTHERN LARAMIE RANGE. FIVE TO 10 INCHES OF SNOW WILL
ACCUMULATE OVER THE REST OF SOUTHEAST WYOMING BY SUNRISE
TUESDAY. ALSO...NORTH WINDS WILL BE GUSTING 45 TO 55 MPH
WHICH WHEN COMBINED WITH THE HEAVY SNOW WILL CREATE BLIZZARD
CONDITIONS ACROSS THE AREA.
A BLIZZARD WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE
EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. FALLING AND BLOWING SNOW WITH STRONG
WINDS AND POOR VISIBILITIES ARE LIKELY. THIS WILL LEAD TO
WHITEOUT CONDITIONS...MAKING TRAVEL EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
DO NOT TRAVEL. IF YOU MUST...HAVE A WINTER SURVIVAL KIT WITH
YOU. IF YOU GET STRANDED...STAY WITH YOUR VEHICLE. FOR
SPECIFIC ROAD AND TRAVEL CONDITIONS IN WYOMING AND NEBRASKA
...PLEASE DIAL 5 1 1.

False alarm

2009-03-21T15:08:00.004-06:00

All it took was a nixed 14-miler, a tight wrap from an Ace bandage, and some well-placed ice.

The tendons on both sides of my left ankle are fine. I ran 4 miles Monday without pain, and have had no issues in my runs since. Tomorrow is the big test, a 22-miler out into one of the canyons, as much of it on the dirt and gravel shoulder as I can manage.

Today's 10-miler still taxed my IT bands, however, and I'm thinking that might be my biggest stumbling block to achieving my goals. There's no way I can run 7:27 per mile for 26.2 miles if my thighs feel like they've been dipped in concrete after 14, 16, 18 miles at that pace. Nor will I be able to run a 3:30 marathon off the bike in the same situation. Is this just something I'll get used to, that feeling that my thighs will explode and I'll look like Hank Hill's dad for the rest of my life if I take one more stride?

• So there is a negative to all this. I spent $18 more this month on groceries than I did last month. On the one hand, I do enjoy eating whatever I want knowing full well the "calories burned" column on my heart monitor will read deep into triple digits, and possibly quadruple digits. On the other hand, I'd rather not eat myself out of my apartment, or out of my car. I do have taxes to pay and other financial commitments to meet, so I'd rather Safeway not end up as my biggest beneficiary.

Hey, I enjoy shoveling food into my face as much as any American. At the same time nothing in this world keeps me awake nights like my finances, and the rumbling in my stomach might as well be the sound of a cash register like at the beginning of Pink Floyd's "Money." Feed the beast!

• This is my favorite time of year sports-wise, though it sucks to not have any way of pulling in a TV signal. Nor can I sit at the computer and watch my bracket crumble in real time. It's probably a good thing, then, that I will finish a 52-mile week this weekend, rather than having planted my skinny posterior on the futon watching the tall student-athletes make their universities and inveterate gamblers untold sums of money that they'll never see.

Pain

2009-03-15T16:23:00.002-06:00

This in no way trivializes the pain other people might be feeling. Like one friend facing down guillotine of corporate bullshit that could end her career. Or the one who recently gave birth nine weeks early. Or my niece, whose first lacrosse season might have ended before it started thanks to a stress fracture.

Anyway, running has been pain-free so far, which is good because it's taken more energy than I thought it should to get my body used to the reduced amount of oxygen. There's been a blister here, a toenail gash (and bloody sock) there, but I've stayed healthy.

Until yesterday.

Toward the end of a flat nine-miler, a sharp pain shot up and down my left leg, starting near my ankle. First though: Stress fracture. Twenty-five years of running now taking its toll. I tried stretching it out (though what you can do to stretch out a bone remains a mystery), slowed down, walked a bit, hoped like crazy... nothing worked. It still hurt.

The nine-miler became a seven-and-a-half miler, and I stumbled home for an ice pack. I sat on the couch with my left foot propped up on an exercise ball and a Zip-loc bag of ice. I tried to read Sports Illustrated but with five weeks to go before my marathon, I pondered the possibilities.

This is a place I haven't had pain before. The kicking motion in the water gives my ankles ridiculous flexibility, and the only time I've even sprained it (through years and years of team sports) was when I rolled it during a pickup basketball game in college. With the pain I had I wondered if how much Advil it would take to get through a marathon, or if maybe I should withdraw now and get myself healed before starting to train for Ironman in June.

My ankle sufficiently numbed, I went through the rest of my day. That night, as I walked downtown to meet some friends for drinks, I jogged a little and noticed something I hadn't before. Rather than a sting when my foot hit the ground, it was when my foot left the ground and cocked back. That means it's a tendon or ligament issue. Deep breath. Sigh of relief.

That means I can rest it, ice it, compress it (with a tight wrap from an ace bandage) elevate it and call it good. I bailed on a 14-miler today and while I hate to do that, I've got a 22-miler on Sunday that I consider far more critical. I'll run four easy miles tomorrow and see what happens. And I'll determine how to proceed from there.

My HRM says I'm dead, or the first 20-miler

2009-03-02T18:11:00.003-07:00

For some reason I'm still leery of going real long in Laramie, partly because of the wind but mostly because of the altitude. Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill but I'd rather not try to run long with my lungs struggling for every last breath — at least not yet.

So even though Laramie reported a high in the upper 50s on Sunday (and with nary a wind gust approaching 20 mph), I still headed down to Fort Collins to run 20 miles on the Poudre and Spring Creek Trails. I set off at what I thought was a leisurely, long run pace but it felt quick for some reason. But I stayed with it.

Now, why do I not have specifics as to the nature of the pace? There are no mile markers on either path. And my heart rate monitor didn't work. I licked it, I dumped water on it, then I dumped some more water on it, and still the display on my watch read "---." So my $200 watch is now... a watch.

