Triathlete of the Year!

Last Saturday was the annual Minnesota Multisport Association awards presentation.  This year I took home 3 of them!

This was the 5th year in a row I've been nominated for some sort of post-season award, but the first time I've ever actually won one.  Back in 2011 I was nominated in 4 different categories and still scored the goose egg.  I did however leave that night with 4 pairs of Minnesota Tri News socks, which were apparently a consolation prize for setting the record for the most nominations with zero wins.

To be fair those are some really bitchin' socks, and they make regular appearances on my feet to this day.

Still, sock quality aside, it's really cool to be recognized like this and bring home some hardware, so huge thanks to the folks in charge of handing these things out!

So here are my personal breakdowns of each category I took home:

Triathlete of the Year

I was up against Kevin O'Connor, Marcus Stromberg, Sean Cooley and Brooks Grossinger.  This one seemed pretty cut and dry since I raced all of these guys head-to-head at various points during the season and came out ahead each time.  Still, this is an outstanding group of guys and to even be listed among them is an honor.  To actually be singled out of the group for an award is beyond cool.

Long Distance Athlete of the Year

This one was a genuine surprise.  The other nominees were Michelle Andres, Dianne Hankee and Emily Kratz, all 3 of whom had outstanding results at the full-iron distance.  I, on the other hand did 4 half-irons which ranged from outstanding (New Orleans), to pretty-good-but-far-from-perfect (Liberty), to "meh" (Chisago), to a total shitshow (Vegas), plus my first foray into longer than half-iron racing, in which I showed up injured and made most every long-course rookie mistake possible but still bumbled my way to an OK result (Leadman 250).

If I had a vote I would have given it to Michelle.  I'm guessing there was a fair amount of disagreement on the committee regarding this one.  It will be interesting to see the reasoning behind my selection when it's posted on MTN later this week.  My personal guess is that I squeeked ahead simply because I raced more often.  Whatever the reason, my name is now engraved on the thing so I guess I'm keeping it!

Performance of the Year

Kevin and I each had 2 nominations in this category.  For me it was a 4:05 at New Orleans 70.3 and a 1:53 at BOUS.  For Kevin it was a 4:07 at Pigman Half and a course record win at Liberty Olympic.  Since neither of us raced head-to-head at any of the aforementioned races this one is about as subjective as it gets and I think a valid argument could be made for any of those performances.  I ended up taking the award for my race in New Orleans, which ironically I went into feeling completely under-prepared with correspondingly low expectations.  Just goes to show that how you feel in the days/weeks leading up to a race does not necessarily correlate to how well you do in said race.

Well, that's all I've got.  I'll just leave you with this sweet picture of my ass.

Leadman 250

A couple weekends ago I was in Bend, OR for a 9+ hour death march otherwise known as the Leadman 250, which is a triathlon consisting of a 5k swim, 223k bike and 23k run.  If you're thinking, "wow, that sounds stupid, nobody should ever race that long," you are officially a smarter person than I am.

It went pretty well all things considered as I ended up damn near winning the thing, finishing 2nd overall by a scant 2:54 margin.  Normally racing for over 9 hours only to miss a win by less than 3 minutes would grind my gears pretty hard, but given how the week leading up to the race went down as well as the fact that I was waaaay out of my comfort zone distance-wise I'm actually pretty happy with it.

Old Man Problems

Looking at the Leadman distances it's pretty clear that success or failure depends entirely on how well the bike goes.  I had a pretty disappointing bike split a few weeks ago in Vegas coming off of a full taper, while I had one of my better rides ever at Chisago earlier this year coming off of a week of hammering up a bunch of Alpine climbs in France, so I figured the right thing to do the weekend before Leadman was to go out and do long (for me anything over 3 hours qualifies as "long") as hard as I can go rides on both Saturday and Sunday.  That ended up being the wrong move as I strained or pulled or otherwise aggravated something in my lower back on Saturday's ride.  I then doubled down on bad ideas and went out for Sunday's ride anyway, which got me from dull throbbing pain territory all the way up to, "Holy shit! Why am I repeatedly being stabbed in the spine?!?!?!"

Long story short I spent the rest of that week walking around all hunchbacked and angry, eating Advil like candy while cursing my bad luck and poor life choices.  It got even more depressing in the days leading up to the race when the weather forecast started calling for rain (with possible snow) and highs in the 40's on race day. 

I ended up getting on the plane on Thursday morning legitimately unsure whether or not I would even be starting the race on Saturday.  At this point any concerns about finishing time and/or placing were completely out the window and I was looking to simply get through the thing in one piece.  Worst case scenario was skipping the race and T-Payne and I spending the weekend hanging out with our good friends/France travel companions/Bend residents Dave and Morgan.

Also, one time Dave got his ass kicked and his very expensive bike demolished by a squirrel.  I just thought you all should know that.

On the fight out. my airline bike fee avoidance game was put to it's toughest test yet, the Delta baggage check counter.  Delta has a $150 bike fee and is known among those who regularly travel with a bike as one of, if not the worst airline on Earth for traveling with a bicycle.  Consequently, I have been avoiding them like AIDS since I first started flying to races 4 years ago.  However, flying from MSP into the tiny little Redmond, OR airport left me little choice other than to run the gauntlet and hope for the best.  As it turns out I underestimated the strength of my wizardry and the GhettoBox 3000 sailed right through as a regular checked bag.  On the way back I checked in through the Alaska Airlines counter at Redmond (my return flight was a Delta/Alaska codeshare, and Alaska is about eleventy-billion times less bike-hostile than Delta) and again breezed through with no fee.

That evening Dave suggested we walk down the street to the gas station to get some beer, at which point he pulled 2 empty 64oz growlers out of his closet.  We got to the gas station and were greeted with this:

That's like 30 taps dispensing damn near any variety of beer you can imagine.  In the corner gas station.  Mind.  Blown.

Why don't we have this in Minnesota?  That was pretty much the pattern for the weekend in Bend.  See something really cool, and wonder to myself, "Why don't we have this in Minnesota?"

Luckily the back pain subsided back to annoying-but-tolerable by Friday night, so Dave and Morgan navigated us to a nice local pizza joint for my traditional pre-race meal.

Then we retired back to the Hirsch residence so I could get my special needs bag in order before taking advantage of the 2 hour time difference and getting in bed nice and early.

