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. 

Cooking with Matt

Alright... my first ever off-season update. When I started this blog I had every intention of posting regular updates on a wide variety of topics, yet here I sit 2+ years later and every single post is a race report. So how can I go on calling this The Most Interesting Man in Columbia Heights?  Well...

I pretty much am that one-dimensional and boring. Now I could do the standard training update you routinely see on your typical triathlon-focused blog, but that would be even more boring and repetitive than an endless stream of very-much-identical race reports. It's December. I'm swimming a lot. We'll leave it at that.

Today I'm not going to say one more damn word about triathlon. I'm going to take one small step toward earning my blog title and drop some real 21st century Renaissance man shit on you. We're going to be talking about cooking. Yes, you heard me right. Cooking. I'm going to take you through all the steps necessary to make a boss level pizza from scratch right in your own kitchen.

Before we begin, we have to clear a couple things up. First and most important, proper pizza has thin crust. If you prefer that deep dish abomination they erroneously refer to as pizza in Chicago, you are a weird pervert and we probably can't be friends. I think there are support groups for that sort of thing. Second, this is not a process for the impatient. It is absolutely essential to cold ferment your dough overnight at a minimum. You can Google recipes claiming that you can mix up the dough and throw it straight in the oven, but they are lying to you. Sure, the results are edible, but so is the pizza crust in a can you can get at the grocery store, which happens to be roughly the quality you'll get if you cut corners on your homemade dough.  If you're OK with that level of quality just save yourself a lot of work and get the pre-made crap. Or better yet pick up the phone and have something delivered. 

Now that we've got that out of the way, you're going to need a couple key pieces of equipment. First, you will need a proper pizza stone. This is essential to get enough heat into the crust to cook it properly while at the same time not decomposing your cheese into its constituent atoms. You can't skimp on quality here either. We're going to be firing the oven up as hot as it will go, which for most consumer grade ovens means somewhere between 500ºF and 550ºF and some stoneware can't handle this much heat (I found this out the hard way). I ended up getting this one from Amazon based on the favorable reviews and it's been performing admirably. Next you will need a pizza peel. That's one of those giant spatulas that you'll see guys using in legit pizzerias to get the pies in and out of the oven. If you're a ninja you can probably make it happen without the peel, but having one makes the whole process 1000% easier.

I am not a ninja.

First up... the dough. My dough recipe is a fairly standard New York style, with the proportions arrived at via extensive trial and error (I ended up going relatively heavy on the sugar and olive oil because sugar and olive oil are awesome):

• 2 cups unbleached flour (I just use all-purpose, one of these days I'll get around to experimenting with some of that fancy-pants Italian 00 stuff)
• 1 teaspoon active-dry yeast
• 1.5 teaspoons salt
• 3 teaspoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Start by thoroughly mixing the yeast with 3/4 cup of hot water and let it sit for about 5 minutes. While you're waiting for that, mix up the flour, salt and sugar in a large bowl. Then dump the olive oil and yeast/water mix in and stir it all up. Before long you'll have a sticky ball of goo that looks something like this:

Once it gets too thick for the spoon we have to get down to the messy business of kneading our dough ball. If you have the means this would be an excellent job for a stand mixer, but I keep it ghetto and just get in there with both hands. After a couple minutes of kneading the dough should smooth out and stop sticking to everything in sight. If it doesn't, work in more flour until it does (and it shouldn't take much, a tiny bit of flour goes a long way here). At the end of the process you should have a nice smooth ball of dough:

This much dough would make one enormous pie, so I cut it in half and put both of the dough balls into a container which goes straight into the fridge.  The dough should roughly double in volume after 24 hours. The 24-hour dough makes a pretty solid pizza, but it seems like my best pies have come from 2-3 day old dough.