I ran. And I completely drank all of four Fuel Belt bottles of stuff — 12 ounces of water, 12 ounces of Fierce Grape Gatorade. Got to see some of the same places I did when I ran there a few weeks back. That's how I can honestly say I ran 20 miles. Still, I just stopped and walked when my watch read 3 hours. That's all my legs would take. My IT bands started revolting at 2:30, and then they twisted like hair ribbons after my last fuel stop at 2:45. So I decided I'd walk the last little bit if it meant I could extend my legs to reach the pedals of my car.

Oh yeah, genius that I am, I forgot to pack Sport Stick in my bag. That's the stuff that will allow my thighs rub together without creating enough friction to start a fire. By the last 15 minutes I was running bowlegged, so you can imagine what it felt like when I applied the first of three coats of aloe that night. Lessen (ow) learned.

I'm OK with the run but I need to figure out how to push out that pain threshold. Or maybe just get my legs used to running great distances. Training probably would do me some good. It's warmed up now so I have no excuses for blowing off workouts. I have 48 days left as of today.

OT: The Rotund Lady sings for the Rocky Mountain News

2009-02-27T09:15:00.003-07:00

This is not the first newspaper to close since I graduated from Syracuse with degrees in newspaper and psychology. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was part of a merger. The Syracuse Herald-Journal was merged as well. And all this is to say nothing of the thousands of newspaper workers who have lost their jobs in the past several years.

I'll spare you my feelings on the corporate bitches who wanted nothing but to turn a profit off the backs of ill-paid professionals who poured their hearts and souls into their occupations. And don't get me started on the mouthbreathers who blame the media for everything from McCain losing the election to furthering the "gay agenda" (whatever the hell that is) to the absence of prayer in schools. This is what the economy has wrought. Dear readers, watch your backs.

Dealing with the cold

2009-02-18T21:15:00.003-07:00

Just for the record, I will remind my three readers that I was perfectly aware of the weather patterns of the high plains before I moved here. That doesn't mean it hasn't been a hard adjustment.

When I lived in Cheyenne, my seasons ended nicely in the fall, just as my work was firing up. And when I was ready to resume working out, I had mid-winter trips to San Diego, Las Vegas, Fort Worth, Albuquerque, etc. for motivation and warmth. In 2005 I even did a marathon on Mother's Day, which necessitated a January start for training. Though I can't remember putting in big miles while on the road for work, I also don't remember the meat of the winter being as rough as this one, so I had no problem getting the required miles in.

Furthermore, I'm finding out my wardrobe is not up to the task of a Laramie winter. My running tights, purchased at a running store in Northampton, Mass., in 1991 while on a college visit, have just a few lycra fibers remaining and offer little protection from any weather. On Saturday I plodded through what was supposed to be a 5-mile pace run with my nether regions numb from the cold. I ran the last quarter mile with my hand covering myself like a soccer player bracing for the impact of a free kick. So that means I wear my bulky wind pants until the temperature rises above 40 during my runs, probably around Easter. And all this is to say nothing of the snow flying straight into my eyes.

Now, I wake up at 6:30 a.m. each day, earlier if the stinkin' furnace kicks on to keep the mid-teen chill out of my living room. One morning I actually stepped out in the cold in my running clothes, intending to put in some speed work. When the goose bumps formed on my arms and legs, I uttered an expletive and headed back inside, poured a bowl of cereal and turned on Morning Edition. The toughest workouts to do when it's cold are speed workouts, because I learned the hard way back in high school there's no such thing as too much warming up when you're facing down sets of 400s and 800s on the track; pulled muscles can lay you up for weeks.

And why not wait until the (relative) warmth of the afternoon? Because the wind kicks up late in the morning and doesn't let off until well after sunset. Nothing like trying to keep your heart rate reasonable when fighting the wind, either heading into it at a snail's pace or trying not to get blown into traffic with the wind at your side. Wind is my least-favorite weather condition and I've lived in three of the windiest places on earth (Lubbock, Cheyenne and Laramie).

As previously documented, I try to keep the treadmill at a minimum — once a week, if possible. That's the four-mile recovery run that's moved from Monday to Tuesday as I've blown off the chilly pre-dawn speed work. I consider it a reward to pound away on the treadmill with my loud, angry music turning my eardrums to mush and the coeds contorting themselves on the exercise spheres in front of me.

Sigh... Guess I'm looking forward to spring more than I'll admit. Tonight I went 2 hours, 15 minutes on the indoor trainer in front of three 2006 Ironmans (my year off). The noise:

"ThunderKiss 65," White Zombie

"Battle Flag," Lo-Fidelity All-Stars

"Beef Jerky," House of Pain

"Eat the Rich," Aerosmith

"Twice as Hard," Black Crowes

"Seether," Veruca Salt

"Two Tickets to Paradise," Eddie Money

"Get On the Good Foot," Parts 1 and 2, James Brown

"Baião destemporado," Barbatoques

"Ready to Go," Republica

"I'm Alright," Kenny Loggins

"A Little Less conversation (JXL Mix)," Elvis Presley

"You're an Original," Sheryl Crow

"Riding," Buckcherry

"Will It Go Round in Circles," Billy Preston

"Slow Ride," Foghat

"Cut the Cake," Average White Band

"Return of the Tres," Delinquent Habits

"Beautiful Goal," Oakenfold

"Get on the Bus," Q-Ball

"Peaches," The Presidents of the United States of America

"Free," Yo! Flaco

"Reeling in the Years," Steely Dan

"Never Coming Down (Part II)," Spacehog

"Slither," Velvet Revolver

"Oh Yeah," Yello

"Pinhead," The Ramones

"One Too Many," The Loft

"Sleep," Downside

"Fine Again," Seether

"Just Because," Jane's Addiction

OT: A night at the theatre

2009-02-13T09:07:00.003-07:00

(Writer's note: When a post title is preceded by OT, that means it's off-topic. So if you were hoping to read my thoughts on riding my bike in front of OLN/Versus' coverage of Ironman Coeur d'Alene 2005 for the 12th time, you might skip such a post. Onward...)

