A Tale of Two Races

My race schedule got off to a slow start this year. After Devilman in early May, I had a string of weekends made unavailable by various Commencements, my own 20th college reunion, and my husband's race schedule. The reunion probably did nothing to help my race readiness. But clearly the Class of '92 takes our parenting seriously:

To show that it wasn't all Bud Light and debauchery, here I am with my kids, one of our classmates, and his kids, after we all hiked up a mountain later that same morning:

At this moment my husband was busy riding his bike the 70 or so miles back to our home, and Kent's wife was wise enough to stay away from the whole reunion, so it looks like Kent and I are the happy parents to 5 children. None of whom have my hair color.

Finally, the last weekend in June, I was ready to race a local sprint. And then the day before I woke up sick--a weird stomach bug, body aches, plus a general inability to haul my sorry self out of bed. All day long I gamely drank water and told myself, "Maybe I'll feel fine in tomorrow." I eventually made it downstairs to the sofa, where I lay and watched reruns of House. Let me suggest that this is not a good show to watch when sick; by the end of it I was busy Googling "encephalitis symptoms." (Which I didn't have.) When, at 7 pm, I was unable to muster the strength to get out of bed and pack my bag for the race, I called it and didn't even set my alarm.

 I woke up at about 7:45 (the race had started at 7:30), and of course felt pretty much OK (though very weak and hungry). I sipped some coffee and then headed out the door to go catch the end of the race and cheer on my teammates and friends, since the whole thing is about 15 minutes' drive from our house. Here I am with some of them, plus my coach, who was also spectating, after the race:

First off, why do I never have any friends as tall as I am? My entire cross country team in college was 5'5". And I wonder why I feel like an ungainly oaf. But while my friends may lack a little in the height department (and to be fair, the 16-yr-old on the end there is actually taller than I am), they are a lovely crew. Several of them spent valuable breath and energy on the run asking me if I was feeling OK. I told them to shut up and start running harder.

I then had to wait another 2 weeks for my next race, an Olympic distance tri about an hour north of here. In the meantime, I lived vicariously through my children, who got to race every week in our local youth track program.

Finally, race day arrived. I had preridden the bike course the week before with some of my teammates, since the course was (thankfully) new this year. I wasn't even going to do the race again, because after two years I was sick of fearing for my life on the descents on the old course, which coincided with bike-eating ruts and potholes. But then they changed the course, so it seemed like destiny, and off I went.

I had big hopes for the swim this year. I swam hard all winter, and it paid off with much faster times for me in my pool workouts. I have been swimming regularly in open water this summer, both more frequently and harder than I ever have before. On race day the water was a balmy 77 degrees, so wetsuit legal, and when my wave started (the last wave of the day, the old ladies' wave), I swam hard to the first buoy. I could see some women had already gotten away from me, but I seemed to be in the front of the main pack. I rounded the buoy, and then. . . . at some point I seemed to be about 20 yards away from anyone else. The good news is, I had clear water. The bad news is, um, I was 20 yards away from probably where I was supposed to be. But I just picked a straight line from there to the next buoy and kept swimming. I felt like my swim went great--I was swimming harder than I usually do (my goal for the race), and I even drafted for awhile. I don't time my swims, because I don't want to get depressed by the time during the race, and this turned out to be a good thing. I left the water thinking, "That was a great swim!" In fact, it was 3 minutes slower than last year. Oops.

