I wouldn't do that if I were you...

This post shares my thoughts on our obsession with ultra endurance events and why I don't think that's a good thing for most people.

I want to argue that most people shouldn't make the jump to ultra(iron) distance and what's more, they shouldn't want to. I want to argue that racing, really racing and not just finishing, a shorter race is more enjoyable, healthier, and more challenging than finishing an ultra distance for nearly everyone.

It's not just triathlon that has become infected by the ultra-endurance bug. Marathons have been the king of road racing for a long time and the niche race of ultra trail runs of 50k, 50 miles and even 100 miles have seen a huge increase in popularity recently. And there's plenty of ultra enthusiasts among open water swimmers, mountain bikers and RAAM participants.

I think it's fair to argue that the growth and interest in these events is due to the extreme difficulty they present. When the existence of these events is brought to the attention of normal people, aka non-athletes, aka muggles, their reaction is a predictable “that's crazy” or “why would you ever want to do that?” Mostly though, they are grudgingly respectable of and sometimes openly admiring of people who finish these events. They know that it is a testament of a person's will power to get to the finish line for one of these “crazy” races.

As an aside, there is an unfortunate mentality among some athletes that they're better than muggles because they exercise and eat healthy and they will brag about the 2 hour workout they got up at 4:30am for to finish before work. If you brag about these things with your co-workers you should stop, immediately. It's akin to when that vegetarian¹ blathers on about how they're saving the planet by not eating meat, and about as enjoyable for them as when that coworker shows you pictures of their cat that they dressed up in costume over the weekend.

¹ Don't call a crusade on me angry vegetarians, for I am one of you. But let's be honest, vegetarianism, like religion, is something that should be encouraged through example, not frequent, self righteous lectures.

Challenge

Back to the point, ultras are a challenge, a proving grounds where you can step out of the hum-drum of ordinary routine and attempt something courageous. And ultimately, ultra events actually are just that, a challenge. But, marketing and social hype have taken this challenge and made it the ultimate challenge, the toughest event and so on. Finishing an ultra is made out to be the end all and be all for the endurance athlete, and that continues to drive the obsession to sign up for the longest possible race your sport offers.

But consider this: In order to finish that ultra you'll have to put in a lot of miles. A lot a lot of miles. Finishing is absolutely possible. I talk to people every week who put in one year of really hard work and just barely finished one, but they did it. So if you have a functional foundation to work on, it will just mean an exhausting number of hours of aerobic work. If you don't have the foundation, it will probably mean injury. Most people's lives are already plenty time crunched without trying to squeeze in 10 to 15 hours of training per week. Do you really want to get up at 4:30 every morning so you can ride the trainer for 2 hours before work?

A shorter race means less time spent logging miles. You could use that time to get some more sleep, or tackle a project you've been putting off for a month. If you really want to improve your health the time difference is a great opportunity to work on range of motion and overall strength. It won't necessarily make you faster, but it will help put an end to injuries, and who doesn't want to put an end to injuries?

So would you rather be a lithe cheetah or a rickety Energizer Bunny with kinesio tape covering you from head to toe?

Of course even though it means you'll have more time and feel better and not have to spend every season nursing your tight achilles, you may still be mesmerized by the challenge of completing an ultra. Here's where I will be a bit unorthodox. If you want a real challenge, something that is truly difficult and so tough that you may never be able to accomplish it, race an olympic distance tri and finish in under 2:15. (Sorry girls, I'm not good at estimating an equivalent time, maybe 2:40?)

I have a feeling a lot of people will respond like this: That's unreasonable, you think that's reasonable because you race fast, but that's so much faster than I've ever gone, I could never go that fast, that's impossible.

Yes, it is very very fast, and yes you would have to drastically improve to do that and some people no matter how fit they get may not be able to achieve that time, but that's the why it's more challenging, harder, more courageous than finishing an ultra. In order to be that fast you'll have to work for years balancing strength, speed and endurance, smartly avoiding injury and you will have to get very lean. It will take intelligence and commitment and long term planning. But if you achieve that goal you'll feel every bit as on top of the world as crossing that ultra finish line.

So here's my question to you: Are you up for a real challenge?

Minnesota: Where Duathlon Lives

USAT has published their 'Athletes of the Year' for 2012. Patrick Parrish and I represented MN well by receiving Duathlete of the Year and Elite Duathlete of the Year.