There were several things that made taking this job a no-brainer, not the least of which was the salary. Those of you who know I was in newspapers know what I'm talking about. For example, during my days in Denton, Texas, Jack in the Box was hiring managers at $31,500, per a sign alongside I-35E. That would have been a $10,000-a-year raise from what I was making at the time.

The other fringe benefits involve being on a campus. I have a fairly nice gym and pool in which to work out (so there's the obligatory tie-in to my workout regimen), there are roughly 7,000 college co-eds strolling across campus for me to ogle (for better or for worse), there are roughly 4,000 of the sharpest minds on the planet in this community to challenge me in my work on a daily basis, I can finally become a paying customer of the college sports I love, and any campus is the cultural epicenter of the community.

Let's not forget the work hours. I played trumpet from fifth grade through college, and since May 12, 1996, my graduation day, my horn has sat unmolested in its case through however many times I've moved. My parents are always after me to play again but I've explained to them on a semi-monthly basis since I graduated that it's hard to engage in a hobby that requires nights and weekends free (any musicians ever do gigs at noon in the middle of the week?) when you work nights and weekends. True story here -- when I moved to Denton, Texas, in 1997, I was walking near the University of North Texas Campus when I saw a flyer posted to a light pole. It said a ska band (again, this is 1997) needed trumpet and trombone players. I started to tear off one of the flaps with the lead guitarist's phone number on it when I realized what my work hours were going to be. "Sure," I thought, "I'll play horn for you. I just can't do gigs on Thursday, Friday or Saturday nights." The life of a sports writer, indeed.

Plus, the "normal" hours mean I have time to enjoy such things, if not participate in them. Like last night, I went to a theatre production. I knew all about it because it's a story I'm working on for the magazine, and because it involves so many elements (dance, drama, comedy, music, physical theatre) I couldn't help but want to see the finished product, even after sitting in on one rehearsal and a dress rehearsal. Plus, now that I have a little more money I want to support these things as much as I can, partly to compensate for not doing so in the past 12 years.

I'll see if I can synopsize it briefly. The production is called "Heyokah/Hokahey," a devised theatre production conceptualized and executed by a group of University of Wyoming theatre students, guided by world-famous mime Bill Bowers. "Heyokah" is a person in Lakota Sioux whose job is basically to be a court jester. "Heyokah" literally means "the opposite," and that person shows us new ways of looking at things, fearlessly questioning things that have gone unquestioned. So the show looks at the world, in particular some of those Lakota stories, in different ways, from the perspective of a person on the fringes of society. It was absolutely amazing, more so when you consider Bowers has been on campus all of six weeks, and that he came here with nothing more than a concept, a seed to plant with his students in the hope that something would grow from a mere idea. It's not for everyone, for sure, but if you ever see "devised theatre" in an events listing, approach it with an open mind and enjoy.

Plus, you can't help but get caught up in the passion of the performers, especially if you've spent an hour chatting with them about what they've done the past six weeks. I love watching people engage in their crafts because you know they're pouring every ounce of their being into this performance (assuming you're not watching Randy Moss run pass routes for a 4-8 team), and sometimes that passion spills over to the audience. When a cynic like me can feel this way, you know there's something special going on.

Another setback

2009-02-09T08:56:00.004-07:00

I slept in Sunday, waking up at 8:30 to head out for an 18-mile run. It's Laramie, it's February, so I figured it would be cold, maybe a little windy.

Yep, I was right. I still set out in shorts, UnderArmour, vest and gloves. I went south with it in mind to run out for 1:15, back in the same time, barring wind. Within 20 minutes I was plodding forward at about 11 minutes a mile, leaning into the bitter wind, and my left arm was numb. I headed back after 30 minutes, went to the apartment, zipped the sleeves back on my vest, put on tights, and headed back out again. This time I headed back after 37:30, turning around at the legendary steakhouse, The Calvaryman. As it happened on the first lap, my heart rate dropped 10 beats (167 to 157) within two minutes of regaining the tailwind.

So I don't know what I gained from this. Poking around on MapMyRun, I figure I did between 14 and 15 miles, but I don't think bailing on a long run two weeks in and 10 weeks out is going to break my marathon. Next week I plan on running 16 on some trails above Laramie -- another 1,000 feet above Laramie. I'm not making up mileage; I don't believe in obsessively trying to hit a mileage target every week. It just seems like a good idea to get off the asphalt and see if I can go a little longer than the 14 regularly scheduled, and especially in the thin air.

Otherwise, I just finished a book called "Running with the Buffaloes," by Chris Lear, a chronicle of the 1998 cross country season for the University of Colorado men's cross country team. While the greatest insights came from what forges a top-level team comprised of bad-ass Division I-calber distance runners (100 miles a week? In college? Seriously?), there were so many copy editing errors it was hard to take the book seriously; the editor never sleeps, you see. Dick Patrick of USA Today said the book is to college cross country what John Feinstein's "Season on the Brink" was to basketball, and I agree. Hell of a season to cover.

Last night, I couldn't sleep at all (Yes, the Fifth Dimension reference was intentional) so I typed up a list of all the triathlons and marathons I've done. You probably know me well enough to know I have a mind like a steel trap, so with few exceptions I even knew the distances of those races. Could've been wrong, though. Anyway, the count is at 38 triathlons in 16 states over the course of 20 years. Including Ironmans, I've done six marathons in six states. The goal is 50 states on both counts, but as for sheer numbers I'll stop when someone in a white lab coat holding a clipboard tells me to. No, scratch that. I'll stop after the third medical professional tells me to. I'm stubborn like that.

And the lack of sleep plus a night assignment today scrapped my easy four-mile run for this morning. I might do it on the dreadmill and then show up all stinky for my night assignment. Wouldn't that be professional of me?

Minor setback

2009-02-07T10:42:00.004-07:00

The skeleton of my training schedule will follow so you people know how I'm beating myself down on a day-to-day basis.