But blissfully ignorant, I charged into T1, made it out without incident, and tackled the bike course. There's not much to say about this part--I went hard, but not all-out-sprint-hard, and I was glad I had ridden it ahead of time. About halfway through I got passed by a women who looked about my age (I can't read ages on the bike), and we kind of leapfrogged each other for the rest of the bike. I felt OK about the bike, but I had no idea how it was actually going. I got a magnet installed on my race wheel this year, but apparently it was not close enough to the sensor, so I got no reliable speed information. In a truly awesome development, I had my bike computer on Auto Start/Stop, so the intermittent speed reading caused the clock to run all weird and slow, so even my time was off. I realized this after I went through the 5 mile mark in 14:56 (OK, 20 mph on an uphill section) and then the 10 mile mark in 23 minutes. As I neared the end of a 22-mile bike leg, my clock was reading 38 minutes. I realized something was wrong, and then proceeded to start cramming shot blocks into my mouth, since it was a ridiculously hot day, and the timing being off meant I hadn't taken in the electrolytes I had planned to. Oops again. I dismounted, if I may say so myself, rather gracefully, ran past a few (young) women into transition, and got back out again in less than 1 minute. And I found out from the results later that this was my fastest bike ever--I got close to 21 mph, when my previous Olympic best was 20.0.

The run was disappointing. I started out well--7:27 for the first mile--then slowed down. I don't know exactly how that happened, because apparently I was unable to take mile splits, but I just know that while I wasn't suffering nearly as badly as I was at this race last year, my legs were tired, and mentally I just kind of punted. It's an out and back course, and I could see that there was no one remotely near my age within a couple miles of me, so in hindsight, I think I just settled in. It's true that it was hot, and being the last wave in a race that starts at 9 am exacerbated this, but honestly, I was just kind of lame. Not much else to say about that.

I finished 2nd in my AG, which was a nice surprise, and although I felt cheesy getting an award with such a lame-ass run and such an abducted-by-aliens swim, the bike split made me feel more legitimate. I think one of my favorite things about triathlons is that, while there's always something to work on, in almost every race I can also find something to be really happy about.

I know how to fix the run (don't be such a lame-ass), but the swim mystifies me a little bit. I am relaxed in open water. I can sight pretty well. I am not fast enough to keep up with the fastest swimmers, but I'm also not nearly as slow as this time (and some of my others) suggest. In the spirit of that old adage about insanity being doing the same thing and expecting a different result, I need to try something different. In my next race I'm going to focus much more on following other people. I've always resisted this, because I don't trust other people to swim a good line, but it's become clear that while there's some chance I'll follow the wrong feet, following myself is 100% likely to lead to disaster on anything other than a straight out-and-back course. I may do an add-on sprint this weekend solely for this purpose, so stay tuned. (It's an ocean swim, though, so I need to remember to follow feet, not dorsal fins.)

Devilman

Almost a month ago, I raced in my longest tri ever--a "half lite" at Devilman in New Jersey. I think it is best summed up by this short exchange I had with my coach about 400 yards from the end of the race--she was standing by the side cheering, having finished (as 2nd woman overall), and I was chugging my way in.

Coach: "I think you may have found your new distance!"

Me: "Let me finish so I can come back and kill you!"

But back to the beginning. I signed up for this race in the heart of winter, on the theory that training for an almost-half would be good for my sprint/olympic racing this summer. My coach, her partner Lisa, my partner in crime Linda, and another woman who works with my coach ("Hot Stuff" to her friends) were all doing it. I never succumbed to peer pressure in high school ("What? Drink beer? How would I finish my calculus homework?!"), but now I'm making up for it. I signed up, then proceeded to ride my bike enough this winter and early spring that finishing a 40.3-mile bike leg seemed feasible.

My trip down to NJ started really auspiciously. Linda got a flight down, so I agreed to bring her bike on the back of my car, with mine stowed safely in the back seat. I backed out of my driveway, forgot that a) I had Linda's bike on the back, and b) we now have a basketball hoop at the end of the driveway. Crunch. Somehow I managed to hook her bike around the basketball hoop. I got it off, hyperventilated (not necessarily in that order), checked to see that wheels and such were still attached and moving, then drove straight to the bike shop to ask them to verify that I hadn't just ruined Linda's bike, which I think cost more than my car. It seemed fine, so off I went.

I stopped on the way down in northern NJ to spend the night with my college friend and former teammate Cherie. It is tradition for us to take an unflattering self-portrait.

The next day I made the second half of the trek down south. I texted Linda a photo from our hotel room, showing her that her bike was indeed safely out of my reckless clutches.

