The Man

I've started doing little news items for my Tri Club's website. I'll post them here from time to time if they have appeal beyond the local. This one does. Check out this guy. Whatever training secrets he picked up at Tri-Club have obviously been withheld from me.

HRTC News

What do you call a 50-year-old man who beats every female professional and all but 11 age groupers on one of the toughest half-iron courses in the world? You call him whatever he wants. And so we await direction from Houston Racing member, Roger Wacker, concerning the name he prefers. Perhaps simply, “The Man.”

Roger qualified for the Ironman World Championships at Ironman California 70.3 in April, but why coast into Kona? On June 28, Roger competed at Ironman 70.3 Buffalo Springs Lake in Lubbock. Roger turned in a sterling 4:31:25 performance to win the Grandmasters title, swimming 1.2 miles in 29:22, biking 56 miles in 2:22:57. and running a hilly half marathon in 1:35:27.

Very few of us can imagine Roger’s disappointment in being passed by professional athletes young enough to be his offspring. Really. We can’t imagine it because we’ve never ever bridged up to professionals on the race course. Roger has. Roger’s swim time beat 10 male professional athletes’ times. His bike time, 8th fastest among all age groupers at an average pace of 23.5 miles per hour, beat 8 male professionals, including multiple Ironman champion, Cameron Brown. And his run time, 7:19 pace, found Roger being edged out by a 30 year old and a professional female.

Of the age groupers to beat Roger, the youngest was born when Roger was 31 years old. That 19 year old athlete only beat Roger by 2 minutes, 21 seconds. The oldest age grouper to edge him out, a 45 year old, only nipped him by 29 seconds. The nearest female professional was more than two minutes in arrears and his nearest age group competitor was twelve and a half minutes back. Indeed, Roger’s time would have placed him second among men 30-34 and third among men 18 to 24–that is, it would have if he had not been born during the Eisenhower administration.

Hearty congratulations to Roger Wacker for a superior race result judged by any standard.

120db of Cyclist Rights Luciousness

I can't wait until Thursday, because the Wells Fargo Wagon (or FedEx or UPS) is gonna bring me sumpin' special. I was reading the comments on a cycling blog where someone had experienced a near miss and an annoying honking motorist, and one of the contributors turned me on to this little number:
It is a 120db air horn for your bike with a reservoir that recharges to 80psi by just using your bike pump. I'm sure i's highest and best use is warning a motorist who is about to pull out in front of you or right hook you. Supposedly you can blast it 50 to 80 times before pumping it up, and it is loud enough to be heard inside a car with the windows rolled up and rattling to Eminem.

Beyond this noble purpose, however, I'm also thinking it is a fitting response to the red neck who gives you the "git off'n the road, fag" message with the horn on his pick'em up truck. Now you can honk back and say:

"Hey, Clem or Jed or Rick Perry or whatever your name is, you toothless, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging waste of carbon. I've got one too!

"AND MINE IS BIGGER THAN YOURS."

**snicker**

But I'm not bitter. I'll let you know how it works when it gets here and I get it installed.

Lollygaggers

The Almighty hates Texas triathletes

Anybody out there a fan of "Bull Durham" like me? Do you remember the scene in the locker room where the coach starts to berate the players for their lack of effort?

SKIP

    What're you laughing at?!

  
      SKIP
    You guys lollygag the ball around
    the infield, ya lollygag your
    way to first, ya lollygag in an'
    outta the dugout.  You know what
    that makes ya
     (beat)
    Lollygaggers.

That's one of the big differences between me with a coach and me without a coach. When I was following "Coach Greyhound" I lollygagged for a week or two after a race effort. Coach Kris is not so down with the lollygagging.

Apparently, he's all about the gagging without the lolly part, because yesterday I had the Eurobrick from hell on the schedule, and this only a week after a long half-iron effort.

Why "from hell" you ask? When it is well over 80 degrees in your garage before you open the door at 0530 in the morning, when you start riding your bike before sunup in hopes that you'll be running before Satan quits for the day because of the heat, when you are dripping down onto your top tube one mile into your ride in the dark, when your heart rate jumps into zone 5 while running at 10:00 pace, and when the dogs that usually bark at you don't even lift an eyebrow because it's too hot to give a sh!t, you are in hell.

Or, perhaps it's just Texas.

But hey, our Starbucks will stay hot in the car all day long. So, we've got that going for us.

Which is good.

Why "Euro" brick, you ask?