The full list of athletes in all categories is here: 2012 Athletes of the Year

If you've never done a duathlon before, they're a great way to test the waters of the 'multi-sport' world. The atmosphere is usually a bit lower key and more friendly than triathlons and for the majority of people a whole lot less stressful because you don't have to worry about the swim.

Gear West Bike has put on an early season duathlon for years and is the perfect venue for anyone thinking about trying out a duathlon. The race will be held on May 19th this year.

This year the crew at Gear West will be going above and beyond to make this the best duathlon of the year with the following perks:

• Pancakes and Caribou coffee at packet pickup
• On-site childcare
• Spectator friendly cross country style run course
• Sponsorship with Zipp to bring you some great give-aways.

Zipp is sponsoring the race which means there some great prizes up for grabs, and you don't have to be fast to win any of these, just lucky!

Each month prior to the race all of the registered entrants are entered into a drawing. Matt Moen won the prize for January, a pair of Zipp Tangente tires.

Still up for grabs:

• March: Two Zipp carbon water bottle cages
• April: Zipp Double Wheel Bag
• May: Zipp Gear/Transition Bag

And on race morning, a pair of Zipp 404 Clinchers will be awarded to one lucky participant!

So dig up your lucky rabbit's foot, put a horseshoe in your back pocket and sign up for a really top notch event today to get your season started the right way.

Registration and course info can be found at the GW Du website: Gear West Duathlon

I hope to see you there!

The Importance of Saying Thank You

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. I highly recommend it. In the book, Gladwell argues that the widely held view of great success as a result of purely individual determination and hard work is misleading and causes our society to let many potentially great successes stall and fail in their infancy. If you think this view isn't widely held just think back to the one man island rhetoric of the recent election. Through a number of very compelling examples Gladwell argues that success is a combination of individual determination and hard work meeting the right opportunities, and the importance of acknowledging those opportunities in enabling success to happen.

I know that I have worked incredibly hard to get to where I am right now. I've done things like riding my bike to work for two months during Minnesota winter, working for 6 hours and then riding to the gym in the dark to swim at 9:00 at night before riding home. But I also remember teammates from college who ran 100 miles a week and had just as much determination as I did who have fallen far short of their dreams.

With all of this in mind, I wanted to post an acknowledgment and an appreciation of a number of special circumstances in my life that have happened in such a way as to provide me with the opportunity to capitalize on my hard work. Each of these circumstances are not enough in and of themselves to produce success and are by no means inherently necessary for success as a triathlete. But what I want to acknowledge is the cumulative advantage of all these circumstances and to say thank you to those involved.

Special Circumstance #1 – Birth Place and Genetics

Two summers ago I had the opportunity to participate in a study at the Mayo clinic in Rochester on the effects of aging on oxygen uptake in athletes. I did a number of tests, but two in particular were very interesting for me personally, a VO2 max test and a lung capacity test. I found out that my lung capacity is 25% greater than average for a person of my size and that my VO2 max while cycling is 74ml/kg/min. The doctor administering the test also noted that runners using a cycling VO2max test will usually have results understated by around 10%, so my VO2max is probably closer to 80-82ml/kg/min. Here is an interesting roll call of some great endurance athletes and their VO2max numbers for perspective: http://www.topendsports.com/testing/records/vo2max.htm

Both of these aspects of my physiology are more or less entirely out of my control, but still have a big impact on being fast. Having unusually large lungs and a high VO2 allow me to get more oxygen into my system and predisposes me to be successful at endurance events.

I am, by birth, a mountain man.

I have my birth place and genetics to thank as the first special circumstances that have gotten me to where I am. I happened to be born at 5000 ft in Denver CO and spent the first 5 years of my life in Boulder and Nederland CO at altitudes of 5k-8k feet. Studies have shown that populations born at higher altitudes have physiological differences including... increased lung capacity. VO2max is a more or less static number that is determined largely by your genetics and cannot greatly be improved except through the use of performance enhancing drugs like EPO.

Special Circumstance #2 – Growing Up “Not Affluent” When Kids Played Outside

I didn't grow up in poverty. I always had food to eat and clothes to wear. But I certainly did not grow up wealthy either. I never watched TV as a kid, and didn't have a gaming system until 8^th grade. I'm not complaining, in retrospect I consider this one of the most important circumstances of my life because as a result I spent all of my time outside. As a kid, what I remember is learning to ride a bike without training wheels and spending every day after that riding everywhere on my bike. I remember every evening getting together with all of the kids in the neighborhood and riding bikes or playing tag or football until the sun went down. What I don't remember is sitting in front of a TV playing video games everyday. Please don't think I'm condemning anyone's parenting. I'm simply acknowledging that I spent nearly every day of my childhood running and biking outside. This was the “base” of my endurance training. Every kid my age in St. Louis played soccer. I spent countless hours running up and down a soccer field as fast as I could, and I usually played mid-field, the position with the most running.