Then I drove 45 minutes more to Ocean City, where coach and partner have a lovely, if still somewhat unfurnished, house. We set about the critical task of painting our nails to be appropriately satanic.

Coach Martha is displaying her trademark focus here, while Linda is mocking us on Facebook. My favorite part of this whole nail-painting exercise was that I, who generally think of myself as a tomboy and inept with all matters cosmetic, was somehow tagged as the girly-girl here for having some ability to paint my own toenails without covering my foot in nail polish. Here is my handiwork:

In case you want to try this at home, I went with a bright red base coat, red glitter on top of that, and then a black crackle finish on the toes. Actually, don't try this at home, because it took a serious amount of chiseling to get that glitter polish off. Also, to state the obvious, it looks hideous. Lisa also painted one of Balto's nails, although it's sort of hard to see here:

We had a yummy lasagne dinner prepared by Lisa, then Linda and I retired to our hotel near the race site.

The big story of the race was this: there was a hatch of tiny, vicious, biting bugs in the field next to transition. We arrived and were immediately attacked, as was everyone else, while we waited in line for packet pickup. The entire pre-race time was spend trying to minimize bug bites. I have never been so happy to start a race in my life, because just getting into the water meant the bugs stopped biting. Here's what my arm looked like after the race:

The water, as it turned out, was both very cold (well below 70 I believe) and an alarming shade of dark brown. We watched the waves before us start, and it looked like a churning sea of mud. When we got in to start, I found that the bottom was some kind of weird cottony-feeling pillow of mud. I still get a little creeped out just thinking about it.

The swim was two diamond-shaped loops for a total of 0.8 mile, and the last 5/8 of my swim was pretty good. The first 3/8 were me running into traffic and then choosing to stop and breaststroke while it cleared out. Yes, I know this is dumb. I got out of the water for the long run to transition and just decided to forget about it; from the number of bikes on the rack, other people were having worse swims anyway. I don't remember my swim split, and I'm not looking it up, because it was slow.

The bike was way better than I expected, given that I've never raced close to this far. The course is pretty pancake flat, two out-and-back lollipops. I just kept my HR where I was supposed to and was pleasantly surprised to find myself passing a lot of people anyway. (Probably because my swim was so crummy, come to think of it.) It was actually kind of fun being in a race and not biking flat out. Until the last 10 miles or so, when I was tired of biking. But in the end I averaged 18.7 mph, which seems neither spectacularly good nor embarrassingly bad to me.

I came back into transition, where I easily got my feet out of my shoes to dismount. The same way I've now been dismounting for about 2 years. With never a single mishap. See where this is going? There was a slight uphill coming into the dismount line, and I was so focused on this that apparently I didn't take off enough speed. I hopped off the bike and immediately crashed in a spectacularly ungraceful way, right in front of a nice little crowd of spectators and volunteers. I got up right away, someone handed me the bottle that had popped out, and I managed to get myself moving toward transition. There was a pretty long run back in over grass and gravel, and I had knocked things around enough that my back wheel was no longer moving. So I essentially dragged the bike for about 400 yards, blood running down my leg to boot. Here's what my legs looked like post-race:

But I headed out onto the run with nary a worry in the world, because a surviving a bike crash (OK, more like a bike flop) with a couple scrapes seemed awfully lucky. My legs felt pretty good, and although I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the mile markers were, I am pretty sure I was running sub-8's to start with. I was passing people pretty quickly; I even passed one 20-something guy who was nursing a hamstring cramp and gave him one of my shot bloks, because I was feeling all happy and generous.

The run was also an out and back, also pretty flat. It was muggy and warm by this time, with not a lot of shade. About 2.5-miles into the 8.8-mile run, I saw Martha coming back in, right behind the 1st place woman, with 3rd place not far behind her. It's not my race to write about, but I will say this: in the thick of a close race, she took a couple seconds to swerve over to my side of the road and give me a high five, which gave me an incredible boost. She may hold the world record in classiness per ounce of body weight.