 

 Two slices of pizza, 4 mini Cokes, 2 Snickers bars, a tube and a CO2 cartridge.

Race Day

On race morning I woke up at 2AM and never got back to sleep.  That's a new one for me.  I typically don't have many problems sleeping the night before a race.  The upshot is that I had plenty of time to eat a legit breakfast instead of my traditonal race morning meal consisting of a can of Ensure chased with a bottle of Coke.  I've never been too worried about deviating from the usual pre-race routine.  Even more so for something like this since I had never done a race even remotely similar to Leadman and the whole concept of a routine is pretty silly when it's your first time.

Dave was kind enough to wake up early to drive me to the finish line area where the athlete shuttles were departing.  The first thing I noticed stepping out the door was that it was really, really fucking cold (it was in the 30's that morning).

Historically some of my better races have been in the cold, so typically I would welcome cold temperatures with open arms.  However, I spent the entire summer conducting a heat acclimation experiment on myself, which mostly involved intentionally doing workouts during the hottest part of the day and never running the AC at home.  I'm rating the experiment a success as I stayed out of the hospital in Vegas (also, huge savings on the electricity bill from never running the AC!), but it rendered my normally freeze-proof Northern European viking-yeti physiology alarmingly vulnerable to temperatures that I would have completely shrugged off at any other point in my life.

We got to the athlete drop off promptly at 5:15 and I stepped out of Dave's car right into a circle of bus drivers who seemed genuinely confused about where we were supposed to go.  I had heard reports of buses getting lost last year so this was a little concerning.  They must have gotten it sorted out because we made the hour long drive out to the lake without incident and arrived right at sunrise.

I pounded down a banana and a couple cans of Coke in a last ditch attempt to stuff some more calories into my system then headed off to the change tent to get into the wetsuit, which I was unpleasantly surprised to find still wet on the inside.  That suit was last worn at the St. Croix Valley sprint on August 31st, so that was gross.  And cold.

The air temp was still in the 40's at this point, so as soon as they finished the pre-race briefing I made a beeline to the comparatively warm 61 degree water.  There were a ton of people wearing neoprene caps and booties, which made me nervous because I own neither of those items and my default assumption in that situation is to assume that they all know what they're doing and I'm acting like an idiot.  Oh well, no turning back now.

The start area was a couple hundred yards offshore, but that part of the lake is shallow so all of us 2nd-wavers were able to stand in waist deep water and watch the first wave take off before lining up for our own start.

Soon enough the horn blew and we were off.  I jumped out ahead of the rest of the wave and stayed there about halfway out to the turnaround, at which point I bumped into another guy from my wave who was moving pretty good.  I got on his feet and stayed there around the turn buoy, but lost him shortly thereafter.  Between the traffic we were hitting from the first wave and the fog on the lake I couldn't tell whether he pulled ahead, dropped back or was off to the side somewhere.  Either way I wasn't in the mood to stress out about it and just kept plugging along toward the next buoy.

The 250 course was 2 laps, with a short run up and down the boat ramp in between laps.  I checked my watch running up the ramp between laps, saw 29:30 and literally laughed out loud a bit.  Either I got significantly better at swimming via injuring my back and not swimming, or that was way shorter than advertised (hint: I didn't get better at swimming).

I ran down the ramp to start lap 2, did a couple of half-assed dolphin dives and noticed something didn't feel quite right with my wetsuit.  When I made it back out to the start buoy I'd finally had enough and stopped to figure out what was going on.  It turns out the back of my suit had somehow come completely unzipped.  I can't rule out my brain operating on autopilot and unzipping it while out of the water between laps.  The shallow water at the start area came in handy again as I was able to stand there and get everything zipped back up to where it should be.

The 2nd lap was the same as the first with the added excitement of a couple head-on collisions with people coming the opposite way (the course was literally straight out and back, so there was no separation to prevent this).  One of those tweaked my back a bit, but it somehow fixed itself after a couple minutes and ended up not being a big deal.

I ended up getting out at 1:02 and change, which was way ahead of where I expected to be.  I heard someone after the race saying their Garmin had it at 4,300m, which sounds plausible enough.  Still though, 1:02 for 4,300m works out to something like :55-:56 for the standard 2.4mi Ironman swim, which is pretty damn solid for me so I'll gladly take it.  The water temperature was absolutely perfect once you got going and started generating some body heat and the water quality was exceptional.  I could easily see 20-30 feet down.  The best swim venue I've ever raced in and it's not particularly close.

Upon exiting the water I grabbed my T1 bag and hustled into an empty changing tent, grabbed one of the 2 chairs that were in there and dumped my sack of crap out onto the ground in front of me.  My clothing strategy was just as haphazard as the rest of my approach to this race and I ended up keeping the wet trisuit on, but added a short sleeve bike jersey, arm and knee warmers, gloves and toe covers.  Only a triathlete could cobble together an outfit that stupid looking.  Due to the addition of the toe covers I didn't trust myself to leave my shoes attached to my pedals, so I goofy-walked the length of transition in my cleats to grab my bike and get to the mount line and embark on the longest bike ride of my life.

The bike course starts with a fast out and back section that lets you get a good look at the rest of the field.  I made the turn at mile 18 in 2nd place, with 1st about a minute up the road ahead of me.  We rejoined the 125 course at mile 28 which was nice because it gave me a nice series of intermediate targets as I bridged up to first.

I caught the leader, Gerry Marvin, around mile ~33 and noticed that he had a 2-digit race number indicating that he went off in the first wave 5 minutes ahead of me.  At first I was all internally high fiving myself for being 5 minutes off the front, but then I realized that I rode pretty hard to bridge that gap and I had literally 100 miles of riding (including 2 significant climbs) left, not to mention the small matter of a 14 mile run.  I consciously dialed back the effort a bit and we did the back and forth for the next hour and a half up to the summit of the big Mt. Bachelor climb.

I soft pedaled a bit over the top of the climb to refuel and to pee and Gerry opened up about a 15 second gap as we started the long descent toward Sunriver.  I thought, "No big deal, I'll get back up there after we get to the bottom."  That turned out to be a seriously bad assumption because I simply couldn't hang on the descent.  It wasn't even a technical descent.  I spun out my hardest gear, then got into the best aero tuck I could muster only to watch Gerry fade off into the distance over the course of the 10 mile descent.  I think my gearing choice screwed me a little bit here.  I had a 12-25 and 11-23 cassette to choose between.  I assumed the 25 would be necessary for the uphills (I was right) and that I wouldn't really miss the 11 on the downhills.  That 1-2mph or whatever having the 53-11 on the downhills would have gained me would have come in handy for sure.  I definitely should've tried harder to scrounge up an 11-25 cassette.