Special Circumstance #3 - 8^th Grade Track

When I was in 7^th grade, there were no sports at my junior high. Then when I was in 8^th grade we had spring sports for the very first time for 8^th graders. The sports that were offered: baseball and track. I wanted to do a sport, but would never have chosen track. Except that I am terrible at the only other sport that was offered, baseball. As a result of this circumstance I happened to go out for track. This is significant because if I hadn't tried track in 8^th grade I would have played soccer as a high school freshman and would not have ever run cross country and probably would never have done track either. I can assure you that I would not have had a chance as a professional soccer player. So as a result of very fortunate timing, I ran track in 8^th grade because it was the only sport offered besides baseball and as a result began running competitively and accumulating training hours in 8^th grade.

Special Circumstance #4 – Mizzou Mindset

The head coach when I ran at the University of Missouri was Rick McGuire. He is well known in the sport psychology field and placed a very big emphasis on sports psychology for our team. In 11 of the 12 Big 12 teams if you were a scholarship athlete and you ran poorly, your scholarship was pulled. In 11 of the 12 teams the only goal of the team was winning. At Mizzou, if you had a scholarship, it was never reduced. There was no cut throat mindset and no extreme pressure to perform. If you performed well, it was rewarded and if you didn't, you just went back to work, no negative consequences. From this I learned everything that I use today in regards to sports psychology, which is another post entirely, but I'll say that without the lessons I learned about how to think about racing, I would likely have given up at this point or would be struggling with external pressures.

Special Circumstance #5 – My Dad Worked at Target Corp in 2009

As a junior in college I got an internship with Target for the summer. I may have gotten this internship through my own merit, but I doubt it. My resume was passed to the head of HR by my dad because they were friends and I “happened” to receive a call from a recruiter soon after. Luckily I am reasonably intelligent and getting the internship is much harder than getting an offer, so in 2009 after I graduated I started working for Target. While at Target I had a moderate interest in getting back into racing for fun and looked into the tri club. The tri club happened to have a presentation for rookie triathletes a week or so later. Who happened to put on the presentation? David Thompson, professional triathlete from Gear West Bike. Through a number of circumstances and opportunities too long to list, I ended up living with Thompson and soon after working at Gear West Bike and Tri.

I cannot emphasize the importance of this opportunity enough. As a rookie triathlete, I was able to live with and observe a professional triathlete that had been racing for over a decade. I had a job at a store focused on triathlon with a staff that knows more about triathlons than any other tri store in the country (IMHO). Because I worked a salaried job for one year and then worked at a store where I could get product at cost I could afford a road bike, a top end tri bike and all of the equipment that young athletes struggle to afford. And when I started to seriously race, because of the groundwork that Gear West Bike has put into fostering the multi-sport community in Minnesota, I had a summer schedule of over 80 races to choose from all within driving distance, many of which offered prize money. I cannot think of better circumstances to have started racing in.

Special Circumstance #6 – A Moustache and a Speedo

Now that's a headshot.

This is my favorite circumstance of my current situation. In Oct. 2011 I grew a mustache for Movember. Everyone said that it looked horrible. I knew that it looked awesome. So I kept it and raced St. Anthony's with a mustache. Jake Rhyner, who happened to live next door in Wisconsin at the time happened to be racing St. Anthony's as well. We happened to be treading water next to each other while waiting for the race to start and Jake complimented me on how good my mustache looked. I won the race and he was second by only 30 seconds, so after the race we cooled down together and chatted for a while. Because he was a cool guy and was racing Lifetime I offered him a homestay at my dad's place for the race. Jake happened to be coached by a guy who lives outside of Clermont FL and could get Jake a job in Orlando. Clermont FL happens to be a hotspot for professional triathletes and after Jake moved down here he was able to finagle a way for me to live and train down here for the winter. Since moving down here I've had the opportunity to swim, bike, run with and learn from more professional athletes and have had huge improvements in all three sports.