Fresh balls

Bigger balls

Now that the dough is out of the way we can tackle the sauce. I started by following this recipe exactly, and the results were... meh, OK I guess. But it was lacking a certain something so I ended up modifying the original recipe fairly significantly (again through good old trial and error):

• 28 ounce can of tomatoes (either whole-peeled or diced, I doubt it matters much in the final product)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon dried basil leaves
• 1 yellow onion
• 2 teaspoons sugar

From there just follow the procedure in the recipe linked above. Two things they don't mention though: First, drain the tomatoes before you puree them. Sure you can cook off the extra water, but why waste the time?  Second, you take the onion halves out and throw them away at the end (although this should be fairly obvious). I also disagree with their idea of only chopping the tomatoes down to ~1/16" chunks. I've found that a smoother sauce is easier to spread evenly over the pizza, but it tastes the same either way.

Sauce in process

Now that we've got our dough and sauce, we can get started on the fun part -- making the actual pizza. Step one: crank your oven up as high as it will go and let the stone pre-heat for at least 30 minutes. My oven tops out at 550ºF, but I've made a few pies at 500ºF as well with good results. While you're waiting for the oven to heat up, flatten out your dough ball into something more pizza shaped. I'd like to say I do this by tossing  the dough up in the air while humming the theme from The Godfather, but I'm nowhere near that skilled so I just lay a piece of parchment paper down on the pizza peel (this is fairly critical to be able to get the pizza off of the peel and into the oven) then plop the dough down on the paper and flatten it out with a roller. How thin you want to roll it out is completely up to your personal preference, just remember that it will roughly double in thickness as it cooks. I usually get a 12-13" diameter pie out of one of ball of dough.

Dough ready for toppings

Now just top it however you want. Personally I prefer a fine white wine alfredo sauce with free range goat cheese and organic baby arugula... oh wait a minute, I'm not a fucking hippie. I hit that thing with a generous layer of the red sauce we made earlier and finish it off with a big ol' pile of mozzarella and pepperoni. On a more serious note, do not use pre-shredded cheese of any sort. They cake that stuff with cellulose to keep it from clumping together in the bag, which really messes up the way it melts in the oven. You'll get a much better end product if you buy a block and do work with a cheese grater.

Ready for the oven

Once your stone is nice and hot slide the pie onto the stone, parchment paper and all. You'll have to experiment to find your optimum cook time based on the thickness of your crust, your choice of toppings and the actual temp of your oven (consumer-grade ovens have notoriously shitty temp control, on the order of ±50ºF from what you set it at). For my pepperoni pizza in my oven set at 550ºF, 5 minutes and 30 seconds seems to do the trick.

Bam... pizza's done! Nothing to do now but let it cool down for a couple minutes, then slice it up and dig in.  Buon Appetito! (Google tells me that's Italian for Bon Appetit)

Mikey approved!

PR or ER (aka 70.3 World Championship Epic Fail Report)

This got really long.  Here's the Cliff's Notes version for people who either don't have the time to read the next several thousand words or who just don't like me that much (both completely understandable):

• Go to Vegas for 70.3 Worlds
• Gamble a bit and play a ton of pinball in the days before the race
• Race day: Swim well, bike OK, attempt to suicide myself on the run
• DNF to med tent, ambulance ride to ER, overnight hospital stay
• Doctors run some tests, tell me I may have a serious heart condition
• Doctors run more tests, do a complete 180º and tell me I'm fine

The Long Version

Well... that did not go according to plan. I didn't sleep at all on Sunday night. That in and of itself is not the problem as the plan did not schedule any sleep that evening. The plan was to be on the Vegas Strip all night making it rain celebrating an AG win at 70.3 Worlds. Instead, I spent Sunday night (and most of Monday) at the St. Rose Dominican Hospital flat on my back, unable to sleep because I was covered in needles and electrodes. How did this unfortunate series of events come to pass? Read on...

