A triathlete in paradise

Mostly, I think, this week is the proverbial calm before the storm. What better place to have a "calm," proverbial or not, than Maui, HI?

A note on Maui, or really Hawaii as a general entity. If there are more beautiful places in this world, they must be fake. Only the monstrous and financially powerful entities of this world could rival what lies here in the Pacific, and when they do their best, they create mistakes like Trump towers...or Vegas.

But I digress. Hawaii is incredible in every imaginable way. The weather seems stuck on perfect, the locals are never seen frowning, and the cuisine is basically a consistent carb load. Like I said, perfect.

Before thinking about my life as a triathlete this week, I am preoccupied by what is looming next week. After having a pretty intense conversation with my coach last week (picture tears, fist pumping, mixed with high intensity intervals of coffee drinking), we have devised a plan for the next two years of my life as an athlete. Summary of the plan: we're getting intense.

There was talk of power output on the bike, jazzy power meters to measure all of my lovely watts, winter riding, run endurance, anaerobic threshold, lactic acid. We also reviewed our mutual opinion about how dumb swimming is in general, a seemingly requisite topic at our meetings.

With all of that in mind for next week, let's get back to the present moment: me on a couch, bottle of beer sweating on the table next to me, hair still damp from my latest soak in the jacuzzi, and posing the nagging question of whether or not I should peel that skin off of my blistered foot resulting from my latest IronMan.  Paradise.

What I love about this week though, aside from the obvious that I'm in freakin' Hawaii, is that I don't have a plan for my training. If there are workouts loaded up for me in training peaks, I won't even look at them. (Coach Brian, if you're reading this, I'm lying completely for dramatic effect as a blogger and treat your recommendations as irrefutable law).

This week is mine. The week I allow myself to soak in hot tubs, eat Spam on rice, chill. If running sounds good, I have my shoes. If the thought of biking entices, I'll rent a bike. If swimming sounds reasonable, I have a support team here to check me in to emergency care because they know swimming never sounds good to me and I must be sick to say something so bizarre.

This week I get to be an athlete at my own pace. Perhaps I'll remember why I love this sport?  Isn't that the point?  While there is a bit of satisfaction in the rigor and discipline of training, don't I do this this because I fell in love with it long ago?  Well... answer me! (Rhetorical questions are as dumb as swimming, right?)

On the plane ride home I plan to tell you all about my training from the week. It may be a picture of a sunset with a palm tree artistically positioned just so in the foreground for effect. It may not. And right now, tonight, with my feet up and my beer calling, I have to say that I kind of love not knowing what I'll be writing on that plane ride.

Race report: IronMan Mont Tremblant 2013

It would seem that I waited until my 3rd IronMan to have that disastrous amateur race, but when I do something, I like to do it right.  I stunk up this race something spectacular, and yet, it has been my favorite to date.  It sounds demented, and well, it is...

Swim: I am a medium swimmer.  It is where I belong.  I feel no shame in letting the psychopaths who pull off a sub 1 hour swim go merrily before me at the sound of the cannon.  This race however was a wave start, which fantastically for me meant that my wave was directly behind the pro's.  That's right, I was up front with the psychopaths whether I wanted to be or not.  The bad part of this meant that the speed demons behind me got to climb over my medium-paced self all morning.  How lovely.

It was a bad swim, even for me.  My training was garbage and I couldn't have been happier to have gotten out of the water, albeit beautiful.  Looking at my swim time (1:43:53), I was a bit deflated.  Not only had I been beaten senseless the whole time by the faster swimmers elbows and feet that found their target of my face consistently, I felt slow...and old.

A perfect set up for a stupid bike performance!

Bike: biggest rule of race day is to follow your plan.  If you know you should ride a certain speed or put out a certain amount of power, the last thing you should do is change that plan on race day.  Did I follow this plan you ask?  Naturally not.  I got out of the swim feeling blah so it made perfect sense to PUSH my bike ride to make up for lost time.  Stupid...

10 miles in, my back started spasming.  I'm no math expert, but I was able to figure out I had 102 miles to go.  Not good.  I popped an Aleve with a bite of rice crispy treat, and ignored my body like all good athletes should.

