Introducing the New Site

I'm proud to finally unveil the fruit of my labors: The Triathlon Lifestyle, Made Easy

This is a website devoted to triathlons, food, friends, and anything else I care to throw in there. It was created during JEM 422, and I hope to make it applicable to all readers.

This introduction comes with a few caveats:

1. It was created with iWeb on a Mac. Therefore, I need to find a reliable way to keep it updated.
2. My domain might expire in two weeks when I graduate; I should probably check on that.

This blog will continue to chronicle the trial (pun wholly intended) and errors of The Word Magician as he embarks on his career search. I'm beating the path; all you have to do is follow it. As always, thanks for reading!

Dogwood 5K Race Recap

*Note: I was waiting until pictures of the race were posted so I could steal one. But, just like the TriDeltathon, they managed not to take a single picture of me. C'est la vie. 


I made a promise to myself (and to Jennifer Torrance) Friday night: that I would rise with the sun to race the Dogwood 5K on Saturday morning. The forecast predicted rain, thunder, lightning, gale-force winds; basically, the end-times.

My promise came with a caveat to myself, though. If it was raining terribly hard, I was hitting Snooze. I went to bed early, though I had a terrible night of sleep. I took it as a bad omen that I woke at 2 a.m. to use the bathroom and felt my toe in undeniable pain. And I outfoxed my alarm by a good 15 minutes. But even with the early waking time, the rains appeared to have bypassed Knoxville. 

Somewhat grudgingly, I pulled warm-ups over my singlet and shorts. I planned to get there early to make sure I at least got a T-shirt for my troubles (they aren't guaranteed for "game-time decision" entrants). It's a pleasant sage-green, though -- a color conspicuously absent from my wardrobe until now.

I've been working out once a week lately with the group of fast guys from the Knoxville Track Club, so I had an idea of who I could try to keep up with. The runner in question was Greg Johnson, a master's runner whose speed seems to increase with his age. I last ran a 5K exactly one year ago at this race; Greg has done at least two in the last three weeks. Needless to say, he has a better awareness of his capabilities. So he was my rabbit. 

First mile, I came through in 5:30. I was about five steps behind Greg the whole time, and felt comfortable. Second mile, my split was 5:38. I slipped past Greg and one other kid who was visibly (and audibly) hitting the wall. It was a miracle, in my mind, that I didn't blow up and bog down. Maybe the training actually works!

Then, the guy who won the 5K at the Knoxville Marathon tried to pass me. I decided to stick with him; then I surged, and opened up a gap. That space grew until the end, where I stopped my watch at 17:19 -- a new personal best by 1:20. To top it off, I won a $20 gift certificate to the Runner's Market for the age-group victory. 

So what's the grand conclusion -- work hard? Sleep 8 hours a night? Eat your vegetables? Maybe. What I learned is this: Only run a race once a year, and a PR is almost guaranteed.

An Open Letter to: Sara Nasab

Dear Sara,

You had the chance to live the American dream on Sunday: to bring diversity and unity to the sport of triathlon where there is none (scroll all the way down); to ride on the front, not the back, of the proverbial tandem bicycle; to sit at the proverbial lunch counter while TriDelts serve you; to to stand at the proverbial Brandenburg Gate and say, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this giant blue inflatable arch!"

But instead, you painted your face so as to hide amongst the fairer-skinned masses, indistinguishable from the other WASPs only by the fact that you weren't wearing The Emperor's New Compression Clothes (from 2XU, as seen in the spring/summer '10 catalog) and pushing around a bike that cost your kid's first semester of prep school tuition when you were struggling to put broccoli on the table but told your family you were just saving extra money for the family vacation to Cabo.

A wise author once wrote that the best-laid plans of rice and (ra)men go oft awry. Well, at least they had a plan. This could have been you. But you blew it.

Love,

Drew

Intensity

I'll just get it out of the way early. By far, the funniest moment of the weekend was watching one of the later finishers of the Trideltathon run across the finish line with her helmet in hand. She was so intense and focused that she forgot to take off her protective headgear after cycling.

We could all learn something from her single-minded determination to get to the finish line as quickly as possible, with total disregard for the conventions of triathlon. Cold? When everybody else is shivering in little more than glorified, sweat-wicking skivvies, wear stylish pink and black sweats.

Of course this is in jest. She is just one of the 325 people who entered the race, each of whom has some fatal flaw which is probably deserving of its own blog post, a la Stuff White People Like. I should mention that triathlon is just begging to be on that list; the above competitor might have been the only non-white person at the entire event. Triathlon is dangerously approaching the whiteness level of tennis, pre-Serena and Venus Williams.

This weekend also saw Collegiate Nationals come and go -- and I don't regret missing it at all. The swim course was cut in half; water temperature was 54 degrees; heavy rains flooded (and rerouted) the run course and caused confusion on the bike. For the people who built their seasons around this race, it was surely a disappointment as two relatively unknown athletes claimed the titles.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee, the TriVols were dominating the Trideltathon. Matt Robbins took second; Ashley Quinn, Leslie Cagle and Emily Mitchell destroyed the 20-24 age group; Victoria Moss raced her first triathlon. I finished third overall, a pretty solid improvement from this race two years ago when I was competing in my first triathlon. All I have left is the REV3 long-course triathlon . . . and graduation. I'll take the race.