At the end of the day, I have worked very, very hard and struggled often to get to this point and I am confident I will make it. But the truth of the matter is, without all of these circumstances happening just so, including 5 or 10 more that I don't have the finger strength to type out, I wouldn't have made it to here.

So thank you to everyone who has made this possible, especially my parents and Kevin O'Connor at Gear West Bike. I appreciate the opportunities you have created which I have worked so hard to take advantage of.

Getting Into The Routine

During my first week I had 4 flats. 3 due to
sub-par rim tape. 1 due to this giant nail.

     Believe it or not, it is now 2013. I've been training in Clermont, FL since the first week in December and it has been fantastic. Quite a few professional triathletes make Clermont their winter training camp and I can see why. The weather is fantastic which makes it possible to swim outside at the National Training Center everyday. For me this is a big win from a mental standpoint. During the winter I want to get in some great training, but I also want to start the season mentally and physically fresh. Since starting to train down here I have started to look forward to the swim each day more than my run (This is blasphemy coming from a runner, and I apologize to any non-triathlete runners for admitting it). I know that I'm not going to have to worry about mid-season mental burnout because I'm not “grinding” through training right now, instead I'm making steady progress and feeling fresh. The old schoolers out there would say that grinding it out during a long cold winter makes you tough, and they may be right... but I'll trade toughness for speed any day.

Swimming with McLarty and Rhyner Outside in January

     To be fair I'm probably enjoying swimming so much because I've made some very big improvements in the last 5 weeks. I'm fortunate enough to swim with some really fast people every day like Sara McLarty, Lauren Goss, Sarah Haskins (these girls are smoking fast), my fellow northern ex-pat Jake Rhyner and Romain Guillaume. The bottom line is these people are usually swimming on a 1:15 base without even really trying. With some stroke pointers and a lot of chasing after feet I've gone from killing myself to swim 200's in 2:35 on a 3 minute sendoff to swimming 200's in the low 2:20's on a 2:30 sendoff. My number one priority for the winter was to make improvements swimming, so this has been very encouraging. To put it into perspective, my race pace last year on average was around 1:17's so even with rest in between intervals I'm usually swimming faster each day than I could race last year. Extra bonus: I have a really great speedo tan which may or may not come in handy this year depending on race kit choices...

     Each day is part of an overall routine blending swimming, biking, running, aerobic work, speed work, strength training, stretching, rolling out, eating, resting, sleeping. I know what I'm going to do every day and get it done as best as I possibly can, making sure to focus on the details. It sounds a bit boring when I say it out loud, but I really enjoy the routine. I'm always hearing about breaking out of routines and ruts, but if you ask me, having a routine is a great way to get work done. When you know what you're going to do every day, you find a way to get it done. Whenever I don't have a routine I always find really good reasons to not do my second workout or to skip stretching.

Claire, still fresh and smiling after running 10 miles on the clay trail.

Hopefully you're having a great winter, even if you are stuck in the snow. If you're on the Twitter be sure to follow all of us training down here in Clermont, sponsors love that sort of thing.

@D_Hedgecock, @jakerhyner, @Lauren_Goss, @SaraLMcLarty, @trialsyorke, @TriCoachK and even though they're back in the arctic, @ClaireBootsma and @dpalmertri.

Thanks for the support!

Winter Speed Work

Today is the first day of November and I'm officially starting to work my way back into training. Naturally you might assume that means that I'm building my mileage back up and getting ready to do lots of aerobic work and put in some foundational miles. Surprise! I plan on doing no such thing this winter. The next four or so months I'll be focused on technique work and low mileage with a lot of speed. This probably seems counter-intuitive, especially if you're used to the standard periodization model that most coaches and online programs prescribe. But I think most people are making a big mistake spending their off-season slogging through lots of mileage. So I've cobbled together this semi-rambling, pseudo-coaching slash training philosophy post to give you some food for thought.

Caveat #1: Taking an extended break after your season is a good thing.

How long did you take off after your last season? A couple days? Maybe two weeks of light training? I've never taken more than two weeks of training lightly after a season before starting to get back into the groove. This year, because of travelling, I took an entire month completely off from training. I didn't run a mile, swim a yard or pedal a bike for over 4 weeks. Initially I was nervous about it, after all I just spent the last year working to get faster, I didn't want to sacrifice all that work just so I could have some fun (I literally held this mindset and realizing I did was a good wake-up call to relax a little...). Then I recently read this article from The Wall Street Journal about Bernard Lagat: 'The Secret to Running: Not Running'

You should read the article. But if you don't have time here's a synopsis: Bernard Lagat is one of the fastest mile/5k runners ever. He has run a 3:47 mile and a 12:53 5,000 meters. He also takes 4 weeks completely off after every season during which time he purposely puts on weight and doesn't run a step.