Saturday, for example, are the gold coin into the savings bank of my training -- the pace run. The thinking behind PMP training (proposed marathon pace, per Runner's World columnist/Brigham Young track and field coach Ed Eyestone) is getting your body used to that race pace. In my case, that's 7:27 a mile for a Boston qualifying time of 3:15. There. I said it. Karma is now banging on the door, demanding reparations.

The first few of these (last week's 3-miler, today's 4-miler, and the next two, possibly) I'm running on the treadmill at the gym, in part because I have very few routes mapped out in my new surroundings and in part because after 25 years of running I still don't know what a 7:27 mile, let alone 26 of them, feels like. So I get on the treadmill, dial up the pace and hammer away.

Last week I had no problem putting down three of them, all the more impressive considering I'd run 14 miles the day before. Well, today I pulled up at 2.5 miles, walked a bit, then cranked the pace back up before finally bailing at 3.7 miles. My breathing was shallow and my heart rate was in the red zone. Given a recent revelation that Ironman and marathon training are all about pushing the red line out further and further over the course of several weeks, I can't help but be disappointed.

Tomorrow's an 18-miler though I don't know if I'll go that far. It's cereal time now.

Monday: 4-mile recovery run, easy jog on the treadmill until I get some more post-work daylight.
Tuesday: Speed work. Plan calls for intervals and repeats instead of tempo runs. Hmmm.
Wednesday: Bike ride
Thursday: Long-ish run of between 7 and 12 miles.
Friday: Swim.
Saturday: Pace run, starting at 3 miles in Week 1, up to 12 miles 10 days before race.
Sunday: Long run, 14 miles every week save for a few variations, including 22 miles four weeks out.

Things you see

2009-02-06T09:30:00.002-07:00

Facing a long day with a possible evening assignment, I did Thursday's 8-mile run before work. No, I don't reap the benefits of 45-degree days in February, but I get out of the vicious afternoon wind, which at this point is more important to me.

This was not the first time I'd been up before the sun. When I moved here, my sense of location was skewed enough that I didn't realize I was a mere mile from my office. So for the first month I woke up at 6:30, had a leisurely breakfast and then walked to work, getting there much earlier than I needed to. I shifted my wake-up to 7 a.m., but for the first couple weeks of January there still was little light in the sky. During my walks to work I'd have seen a sunrise were it not for the mountains, trees, houses, and campus buildings, but I won't begrudge the infringement of civilization on nature's big moment.

So I ran west from my house and crossed the bridge that spans Curtis Street, high over the train yard that bisects Laramie into east and west. At the apex of the bridge I saw the day's first light over the Laramie Mountains behind me. And ahead of me the Snowy Range was illuminated in orange. Both beautiful sights filled my spirit as I strode through the run.

At about mile 3, the Laramie River Greenbelt feeds on to a street briefly before returning to the scrubby savannah that occupies the geographical middle of town. In one yard I saw an absolutely ingenius contraption -- a mountain bike with an old-school push-mower where the front wheel ought to be. Basically, this homeowner hops on his bike and mows his lawn. Someday I'll take a camera along in the hope that this machine is still there, because it's damn sure not available in stores.

The out-and-back run otherwise finished without incident. I had the path practically to myself, save for a woman in a black beanie towing a golden lab along for the run. Breakfast, showering and stretching followed before I made the stroll to the Bureau of Mines Building, where my office awaited.

As a sidenote, when I haven't been working out with music, the song most prominent in that jukebox in my brain has been Ziggy Marley's "Into the Groove." It's more appropriate than you can imagine.

Take it outside

2009-02-03T16:35:00.003-07:00

With a couple of night assignments today I had no choice but to brave the cold before work. It was 21 degrees, but no wind. And thanks to a recent thaw there was some pavement to spare.

That pavement led me to Labonte Park, a pond-centered green space around the corner from my house. There's an asphalt path around the perimeter of one side of the park, and a city sign at one corner of the park says "One lap = .623 miles," or .002 of a mile longer than one kilometer. That's the distance between two young cottonwoods on the north side of the park along Shields, a good place to begin and end my intervals.

I jogged 1.6 miles for a warmup and dove right in. The workout was 3x1km at 10k race pace; for me, that's around 4:20. I ran them in 4:20, 4:13 and 4:27 with about a half-lap jog between each repeat. Here I was hoping the monitor would tell me what my heart was doing on each rep but I just now noticed that's not the case. Still, it does say I maxed at 181 beats a minute, four beats short of my max, which would have been exceeded easily a week ago.

Point here, through all the technical jargon, I'm getting in shape. I'm not saying I wasn't winded this morning, but my body is starting to accept the task at hand -- altitude, weather, training intensity, end goal. It should be a trip down memory lane for my heart and lungs, and the coming weeks will reveal what they remember and how to process it.

Holy cats, what a weekend

2009-02-01T14:32:00.003-07:00

The plan to run at race pace did not backfire. Quite the opposite.

I woke up this morning and the quadriceps minors on both legs were still tight. I read in one of my fitness-related publications that one of the causes of such tightness (or the feeling like they've been dipped in concrete, as it were) is increasing distance or intensity too soon. Well, no shit. Nothing that my nightly stretches can't heal.

That said, I still trudged up to Half Acre and found myself a nice treadmill next to an attractive lass running (as it turned out) as hard as I had planned to. I warmed up at 6.5 mph and once I'd covered 10 minutes, I cranked it up. The workout called for three miles at race pace — for me, in the neighborhood of 8 mph, or 7:30 per mile. Mission accomplished. Furthermore, my heart rate stayed under my max for the second day in a row; I knew something was up when my heart stayed under 150 for most of my 9:00 per mile warmup. The total time was around 22:59. Should have been 22:30 but I wussed out and did a half mile or so at 7.9 mph. It was tough, but worth it.