After the long descent the course turns off of the wide smooth highway onto a super narrow little forest service road.  The next 10 miles marked the absolute lowest point in the race.  I grabbed a Gatorade from an aid station at mile 80 only to find that the seal underneath the cap was still on.  It's annoying enough to pay a $300 entry fee and get those shitty gas station bottles, but it's downright infuriating to get one of those and not even be able to drink out of it.  That really does grind my gears...

 
Up to this point we had been pretty lucky with the weather.  The sun even peeked through a couple times on the climb up to Bachelor.  But now it was starting to rain pretty hard, my hands were frozen solid (even in the gloves) and I was starting to run out of gas.  And there was 60 miles of riding and 14 miles of running left.

It was then that I saw a sign proclaiming SPECIAL NEEDS BAGS AHEAD.  The promised land!  Where a veritable feast of Coca-Cola and pepperoni pizza awaits!  I pulled up to the tent and channeled my inner Kobayashi and slammed down a slice of pizza and a can of Coke as fast as I could manage.  The original plan was to grab it and eat on the go, but with the wet gloves and frozen hands I thought better of it.  I think I spent 2 minutes give or take a few seconds stopped there.

The pizza and Coke refuel was a serious shot in the arm and allowed me to ride the last half of the course with some semblance of strength.  The 2nd time up to Bachelor was actually faster than the first.  We had a pretty wicked headwind near the top on the 1st lap that had abated by the 2nd.  So that was nice.

Once again I got torched on a non-technical descent as I watched a guy in front of me fade away on the long descent back into town.  Super frustrating.  I also couldn't coast without my legs shaking uncontrollably.  It got bad enough to cause the front end of the bike to shake to the point where I was legitimately concerned about crashing.  So I did my best to keep my legs spinning even though I was going fast enough where I would have to spin at about 150rpm to put any power into the road.

I rolled into T2 a frozen, shivering wreck.  I did get a good laugh when I saw the rest of the gang near the dismount line.  They had raided the Hirsch family Halloween costume bin.  T-Payne and Morgan were Thing 1 and Thing 2 (which I've been told is from a Dr. Seuss book).

 

And Dave was a turd with wings and a halo (AKA "Holy Shit")...

I heard they were the life of the T2/finish line area.

Transition was awful.  I tied my bag shut the night before, and now my frozen claws were proving woefully inadequate to untie the knot.  Eventually I went caveman-style and tore the thing wide open.  I had a similar problem with the helmet, but brute forcing it off wasn't an option so I had to try, fail, repeat ad nauseam until I finally got the buckle undone on the 32,843rd try.  Two minutes and 18 seconds later I finally made it out onto the run.  That may not sound like much but the transition area wasn't that large.  I'd bet I could get through there in 45 seconds or less on a warm day with full use of both opposable thumbs.

I was told I was in 3rd as I crossed the timing mat officially starting the run.  I could see 2nd a minute and change in front of me, but first was way out of sight.  The run course is deceptively difficult.  There's actually quite a bit of elevation change with a couple of really nasty steep pitches thrown in.  As such my mile splits varied wildly, from 6:30 on the good side to 8:20 on the bad.  By the time we made in back to transition to complete the first lap I finally caught sight of the guy who had exited transition 1st who looked to be struggling a bit.

I was feeling thoroughly dumpster at this point.  Dave cheered me up with a nice loud, "Only 7 miles to go buddy!"  At around mile 9 I caught Gerry, who I had ridden much of the 1st lap of the bike with, and moved into 2nd.  Unfortunately the one guy in front of me had a good 3 minutes on me and was definitely out of reach, but I still didn't know what wave he went off in so there was a chance I was actually ahead if he was from the first wave.  That kept me running hard as we entered the tough section at the bottom end of the course again.

Strangely, I had a bit of a 2nd wind and actually covered the 2nd lap faster than the first.  This has literally never happened to me in a race of any length before.  My usual M.O. is to go out fast and hold on for dear life as I fade toward the end.  I think on this course a good deal of psychology comes into play.  On the first lap I was all doom and gloom dreading having to come back around and do it all again.  On the 2nd lap there was light at the end of the tunnel and failing to finish was no longer a concern.

The gap between me and the dude in 1st held more or less constant for the remainder of the race and I was 2nd across the line in 9:13:11.  Shortly thereafter I heard that the 1st guy across, Ray Fiori, was also in my wave so I was officially 2nd overall.  When I signed up for the race I was entertaining fantasies of going sub-9 to claim the big belt buckle, but between my back issues leading up to the race, my utter cluelessness regarding pacing and nutrition for a 9 hour effort and the inclement weather I'll gladly take the 9:13 and 2nd overall.  That could have gone way worse in many different ways.

And... I got the big buckle after all.  It turned out that since nobody broke 9 hours they decided to abandon the time standard and simply give the big buckles to the top 20.

Normally I'd be a little bit annoyed that they watered down the "standard" like that, but on that day, rolling around in that frozen ass rain I can say that everyone who got the big buckle certainly earned it.

So... am I glad I did this race?  Yes.  Do I ever have to do that again?  Well.... maybe.  I swore off ever again racing longer than a half-iron many, many times as the day played out.  Of course now that I'm all recovered, healed up and sitting in the comfort of my chair at home I'm thinking about how much faster I could go now that I've got some experience going this long (and showing up healthy would certainly help as well).  But there has already been talk of establishing some sort of equalizer time for a Matt vs. Dave grudge match in the 125 next year where the winner would get nothing and the loser would have to do something extremely embarrassing in public. We shall see...






  

Lots O' Updates

'Sup internet?  Long time, no updates.  What have I been up to?  Hell, what haven't I been up to.  I feel like I've been running in 5 different directions at once for the last several weeks.

Lake Waconia Tri

First up is the Lake Waconia Tri.  This has always been one of my favorite races, but even more so the last couple years because they hang up a super sexy banner of yours truly.