Well, it's not because "Le Tour" is on, although I am again addicted to the spectacle, suspecting all along that much of the athleticism I am watching is about as authentic as professional wrestling. (Side note on stage one: I have serious reservations about anyone who beats the best cyclists in the world by more than 20 seconds in a 15.5k time trial. If you see a performance far outside the bell curve, you should suspect pharmaceutical intervention. Just as Barry or Roger.).

But I digress.

My brick Saturday was a Euro brick because I was in metric, not by conscious choice.

My Garmin Forerunner 305 went missing over the Buffalo Springs half-iron, and I did not want to replace it before the Garmin Forerunner 310xt comes out on July the 20th. I spent all this effort to hook my old Polar up to Delilah, my new road bike, so as to have data to crunch, because every good triathlete knows that if there are no numbers on Training Peaks, the workout did not happen and it provided no physical benefit.

In all that effort, I somehow got all the units set in Euro numbers instead of good ole American miles per hour. (Of course, we know that's why Lance won all those Tour victories. He trained in miles instead of doing baby Euro, metric centuries. Ever hear of a Canadian tour winner? Non! Coincidence? I think not.)

Anyway, there I am sweating over my bike and riding the first 45 minutes of my ride before the sun even peaks over the horizon, and I'm just waiting to see what my pace and distance are like. I'm giving it my all, trying to maintain a good cadence and level of effort, just anticipating first light when I can see the pay off. Then, all I see is . . .

KM/H

Ugh.

And after two hours of incalculable, metric suffering, I pull back into the garage, and throw on my running shoes. Last minute, I reach into the bento box on Carmen Tequilo, my tri-bike, still crusted with mud and ill-used from her half-iron effort, in order to grab a spare gel pack for the suffer-running to come. Low and behold, what do I find?

Il y a Monsieur Garmin, n'est-ce pas?

Oui. C'est vrai.

So not only do I not know how I rode in the Gulf Coast Stank we call "air," I know exactly how slowly I ran for the last 55 minutes, and exactly how high my pathetic little heart rate was for all that.

I decided to take a "heat discount," by walking in the last five minutes, for which I received the "no lollygagging" e-mail from Coach.

Okay, I get it. Mexico in November=Hot. Houston in July=Hot. Pefect bank of Ironman I have here. Seems like I should at least get a toaster or something for opening up an account in this blast furnace.

Chasing Butterflies: Iroman 70.3 Buffalo Springs Lake

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. "

--Nathaniel Hawthorne

I think my mental processor must be getting slower, or else my RAM needs to be upgraded. I have been trying to process a race report on the Ironman 70.3 Buffalo Springs Lake for days and days, and yet it just would not gel. It is a great event, and I am glad I undertook the challenge, and I had a lot of fun. But at the same time, it was the Murpyh's Law of weather--windy swim and bike, rain in Lubbock (WTH??!!!) and then a sunny hot run with high humidity -- in Lubbock??? How do you write any kind of unified account of that type of experience.

Then, things went from bad to worse when I read the race report from Crazy Jane, M.D., who seemingly just floated, unworried and untroubled, through conditions that I found very challenging. Since Jane has a license to practice medicine and the ability to prescribe medications to her psychiatric patients, I immediately suspected that she had been self-medicating. That, and I rationalized that the swim did smothe out for the later waves and the wind died down for the later waves on the bike. So. See, it was much harder for me. (Blah blah blah excuses and rationalizations).

And then I read a version of the quote set out above in reading a recent magazine article in connection with the Boston Marathon about Bill ("Boston Billy") Rogers. And it kind of snapped into place. I have been chasing butterlies, trying to get faster and be happier with my skills as a triathlete. The worst moments of the weekend happened when I was chasing the fastest, the inability to sleep the night before worrying about swimming open water without my wetsuit, bumming out about my swim time, being judgmental about my bike performance, pulling the plug in the last mile of the run rather than risk puking. The happiest moments of the weekned were when I just "sat quietly" (or as Mark Allen says, "quieted the mind") and just focused on the task at hand--making a good swim stroke, efficient pedal cadence or rapid foot turnover. If I had done that more, the race, which all in all should be considered a success, would have been even more of a positive experience.

The Swim



I swam what time?