Pre-Race

I arrived in Vegas on Thursday afternoon feeling on top of the world. I had just come off an AG win at Nationals a few weeks ago and had been absolutely crushing it in training since then. I felt like another AG win was mine for the taking. Hell, even 1st OA amateur didn't seem totally out of the question, although realistically I'd need a bit of good luck for that. Either way, I showed up in the best shape I've ever been in, fully tapered and ready to go.

After loading up the rental car, I headed on over to my hotel in Henderson and checked in. My room looked like one of those fake studio apartments they set up inside of IKEA.

After assembling the bike and hitting the grocery store to stock up my mini-fridge I headed on over to Green Valley ranch to donk around on the poker tables for a bit before heading back to my hotel to call it an early night.

Friday morning I headed over to the race site and jogged one loop of the run course prior to picking up my race packet. Since that was all over and done with by 10AM and bike dropoff wasn't until Saturday, I had the rest of the day to kill. If there's one thing you can say about Vegas, it's that it is just about impossible to be bored there. Name an activity, and it's available in this town (for a price, of course). As luck would have it the price of my chosen activity was only a handful of quarters, because I ended up going to the Pinball Hall of Fame.

This picture shows ~10% of their machines.

This place is beyond amazing. They do not charge admission, you just walk in, plunk your quarters into the game of your choice and do work. They had not one, but two of my 2nd favorite machine ever, Attack From Mars...

Destroy the saucer!

And my #1 all time favorite pinball machine, Star Trek, The Next Generation...

Resistance is futile!

My skills are a little rusty compared to my college student union glory days, but I still managed to hit the replay score often enough to make 5 bucks last for 3 hours. I ended up leaving only because my feet were starting to get sore from standing up so long. A repeat visit is definitely on my list next time I'm in Vegas.

Saturday was bike and run gear check in. I decided to go for a short ride prior to check in and managed to flat my front tire about a mile out of transition. Luckily some friendly Germans were driving past at the time and offered me a ride back to my car. I never got their names, but I made sure to thank them profusely for saving me from having to waste my only spare tube and CO2 cartridge before the race even started.

Once back at transition I walked around looking for a place to buy a new tube. Strangely, WTC only had official bike tech support back in Henderson. Nothing at all at the lake. I really didn't want to have to make another round trip back into town just to fix a flat. However, I vaguely remembered a large trailer full of bikes a few hundred yards up the road so I set off in that direction. Turns out that trailer was manned by a friendly gentleman named Nick, owner and proprietor of SAGmonkey, who hooked me up with a new tube and valve extender. Seriously nice guy. If you find yourself out on the West Coast and want to ride look these guys up!

After bike checkin it was back into town to drop off my run gear. As I was walking through the expo on my way back to the car, the day's trend of strangers treating me way nicer than I deserve continued. I stopped by the Foster Grant booth to look at their sunglasses and the guy there hooked me up with a free pair in exchange for filling out a survey. Nice! After that it was back to the room to try and rest up as much as possible.

Race Day

Finally, race day. I felt like I had been in Vegas for weeks at this point. Since my body clock was still on Central time waking up at 4AM was no sweat and I got out to Lake Las Vegas nice and early. The race started with the pros at 6:30 with my wave scheduled to go off at 7:20. After watching the pro start I got into line with the rest of my wave and shuffled along as we waited our turn. Everything moved along relatively quickly and we entered the water right on schedule.

For some reason they split M35-39 into three waves, of which I was in the 2nd, so there was plenty of room on the starting line. Being the World Championship I expected the start the be pretty rough, but it was actually very mellow since there were so few of us in the wave and we all had plenty of space. A few hundred meters in I settled into a draft and stayed there around both of the turns. Maybe 2/3 of the way into the swim we started running into significant traffic from the previous waves and I lost my draft, so I kept on plugging away on my own. I got out of the water at 28:46, which is a huge personal best for me in a non-wetsuit 1/2-iron swim. If there's one positive I can take away from this race it's the swim.