By mile 30, the pitiful sounds coming from my mouth sounded foreign and absurd.  While it hurt my pride even more than my back, I had to sit up out of my aero bars.  For those not familiar with what this means, I basically threw an open parachute behind my bike to see if dragging it would slow me down at all.  Humph.

Approaching mile 56, I was ready for the first time to DNF.  Those nasty letters stand for "did not finish."  There are perfectly good reasons to DNF in an IronMan: busted bike, horrific crash leaving you temporarily blinded, kidney stones.  A sore back and a fussy knee just aren't on the list.  I sucked it up and continued.

With the aid of some caffeine, I started feeling good again at mile 70.  It didn't last.  By mile 80 I was getting passed by a lovely woman older than my mother.  Not an exaggeration.  If I needed one last bit of ego-crushing data from this day, seeing this woman smoke me on a hill did it.  I began to re-think my bold decision to not DNF.

The end of the bike ride was approaching and all I cared about was having a good run.  I started smiling again, fully knowing that my bike performance was an embarrassment to my loved ones.  "Whatever" I told myself.  "This is just a good training day" I said.  "Knee caps aren't really all that important" I considered.

All said and done, my bike time was a noteworthy 7:12:09.  I've read of turtles moving faster than that.

Run: FINALLY!  Something I'm good at!  The best part of sucking on the swim and bike portion of a race is that even if you're a mediocre runner, you are passing people like you're a freakin rock star.  And boy was I rockin!

My goal was to pull a sub-4 hour marathon, which means I had to keep about a 9:00 min/mile pace.  I was feeling like a champ and averaging an 8:45 pace.  Who's faster than this guy I'd like to know?  (for the easy answer, you could have asked the 1500 people in front of me, but never mind that).

A few miles into the run, the course veers off onto a gravel pathway for several miles.  I immediately got gravel in my left shoe.  Oh good.  Did I do the smart thing and stop for 20 seconds to take it out?  And take the chance of losing momentum or cramping up?  Crazy talk!  I'll just tough it out.  "I'm the fastest runner ever," I boasted.

All was going spectacularly until mile 12 when my belly finally decided to have a come-to-Jesus moment with me about the sugar filled garbage I had been eating all morning.  I was at mile 12.  14.6 miles to go.  I have no time for a grumpy belly, or Jesus for that matter.  I ignored it.

By mile 13, ignorance was no longer an option.  I was still averaging an 8:45 pace so I had a buffer of time already built in.  I made the call and decided to handle the situation, blue-watered port-o-potty style.  Unfortunately, that just seemed to encourage the bad behavior and the punishment began in earnest.

Dear reader, I will save you the details of the next 1+ hours of my life.  If you want to hear about them, you are a sick and twisted jerk and should confine yourself to a solitary life.  It was ugly with a capital U.

From miles 13 to 21 I was unable to get anything down other than ice chips.  At this point in the race, if you aren't getting calories in, you just aren't really moving much.  True to my exercise physiology training, my ice chips weren't doing squat for my energy levels.

I ran when I could, walked when I had to, and scowled at all living beings I could make eye contact with.

After mile 21 things started to settle down and I resumed some sloppy form of movement some might call running.  It wasn't pretty, but at least I wasn't crawling.

I finished the run in 4:38:28, for a total time of 13:47:06.  A far cry from my goal, while stupidly optimistic, of under 12 hours.

While the race did not go as planned, or even close to it, I somehow found it to be stupidly rewarding and meaningful.  Going through that much pain, wanting to quit pretty consistently for 13 hours, not knowing how you can take one more (gravel filled) step: it changes a guy.

Everyone faces demons during an IronMan.  You start the morning knowing it and are surprised by it every time.  The demons I faced during this race were some of the ugliest I have encountered, and I lived in the Midwest for several years.  But those demons, nasty as they were, opened my eyes to a simple and resonate truth: I am a fucking monster and can handle anything put in my way.

People ask my why I do this crap.  After punching them in the eye, I try to explain how something so painful can be so incredible.  An experience that destructive can somehow be concomitantly uplifting and inspiration in the eyes of an athlete.

I do this because at one point it seemed impossible...