Everything was pretty good until I hit the turnaround, and about 100 yards past that, my legs seemed to be done for the day. They hurt, I was tired, there was a headwind. . . you get the picture. I don't have a lot to say about this, except that after a couple minutes of feeling sorry for myself, I just mentally reset myself and focused on running as hard as I could at any given moment. I don't think it was pretty, but I didn't get passed a lot, and once I sort of gave in to "this is what I have, and I'm going to work with it," I actually kind of had fun.

By about 5 miles my inner right thigh was hurting so much that I began to suspect I had pulled something on the bike; it wasn't until I pulled up my shorts for the picture above that I realized I had a massive hematoma brewing there from my fall. With about a mile and a half to go, a young (I thought) woman I had passed at the turnaround passed me back. We chatted a little bit (me: "Since you're wearing calf sleeves, do you mind if I ask how old you are?" her: "don't worry, I'm 28."), and I sort of vaguely hung with her. Right after my pithy little exchange with Martha near the end, I shrugged off my stupor and kicked my way past the 28-yr-old; I invited her to come along, but she just laughed. I ended up averaging 8:22's for the run, and I finished 5th in my AG. Here I am, plastered in little bugs, approaching the finish:

I have noticed that I have massively flared nostrils in all my race photos, which I take as a good sign--apparently I am getting oxygen through all available openings. Also, please note that my devil-red fingernails show nicely in this picture.

They had a lot of good food post-race, which we enjoyed while being re-attacked by the biting bugs, which had been thankfully absent during the run. Hot Stuff doesn't actually seem to be enjoying the post-race spread, but that could just be the bugs,

Martha got 2nd overall, Lisa won her age group by a landslide, and Linda recovered from a craptastic swim to take 3rd in her AG. Eventually we all made our way back to Ocean City and celebrated.

While it was not exactly beach weather, we walked the boardwalk anyway. I sort of hobbled.

On the left is Hot Stuff's friend Flash (no, I don't really know what is with the nicknames--I think it might be a Women's Studies thing, since they're both WS professors), who was injured but came down anyway to cheer us all on.

That night I let Balto sleep with me on the air mattress, and he feel deeply in love with me. Although rumor has it he started flirting with Linda pretty heavily when I left the next day.

The last thing I'll say about this race is that I had about 200 bug-induced welts on my arms, legs, scalp. . . yes, pretty much everywhere, and they lasted almost a week. I don't know what it is about my body chemistry, because everyone else was like, "Yeah, my ankle itches a little bit," whereas I was pretty much trying to flay the skin off my body with my fingernails 24/7. It was not pretty. But yeah, I'd pretty much do this race again, if I had that fun crew with me. Plus some Deet.

Where did March go?

Not to mention April. I am, as usual for this time of year, weeks behind in my work. But I'm now so far behind it seems pointless even to try to catch up.

When I last wrote I was about to do my first race of 2012--the ever-challenging February 10-miler near my house. My goal this year was not to completely shut down for the last (mostly uphill) mile. I'm not sure I accomplished that, but I did accomplish my less-publicized goal of not looking like I was about to pass out in the race pic:

To be honest, I think I made that goal only because the photographer was stationed a) earlier in the race than in previous years, and b) on a downhill portion.

I executed my usual plan of holding back the first 5 miles, then going for broke. I lost my friend Linda somewhere around mile 3, when I slowed down to drink water. I was on a mission to catch up with her when this picture was taken (somewhere around mile 6). Linda later described the middle portion of my race as "opening up a can of whup-ass," which is pretty accurate, only it doesn't specify that the ass I whupped was mostly my own. She came with me when I passed her, and I led us through a couple really quick miles. I managed a 7:07 between miles 7 and 8, and it's not even a downhill. And then I hit the final hills, and my legs completely abandoned me, while I watched Linda cruise off to her best finish ever. (She actually turned around at one point to wait for me on the hill, because Linda is pathologically nice, but I think she came to her senses when she saw how bad I looked.)