The race went well and I honored the legacy of that amazing banner by finishing 2nd overall behind David Thompson.  I also unlocked a lifetime achievement that I never thought possible by recording the fastest bike split of the field, DKT included.  I can only assume he was some combination of really tired from racing the St. Louis 5150 the day before and/or not going 100% because he knew it was only my struggling ass back there chasing, but I adhere to a strict no excuses, no mercy policy.  I learned it from watching Devon.

On a sad note, this race may not be back next year.  Hopefully someone will step up and keep the race alive. I don't want to raise my son in a world where my banner does not get hung from the back of an RV once a year.

Trip to France

Not long after Waconia, T-Payne and I teamed up with our good friends Dave (aka the other half of the 2009 Burrito Union 10-hour Triathlon 2-man division champion Omaha Scrapes) and his wife Morgan and went to France, where we proudly represented the USA on the slopes of Alpe d'Huez during Stage 18 of the Tour de France.

If you're not jealous, you should be, because that trip was amazing. In addition to the regular touristy bullshit I brought my bike over and did a bunch of riding in the Alps, which I highly recommend if you ever get the chance.  The most well known climbs we tackled were the Col de la Colombiere and the Col de Joux Plane, which are both Tour staples (although neither were on this year's route).

The real highlight, however was a lesser known climb in Switzerland up to a man-made lake called Lac d'Emosson.  It finished off with 2km at 15% up the most ridiculous "road" I've ever encountered anywhere.  This ice tunnel was right in the middle of that 15% section and was super sketchy because you couldn't see a damn thing in there and the melting snow made it extremely slippery.

And here's the view from the top.  You can see that they're not huge fans of guard rails in Europe.

Also, the Euros have a very advanced swimwear game...

The GhettoBox3000

The trip to France turned out to be just the kick in the crotch I needed elevate my airline bike fee avoidance to full wizard status.  I am proud to announce the arrival of the next generation in airline-defeating bicycle transportation systems, the GhettoBox3000.  It's a composite construction consisting of approximately 50% fiberglass, 50% closed cell foam, 50% epoxy resin, 50% black spray paint, 50% sweat and 50% Coors Light.  But wait a minute, doesn't that add up to 350%?  Yes it does.  This thing is that fucking awesome.

Here's the finished box shown next to my tri bike for scale.

If you're doubting that I got an entire bike in there, here's a size check I did during construction with my road bike.

Here's the TT frame in the box slightly farther into construction.  It turns out that my TT frame packs down smaller than my road frame, which is largely irrelevant since the wheels are the true size limiter anyway.

And here's the fully packed road bike with all of the ancillary crap that also needed to come along (shoes, tools, water bottle, shorts/jerseys, etc.).  The secret sauce is that most of that junk does double duty as padding for the bike.

It weighed in at 32 pounds fully packed and breezed through the airline check in counter with no issues.  Patrick recently borrowed it and flew fee-free round trip from Minneapolis to Cali, Colombia for Duathlon Worlds.  Since he was the sole representative from the USA in that competition I am hereby pronouncing myself the official bike box sponsor of Team USA Duathlon.

Chisago Lakes Half-Iron

I signed up for this race a few days before leaving for France hoping that it would keep me motivated to train during the trip.  That didn't really happen as I ended up swimming one super shitty 2000m workout and ran a grand total of 15 or so miles (with zero quality whatsoever) during the trip, but on the bright side I did knock out a good solid block of hard riding during our too-short stay in the Alps.


I raced pretty much as expected after that: swimming pretty mediocre, riding like a beast and successfully faking it for the first half of the run before getting deep into the struggle for the 2nd half.  The final miles of the run were super ugly, like barely under 8-minute pace ugly, but it got the job done and I finished 3rd behind DKT and Dan Hedgecock.

AG Nationals

Two weeks after Chisago I went to Milwaukee to race AG Nationals and got my ass handed to me, finishing 16th overall.  That's my worst placing at Nationals ever.  I'm not entirely sure what went wrong.  I just didn't seem to "have it" that day.  I'm most disappointed in my bike split.  After what I did at Chisago and Waconia anything less than the #1 bike split in the AG Nationals field is a disappointment.  To be over a minute off the pace is a complete fail.  I inspected my bike pretty thoroughly after the race half-expecting to find a brake rubbing or something, but it turns out it was just good old-fashioned not pushing on the pedals hard enough.

My swim and run were also way off what I would consider acceptable.  I think that was simply my haphazard training for the entire month of July coming home to roost.  First world problems to be sure...

Anyway, congrats to Colin Riley for winning the overall and my friendly M35-39 arch-nemesis Mark Harms for putting together a superb race, finishing 5th overall and winning our AG by 2+ minutes.

Lesson learned for next year...

Up Next

As I sit here writing this, I have 10 days until I get a shot at redeeming myself on the 70.3 WC course in Vegas.  For anyone who stumbled upon this blog recently and somehow managed to scroll this far down before losing interest, I literally almost killed myself in that race last year.  Well, that may be a little dramatic, but I did DNF via keeling over on the side of the road on the run course and blacking out for several minutes.

While I'm obviously a little nervous to go race in that heat again, I'm also getting pretty excited because I knocked out some really solid training since Nationals and I finally feel like I'm coming into some decent form (and injury free, knock on every piece of wood within reach).  The field is ridiculously stacked, being the world championship and all, but I'm still coming in with pretty lofty goals.  It should be a good one.

Assuming I don't have a repeat of last year's performance in Vegas, two weeks later I'll be tackling the Leadman 250 out in Bend, OR, which features a patently absurd 223km of biking.  The aforementioned Dave and Morgan went to Bend on vacation a couple years ago and were so impressed by the place that they picked up their entire fucking lives and moved there.  I figure with an endorsement like that I should at least check it out for a weekend.  Also, free place to stay!

I have no idea what to expect for this race other than a really angry taint from being on the bike for 6+ hours straight.  I'd like to think I'm capable of going sub-9 to earn the giant belt buckle.  There's only one way to find out I suppose.

Liberty Half Iron

So I was back in action last weekend at the Liberty Half Iron.  Since Liberty is a Saturday race and BOUS was a Sunday, that left me with only 6 days to recover.  Normally that wouldn't be an issue as I'm typically feeling fully recovered from a hard Olympic distance effort within 2-3 days, but for some reason when I woke up the day after BOUS both of my calves cramped up and never really loosened up at all.  Hopefully this has something to do with the fact that it was so cold at BOUS and it's not just the new normal as I get older.  If that's the case my days of racing on back to back weekends may be over.