The day began very windy, me shivering in the water before the swim start, sans wetsuit. I had decided to swim without one to begin getting accustomed to the feeling in advance of Ironman Cozumel, which is not wetsuit legal. I ran and swum a good warmup, which allowed me to start swimming without hyperventillating. I thought I was doing OK and would swim somewhere in the mid-40s, which is my normal, pedantic, half-iron pace, but it was not to be. I found the lake to be fairly choppy and sucked down much water. The swim times in the pros and the rest of the field would indicate adverse conditions and perhaps a course that was long. I saw myself bouys being blown and moved during the race. That said, with all the improvements to my swimming of late, I was not expecting to swim ELEVEN MINUTES SLOWER than I've swum the course before. I was not happy, as you can see:



Starts with "F" and rhymes with "Duck"

Note to the race organizers: 4 main buoys spaced 400 to 500 meters apart is not adequate for a half-iron race, especially one that starts in the dark and has lake chop. It certainly would neither kill you nor break the bank to have a little round buoy every 100 to 150 meters to aid in siting and provide interim goals for iffy, middle-aged swim novices.

The Bike

The bike involved a much quieter mind, and although I was not as fast as I had hoped, I showed some gains in fitness. I narrowly edged out my previous performances on this course, notwithstanding much tougher conditions than the last two times I did this race. I wanted to average a touch over 18 mph, and through the first 40+ miles I managed to do so. A stiff 20+mph wind from the north, and the last two northerly-oriented climbs out of Ransom Canyon, however, served to lower my average speed to such an extent that I could not bring it back above 18 by the time I re-entered Buffalo Springs Lake Park on my way back to T2.

Re-entering the park, one had to deal with car traffic on the road--getting stuck behind cars during a race?? That probably cost a couple of tenths of an mph off the average, but the main issue was one of safety. Note to the organizers: close the road over the damn to incoming traffic until the race is over.




The good news is that the parts of the course most like Cozumel--flat and windy--I did just fine. If the road does not tip up, I am in my element. I was able to just relax, hunker down, focus, and chip away at time and distance. Hopefully, this is a seed of confidence for a quiet mind on race day in November.

The Run

The good the bad and the ugly. The good was the relatively flat portions of the course where, notwithstanding some tired legs, I was able to get a rhythm going and set a sustainable pace that chewed up the distance and got me from aid station to aid station in good stead. I even overtook Coach Liz about a mile after T2, which surprised me to no end because she's a hard case and a great athlete. But, I took a cue from Hillary Biscay, "no walking in Ironman," (at least on the flats in my case) and every time I had a wave of discomfort, I just focused on my stride and rationalized, "the fastest way to get this overwith is to keep running." That is what one needs on Ironman day.

The bad--three very steep hills. It made no sense to run them on the day, so I power walked. It's just a tough course, so no excuses but no worries either.



The ugly--chasing butterflies. I wound up running a better pace on this course than I have in the past, due to my consistency (if not speed) running the flatter sections. Had I known that, I would have been content to keep the mind quiet in the last mile and a half and just suffer a little more discomfort and done even better.

At the time, however, I was thinking about the PRs and the time goal butterflies that had gotten away--indeed they were unrealistic given the swimming and biking conditions and might have been unrealistic even under ideal conditions. In so doing, the butterfly chasing brain began to ask, "what's the point? No need to puke if you're not going to PR." And so I began walking instead of channeling my inner-Hillary-Biscay. Coach Liz passed me back at about 3/4 of a mile to go. I should have run with her and finished a fun race with a friend, but I quickly cut her loose and hobbled until the finish line was comfortably in sight.




So, again, I finished Ironman 70.3 Buffalo Springs Lake. I did not get near the numbers that I had placed on myself, but in a sense, those numbers will come when I stop chasing them and just get down to the business of putting one foot in front of the other during individual moments.

Even more important than the numbers, however, was the experience and its fruits. I put some big deposits in the Ironman Bank on which I can draw in Cozumel in November, and learned a ton. Better still, the beer was great, the comeradery authentic, the after party loud and boisterous, and the hunger for more such races rekindled. The road goes on forever and the party never ends.

I've Seen This Movie Before

I hated the movie "Titanic." There I said it. Beyond being the worst movie to ever win "Best Picture," I could not see the point of starting a movie where you know how it ends. No matter what twists the writers have put into the script to keep you occupied for the next couple of hours of your life . . .

THE SHIP SINKS, FOLKS. Really.

And Leo isn't going to get the girl.

Same thing for lots of historical and fictional movies where I know the ending: Glory, Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler's List, even West Side Story. Some people don't mind it, but I just sit there in dread for two hours. 'Cause that's how I roll. Mr. Positive. And I need to change that, because if I don't, it will progressively rob me of the enjoyment of Tony and Maria falling in love in the first reel.

I am reaching the point in life where I am starting to realize that I know how this movie ends. Life is a sexually transmitted disease that is terminal in all cases. At a certain point in life, people in your first degree of separation start receiving news from doctors about their particular terminal condition.