T1 was a total gong show. I ran down the wrong row and couldn't find my bike, wasting at least 30 seconds. Eventually I stumbled to the correct rack and got my swimskin off and my helmet on. After a long run up to the mount line I finally got rolling.

The bike course starts out tough with a significant climb and doesn't get any easier. I seriously doubt there's a  mile of flat road the entire 56 miles. Traffic was pretty thin thanks to the small waves and 5 minute spacing so moving up through the field never required too much evasive maneuvering. I took 2 bottles at every aid station and did my best to stay hydrated, but that was starting to become a losing battle as the temp climbed up toward 100.

Just after the turnaround at about mile 30 Sami Inkinen came around me for the pass. Sami went sub-9 at Kona last year and is consistently at the top of the AG results and was a logical pick to be on the podium at this race, so I didn't want to let him get away. I managed to re-pass him a couple minutes later and stayed in front for a bit, but eventually he must have decided to kick it up a notch because he went flying by and before I knew what was happening he had about a 10 second gap. I pushed hard trying to close the gap, but he kept slipping farther forward and I eventually had to back off the pace and resign myself to letting him ride away. It's not every day I get broken off like that on the bike, dude is a certified beast.

The good news is that while I was unsuccessfully trying to chase down Sami I passed Tim Hola, who is another guy with extremely impressive credentials. He also started five minutes ahead of me in the previous wave, so that was encouraging. The rest of the bike was fairly boring and I made it to T2 with a 2:25 split. I had seriously underestimated the difficulty of this course as I had targeted a 2:20 split based on the map and elevation profile.

T2 had valet parking. Right at the mount line there was a gang of volunteers grabbing bikes as we jumped off. Nice. I grabbed my gear bag, busted ass through the change tent as fast as possible and got out onto the run.

As I crossed the timing mat marking the official start of the run I looked down at my watch and saw that I was right at the 3 hour mark. As I sit here writing this a week and a half later I can identify this precise moment as when my race went off the rails. Pre-race I had targeted 4:20 as my goal time. So I looked down at my watch and said, "alright, 1:20 it is, let's do this." With a flat course on a cool day that's not totally out of the realm of possibility. Unfortunately for me, this was not a flat course or a cool day, and with the clarity of hindsight it seems like such an obvious rookie mistake to try and run that fast on that course in those conditions, but at the time I was most certainly not thinking logically. I didn't go out to Vegas to not gamble. I was all in.

I started out feeling pretty decent heading down the hill to the first turnaround. I was keeping a lookout for Sami heading back up the hill the other way but I never saw him. At the time I figured he was so far ahead of me that it was hopeless, but anything can happen in a race like this so I stayed on the gas.

After the first turnaround at ~1mi there is a solid 2 mile uphill to the next turnaround. I was still feeling good so I kept pushing it hard all the way up. On way back through transition I heard a nice loud, "Hey Minnesota!" in a thick German accent. It was a guy I had met on the walk between the parking lot and bike checkin the day before. I gave my new German friend a high five as I blasted through. Just before I made the turn at the top I saw Sami heading the other way and the gap was right around a minute. Holy crap... I'm still in this thing. I pushed hard all the way back down the hill and managed to catch him right at the turnaround at the bottom of the hill at mile 5 or so.

On the way back up the hill I started to feel pretty crusty, but this is completely standard at this point in the race so I just did my best to keep the pace up and put some distance between me and Sami. I made the turnaround at the top of the hill (about mile 7) still feeling what I can best describe as "acceptably shitty" and made the turn to go back down. As I passed back through the transition area to start the 3rd lap my pace really started to suffer and I was rapidly passed by about a dozen people after not being passed by anyone for the entirety of the first two laps. Even this wasn't too alarming as I was starting lap 3 and many of the people passing me had to be on lap 2. I saw my one-man German fan club one last time and couldn't even muster up the strength to slap his hand as I went by.

