It's all about the moose

Lived through a fried motherboard, and now back to rant away. I had been saving up a bunch of things to bitch about, but time just got away, and besides there will soon enough be other dumb things to rant on.

Spending less time now blogging and more time trying to get the training back on track for Muskoka, only six weeks away.

I was going to rant about Lake Placid and the new policy which basically eliminates online registration. I was going to rant about Chinese Olympic athletes and "fair play". I was going to rant about police and cyclists or about the risk of death in our chosen sport. I was going to rant about the Tour de France and how I'm so sick and tired of the lying, cheating and stealing that it passed this year and I really didn't even care.

Never mind all that. Check out the moose - twenty feet down the road from the car when we went camping last weekend, just calmly eating leaves (the moose was, not me) as dozens of people stood across the street taking pictures.

You don't see that every day.

Peace.

PBO Road trip, race report

First up: big cheers to the folks at Endurosport, specifically Jared and Brian, who saved my bacon and let me get my race on this weekend. Broken aerobars are not something you can patch together with duct tape and prayer, and when you can do it in 45 minutes on the way to the race site...well, good on them.


Now, on to the road trip and race report. I went up to the race site on Saturday afternoon with my sometime training partner Cliff. Even though the drive itself is reasonably short - less than two hours where we were leaving from, it's important to be able to coexist. Even more so when in sharing a hotel room. Cliff can be quite the conversationalist, so here are seven things I learned about Cliff on the trip to Peterborough:

1. Even though it was listed on his Ironman profile, Cliff is not actually a spandex model. He is in internet marketing.

2. In the months leading up to a race (PBO was an A-list race for Cliff) he will swear off coffee and beer. I don't know if I could find the strength to carry on.

3. The Canadian Death Race is on Cliff's list of life events to complete. He will also be competing in the Transplant Olympics in August.

4. Next week Cliff is making his (annual) pilgrimmage to Boston, most likely with nine other friends in a rented van. Talk about needing some entertainment.

5. Cliff wants a DVD player to watch all seasons of Arrested Development. Necessary for #4.

6. For race nutrition, Cliff will sometimes stock his pockets with frozen grapes. Great idea, but I don't know how he keeps them frozen.

7. Cliff is a champion sleeper. He slept in the car on the way to PBO, pounded down a solid two-hour nap once we arrived, fell asleep as soon as the lights went out after dinner, and slept over half the way back after the race on Sunday. I don't ever sleep well in hotels, and especially not the night before a race.

RACE DAY

Transition on race morning is always barely controlled chaos. Fortunately I managed to not forget anything this year and threw everything together in about ten minutes. The funniest part of transition? Skipping the lineup to the portapotties, and trying to find somewhere, in the middle of a park field surrounded by ~1000 of my closest friends, to apply body glide to the, ahem, necessary locations without threatening indecency and arrest. That done, I sausaged myself into the wetsuit and headed on down to the beach. Actually found Cliff right before the start and wished him luck. I never did see Darren until well out onto the course - read his account of the day to find out why.

Swim: 39:55 (2006 - 37:23)

Yep, this time is crap but it was no surprise. As a frame of reference, both laps of last year's Lake Placid swim were faster than this. What can I say - the yardage (metreage?) just hasn't been there this year. This is going to have to be a focus going forward, but I don't know what can be done to "fix it" in the time left this season. Only metreage will tell.

As an observation, the open water "spin cycle" at PBO is in many ways worse than a full IM. In an IM it's 100% beat-down from start to finish, speaking as a MOP'er. You know what you're going to get and at least can prepare mentally for it. In a half-IM with a smaller crowd, there are brief occasions where the water opens up. But, they're brief - usually less than seconds, and just as a rhythm starts to get a stroke or two, another intermittent beating starts. The taunting false promise of rhythm in the water is much more difficult (to me) to get used to.


Bike: 2:42:15 (2006 2:48:33)


RECANT: in the last race post (WellandQ) I admit that I slagged the race organizers for shorting me on the bike course. Strangely enough my bike computer says I was shorted again at PBO, again coincidentally by about 10% - 81km of 90 paid for. I do believe I owe the Welland organizers an apology, so this is it.



The bike course is not particularly tough, but it is the dictionary definition of "rolling hills". There really aren't any long flat stretches to unwind and let fly. Again, due to the shortage of quality training this ride was tougher for me than it should have been. The PB in the split owes entirely to the gains from the TT bike and the dorky helmet, over the road bike - traditional helmet combo of 2006. I made a real effort to keep the HR reined in - 150's in the, ahem, "flats" and no more than 160 on the climbs.



Run: the moment of truth - no spoilers here. Read on!



This is always where the truth is told. If you've not trained well (which I hadn't), hammered on the bike (which I tried not to) or not eaten properly (read on) then you pay the piper. There's no getting around it. My goal here, once I took stock getting off the bike was to knock off 5 min km's. Nothing flashy nor earth-shattering, but something I thought that would be achievable given the training inconsistency and the state I felt I was in off the bike. And to be honest, everything went well for about 14km. From 14-17 km it started to become work, and after 18km the wheels came off. Note: a cola-type beverage at an aid station really, REALLY needs to be degassed, or "flat". If not, the gas stays in and leads to vicious cramps. Lesson of the day. By the time I made the last turn around the soccer field I was waving the crowd to louder noise and grinning like a cat eating onions. I had brief thoughts of rolling across the finish line, a la Blazeman, but wasn't sure I'd be able to get up off the ground, so decided not to. The final run time of 1:47:32 was nearly nine minutes better than the last time I was at Peterborough, 1:56:31 in 2006.