Being naïve about foreign training regimens, I commented on the “peculiarity” of Lagat's post season routine to fellow Gear West employee Sean Mulheron (peculiar in quotations because it's not actually peculiar). Sean quickly corrected me. Sean rubbed elbows with a few Kenyans during his days as a distance runner at Iowa State, a school notorious for importing fast Kenyans, and this extended rest is the norm for them.

So what's secret here? Well in Lagat's case I think the need for long rest has a lot to do with being a runner, as distance running just tears on your body. For triathletes however I think a long period of complete rest can be just as important to relax. Triathlon is a very time intensive sport and many of us spend every waking minute trying to squeeze in training sessions into the time we have. If you've ever ended a season happy to just be done with training, you know what I mean.

As for me, I've never felt so good starting back into training as I do this year, thank God for forced downtime.

Downtime on the Mediterranean Was Gorgeous

Caveat #2: Technique Trumps Strength

If you don't come from a swimming background, like me, and you've ever gone to the pool and watched an out of shape swimmer jump in the water and cruise up and down the lane faster than you can swim with a smile on their face, you may have been frustrated. How does he, or even worse she!, do it? Of course it's just superior technique.

The problem with working on your technique is that because you are trying to introduce new movement patterns that are unfamiliar you may actually slow down before getting faster. I'll leave the science of it up to exercise physiologists, but in a nutshell muscle memory or motor learning is how someone moves from unable to play a chord on the piano to playing Fur Elise without having to consciously think about the fingering. So if you try to improve your technique in a sport, say by keeping your elbow high during your pull instead of allowing it to drop, you are forcing your muscles to move in a new, non-memorized pattern. As a result, you feel choppy and awkward and slow. This can be unsettling for us Type-A triathletes. The LAST thing I want to do is take a step backward and get slower. But like eating broccoli, improving technique is good for you in the long run.

The easiest way to deal with this problem? Focus on technique in the off-season when you don't need to worry about being fast for an upcoming race. Disregard time and distance when working on technique so that you can focus on the changes you're making. After committing the new patterns to memory you'll be swimming/biking/running easy just like that out of shape veteran I was so envious of.

Some Good Sites I've Found:

Bicycling Magazine: The Perfect Pedal Stroke

Gary Hall's The Race Club

Caveat #3: Speed Work Makes You Fast

I think this can be taken for granted: Speed work makes you fast. I suppose you could argue that a sufficient amount of slow aerobic training would provide the engine needed to go fast, but it seems like you're just arguing for the fun of it, which is a jerk move. But speed work is a double edged sword. Doing speed work will make you faster, but done incorrectly you're almost guaranteed to get injured.

During the season speed work is difficult to get right because of fatigue from mileage. Looking back at the conventional periodization model, you're supposed to focus on speed work in the final phase of your training year when you cut back on mileage, that way you are rested and fast for your big race. The problem I see with this is that speed work is very destructive. As a result, even though I might be tapering by decreasing mileage, my training workload maintains or increases because I introduce speed work. Instead of recovering and getting sharp, I carry my overall fatigue into championship season or possibly get injured just before the big race. How many times have you or someone you've known had to make big concessions in their training just before their “A” race of the year because a nagging injury blew up into a full blown disaster?

My mileage will already be low during any days of the week that I work on technique. To take advantage of this low workload I'll throw in some speed work two or so times a week. Speedwork has also been shown to improve economy better than any other workout, as well as acting as a type of strength work.

So for me, training this winter will buck the trend, go against the grain, fly in the face of common sense and other such heroic sounding idioms.

My goal for this winter isn't to build a foundation for next season. My goal is to fully recover from last season (already done), and use consistently low, low mileage to improve technique and get back a little of my college days speed. Hopefully once spring rolls around I'll be ready to transfer both into some reasonable mileage. At the end of the day I might not be as strong as I could, but I'm betting that better miles per gallon technique and some cayenne pepper of speed makes up the difference.

But will it work? I'll tell you next September.

Additional Off-Season Strategies:

Grow a beard for Samson-like strength.