At this point I was concerned about my pace falling off, but I was still thinking about the podium, not survival. That all changed within the span of a minute. About a half mile down the hill from transition (I think, this part is a little fuzzy) it was like someone threw a switch and my body just crapped out. The last thing I remember was veering off to the left and ending up on the curb, thinking to myself, "Wow, that's not right," then jumping back down on the road only to end up back over to the left on the curb a couple steps later. Then next thing I remember is sitting on the grass on the right side of the road (I have no idea how I got  all the way over to that side) being handed a bottle of water, insta-puking said water upon trying to drink and thinking, "Where the fuck am I?"

<The next couple paragraphs may or may not have happened as written, the memory is fuzzy at best>

After a couple minutes sitting there things started to slowly come back to me. Where am I... oh yeah, Vegas... what am I doing here... ummm, some sort of race... oh yeah, 70.3 Worlds... fuck, I think I was winning my age group and now I'm not even going to finish. All the while I was trying to drink but nothing at all was staying down.

Eventually I was loaded into a golf cart to head back to the med tent. I have no idea how long that ride actually took, but it felt like hours. My condition steadily worsened the whole ride and by the end of it I couldn't feel my legs, was having trouble breathing and was thoroughly convinced I was going to die. I very distinctly remember the only coherent thing going through my mind at the time was the repeating thought, "Don't close your eyes... don't close your eyes." I also remember absolutely screaming at the driver trying to get him to go faster. Race director Frank Lowery called me on Wednesday to see how I was doing. It turns out he was the guy driving the cart. Frank, if by some one in a million shot you stumble upon this blog, thank you again. I can't possibly apologize enough for whatever I may have yelled at you while you were driving.

Upon reaching the med tent I was hoisted out of the cart, plopped down onto a cot and had an IV jammed into my arm. After a couple minutes a girl came by with a name tag that identified her as a nursing student, which, ridiculous as it sounds was a huge relief to me. I figured if they're unleashing the students on me I must not be actually dying.

An IV bag and a few glasses of Coke later I again had full use of my arms and legs, but my head still felt pretty fuzzy. Several people asked me for my race number and I couldn't remember it to save my life. It also took me a few moments to remember my age when asked. This set off a whole new round of terror in my head as I was now convinced I was permanently brain damaged and doomed to spend the rest of my life as an incoherent moron who can't even remember his age.

Over the next hour or so I laid there in the med tent trying convince myself I wasn't brain damaged by attempting to remember random facts like family and friends' phone numbers and birthdays. I also ran through the multiplication tables and some basic arithmetic in my head. Luckily it all came back relatively quickly and my fear of knocking a few points off my already suspect IQ was gradually replaced with anger at not finishing the damn race.

Eventually a doctor came by and told me I wasn't coming around fast enough and he was recommending I go to the ER. I put up a pretty feeble argument against it, but I was obviously not quite all there yet and ended up relenting. So when the EMT's showed up I hopped onto the stretcher to take the roll of shame through the packed finish line area out to a waiting ambulance. 

It was only a 5 minute or so ride to the hospital and I was wheeled into the ER to await evaluation. Over the next couple of hours they poked and prodded at me in a variety of ways. First they took some blood for the lab, then they wheeled in a portable x-ray machine for a chest x-ray, then someone showed up with an ultrasound rig to look at my heart.  By now it's somewhere around 6PM and I'm actually feeling somewhat normal, so I'm confused at why they kept ordering additional tests to say the least.

While I was laying there the EMT's who brought me in stopped by a couple times to see how I was doing. I'm not sure how it even came up, but on one of their visits I somehow mentioned that my hotel was only a couple miles from the race site. The EMT then completely blew my mind by volunteering to get my bike and drop it off at the hotel. Apparently when they're not responding to a call they're allowed to do pretty much whatever they want provided they stay within their assigned area. Since both the hotel and race site were within their area using the ambulance to haul my bike was completely above board. I never got the guy's name, but whoever you are, thank you immensely. It would have been a colossal pain in the ass to try to track down my bike the next day.

