The Butt Kicking Begins

Ah yes, winter. It’s snowing outside and a (no so young) triathlete’s thoughts turn to, um, working out.

My training for the 2010 season officially began last night and continued on this morning. Last night, with a nice layer of dirty snow and ice blanketing the ground I put La Machina in the back of my truck and drove over to the basement of the Velvet Crème Popcorn Co. where I joined about 50 of my closest tri buddies in something called PowerHour. PowerHour is basically a spin class, except just about everyone on their bikes is a triathlete or cyclist preparing for the season. Yup, you guessed it – HUGE quantities of testosterone were in the air and I felt awfully fat. Luckily last night's class began gently - rumor has it that last night was an anomaly. Let the Butt Kicking Begin!

As if last night wasn't fun enough, this morning I hit the pool for more punishment. After a hiatus of about 4 months from any sort of serious pool workout, I joined 5 of my closest friends for a nice, hard pool workout. 7 time ironman Jene was is the coach of the torture session and she began the season with a bang - a nice combination of ladders, drills and something she called oxygen deprivation. Fun, fun, fun! Let the Butt Kicking Begin!

Allow me to bitch…just one time…just once…

So this week I headed to the pool for the first time since….um…August. Like the bag that I use to transport my swim gear to the gym, my stroke to be a little dusty, but there’s dusty and there’s DUSTY. I was D-U-S-T-Y.

I fully expected to be a little out of shape in the pool, but holy crap, where did my form go? Swimming is a really weird thing – its definitely not like riding a bike – you really can forget how to swim (or at least I managed to). While I still have excellent cardiovascular fitness from all of the running that I do, evidently my cardio fitness in the pool went by way of the dodo. I used to be able to knock off 1000m without breaking a sweat. Now I’m struggling to do 1/5 of that without getting winded.

Worse than being out of shape in the pool, I’m out of form. My form blows. I’m now doing all of the bad things that I worked so hard last year to correct: lifting my head out, not gliding, not kicking as much as I should - the list goes on an on. In August, my stroke was fluid and efficient – now I feel like an overweight St. Bernard trying to compete in a world of labs and retrievers. I just don’t get it – did all of the beer and grease that I’ve been consuming somehow kill my buoyancy?

Guess where I’m headed tomorrow morning? Out for a long run.

Um...this is Fall?

What’s up with the weather? Normally, early November in the Midwest brings cold blustery days, cold rain and athletic conditions that range from shitty to downright crappy. Look out the window: The sun is low in the sky, most of the trees are bare and what's left of the leaves are various shades of orange and red. You’d think it’d be in the 40’s and I’d be putting on my jacket, gloves and tights. Instead its 76 degrees out! Is Mother Nature laying a huge mind f*** on us before she nails us with one of those winters that makes it feel like we’re in Detroit in the middle of February?

So, what do you do when Mama N gives you a gift like that? You go for a long run or a long ride - pick your flavor of pain, but you don’t spend your day inside. That’s what I did this morning - I met my buddy Bob (aka Mr. Clean) for a leisurely 10 miler along Indian Creek. Nice run - fast (at least for us), gorgeous fall colors, shorts and a t-shirt and lots of good conversation about nothing. What more could you possibly ask for?

Now if only that Orbea would come my way, I'd be heading back from Louisburg right about now. :-)

Now its time for a drink

It’s over. The 2009 season is in the bag. It’s time to relax, put back a few drinks and get fat. Yup, it’s officially the offseason.

This past Saturday I finished my last race of the season: the Kansas City Half. After the Jackson County Tri in August, I focused all my energy on running (read: got lazy and only ran). No more 5:30 am pool workouts, no more long Saturdays spent on La Machina, no more bricks; just a few midweek runs and a single long run on Saturday – a veritable vacation for me. I probably didn’t put in any more than 13 or 14 midweek miles and my long on Saturday was no more than 16. I guess I did something right, because I absolutely nailed the KC Half! I ran the race in 2:13, which is a 4 minute PR for me. What gives that number added credence is that the KC Half is a relatively hilly course; I really need to find a nice flat half and see what I can do. Maybe I can arrange that in 2010?

What next? Well, for starters the pile of shoes, cleats, jerseys, swim caps and assorted tri gear that take up some serious real estate in our closet are going to be put in the spare closet. La Machina is in its rightful place in the garage and my ass is on the couch drinking a beer. Yup, the season's over and true to my word, I'm taking a rest and getting fat!