Harnass the power of positive aka wishful thinking.

Bench press and bicep curls for increased start line intimidation.

Destitution: “Nothing hones your mind and your instincts like necessity” - Reese Bobby.

The Biggest Win of My Life

 When I left my job at Target I dedicated everything I had to training and racing and spent the last two years relying on the help of friends and family to chase after the foolhardy dream of being a professional triathlete. Most of the time my life feels like a bi-polar disorder. Sometimes I'm training completely alone in the freezing cold pitch black of a Minnesota winter and sometimes I'm spending Monday afternoon riding my road bike on gorgeous rural roads with great friends. Sometimes I'm dropping huge chunks of time in training and doing workouts I couldn't have seriously considered just a few weeks earlier and sometimes I'm irrevocably stuck in the same place I've been in training for the last 6 months, no matter how many hours I spend staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool. The time has been everything from immensely rewarding to painfully frustrating. But this weekend made me appreciate every moment of it. After all of the hardship and focus I had a breakthrough race at the biggest race of my life, Hy-Vee. I won a car and a $6,000 gift certificate which is obviously huge from the financial side of my life. But the win also validated everything that I've done so far and given me confidence to keep plugging away even when it seems like winter will never end or I'll never swim fast enough or not feel an exhausted zombie. So right now I'm stuck with a huge smile on my face, but I'm not finished. It's really just getting started, and I'm looking forward to all the highs, but I'm also looking forward to all the lows.

The race this weekend was set-up starting two weeks ago at Age Group Nationals in Burlington VT. I had a pretty mediocre race there that I kicked off with a painfully slow swim. I had the 134^th fastest swim, which brought me out of the water a full 4 minutes and 40 seconds behind Adam Webber... ouch. After that I pulled myself together and finished 3^rd overall behind Brian Duffy and Drew Scott. I wanted to be in top form, but in reality the race was still a tune-up. Hy-Vee and Duathlon Worlds are the peak for my season, and because Du Worlds is 3 weeks after Hy-Vee I couldn't taper at all for Age Groups. If I had, I wouldn't be able to hold that top form for another 5 full weeks and would probably suffer for it at Du Worlds. So instead I used the race to “shake out” the legs and have some fun in Vermont. Claire and I stayed in a B&B 40 minutes outside of town to save some money on a hotel and it turned out great. The house had a big deck with a great view of the Green Mountains. We got to enjoy homecooked breakfast and coffee while taking in the sights. I always thought Missouri and Minnesota were as green and lush as it gets, but it turns out there's a reason they call them the Green Mountains. Even driving back and forth between the B&B and Burlington was nice because there are no billboards in Vermont.

After getting back from Age Groups I started cutting back mileage and resting up for Hy-Vee. It was finally go time. I left last year's race focused on coming back and winning. There's no race with richer prizes than Hy-Vee. Because it's the biggest dance of all the big dances I knew I'd have to be perfect on race day to have a chance to win. So last winter I planned my whole year with this race in mind. In April when a few small things started bothering me and I wanted to race fast in all of the early season races here in Minnesota I thought about Hy-Vee and took a step back. It was hard to not start a few races and to step back from training to fix imbalances, but it payed off.

Race day started off with a 4:30 alarm. I could barely fall asleep the night before because I was so excited for the race. I felt ready and knew that I had a chance to win. Pre race was a blur like always and I spent extra time trying to loosen and warm up my arms. No one was allowed in the water before the race, and I don't think I've done a good job factoring that into my warm-up in previous races. In no time the starting horn sounded and 60 of us dove into the water. I knew that I absolutely had to swim better than I have been or I would lose too much time to make up on the bike and run. But I also knew that I couldn't force it. I tried to visualize important technique cues in the swim and keep my stroke as smooth and strong as I could. It was still a mediocre swim in the spectrum of elite swimmers, but things finally clicked enough that I came out of the water only 2:28 down on Adam Webber.