I've done Liberty twice before, in 2008 and 2009.  The last few years I've opted to race Trinona instead, but with out of town travel the previous two weekends I really didn't want to make it 3, and I've grudgingly come to accept the reality that I'm a better 70.3 than Olympic distance racer anyway.  So... eff it, let's fire it up for a half iron 6 days after BOUS and hope for the best.

The Pre-Race Jams

Warning... nostalgia trip incoming!

I remember going to my first "real" concert back when I was a 15 year old high school sophomore in Mankato.  Up to that point, the only live music I got to see was the shitty teenage bands I and my friends played in.  But on this day my friend Jeremy had a newly-minted driver's license and permission to use his parents' van, so a half dozen of us piled into said van and made the trek up Hwy. 169 to the promised land of Minneapolis and the legendary First Avenue.

We were going to see Helmet and Quicksand, who were (and still are) two of my all-time favorite bands, along with an opening act called Orange 9mm that I had never heard of.  When Orange 9mm took the stage I was blown away.  I had never heard anything that sounded even remotely like that.  During their set they tossed a bunch of promo cassette tapes off the stage and I snagged one.  This was the first song on it...

Normally I'm of the "disregard nostalgia, acquire new jams" mindset, but this shit right here stands the test of time and will remain in heavy rotation for me until I'm either dead or deaf.

The Race

Liberty always feels more like a travel race than a local race just because so many Canadians show up.  It's like they shine some sort of Canadian bat symbol (I guess it would be a maple leaf) up in the sky and every triathlete in Thunder Bay and Winnipeg immediately drops their hockey stick and their plate of poutine and heads south.

The thing about Canadians is that they are masters of public relations.  They have the whole world thinking they're all polite and mild mannered, what with their "eh's" and "aboot's" and socialized health care and all.  But I know better.  Canadians are vicious, ruthless bastards.  Their national sport is hockey...

And their whole country is overrun by bears...

BEARS!

You cannot possibly survive all that and winters that are even colder and drearier than ours and not be a soulless killing machine. So isn't just your ordinary, run of the mill local race.  This is a matter of national security.  I won't let you down America!

Swim

I think they said the water was 62F.  That sounded a lot worse than it actually felt.  It was actually quite pleasant once you got over the initial shock of getting in.  After about a 10 minute warmup swim I was comfortable and ready to go.

I lined up right next to my Canadian arch-nemesis Jon Balabuck hoping to be able to stay on his feet at least for a little while.  Jon has historically been a much faster swimmer than me so I really wanted to try hard to minimize the damage in the water and at least keep it close.

I had what felt like a pretty crappy start because after the initial chaos cleared out I saw about a half dozen guys in front of me.  In hindsight though I think I did OK and they all just went out unrealistically hard because by about halfway out to the turnaround I found myself in a most unfamiliar spot in the swim: LEADING THE DAMN RACE!

Jon was swimming directly to my left and there were a few guys not too far behind us.  I thought about dropping back to try and get on Jon's feet, but his fellow Canadian and eventual 3rd place finisher Patrick Peacock was already pretty firmly camped out there and I didn't want to drop all the way back behind him because it would have been way too easy to lose track of Jon from 2 spots behind, so I settled in and we swam the rest of the race directly next to each other.  I tried to throw in a couple surges here and there but never got more than a half body length for my efforts.

Before long Jon, Patrick and I made it to the swim exit together with Brendan O'Flanagan not too far behind.  The official timing mat was about 20 seconds of running away from the swim exit, so seizing my first ever opportunity to record a #1 swim split I sprinted up those stairs and was the first guy to enter T1.

According to the results 3 guys in the later waves beat me, giving me the 4th overall swim split, but digging a little deeper I can pretty confidently say that 2 of those are either timing glitches or guys who accidentally swam the Olympic distance course.  The 3rd probably legitimately outswam me, but whatever, simply not losing several minutes to Jon is enough for me to get excited about.  This was bar none the most fun I've had in a triathlon swim.  Actually having to think about tactics and pack dynamics makes the swim much more interesting than my typical practice of getting my struggle on by myself back in no man's land.

Bike

Jon beat me out of transition by a couple of steps, but as soon as I got strapped into my shoes I started hammering and made the pass as we were leaving the park.  I know on my best day I can count on him outrunning me by 5-6 minutes, and given how banged up my legs still were from BOUS I didn't expect to have my best day on the run so my best chance for the W was to go for broke on the bike and hope to build up a big enough gap to jog/shuffle/hobble it home in the latter miles of the run.  Fortunately I had actually been feeling pretty strong on the bike all week.  Everything seemed to be falling into place in the early miles of the ride and I steadily built up a pretty significant advantage.

I maintained a pretty high effort level for about the first 15 miles or so until I realized it was probably in my best interests to back if off a touch, but still kept up a good strong effort for the remainder of the course.

There isn't much else to say because I was pretty far off the front, so the only other racers I saw were either in the Oly or were on their first lap while I was on my second.  I'm happy to report that I saw zero squished turtles on the ride.  I've done quite a few training rides on those roads and typically you would see a handful of flattened turtles over a ride that length.  Hopefully that was just good luck and not a result of massive die off over the long winter.

I made it back to transition with a 2:09 split, although I heard the course was roughly a mile short so it would have been about 2:11-2:12 at full length.

Run

There's no way to sugar coat this one, it just flat out sucked.   A 1:27 split on that course in perfect weather is borderline embarrassing for me.  I haven't run that slow in a half in about 5 years.  Both of my calves cramped up at mile 1 and it never got any better.  I managed to average about 6:20/mi out to the turnaround, but as soon as I saw that I was ~10 minutes up I shut it down completely, slowed to about 7:30-8:00/mi and started walking through aid stations.  I'm not sure if that was the correct decision because it didn't really hurt any less than gritting out the 6:20's, but once you flip the switch and slow down like that speeding up again is basically impossible.

I managed to minimize the damage enough to keep the rapidly advancing Canadian horde behind me and eventually turned onto the gravel path that marked the last half mile to the finish, where I picked up the pace just a bit in order to not look like a total putz for the spectators at the finish line, then damn near collapsed as soon as I crossed the line in 4:07:37.