The questions facing me this week: How wise would it be to move up to 18 miles per my schedule for Sunday's run? And how many miles will I face before I sac up and go outside, leaving the womblike cocoon of Half Acre?

Bottom line, I needed this. Badly. In a previous post I talked about how my goals for St. Louis get more and more "realistic" every day. Now I feel like I can go back in the other direction.

The playlist: The first nine tracks of 1:45 Playlist B

"Suckerpunch," Bowling for Soup

"Army of Me," Björk

"Say Goodbye to Love," Kenna

"Big'uns Get the Ball Rollin'," Stanton Moore

"Vapor," Soulive

"Sexx Laws," Beck

"Into the Groove," Ziggy Marley

"Shu Ba Ba Du Ma Ma Ma," Steve Miller Band

"Travelling Riverside Blues," Led Zeppelin

I wear shorts — period

2009-01-31T17:38:00.002-07:00

At the same time as I laugh at my sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephew for driving great distances to find running and cycling trails, I have no problem making a 132-mile round trip to get in a long run. If Fort Collins is going to be 15-20 degrees warmer with a third as much wind, I see nothing wrong with putting the mileage on my car.

Besides, days like these illustrate perfectly why I live here. The closer you get to the mountains, the more of the wind gets blocked, the more the sun can warm you and your surroundings. Without an alarm I woke up at 7:15 a.m. and headed south shortly thereafter. On Friday, I spent a little time at work researching the thriving (based on the number of people I saw today) Fort C running scene, and found the Spring Creek Trail. It runs south of downtown along a dribbling little creek that feeds the Poudre River, starting at Cottonwood Glen Park at the end of Overland Trail. I drove down and found the place perfectly. A couple of ladies directed me to the start of the trail and away I went.

First of all, let me explain why I pushed the first long run of this training cycle to Saturday, and the three-mile pace run to Sunday. I think most training plans are fluid, and some "real-world" adjustments are entirely appropriate. When I saw that it was going to be nice on Saturday, not so much on Sunday, I figured I'd move things around — especially when I saw Fort Collins was supposed to be 50 and sunny with light winds.

I'll spare you the gory details of the run. Because I tried to run on the grass, gravel and dirt instead of the concrete, my wobbly strides pushed my right foot into my left calf a few times, rubbing some hair off that part of my leg. I saw every kind of neighborhood, from sprawling one-story ranches to massive cookie-cutter tracts on cul-de-sacs to trailers to duplexes to dilapidated off-campus ghetto near Colorado State. As I said before, the trail wasn't packed but when I approached any Fort Collins' parks I definitely wasn't alone. Better still, about 90 percent of the people out there offered some sort of greeting — a wave, a nod, a "good morning." That never happened on the Duck Creek Trail in Davenport.

What's more is my heart rate stayed somewhat reasonable. Where my heart raced in the past month in Laramie, averaging nearly in the mid-90-percent range of my max, today's 2-hour, 3-minute jaunt kept me at 90 percent (avg 167, max 177), and I didn't go over 170 until the second half of the run. Bear in mind Fort C is more than 2,000 feet lower than Laramie and I could feel my body drinking up the extra oxygen (such as it was) like a desert-stranded vagabond. Perhaps with all this extra oxygen my body just worked more efficiently today, giving me a new batch of hope for the rest of the spring.

And I wore shorts. When I left Laramie I guessed the temperature to be in the low 20s. When I arrived in Fort C the first couple of runners I saw were in shorts and long sleeves. I figured I'd warm up plenty so I left the wind pants in the car. Couldn't have been a better move. My legs are stark white but their muscular. And they gained a little color today — which I will promptly lose over the next couple of months, until I can expose them to the world again.

As of this writing I don't know how far I went. I followed a proscribed 12-mile route I stole from MapMyRun and went a little farther. Out for an hour, back for an hour. Killed the outside muscles of my thighs in the process. Tomorrow I'll do the 3-mile pace run; wouldn't it be wise to know how it feels to run race pace with tired legs? Thought so. Back to the dreadmill I go.

The vagaries of the heart

2009-01-29T12:00:00.003-07:00

Admit it. You thought I was going to write some overwraught screed about love and the human condition. That makes one of us.

No, I've put my heart under a bit of scrutiny with this latest bout of training. About a year ago, with my 2007 REI dividend I bought a Polar RS200 heart rate monitor to tell me what my heart's doing while I destroy the rest of my body. Interesting stuff. There's this baseline test you're supposed to take with it, which I didn't do because I wanted to get at it. And I thought I knew everything. Maximum heart rate = 220-age. The manual says otherwise, that Polar's test is more accurate. And I'm wondering if that's the case.

For example, last night I hit the bike trainer for an hour-and-a-half, watching St. Croix Half-Iron 2005 and Ironman New Zealand 2005 (you'll get to know my VHS collection well if you stay with me for a while) while killing my hearing with another one of my self-labeled cool playlists. I don't think that has anything to do with what my heart does during the course of a workout, but at some point I'll investigate a possible cause-and-effect relationship. Moving forward...

The max heart rate was 157, and the average was 142. In fact, I've averaged 20 beats higher on any of my runs than any of my rides. At times I was working pretty hard last night. What I do is this: Keep it on the small ring with a high turnover while the race is going on, but shift into bigger gears when commercials come on, then back down when commercials end. Some shows have longer commercial breaks than others, but that's the nature of a real bike ride or the bike portion of a triathlon. Sometimes you've got to put the hammer down at unfamiliar intervals, which is what I try to do during these winter training sessions.

Now, I just had this thought that perhaps the scenery at Half Acre Gym, where I do my running, adds a few beats to my pulse. Not a chance. There's some nice scenery in these races I've taped , too, and I'm not talking about the sky-blue Caribbean waters of Christensted or the soaring mountains around Lake Taupo. Stuff like that doesn't get to me. I'm a pretty cool customer in such situations, so let's just eliminate this factor now.

Again, the question remains. Why is my heart rate that much higher when I run than when I ride? And will this continue to be the case when I move my training from my living room and Half Acre to the roads of Albany County?