A total finish time of 5:14:22 for a solid 12-minute PB. 119th overall, 27/66 in the age group. Congrats go out to Darren, who rocked the course in 4:26 and change, 8th overall and handily winning his age group, and to Cliff who also PB'd, on an afternoon that got very warm toward the end of the day. And a final round of applause for Trisport Canada who always manage to put on a great race.

10 weeks to go to Muskoka. Ten weeks to refocus, to put in time in the water and to refind the bike and run endurance that took the spring off. Is ten weeks enough time to find another 14 minutes? Let's see.

Peace.

WellanDQ

A couple of days late, but here's the report from the Welland Sprint Triathlon Sunday June 29.


Lessons learned, lessons learned. The day broke warm, but not too warm, wind-free and sunny. I rolled into the parking lot with plenty of time to get to transition and also go through the process of race morning registration. Lesson #1: if you can avoid race-day registration, do so. Not that it was overly terrible - in fact the young women in charge were very helpful. It's just one more thing on the list of things to organize that's not required on the day. Lesson #2: race wheels cannot be inflated with Schrader valve adapters. A big thanks to the dude (racer #143) who saved my bacon that morning. Just goes to show that even when anarchy, disorganization and chaos reign, there remain small islands of civilization, hope and good favour.


The Welland tri goes off in a time-trial format, in bib number order and at five-second intervals. Owing to the fact that I registered on race morning I was bib #429, which meant that factoring in five seconds for every starter beginning with #1 (really, where else would you start?) at 8:30 a.m. or thereabouts, I would be going off just before lunch. Okay, I'm slightly exaggerating, but you get the general idea. Lined up in wetsuits like sausages on a grill, waiting to start the race a great number of swimmers had already started and finished the swim before I managed to get in the water.


I had no expectations for this race. My training has been sporadic this spring and I really just wanted to work on some things in transition and so forth to work out the bugs before PBO this weekend. It was therefore with great surprise that I found I chopped nearly 3 minutes off my 750m time from last year - 13:30 this year vs. 16:24 last year. This makes no sense, so I went back and read my race report from last year. Aha - managed to not get my goggles kicked off this year - that'll certainly shorten the time in the water. Also I made a conscious effort to sight early, sight often and sight repeatedly, as I have often found myself well off-course, swimming on my own. Not this year. I laid down some pretty straight lines from buoy-to-buoy and it looks like it shows. Now I understand that 13:30 is not blazing fast, but I've never claimed to be fast in the water, and a 1:48/100m is more than respectable for me.

Rant point #1: there's just no need for a 400m or longer run from the water to transition. I do understand the attraction for a paved transition area (i.e. in a closed parking lot). I just don't understand why I have to run barefoot across gravel, cinders and then circle the parking lot before I'm allowed in. On to the bike...

...where I got the second surprise of the day. If you've been following along, you know of course there's a new ride in town for this season. It definitely showed in this year's bike split, and I'm sure the dorky teardrop helmet didn't hurt either. The only downer on the bike was that I managed to launch my water bottle, out there in the gloamin' somewhere. This comes into play later on...
Last year's bike split for 30km: 51.42 min (avg. 34.8 km/h)
This year's bike split for 30(?)km: 48:05 (avg. 37.4 km/h) KABOOM!

Last year this race was three weeks before Lake Placid, when I was fully trained to the teeth (in fact, sick and tired of training as I recall). This year, of course, not so much training. One can only wonder, "if I had just put in the kilometrage...."The "?" is only because my bike computer measured the course at 27.12 km. I'm not saying, I'm just saying...

The run: this is where it all started to unravel. How so? Follow along, young Jedi, and ye shall see...
Lesson #3: a morning with only a bagel and a coffee for breakfast is a sign of bad things to come. There are not enough matches in the matchbook. Lesson #4: wearing last year's race shoes, because they have the speed laces is a risk that might be better to avoid. Lesson #5: added to lesson #4, wearing old shoes with no socks, even for a short (and in this case, shorter than advertised) run is well, the technical term would be, stupid. I'm currently wearing the height of band-aid fashion - three different blisters and a pair of shoes so bloody as to be unworthy for even a future in lawn-mowing.

By now, you've probably assumed that the run did not go so well. Even with two short stops (for minor dizzy spells) I was on pace to be within shouting distance of last year's finish time. And then, I missed the last loop of the pretzel.

This year's run course circles the Welland canal on what was referred to as a "double out and back". This is not the same run course as last year. The course went out past the swim over the bridge, around the canal, crosses over another bridge and turns around to recircle once again before running "in" back down the "out" trail, across the bridge one more time and finishing in the arena. Confusing? Yep, even more so on the course, with no km markers after 2 km (none that I saw), and a grand total of one run course marshal issuing instructions out loud to duathletes, triathletes on the first lap and triathletes on the second lap.

To make a long story short, I missed the second loop of the run, so my 7.5 km run was more in the neighbourhood of 5 km. The one marshal was shouting instruction as I passed through what (in retrospect) must have been the turnaround, but I didn't hear him clearly - the aforementioned dizziness probably didn't help.

2007 run - 7.5 km (est. - my raised eyebrow wrt this claim is well-documented... 32:27 (4:20/km)
2008 run - 5.0 km (again, est.) - 29:59 (6:00/km).

Clearly, I over-hammered the bike and under-fueled for the day, in addition to missing the sparse run directions.

Race results show me finishing in 8th place overall (and 4th in the AG). Clearly, that's a load of hooey. If I had been able to find a race official afterward I would have voluntarily DQ'd myself (and we're not talking Dairy Queen). I spoke to several other people at the finish who had the same confusion with run course markings.

Overall, although the end result was not A-one there were good positive learning experiences to take from this course. The swim sighting clearly assisted in putting together a better swim. I've probably also found the upper limit beyond which hammering on the bike has a significantly detrimental effect on the run.

All good things to "get out of my system" before gran-daddy #1: Peterborough in four days!

Peace.