Jon was the next guy across the line in 4:11, meaning he put almost 8 minutes on me in the last half of the run alone, and Patrick crossed in 3rd less than a minute after.

I would have let the Canadian version of the CIA waterboard me with maple syrup for a can of Coke at the finish line, but there was none to be found in the otherwise excellent post-race food spread.  Jon was in the same boat.  Luckily, I had a couple bottles stashed away in my car and in an act of international diplomacy that will be studied by scholars for generations, negotiated the eventual withdrawl of all Canadian forces from the race site in exchange for one 16oz bottle of Coca-Cola.  You can go ahead and pencil me in for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize right now.

2nd Best of the US

A couple weeks ago I road tripped it down to scenic (as an engineer, oil refineries and steel mills do count as scenic) Hammond, IN to attempt to defend my title at the Best of the US amateur triathlon championship.  I managed to put together a fairly decent race, but still only came away with 2nd place.

After races like this I have to sort of step back and remind myself that I'm basically playing with house money at this point.  What I mean is that when I toed the line at my first race six years ago I was overjoyed to simply finish (I took 82nd that day in case you're curious).  Even qualifying for a race like this seemed like an impossible pipe dream.  Competing for the win seemed downright ludicrous.  Fast forward to 2013 and I can throw down a 1:53 at an Olympic distance race, finish second against a nationally competitive field and actually be somewhat disappointed.  2007 me would kick present-day me so hard in the nuts for that.  Oh well, enough of the emo shit, here's a race report...

Sean Cooley and Marcus Stromberg were also making the trip, so we assembled at my place pre-dawn on Saturday and loaded up Marcus's truck for the drive.  Those guys were great travel partners.   I was expecting some resistance when I suggested we hit up the Old Chicago across the parking lot from our hotel for my traditional pre-race dinner of pizza and beer, but they were all about it.  My people!

Trudy organized a special BOUS-only course briefing from the RD at our hotel, at which we also picked up or swag bags.  We got some pretty cool stuff this year, including some boss level goggles...

and this tasty bottle of wine...

which was given a good home in my belly when we had some dinner guests over last weekend.  It's always a nice touch to get stuff from a race that's actually useful. 

On race morning we were joined by Alex Hooke at the hotel and we managed to clown car all 4 of us plus our bikes into one vehicle for the 20 minute drive over to the race site.  While we were loading up it was absolutely perfect race weather - about 60 degrees and overcast with light winds.  By the time we got to the race it was already starting to cool down and the clouds were starting to look a bit threatening.

The BOUS race was held in conjunction with Leon's "World's Fastest" triathlon.  Whatever Leon's background is, he is a master of marketing and promotion.  I've never seen so much advertising plastered around a transition area/finish line before.  The race t-shirt looks like something you would see in NASCAR with all of the sponsor logos.  There was a pre-race flyover by military aircraft.  There were two guys buzzing around the start area on jetpacks (seriously).  If that weren't enough, they had a TV crew there.  I've been told that the race will air July 4th on Comcast SportsNet, although I'll have to get someone to record it for me since I don't have cable.  Or just bootleg it off the internet somehow.

As the defending BOUS champ I got a fair bit of attention from the cameras as I was setting up my transition area, so expect a few seconds of B roll footage of me taking my running shoes out of my backpack or something similarly mundane if you happen to catch the broadcast.  I also got interviewed by Robbie Ventura, which was awesome.  Hopefully I don't come off as a total spaz if they actually use it in the show.  In case you couldn't tell, having my every move documented by a film crew puts me a wee bit out of my comfort zone.

By the time the actual race started the weather had made the transition from perfect to downright awful.  The temps had dropped into the low 50's, a light rain started and the wind kicked up to a steady 20 miles an hour with gusts to who knows what.  I took that as my cue to suit up and get the hell in the water, because it was much warmer than the air at that point.  As a result I probably got a good 600-800 meters of warmup swimming in, which is a solid 500-700 more than I traditionally do.  Despite the industrial surroundings the water was pleasant and seemed reasonably clean.

Finally I made my way over to the start.  Both the male and female Best of the US competitors were lumped in with the male and female elite amateur wave in the Leon's race, so there were on the order of 150-200 of us starting at once.  Luckily it was an in-water start and the line was a couple hundred yards wide, so there was plenty of room for everyone and not too much contact.

There were some fast swimmers at this thing, so I found myself blown off the back of the lead pack before we even got to the first marker buoy.  Every time I sighted it looked like there were about 50 people in front of me, which was disheartening to say the least.  At the time I thought I was in the middle of one of my traditional epic fail 22+ minute swims that would take me out of contention right from the start.  Eventually, about 1/3 of the way in a female came past me kicking like a maniac and I settled in behind to draft.  While drafting a girl in a race is a serious blow to my manhood, it was a pretty decent boost to my swim speed.  I can't adequately describe how hard this girl was kicking.  It made it very easy to stay behind her even though the visibility in the water wasn't the greatest.

I rode Ms. Happy Feet all the way to the swim exit and passed about 5 people on the short run into transition.  When I saw an 18:55 split in the results my first thought was that it had to be at least 100 meters short but Marcus had it at 0.93mi on his Garmin (consider that imperial/metric conversion your homework), so who knows, maybe I'm finally starting to crack the code on open water swimming.

After an uneventful transition I got out on the road and passed another 10 or so guys in quick succession before the field started to thin out and it was only Adam Zucco, Colin Riley, Marcus and a couple other guys I didn't recognize out in front of me.

The bike course was pretty wild... 2 loops with 4 u-turns per lap and a couple sections of not-so-nice pavement.  I think this type of course plays to my advantage a bit since I do most of my riding in the city, so I'm used to sharp corners, evasive maneuvers and bombed out pavement.  It seems like a lot of triathletes, even relatively fast ones, don't like taking any chances in the corners and are unwilling and/or unable to spike their power to get back up to speed quickly afterward.  If you are willing/able to do those things you can pick up 5-10 seconds at every turn, which is a considerable advantage on this kind of course.