Finally after several hours in the ER a doctor shows up and starts saying something about Troponin levels and T-waves. Apparently between my labs, EKG readings and ultrasound images they hadn't ruled out some sort of heart condition. Anything from congenital hypertropic cardiomyopathy to a straight up heart attack. Seriously!?! A fucking heart attack?!?!? The one place that I had never felt any pain through this whole ordeal was my chest. Wouldn't I have known if I had a heart attack? Regardless, the doctor told me I was being admitted for observation over the night and should expect further testing by a cardiologist the next morning.

After a couple more hours sitting there in the ER I was wheeled up into a room. This was a significant upgrade because I had a TV. I was getting pretty bored staring at the wall down in the ER. Now there was nothing to do but settle in for a long night and call home to Tiffany and let everyone know I was still alive.

After a night of little to no sleep Monday morning finally arrived and someone showed up to roll me down to the lab for a cardiac stress test. For those lucky enough to have never had this experience, it involves being shot full of some sort of radioactive tracer and imaged under a gamma camera, getting your heart rate elevated to ~85% of max either the old fashioned way (running on a treadmill) or via drugs, then getting another dose of radioactive juice and going back under the camera. I'm still waiting on my super powers to develop.

So after the first image they wheel me over to the testing area and hand me a consent form for the drug-induced stress test. OH HELL NO. I inform the nurse that sitting on a bed perfectly still while my heart spazzes out is not an option and it's the treadmill or nothing. She kept trying to tell me that the cardiologist (who I had still not met) had ordered the drug-induced test and did not want me to run. I dug my heels in and eventually she called the cardiologist who approved the treadmill test with zero hesitation. WTF?!? Who the hell is actually in charge here and why can I ask one person what the hell is going on and get one answer, then a few minutes later ask someone else and get the completely opposite answer?

With the blessing of the mystery cardiologist I got wired up to yet another EKG and hit the treadmill. Holy crap it felt good to move my legs a little after being flat on my back for the better part of 24 hours. As the treadmill started at desert tortoise pace I was told the speed and incline would be kicked up a notch every three minutes until my heart rate reached 158, then I had to maintain that for a minute. I finally got there 18 minutes in, which I was told by the staff was a record. Sweet, I may have DNF'ed the world championship, but I rewrote the record for a cardiac test usually given to elderly heart patients.

After another round of images I was sent back to my room. After another several hours watching crappy daytime TV I finally came face to face with the mystery cardiologist. Dude walks into the room, shakes my hand, and tells me, "You have what we call an 'athlete's heart'. You're perfectly healthy and we're discharging you this afternoon." 

Don't get me wrong, this is much better news than being told my heart is going to explode, but at the time I was just sitting there slackjawed wondering why in the world it took a 24 hour hospital stay and many thousands of dollars worth of testing to come to this conclusion. I asked if I needed to limit my physical activity at all and he said no, I was free to do pretty much whatever I wanted. And just like that homeboy left the room and I had nothing to do but pack up my crap and figure out how I was going to get to my car, which was a solid 20 miles away out at the lake. I'm sure I looked something like this the rest of that day...

Several hours and one expensive cab ride later I had retrieved my car and made my way back to the hotel. It was still only 8PM and I briefly considered trying to rally and hit the strip, but as soon as I saw the bed the whole ordeal caught up with me and my energy-o-meter went straight down to zero.

So what's next? No idea. I feel pretty good right now all things considered and would like to race again this season to try to redeem myself from such an epic fail in Vegas, but I'm honestly a little scared to race given how everything went down. I figure I'll chill out for another week or two and then reevaluate whether or not it makes sense to try and rally for a late-October race somewhere, otherwise I'll just throw in the towel on the 2012 campaign knowing I've failed in a way in which only a select few have managed to fail, which I guess is sort of a win.