Ah yeah, the playlist. My favorite part of this whole ordeal:

"Cochise," Audioslave
"Ignition," Brian Setzer's '68 Comeback Special
"Baton Rouge," The Nixons
"I Ain't Goin' Out Like That," Cypress Hill
"Click Click Boom," Saliva
"Mr. Brownstone," Guns n Roses
"Serpent Boy," (hed)pe
"Headspace," Velvet Revolver
"The Distance," Cake
"Feel Like I Wanna Feel," The Bella Fays
"Greater Than/Less Than," Saliva
"Roll Right," Rage Against the Machine
"A Song for Sassy Baxter," Hollywood Superstars
"Heart Attack Man," Beastie Boys
"Bring the Noise," Public Enemey
"Warped," Red Hot Chili Peppers
"Jimmy Olsen's Blues," Spin Doctors
"I Make My Own Rules," LL Cool J feat. Flea, Chad Smith and Dave Navarro
"I Come From the Water," The Toadies
"Business as Usual," Blues Traveler
"My Wave," Soundgarden
"The Only Way to Be," Save Ferris
"Can't Get Enough of You Baby," Smash Mouth

Higher math fails me

2009-01-27T18:36:00.004-07:00

With temperatures in the single digits and winds deep into double digits, I did the speed workout on the track inside at Half Acre. It's an elevated wooden thing above the basketball courts, combining two of my favorite things: running and pickup basketball. Granted, I didn't play but I love to watch the dynamics on a court.

The workout was called Yasso 800s. They're named for an editor at Runner's World named Bart Yasso, who figured a runner could get a little bit of a speed workout while training for a marathon in a simple way. Take your goal time and extrapolate it for a half-mile or 800 meters (the difference is 4.75 meters. Sue me). For example, my goal time is 3 hours, 15 minutes so I'd do my Yasso 800s in 3 minutes, 15 seconds.

Today I warmed up for 10 minutes, took an energy gel and some water, then did each with about four minutes of walking and light jogging between. Then I cooled down for 10 minutes and stretched on the mats at the scenery fest downstairs. The times were 3:07, 3:27 and 3:16, though it didn't feel like I was running that fast. Here's where the higher math fails me, and where someone better at this than I can step in.

The sign on the wall said

Lane 1: 11.5 laps to the mile.
Lane 2: 11 laps to the mile.
Lane 3: 10.5 laps to the mile.
Lane 4: 10 laps to the mile.

Naturally, the lanes weren't labeled. But I figured since the distance around the track is shorter on the inside lane, it would take more laps to equal a mile in that lane, less in the outside. The faster the runner, the farther outside they're supposed to run, so I stayed in the outside lane and ran five laps for each alleged half-mile. Again, I'm skeptical that I did them right because those times are way too fast for my current level of fitness.

Note the bolded part. Was that assumption wrong?

I ditched the iPod for the meat of the workout because I didn't think I could run fast with the thing in. I was right. So no playlist.

And so it begins...

2009-01-26T18:13:00.003-07:00

Contrary to my musing yesterday, today my marathon training truly began. It was a four-mile run on the treadmill amid the scenery of UW's Half Acre Gymnasium. Took me 35 minutes, 1 second. That's an average of around 8:45 a mile. As I said in the wake of yesterday's aborted workout, you've got to start somewhere.

I hate running indoors but I hate freezing the cilia of my lungs even more. Weather.com said it was 2 below zero when I left the office at 4:30 for the workout. Call me whatever you want, just don't call me a frozen-lunged fool.

And if anyone out there in blog land has an idea of how to post a spreadsheet, I'm all ears. Or eyes, as it were. I was thinking of posting my training plan.

The music: Part of 1 hour workout C. I succeeded in yanking the iPod out of the little slot on the treadmill and on to the floor at 7 mph. Thank goodness for iPod cases.

Up for the Down Stroke, Parliament Funkadelic
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Sly and the Family Stone
Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), Jimi Hendrix
Ponte De Lanca Africano (Umbabarauma), Jorge Ben
El Paso, Old 97s
My Wave, Soundgarden
Jimmy Olsen's Blues, Spin Doctors
Woman, Wolfmother
Closer to the Heart, Rush

Inauspicious beginning

2009-01-25T14:29:00.004-07:00

With every intention of striding through about eight miles I headed out the door around 8:30 this morning. There was a thin layer of snow on the ground but I thought nothing of it. When you run high school track in Minnesota you accept snow as a way of life, not an impediment.

Until I lost my feet.

What I failed to mention about the thin later of snow is that the salt trucks hadn't been out yet. So within my first few strides I slipped once, then regained footing and went on. The second time I slipped I felt my hamstring stretch unnecessarily. That's when I turned around and headed home.

My hammy is fine, but the workout lasted about three minutes. No way I was putting myself at risk in that way. At the same time I needed to run and feel good about my fitness. Tomorrow's a four-miler I'll do on the treadmill at Half Acre Gym and Tuesday's some speedwork ("speed" being a relative term). My goals for the St. Louis Marathon get more and more realistic every day.

On the eve

2009-01-24T15:57:00.003-07:00

The St. Louis Marathon training starts Monday. With a swim.

No, I fixed it. The plan I set up originally called for swims on Mondays, bike rides on Wednesdays, and runs the other five days. It seemed rather odd for a training program for a marathon to start with a swim, so I shifted a four-mile run to Monday. Now, the only thing is to find a four-mile route without getting in my car and driving around. Yes, MapMyRun.com kicks some serious posterior (Blatant plug! Blatant plug!).

I go two weeks between posts and my loyal readers start fiending like heroin addicts. Or maybe not. I'll piddle away some bandwith talking about today's workout, a 1-hour, 15-minute ride on the trainer in front of Ironman Hawaii 2005. My heart rate topped out at 168, though I admit I didn't push too hard. Still, the average (which I neglected to record on the spreadsheet that houses my plan) was about 20 points lower than any run so far. Any reason my heart would work that much easier on the bike than on the run? It's the same thin air, the same battered body, the same stressed-out lungs. Different exercise, but still, I'd love for my runs to feel as easy as my ride today.