About midway through the first lap I passed Marcus and it was only Colin and Adam in front.  I didn't manage to catch Colin until about mile 18 or so, which just so happened to be in the "speed trap", which was a one mile section of the course that was separately timed.  Since I was going basically max effort all the way through there to try to make the pass stick I ended up posting the fastest time of the day, which earned me this sweet trophy:

Passing Colin and moving up into 2nd overall also earned me the privilege of having a TV moto hovering about 6 feet to my left for the rest of the ride.  Hopefully I didn't hit the camera with any snot rockets.

I stayed slightly in front of Colin all the way back to transition and made a pretty careful dismount since I knew my feet were going to be numb from the cold.  T2 was tough since my hands and feet were cold enough to make getting into my running shoes something I actually had to think about, but my time is right in line with the field so everyone else must have struggled a bit as well.

Colin came out of T2 right on my heels and we quickly closed the gap up to Adam.  Right about then Colin decided he had enough of my company and tore off up ahead, putting a solid 20 seconds on me by the time we hit the first mile marker.  I outran Colin pretty handily to win the 2011 BOUS Championship, so I had no idea what to make of this move.  I just kept plugging along at my usual 5:30-ish pace figuring he was either going to blow up and come back, or he simply got that much faster since 2011.  Either way I was more or less at max effort already so I didn't have much choice in the matter.

The run course is a straight out-and-back and is likely the flattest thing possible so there isn't a whole lot to say.  By the time we hit the turnaround Colin had grown the gap out to ~45 seconds, so absent a complete meltdown he was going to be out of reach.  The good news is that I was pretty secure in 2nd with a minute plus back to the rest of the field.  One of the two TV motos stayed with Colin and the other stayed with me for the entire run.  I figured they would have bounced around a bit since places 3-7 were tight enough that there was some actual action.  What they're going to do with 35 minutes of footage of me running by myself is beyond me, but that's not my problem I guess.

As near as I could tell from my vantage point the gap between me and Colin held steady after the turn and he crossed the line in 1:52:05 for the win while I held onto second at 1:52:54.  Jason West, a 20 year old kid I hadn't heard of before, made up some serious ground on the run, coming in about 30 seconds behind me to win the Leon's race, marking what will in all likelihood be the last time he's beaten by my old ass.  That dude can fly.  Mark Harms was the next finisher across the line, rounding out the Best of the US podium.

Marcus had an extremely solid day taking 5th in the Best of the US race, which gave us a pretty stout margin of victory in the men's team competition.  And Andi Meyers took 7th in the women's race, which gave us 3rd in the coed team competition.  Add in top 10 finishes by Alex Hooke and honorary Minnesotan Sean Cooley and Minnesota was represented quite well indeed.

So, while it would have been nice to repeat as champ, I gave it my best and it just wasn't in the cards this year.  Hats off to Colin for unleashing a serious dose of beastmode on the rest of us and taking the win in style, Marcus and Sean for being most excellent travel partners, and to Trudy Marshall and the rest of the BOUS organization for putting together a great race!

New Orleans 70.3

Holy crap, tri season really sneaked up on me this year. Since my DNF disaster at Vegas last September my head really hasn't been in the game. Training-wise I managed to string together a few 25,000+ yard weeks of swimming back in November/December, but then my shoulder blew up, taking me out of the pool altogether for a couple weeks and sharply limiting my volume thereafter. And then I got the flu in mid-January, which took me completely out of action for about a week and a half and felt like it took a solid month to really recover from. Our ass-tastic neverending Minnesota winter didn't exactly help things either. 

Luckily everything started to come around by about mid-March and I started to feel more like my old self again. Next thing you know it's last Friday and I'm pulling the old Ordu down off of the hooks in the garage ceiling for literally the first time since September, only to immediately disassemble it and stuff it in a bag for a Saturday morning pre-dawn flight to New Orleans and my first race of 2013.

So suffice it to say I was feeling rather under-prepared and my expectations weren't exactly sky high for this one. Basically as long as I made it to the finish line in one piece and stayed out of the med tent/hospital I'd be satisfied. If I got a Vegas slot I'd be happy. If I won my AG and/or went under 4:10 I'd be ecstatic.

The Pre-Race Jams

Hatebreed may be the quintessential pre-race jam. Knuckle dragging mosh riff after knuckle dragging mosh riff? Lyrics that are basically a more profane version of the motivational posters in your dentist's waiting room? A style that is self-described by frontman Jamey Jasta as "all pit, no shit"? Yes please!

Race Day

I somehow leveled myself into staying at the ridiculously overpriced host hotel for this one. While that's a bad beat for my wallet, it worked out pretty well for the pre-race logistics. I got to sleep relatively late and stumble downstairs to catch a shuttle bus out to the race start.

Since I had to drop my bike in transition the night before there wasn't much to do other than put some air in the tires, layer on the sunscreen, pull on the wetsuit and stroll on over to the swim start.

Swim

The swim started with the male pros and female pros going off as waves, with the rest of us going one at a time in time trial format starting with the relay teams. M35-39 was the second group in the time trial lineup, right after the relays, so I didn't have to wait around too long. It was first come/first served for the order within the age groups, so naturally as soon as they let our group into the corral just about everyone started trying to get to the front. I decided to deliberately hang back, figuring that all of the faster guys would be starting up front, so by starting in back I'd be sure that in "chip time" I'd be ahead of anyone I came across out on the course. By the time we settled into an actual line I was about 120 out of the 160 guys in the group.

Eventually I made it to the end of the dock, crossed the timing mat officially starting my race and jumped in. 

The water wasn't bad. I expected it to feel much colder. Since there were no warmups allowed I made a conscious effort to ease into a reasonable pace as opposed to my usual tactic of monkey spazzing the first couple hundred yards then blowing up. Soon enough I settled in and was steadily passing my fellow yellow-capped M35-39'ers and within a couple minutes started picking up the stragglers from the purple-capped relay group.

There isn't much else to say about the swim. I never came across anyone that made any sense to draft off of, so I just tried to keep my turnover high and work my way from one turn buoy to the next. When I got to the stairs leading out of the water I took a quick peak at my watch and saw that it was still reading 00:00. D'oh! Apparently I didn't hit the button on my way in. Seeing a 27:00 split at the end of the race was a pleasant surprise. That's a nice PR for me in a 70.3 swim and was honestly better than I expected given that I don't feel like I've been swimming all that well in practice lately, although I guess it's not that far out of line with the non-wetsuit 28:30 I did in Vegas last fall.