I got out on the bike course and that's where everything really started to come together. This was my best bike ever and it felt like it. The first 5 or so miles are very technical with many successive 90 and 180 degree turns. I always focus on cornering and bike handling and even if I hadn't been pushing my fastest pace ever would have made up ground on most people. I still can't believe how many people I saw breaking all the way through turns, sitting up when they didn't need to and generally just giving away huge chunks of time. On a course like this, with 25 or so turns of 90 degrees or greater, if you give up a couple seconds at each turn by cornering poorly you could easily lose over a full minute. After riding the turns aggressively we got out on the open road and I put my head down and cranked it out as hard as I could. Last year my best race was about 283 watts average. Yesterday was 287 watts. But last year I weighed 156 pounds and slimmed down to 151 this year. So my watts/kg improved from 3.99w/kg to 4.18w/kg, about a 4.7% improvement. In comparision a top tier fast biking pro like Cam Dye might put out up to 4.83w/kg. I have also been able to get into a more aggressive aero position this year by working on flexibility, with a lower front end and tighter elbow pad placement along with a closer fitting aero helmet. All in all it paid off, I biked 2 minutes faster than Adam and 1:15 faster than Drew Scott.

Other misfortunes of the race include Claire Bootsma and
Jake Rhyner violently puking at the finish line. Jake got most
of his in a bucket, Claire got ALL of hers all over the nice
blue finishing carpet.

Unfortunately Adam and I both crashed on the bike. Adam crashed on a very tight 270ish degree turn with some loose debris and I crashed coming back into transition because I wasn't paying attention and almost run straight into a barrier in a little S-bend. I already had my feet out of my shoes to dismount and almost made the turn, but I was going full speed, locked up my brakes and when my back wheel slid sideways my forward momentum literally threw me off my bike. Since it was right in front of transition everyone was watching, and the shock of it left me all jittery. I picked up my bike and tried to get back on, but my chain had fallen off and I didn't realize it, so everytime I stepped on my pedals my crank would just spin around. There was a really young volunteer next to me telling me over and over that it was alright which almost made me laugh. After standing there for 10 seconds looking foolish I finally thought, forget it, I'll just run it in. Of course, I was only 20 yards from the dismount line and should have just run it in right after I got back up. Luckily for me I landed right on my ass and only got a tiny spot of road rash. My glute is so sore today I can barely walk, but I'm sure it'll loosen up. Adam on the other hand got the short end of the stick. His entire shoulder/upper arm/hip/leg got torn up and he lost a big gouge out of his elbow. He is by the way incredibly nice. During the race his wife, who I had never met before, was cheering for me like we were family. I remember thinking on the run, “who is that incredibly nice woman who's cheering for me?” I chatted with Adam after the race and he told me that he only trains 7 hours a week because he has a full time job and a baby. I can't believe how fast the guy is with that much on his plate.

Photo taken by Nick Morales of Trijuice.com

After the bike it was a hard, hot 10k to the finish, but I loved every minute of it. I was off the bike 30 or so seconds behind, which was a new experience and with my strength in running I started to really think that I could actually pull it all off. David and Hannah were downtown taking pictures and told me I had a minute buffer. I still couldn't help looking over my shoulder at every turn though to see if anybody was behind me. Finally I crossed the finish line and it was all smiles and relief.

The rest of the day was filled with watching the best pro's in the world race for a million dollars, almost getting heatstroke from the blinding sun, hanging out with friends at some house party where we got free food and booze, letting off steam at a bar... generally a lot of “merrymaking”. And now it's back to resting and getting fast. France is less than 3 weeks away and I plan on making the 4,000 mile trip worth it.

As always, I couldn't have done it without lots of help. Thank you everyone, especially Kevin at Gear West for keeping me in the best gear for racing and my dad for the free rent.

Wish me luck and have fun training!

Race Results

Hy-Vee Writeup

New Sponsor: Swiftwick

I love Swiftwick socks. We sell them out at Gear West and they are without a doubt the best socks on the market. See below for proof:

• Kevin O'Connor says they are the best socks in the world. QED. (QED is an abbreviation for quod erat demonstrandum and is used after proving an argument's conclusion logically follows from its premises. This is probably the first concrete use of my philosphy degree from school, even if I'm using it to make a joke. Who doesn't love philosophy jokes?)
• Their socks that use Olefin, the only Nobel Prize winning fiber ever, retain less than .01% of their weight in moisture.
• The linked toe removes seams from the toe box so you don't have to worry about chafing and they NEVER bunch up annoyingly.
• Everyone that buys a pair from the shop to try comes back a week later and buys 5 more.
• They are hand crafted by magic sock elves*.

*Not verified by Swiftwick

For all of these reasons I'm very excited that Swiftwick has extended a sponsorship and I will now get to wear their hats, t-shirts and most importantly socks all the time.

If you've never tried a pair come out to Gear West, we have the full line.

Have fun and train safe.