The playlist for the ride was "1:15 workout A." iTunes tells me this is 1:15:56 worth of music. That doesn't change the fact that I still knocked off at 1:15:30. Yes, I'm stuck in the 90s. Has there been an era of music that possessed and gave away so much energy? No. Perfect for working out.

Cherub Rock, Smashing Pumpkins.

Elevation, U2

Santa Monica, Everclear

Mountain Song, Jane's Addiction.

Alive and Kicking, Simple Minds.

Wanted Dead or Alive, Bon Jovi.

Here in Your Bedroom, Goldfinger.

You Get What You Give, New Radicals.

Can't Find My Way Home, Blind Faith.

Hot Pants (I'm Coming, Coming), James Brown.

Cult of Personality, Living Colour.

Put a Lid on It, Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Knife Party, Deftones.

Learn to Fly, Foo Fighters.

Gimme That, The Resource feat. Jimmy Napes.

Tom Sawyer, Rush

Wicked Garden, Stone Temple Pilots.

Let's Rock, Smash Mouth.

If I Run, Semisonic.

Week 2, or thereabout

2009-01-10T13:48:00.003-07:00

With no internet at home (and with an overriding sense of duty for my time at work), I post only from the library. So you get a week's worth of musings at once. Highlight of the week was getting running shoes via UPS (thanks Mom!), which I laced up and broke in on Thursday. I ran for 32 minutes, up and down Fourth Street, a distance of 3.4 miles that felt like about 6. A week ago it would have felt like 12 so I think I'm making progress.

Then it was on to a couple of firsts. On Friday I swam for the first time since Oct. 26. That swim was a triathlon in Tempe, Ariz. This time I hopped into Half Acre Pool at UW, which, surprisingly, was nice and cool for swimming laps. I did 1,000 yards, which is not that much though it felt like I was breathing through cellophane and my shoulders throbbed later in the day. Just like the beginning of swim season.

On Saturday I rode my bike for an hour in front of the 2004 Ironman Wisconsin broadcast from OLN (the network known now as Versus). Sometimes I wonder if we're too wired in to truly enjoy being fit in and of itself, and my preparations for 1 hour, 2 minutes, 10 seconds of riding seem to bear this out. There was the videotape, the iPod and the heart rate monitor. All I needed was the cell phone next to the indoor trainer and I'd have been the consummate 21st-century athlete. Of course, answering it is quite another level.

The HRM gave me some interesting date, though I'm not sure what I can do with it. My average heart rate was 152, max of 171 (which is 92 percent of the 195 that is my drop-dead maximum). The manual says 129-147 is aerobic Zone 1, which is supposed to be ridiculously easy, like an easy jog or spinning your pedals on the small chainring. Not me. I spent 15:14 in Zone 1 and 43:37 above that. And I burned 800 calories. All this from my little watch and chest strap. Again, the next step is to figure out what to do with it.

Tomorrow I'm heading to Boulder to run without wind and see a friend. The goal is to not walk at all, something I can't seem to do since I've been here on the high plains. Sure wish I had a little more oxygen.

Run below zero

2009-01-04T14:19:00.004-07:00

End of week one of the plan... mediocre to say the least. It's easy to run when you're in, oh, I don't know, Georgia, and the weather is at least tolerable. And then you return to the tundra of the high plains (no, no need to remind me I chose to live here).

I ran four of the seven days I was in the ATL for Christmas, including on the Sunday after Christmas with my brother-in-law Kevin and my nephew Ryan. Kevin has finished two Ironmans and a bunch of marathons with a PR in the neighborhood of 3:32. Ryan is 12 and has a 22-minute 5K. As I later found out, after covering 3.5 miles in 26 minutes (7.42.6/mile, if you were wondering), Ryan doesn't understand the concept of running with people. He stayed about 10 yards ahead the whole time, and my efforts to bring him back failed miserably. To put it another way, that little shit tried going Prefontaine on us.

I was reminded of a scene from the Pre movie that starred Jared Leto. In this scene Pre is blowing his teammates away in practice when a teammate pulls up alongside him and says, "Hey, there's no racing in practice." Pre replies, "Then don't race me."

Anyway, I've run twice since my return to the high plains. The first time was on New Year's Day and the second was today. Hmmm... not sure I can call them runs. I went out the door in running clothes and moved for 34 minutes on New Year's Day, followed by an hour and 20 minutes today. Both times I stumbled over to the Laramie River Greenbelt, a nice enough place to run. On New Year's Day I struggled with the wind, lungs and cold, but today I just struggled with the cold and my own lungs. Per the NOAA Web site it was about 4 degrees with a slight breeze when I ran today, and ice formed on my eyelashes and eyebrows. That's a new one for me.

At this point I hope it gets easier soon. Seriously, it was hard enough to breathe the cold air by itself, and then add the polypropylene baclava I wear over my face to warm said air — not fun by any stretch. To put things in perspective, I have an 18-mile run in five weeks and today I struggled through roughly six.

When I lived in Cheyenne, I'd say it took a month of regular workouts before I was used to the altitude (1,000 feet lower than Laramie), but it doesn't change the fact that I wish I could breeze through these base-building runs. I already feel like I'm cramming for a midterm the night before.

Every step on the path IS the path

2008-12-23T17:29:00.003-07:00

Today I ran 3.6 miles in 36 minutes. More on that later...

I no longer have the excuse of the newspaper business to cut in to my training. I've turned my back on the Fourth Estate to edit the University of Wyoming's magazine. Or, in the words of former UW sports information director Kevin McKinney, I'm now feeding from the government trough.