Observations of the Week

Besides being busy and highly stressful, this week represents something more comforting. Well...I take that back. This observation is also stressful: There are just three weeks (21 days) until the half-Ironman, and my graduation follows three days later.

Time is short, so I'm paying attention to every little thing I do. Here's what I've noticed about both training and life in general.

1. Stay hydrated. I tried a 40-minute tempo run last night, but I spent three hours walking around the Knoxville Zoo without water. So around 35 minutes, the wheels came off, leaving me lightheaded, dizzy and with a little bit of chest pain.

2. It doesn't matter how fit you look -- it matters how fit you are. "You look fit" is the best, most nebulous compliment you can pay a runner, as this blog entry points out. Read the comments, and it's amazing how often this is thrown around. I've heard variations ("Your legs are skinny! I mean, you have runners' legs..." and "You look thin. . .") just in the two days since I read this.

3. Pay somebody to work on your bike. I've been riding bikes for 17 years, and I still screwed up my drivetrain in less than five seconds with a few wrong twists of the barrel adjuster. It took me 30 minutes to even get it close to fixed. Either take up an apprenticeship, or get a favorite bike shop and mechanic.

4. Take care of yourself. Get in a habit of eating right after a workout, taking cold/ice baths after hard runs and bike rides, using anti-chafe cream, wearing proper clothing, stretching...the list goes on. Neglecting any one of those things can throw off all the hard training you do. That's why my website is called "an active lifestyle." To race your best, you have to live your best.

Until next time, peace, love and chain grease.

Beware the Fred

This morning, I set out to ride 62 soothing, relatively flat miles on my bike. I drove down from Knoxville to Chattanooga, then woke up at 6:30 to drive another hour to Cohutta, Ga. Then I (and by "I," I mean my dad) paid $35 which presumably covered a donation to the Cohutta Fire Department, some good-ass post-ride chili and hot dogs, and a woefully misspelled T-shirt that reads "Peddle faster - I hear banjo music!"


The turnout was halved from last year, ostensibly owing to another charity ride -- darn those guilty cancer sympathizers! -- which started in Bradley County and overlapped part of our route. So that meant, mediocre cyclist though I may be, that I found myself at the front of the ride. Not riding too hard, but fast enough to overcome the basic forces of friction, gravity and rolling resistance.


Then the Freds swooped in and swept me up, the guys who ride $3,000 bikes at a whopping three-tenths of a mile per hour faster than me. I generally dislike avid-recreational cyclists as they tend to be exclusionary, elitist, and  laugh-at-their-own-jokes funny, which is to say not terribly humorous.


They also are apparently colorblind.


This year's route was marked in green (100k) and orange (50k). There were some leftover marks in a pleasant, though visibly aged, bluish-green (that's my best Blogger replica) from past rides which I dutifully ignored until I got called back and told to turn around. Again, I rode off the front, confident in my ability to distinguish neon-green spray paint from turquoise, until I reached a road clearly not on the cue sheet. A "local" rider tried to fix the errs of the group, and while we got back on course, we cut 17 miles off the ride. 


That doesn't cut it for me. I went pretty far out of my way to get jerked around by some morons can't differentiate between new and old paint. This spring, I'm 0-for-2 in the "Paid Events In Which I've Been Led Astray" category, and I don't appreciate it. An eagerly anticipated training ride turned into a pedestrian pissing contest because I trusted other people more than myself. 


To which I say, No more! Save your pseudo-upper echelon Chattanooga Bike Club / KnoxVelo lack-of-pace-lines for somebody who gives two spokes about being "part of the club." And definitely don't send me off course, then draft off me for 10 miles without taking pulls, then make some snarky comment at lunch while I'm right behind you about how that Tennessee guy was pushing the pace. Go home -- or do you need a cue sheet and GPS system for that, too?

Efficiency or Efficacy: a choice

The first week of "intense" training is done, and I came out of it unscathed. By the numbers:

• Swimming: 2.4 miles
• Biking: 115 miles
• Running: 23 miles

Once upon a time, running 23 miles in one week was bound to lay me up for two more. But now I'm uninjured, training smart, eating plenty, getting sleep and not doing anything stupid. This weekend is my first metric century (pdf) -- 100km or 62 miles of relatively flat terrain. That's about three hours on a bike. If you choose to go out with me in spirit, remember to wear sunscreen and comfortable bike shorts, or you'll be in a world of hurt. 

On another note, I found an intriguing blog discussing the merits (or demerits, as the writer points out) of drafting in a triathlon. He argues that falling into the slipstream of other cyclists destroys the integrity of this individual race against the clock. He says there's one solution: a time-trial swim start to separate everybody. 

I contend that starting five seconds apart (rather than in waves) won't help. It only serves to draw the race out much longer, and when catching and/or passing somebody on the bike, riders are likely to use the draft as an added burst of passing speed. 

I also argue that starting individually takes away the fun of competition, the thrill of knowing your opponents, of being in the moment with the other competitors -- all trying to reach the finish line first. Anybody can race against the clock, but the psychological component of working with your opponents is a skill that I think enriches all triathletes, regardless of race type.

So I ask: If you had the opportunity to go faster and save energy by working with an opponent, versus forging ahead on your own and earning the glory of being the lone leader for a while, which would you choose? The comment section is open ;-)