Envy

I love my bike. It’s fast, it’s light, it’s half Italian, and damn its got a great story, but its also showing its age. A couple of weeks ago I heard this really funky clicking in my rear wheel. Being the crazy mechanical dude that I am, I started playing around with the wheel trying to find the source of the noise. After about 30 minutes of tinkering, I cried uncle and brought it into the shop. Bringing your bike into the shop is like bringing your car into the shop – generally the outcome is financial bad news. Sure enough, my rear wheel was completely toast. Not just nicely golden and crisp around the edges, but the kind of toast that is so black and destroyed that it ends up in the garbage. The prognosis came in the form of a somber call from Travis, one of the mechanics down at BikeSource. Turns out that the weird clicking that I heard only when climbing or pushing a big gear was a wheel about ready to turn into a taco of aluminum and steel. Grudgingly, I bit the bullet and bought a new wheel. As much as I hated doing it, one more chunk of my bike was being relegated to the world of scrap metal. As I clipped La Machina into the rack in the back of my truck I began to admit to myself that I just might have to replace La Machina at some point in the future.

One of my rituals whenever I’m at BikeSource is to check out the bikes that are up on the racks.I liken it to being a kid in a candy store…you look at everything…heck you might even drool, but you just can't take them all home. Cameron, the store manager and the magician who did my bike fit, obviously saw the puddle of drool forming on the concrete floor beneath me and came over. The magic words came out of his mouth with no prompting: “Looking for a new tri bike?” We chatted for a few minutes about tri bikes and without pause, he said that he had a terrific deal on a 2008 Orbea Ora. Only two left: One really little one and one that’s just the right size for me. As he pulled her down from the rack I could feel a tear welling up in one of my eyes. She was beautiful!

Just one question: When?

Cider Mill Century Postmortem

Ok, so it’s a few days late but I wanted to write up a brief post mortem (literally) of the Cider Mill Century that we all did this past weekend (the we of course being the quintessential quad of Christy, Joe, Rianman and myself). For those of you that don’t know what a century is, it’s essentially the cycling version of a marathon – 100 miles of fun on two wheels. All four of us have done centuries before and we’re all in good shape, so this wasn’t anything new. I can’t speak for Rian and Joe, but it’s been about 7 years for me and I think about the same for Christy.

The course covered 100.7 miles of “rolling” countryside south of Kansas City. If you believe that Kansas is flat, you haven’t seen this area – lots of flats, but also some significant hills. Normally I don’t mind hills, but when you have a lot of them on a long ride they can get annoying. BTW, who was the Einstein who put the majority of the hills on the last 30 miles of the course? By the time we were about 20 miles from the finish, all I could think about was a cold beer, some BBQ and getting off the bike. When it was all over, we had been underway for right around 7 hours, it was hot and I was flipping tired.

One of the things that I thought about when I was sitting in the parking lot sipping my beer is that this is only one component of an Ironman. Later I asked Rianman how he was able to do a full marathon after riding 112 miles and swimming 2.4. His answer in typical Rian fashion was “You just do it.” So why did I even contemplate this question? I’m actually considering doing an Ironman.

I said Multi Sport. I Didn't Say Multi Event

I’m not that bright. Really.

When I signed up for this, I knew that my training would be hard. I’d have to be incredibly disciplined and push myself through a lot of hard workouts. But hey, I've done 5 marathons, more than a dozen half marathons, a century and countless VERY long rides - I can muscle through the pain.

When training for a triathlon, most intelligent individuals figure out a schedule based on the length of their tri and stick with it. For example, if you’re focusing on an Olympic distance tri, your swim/run/bike workouts are no longer than the distance you ultimately race (1.5 km/40km/10km). If intelligent triatletes follow a tri schedule, then I’m not the brightest bulb in the box because I signed up for a century (100 miles on a bike), a few triathlons and a half marathon - all in the same summer. As a result, I get to have fun training well beyond my tri distances AND still focus on my tri schedule. Yes, it’s possible, but its not fun.

For example, on Saturday I ran 10 fast miles and biked 70 on Sunday and yes, my body hurts. If I was intelligent, those numbers would be more like 6 and 26. Sure I’m a lot more fit than I need to be, but I’m also a lot more sore than I need to be. I’m trying to look on the bright side of this – when I do the Jackson Country tri in a few weeks, that 10k will be a piece of cake, my endurance is probably phenomenal and my tolerance for pain is probably pretty good, but geeze, this hurts.

Often I look at my dog and say “You’re awfully cute, but you’re just not very bright.” Little did I know that he’s saying the exact same thing about me.