T1 was uneventful. I managed to find my rack on the first try and get all my swim gear off and bike gear on without tripping over myself.

Bike

This was the part of the race that had me a bit concerned going in. As previously mentioned, my tri bike hung neglected from the garage ceiling between unpacking it after Vegas and packing it for this race. I did one ride of ~2 miles the day before the race after reassembling it just to make sure everything was working correctly, then racked up and hoped for the best. 

That's not to say I haven't been riding, it's just that almost all of my mileage has been commuting on my cyclocross bike with big knobby tires wearing a loaded messenger bag and full winter gear (i.e. really slow), sometimes pulling Mikey behind in a trailer for extra slowness. I've always maintained that a Watt is a Watt, and that it doesn't really matter if you're grinding your way up a hill towing a trailer behind your steel-framed beater at 9mph or all dorked out on on your fancy carbon race bike doing 25+. Just get out there and give it hell on a daily basis and you'll be fine. I guess I was going to put that theory to the test on this one.

So coming out of T1 I executed my first flying mount of 2013 without falling over, got into my shoes and commenced giving it hell. I'm still one of those non-power meter using Luddites, so I settled into my "I left the house kind of late on my way to work and need to hustle if I'm going to make this stupid 8 o'clock meeting in time" pace and was pleasantly surprised to look down and see that it was netting me a ~23mph pace into a pretty stiff headwind. It will take a bit to recalibrate my brain after a long winter of seeing 15mph on the commute for that same effort. This was the first point that I stated thinking I might have a pretty good race in me after all.

I passed a couple guys from my AG within the first 5 miles, then a couple relay riders in the next 5 and it was all open road in front of me until I saw the pros coming back the other way around mile 20. 

The course is an out and back and we were pushing a solid ~10-15mph headwind on the way out. It is however, pool-table flat with very few turns so I was able to stay aero the whole time and keep the average speed respectable. After making the turn and picking up the tailwind I started passing a few of the female pros.

My nutrition "plan", to really stretch the definition of the word plan, was to eat one gel at each of the 3 aid stations and grab bottles of water once I ran through the 2 bottles of sports drink I started out with. For whatever reason that left me really bloated and gassy by about mile 30. I even puked up a little bit of gel at one point, but my legs still felt fine so I was able to keep up the pace. Luckily everything started to normalize by about mile 45 and I was able to keep riding strong all the way back to transition for a 2:13 split, which is way better than I could have reasonably expected going in, so no complaints there.

T2 went off without a hitch, although I was surprised to see one bike already racked up not too far from me. It couldn't have been a relay because they were all the way on the other side of transition, so it had to have been another M35-39'er. That was surprising because I thought I was keeping a pretty good lookout at the turnarounds and thought it was nothing but relays and pros out front. Oh well, either I catch him or I don't. One foot in front of the other either way.

Run

Immediately upon leaving transition I was passed like I wasn't even moving by a couple relay guys, who were considerate enough to clearly identify themselves as relay runners by wearing splits and singlets. I did my best to ignore them and set off at my own pace.

And now the TMI/gross part. I'd been feeling kind of like I had to pee since about mile 45 on the bike, and I'm not above pissing all over myself on the bike, but it never got bad enough to have to take action. Once I started bouncing around on the run, however, I really didn't have much of a choice anymore. I had already left the transition port-o-pots behind and I didn't feel like stopping anyway so I figured what the hell, may as well let it fly on the run. I figured pissing on the street is pretty much standard operating procedure for New Orleans anyway, right? So if you've ever wondered if it's possible to take a piss while running a sub-6 mile... yes, yes it is.

My now piss-soaked self reached the first mile marker in a nice brisk 5:43, which is unsustainably fast for me, so I made a concerted effort to pull it back a  bit.  I covered the next mile in 6:03 and settled in at 6:19 for mile 3, which actually felt reasonably comfortable.

Somewhere between mile markers 3 and 4 I caught up to the owner of the mystery bike in T2 and we exchanged pleasantries as I went around for the pass. I built maybe a 20 second gap by mile 5, but some combination of him speeding up and me slowing down had us running together by mile 7. We ran together for a couple miles and actually chatted a bit. Turns out his name is Shane Niemeyer and he has a pretty interesting life story. At around mile 9 Shane became bored with my company and dropped the hammer on me and started to pull away. Lucky for me he had divulged that he was 4th into the water in our group, meaning he had at least 3-4 minutes head start on me. That gave me the luxury of keeping my own pace and not having to try to respond. By now my stomach was once again protesting the crap I'd been stuffing into it. It likely would not have gone well had I tried to counter his move.

I managed to keep plugging along at ~6:20/mi and eventually the gap between us settled at ~30 seconds. Somewhere very close to the end, like mile 12.5 or so, Shane actually stopped and was bent over grabbing his ankle as I ran past. Talking to him after the race, apparently it occasionally pops out of joint and he has to manually jam it back in. Gnarly. He eventually got it sorted out and re-passed me in the finish chute, but by then I was feeling pretty secure for the AG win knowing that I started so far back.

Post-Race

Since I forgot to start my watch before the swim I still didn't know what my final time was. Eventually I made my way over to the results tent and got my printout saying I did a 4:05:52. Given the lack of preparation I would have been very happy with anything under 4:15, so to come in almost 10 minutes ahead of that and win my AG by a healthy margin is nothing short of amazing for me. I guess that's why we race instead of just comparing training logs and calling it a day.

Winning my AG conferred upon me the privilege of signing up for the 70.3 World Championship in Vegas this September. Of course, being that WTC is very much a for-profit concern they need their money up front. So after walking back to the hotel to retrieve my checkbook I approached the Vegas signup table to claim my slot. As we were completing my registration the girl behind the table said, "I'm going to need one more thing from you." "Ok," I said, "What do you need." She said, "I'm gonna need about tree fiddy." It was right then that I noticed the WTC representative was actually 8 stories tall and from the Paleolithic era.  That damned Loch Ness Monster had tricked me again! "Dammit monstah! I ain't givin' you no tree fiddy!" I yelled as she swam off into the distance.






Some of you reading this are probably productive members of society and as such do not waste enough time on the internet to understand the whole Loch Ness Monster bit at the end. It's from South Park.  Lrn 2 internet.  The fee to register for Vegas happens to be $350 and I couldn't resist.