For once I'll have the right amount of time to train and money to help myself. I've always had time to train. Or at least I've always made time to train. I liked training in the morning and afternoon before work but now I'll have to adjust to a new set of work hours. It means swimming at the university pool during my lunch break and maybe working out in the predawn chill before work. And then I can have my evenings to sleep or eat or die or something.

That's why I skipped out of work early today — so I could run while the sun was out. It was a gorgeous, sunny day with that atomic high-altitude sun baking the snow without melting it. That's because it was 18 degrees with a 30 mph wind. I intentionally kept a plodding stride and leisurely pace even with the wind at my back, in deference to that vicious, omnipresent wind and the 7,200 feet of altitude to which I must acclimate. I used to live in Cheyenne, 1,000 feet lower, and it took me a full month of regular working out before I could run, ride and swim without feeling like my lungs were on fire.

From those three-and-a-half years, I know I can make it, though. And I'll be better off for it. Ironman Wisconsin is in less than nine months.

Gotta start somewhere

2008-01-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, January 6, I awoke at 11-something to the sun streaming into my bedroom. I got out of bed and walked to the door to my ghetto crib, intending to pick up the paper. When I opened the door I felt something unfamiliar.

Warmth.

Serious warmth. It wasn't that stinging blow from the north shoving into my apartment and sending my boys running for the hills. No, this was genuine warmth. And I knew I had to run.

Indeed, I went to the fridge for a drink of water and noticed something I'd scrawled on the greaseboard: "Run today!!" Yep, this was the day, the first time in at least a month that I shook off the offseason slumber for a turn on the roads.

So I headed south across Kimberly, waiting three full minutes for traffic to clear and for the signal to be in my favor. And I jogged easily, wondering just what I'd been waiting for all these months. The breathing was natural, the stride slow, long, purposeful. And then I got to the Duck Creek Trail.

What wasn't covered by frigid snowmelt was covered by ice. And sometimes there was ice underneath a couple inches of water. At least my feet didn't hurt, in large part because they were too damned numb. But I spent more time with my arms out balancing myself to prevent a fall, thanks to the ice that covered roughly 20 percent of the trail. I went out and back, 53 minutes in all. I ended up at the corner of the path and Marquette, which in happier times takes me around 40 minutes round trip.

My breathing was labored by the time I returned but what else would anyone have expected? I'm really blowing off about four months' worth of dust, making my last serious bout of exercise September 17, 2007, when I ran the Quad-Cities Half Marathon. Better yet, I was sweating, something that hadn't happened since then. I was in shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt and I was sweating. You never know how good that feels until you spend a couple of months not exercising and eating crap, the better to slow down your metabolism and save money (odd logic, n'est-ce-pas?). The soreness and aching lungs feel way better than that. I'm in it for the long hall.

I'm starting from Ground One but you've got to start somewhere.

What is the Why?

2007-11-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

Recently I've read a couple of books based in Buddhism -- the Deepak Chopra tome "The Book of Secrets" and W. Timothy Gallwey's classic "The Inner Game of Tennis." They both talk a whole lot about living in the moment and being one with the universe. The past is past, so bury it and move on. The future is a mystery and not worth the energy. So be here now. Far as I'm concerned, truer words were never spoken.

Furthermore, Buddhism is rooted in finding everything you need within yourself. The love we all possess is enough to sustain us for a lifetime and comes from within.

I take that to mean the competitive fire burns within each of us. We always can do better, go further, go faster, be greater. To me the challenge gets no greater than the Hawaii Ironman, between the frothing ocean and the unforgiving lava fields, the heat radiating off the pavement and the fact that anybody who's anybody in the world of triathlon does this race.

Then again, that's not why I'm here. I'm here because of me. And if that comes off as selfish, so be it. This is something I want to do, and I'm not letting anything stand in my way.

If at first...

2007-11-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

This is nothing new for me but I'm struggling to find the start. As Maria crooned in "The Sound of Music," the beginning seems to be a good place.

For those who know me, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, none is possible. You see my name. You might or might not see a location, which really is immaterial. I am a lot of things -- brother, uncle, son, writer, drinker, driver, thinker, puppet, pauper, pirate, poet, pawn and a king -- but for the purposes of these infrequent screeds, an Ironman triathlete.

Today is Nov. 5, and tomorrow is Election Day. It's approximately 22 months before I toe the line at Ironman Wisconsin, which is the reason why I'm here. That might or might not be my last attempt at a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run accompanied by 2,000 of my closest friends and my own worst enemy. I enjoy the training and racing, to be sure, but I'm wondering if I should direct my energies elsewhere. This is where the title of this blog comes in.

Lava is the basic element of all the Hawaiian Islands, a series of volcanoes in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Big Island, Hawaii. It's coverered largely by a lava desert formed by eruption after eruption from Kiluea (the spelling of which I will check later). In Kailua-Kona, the Ironman World Championship takes place each October -- loftily, the organizers originally staged the race on the first Saturday in October after the full moon, but now I guess they shoot for between the 10th and 17th -- involving the best professional and amateur triathletes in the world. Only 1,700 people toe the line that day and you have to qualify to get there. Or you have to be famous or supremely wealthy, a nod to ex-Baywatch chick Alexandra Paul and ex-"Bachelorette" winner Ryan Sutter (chosen by Trista, you check the show title for me, eh?).

I want to be there. From the time we visited the Big Island on a family vacation in 1987, this race was foremost in my mind. Every time I walk when I'm supposed to be running, take an extra couple of seconds on the wall between intervals, or coast down a hill after an intense climb, I think: If I can't handle this lame-assed training ride, how am I going to get to Kona?

Go ahead and call me obsessed. I take it as a compliment. Some people have miles of model train tracks in their basements. Others can create scenes so beautifully you could swear they were photographing instead of painting. This is what I do. Whether it's who I am or not remains to be seen but I won't mind if this is how you want to define me.

So I've got 22 months left before the final exam and you're welcome to come along with me. The mission will become clearer as time goes on. Bear with me. It could be a hell of a ride. And run. And swim.