A couple weeks later I did the enormous local St. Patrick's Day 10K. I prepared meticulously:

I rode down to the race with 3 of my friends, all pictured here pre-race: Martha (Coach), Dena and Lisa:

We were doing our best to be decked out for St. Patrick's Day, because this race is an odd combination of elite 10K race and drunken spectatorfest, so you want to appease the spectators by dressing appropriately.

I have never run well here--one year it was hot, one year I was just lame, one year I don't really remember what happened. Dena, Lisa and I got stuck way the hell back at the start, somewhere behind the 9-minute pace sign, because they wouldn't let you into the corral (20 minutes before the start) except at the back of the race. I love this race, but they really need to check in with some other big New England races to figure out how to let people line up appropriately. My theory is that anyone who legitimately belongs anywhere near or in front of a 7-minute pace sign is going to be out warming up until the last minute, so we need a side entry into the corral. But we just chilled, and luckily so did everyone behind us. After the start Lisa and I spent about a mile working our way through people running way slower than we were, but I think this helped me in the end, because I couldn't go out too fast. And the good part was that for the entire race, we passed people. Like thousands of them.

My plan was to try to be a bit more aggressive on the roughly 4 miles of uphill at the start, and I was. I still had some legs in me for the screaming downhill after mile 4, and I did it in about 6:10. And then the key was the final mile--it is up and down, and Lisa and I went back and forth here (as we had the whole race, actually), which kept me moving faster than I might have if left to my own, pain-avoiding devices. We ran from mile 5 to 6 in about 6:46, and then Lisa dusted me in the last 0.2, while I tried hard to avoid throwing up from the smell of grilling hamburgers. I finished in 45:32, which for me on a hilly course is great this time of year. And then it took us about an hour to find Dena and Martha. After Martha collected her prize for winning the master's race, we refueled with an array of healthy food choices:

The thing is, since everyone around us was refueling with beer, fried dough and $5 margaritas, a little sodiumfest from McDonald's really didn't seem that bad. I am especially proud of getting Martha to drink her first ever Shamrock Shake, immortalized here.

The other exciting news from March is that I had a conference in San Diego, where I skipped most of one morning's worth of talks to swim here:

Since then I have been training with a particular focus on the bike, since in less than two weeks I am doing a race with a 40 mile bike leg. Which seemed like a great idea back in the winter, when I signed up. And it actually seems OK again, now that I've been out for a couple long rides on the cow bike and have gotten used to it again. We had a lovely spell of weather, now vanished, during which I had one particularly blissful 40+ mile ride. My friend Nancy did the first 15 with me, then peeled off into the distance:

An hour or so later I stopped at a scenic overlook to take this picture of the Connecticut River with Mt Sugarloaf in the background:

And even later I stopped one more time (really, I did ride hard in between all this) to take a picture of my favorite herd of cows, the Belted Galloways, aka "Belties":

After this ride I did a short, easy run off the bike, just to make sure this was even feasible. On my whole ride I had no problem with traffic--the few cars and trucks I saw gave me a wide berth, let me pull out to make left turns, and generally behaved like the good Western Ma people we all are. And then during my run, someone from a passing car pelted me with a half-chewed strawberry. It left a red welt on my arm. That was so uncool.

In other biking news, I've done two of my club's time trials already (which I think is as many as I did all last season), and last weekend I headed out in cold and windy weather to do my longest ride ev-ah. I didn't take any pictures, because I was too busy suffering through an endless headwind, plus I was grumpy that I had to go back to booties and tights after that one blissful week of riding in shirtsleeves. 

At some point in here Easter happened as well, which resulted in some very cute eggs that we mostly never ate, because none of us really like hard boiled eggs.

 And of course the other monumental event in March was a mother/daughter pilgrimage to this:

Not only did I love this series and hence the movie as well, but I find it offers me a useful perspective on things like attempting a triathlon with a 40-mile bike leg, which doesn't seem bad at all when compared to the Hunger Games. May the odds be ever in my favor.