"Well, you can see here, Mother and Father Greyhound, there's no circulatory problem, and there is no sign of stroke, but Father Greyhound has experienced some shrinkage of the brain consistent with Alzheimer's Disease."

Flash to Father Greyhound's confusion driving at night and getting lost in familiar surroundings.

Flash to our dear neighbor's wife who deteriorated over a period of 20 years until she was afraid of everything, including her spouse.

Flash to Father Greyhound's father, who looked exactly like him who looks exactly like me, and how he became increasingly combative and paranoid and withdrawn.

Father Greyhound only 70, and has not yet even had the opportunity to retire and take up a hobby. I imagine myself at 70 and it does not involve working my ass off to make ends meet or battling with diminishing faculties or loss of self. Now, however, I know how this movie ends, and I start to worry that I know how my movie ends. But there is a whole 'nother reel to the film, and (unlike Titanic) some great songs and scenes to enjoy along the way, for him and for me.

Indeed, that script has not even been written. If the ending totally determined the value of the intervening journey I wouldn't even do triathlon. I know that, in the end, no matter how hard I train, the podium will not include a short little welp like me who did not begin exercise until his late 30s. The ending of that movie has the tall, athletic kids on the podium who ran track or swam since they were kids. But that does not take away from the grace and joy of the first reel, wherein I learn I am stronger than I thought, and I know what it feels to be truly alive.

Sure, we all know how this movie ends, but very little of who you are will actually travel all the way to the ending with you. With the exception of one particular group of cells, every atom in your body will be regenerated and replaced at least every 10 years--from your red blood cells to your skin and even down to every cell in your skeleton. The lone exception is that mass between your ears, your brain. What is to be done with the new you that gets out of bed every morning? Do those new cells and the new you get a chance to excel, explore, enjoy?

No one would tell a toddler that it is vain to pull up on the coffee table and walk because, in the end, we perish. If, in the end, that one set of cells you were born with shrinks, and you become something other than you before you die, what are you doing with your first reel?

This weekend, my first reel includes a 1/2 Iron triathlon. It will hurt. It will probably be hot. And all along the way I will be tempted with the voice that reminds me how the movie ends. But I get to write this part of the screenplay.

Courage

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

I haven't mentioned this lately, indeed I haven't mentioned much lately, but Coach Kris rocks.

This is easily said in a week like this one where I have gone down to 6.5 hours of pretty easy training--as compared with last week when I was at 15.5 hours of training. Grownups, much like toddlers, are happy and compliant when they are well-rested and fed.

That is me right now. Unlike some of the training plans I have followed in the past, Coach Kris takes recovery very seriously--maybe making a special issue of at my advanced age. My training is less than half what it was last week and I get two--count 'em TWO--days with no training at all.

Now if only I could get the psycho triathlete side of my brain to remain asleep past 3:30 in the flippin' morning. Seriously, I have done two Ironman training programs with key morning training sessions without ever being awakened by an alarm clock. I never use an alarm because I never need one . . . because I always wake up.

Always.

Even when I don't have to.

Even when I don't want to.

Which brings me to another point--the flip side of rest week. Unlike toddlers, psycho triathletes aren't happy unless they are hungry, exhausted, and on the move. That is me in spades. I'm a midget when it comes to racing, but I am a giant in training. I LOVE to train. So the flip side of Coach Kris, during the build weeks, suits me just fine.

Other plans I've followed had one rest day ever week, which always kind of annoyed me. Sure, I need reset, but I want to DO something. Coach Kris uses his Ouija Board or Magic Eight Ball or Divining Rods to give me something every day during the build weeks. I get recovery by Coach Kris' mix of intensities and the mix of swim/bike/run. And instead of piling all the key workouts into the weekend, I actually have some key sessions during the week, meaning more key sessions and better recovery between the sessions.

I think our only problem, Coach Kris and me, is that I don't speak "swim." He does speak the polyglot swim dialect, and he doesn't always stick to the glossary of "swimming terms" that he sent me. I'm not sure what kind of alchemy goes into swim coaching, but instead of saying, "swim longer and faster than last week," you get a lot of numbers and "@" signs and "s/dr/k by 50s" and "desc 1-4." I usually get the gist of it, but sometimes you just gotta e-mail and say, "WTH?"

He hasn't laughed at me.

Yet.

To my face.

All this is making me better, I can feel it. However, I have yet to show it in a performance.

But, Ironman 70.3 at Buffalo Springs Lake is a week from Sunday. It is a hard course that I have raced twice, but never very well. I'm starting to feel like I am a hard athlete. I'm starting to dream crazy numbers. Do I dare even say them out loud? Write them down?

Hmmmmmmm.