Surviving a Scare

It's been awhile since I've posted anything, but I've had irons in the fire.  Work and travel demands caused me to take almost two months off of the bike after Race Across Oregon in July, and when I emerged in mid-October, my fitness was in Nowheresville.  But, for the first time in nearly a decade, I  renovated the Pain Cave both physically and virtually.

On the physical front, I picked up a Tacx Neo smart trainer to replace my 2006-era Computrainer, and I've been using the heck out of it.  In my mind, the direct-drive setup is categorically superior to the older wheel-on technology, and the Neo is a beautiful beast.

On the virtual front, I signed on with Trainer Road and Zwift, following a structured training plan for the first time in recent memory.  I've gotten to be reasonably proficient at prescribing workouts for myself over the years, but there hasn't been much periodization to it, and overall things had just gotten a bit stale.  Between October and late January, I was able to ride 6 days a week with consistency, recording about 700 training stress/week, which is about 50% more than in years past.  And the result showed: my power/weight ratio jumped from ~3.8 to ~4.4, which was the highest it's ever been -- an auspicious place to be in January -- and I was getting stronger by the week.

All told, although nothing is ever guaranteed, I was confident that I could put in a serious showing at Sebring.  I'd initially planned to ride the 12-hour, but I was feeling so strong that I'd mentally committed to switching to the 24 and taking a shot at that magical 500-mile day.  I started my taper late, putting in a hard weekend only a week out with the idea that I'd take it easy for a few days and then give it a go.  The Sunday before the race was my last long ride, a 5-hour trainer session that I entered tired but knocked out with no problem.  Then it was off to a Super Bowl party to enjoy the fruits of months of discipline.

The following day (Monday), though, I found myself feeling like I had a bit of a cold.  I do get the occasional head cold, and it's common to feel a little under the weather during a taper, so I didn't think much of it.  The hard work was done, and a scratchy throat was nothing to be concerned about.

Tuesday brought no improvement -- I was definitely fighting something.  What had been a mild, generalized sore throat had become more focused in an area in the back corner of my throat, and it was acutely raw when I swallowed.  Still, I figured, no big deal.  I even knocked out a 3x15' sweet spot session on the trainer as planned, and did so without drama.  I reasoned that the workout might even help clear out my head and throat.  The workout wasn't easy, but I *was* in taper mode with the fatigue it entails, and nothing about the experience suggested anything more than a cold.

By Wednesday, I'd put myself into the category of sick, as much as I hated to draw that conclusion.  I'd busted my butt for months to put myself in a position to try to win Sebring outright a few days later, and the idea of being sick for the first time in years was unbearable.  I was blowing my body weight in snot on an hourly basis, and when I swallowed, it felt like there was a spiked golf ball in the back of my throat.  It turns out that we swallow a considerable volume of saliva and mucus each day, and when swallowing is to be avoided, you become pretty disgusting, because it has to go somewhere.  I bought some cough drops and made the best of it, even dropping my bike and supplies with a friend for transport to Sebring.  That evening, though, I had a fever for the first time, felt achy, and the rest of it.  (Crap.)  Still, my philosophy was that all I needed was a solid night's sleep and I'd be on the mend.

Unfortunately, Wednesday night brought almost no sleep.  I felt like I was drowning -- imagine the worst cold in the world where you can't swallow without an explosion in your throat.  Amy slept on the couch that night, but I didn't even notice until the next morning.  Pretty much sums up how out-of-it I was.

By Thursday morning, it was becoming increasingly clear that Sebring was a stretch.  (Many people would doubtless say "of course" at this, but I think endurance athletes are used to just working through challenges in a way that alters how you view things.)  Amy and my parents thought I might have strep throat; I was undeniably miserable.  Awkwardly, I had to go to work on Thursday because I had a hearing in court that afternoon that I felt I needed to attend.  By this time, I couldn't really talk without coughing spasmodically, and swallowing was almost entirely out of the question.  I managed to communicate to the judge that I was sick, and that was pretty much all that was required of me that day, but I went straight from court to a primary care doc to see what the heck was going on.

The nurse practitioner saw me quickly, noted that my tonsils were swollen, and performed a strep test that everyone expected would be positive.  But it wasn't -- negative as could be.  She consulted with some other folks in the office and recommended that I go to the ER based on the fact that something was clearly wrong, but there was no obvious answer as to the "what" of it.  By then, things were so bad that I dialed Amy's cell and asked the nurse to tell Amy what she'd just told me, because I couldn't speak more than a couple of words at a time.

Amy met me at home about an hour later; I took that time to stand in a hot shower and just try to stop shivering.  We drove to Sibley Hospital ER, where I was admitted about 8:00 p.m. on Thursday night.  I got a CT scan, which showed several large peritonsillar abscesses (essentially pus-filled pockets of infection) in the back of my throat, some of which were dangerously low in my neck and thus close to my vocal cords and chest.   Also, I had a 103-degree fever.  After hours of deliberation, the folks at Sibley determined that I needed surgery immediately but that they weren't equipped to do it -- given the scope and location of the problem, the ENT docs needed a full-fledged facility that could deal with collateral chest infections that might arise from the initial surgery.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it took hours for Sibley to find another hospital that could take me.

During this time, which stretched until about 1:00 a.m. on Friday morning, we'd decided it made sense for Amy to go home to try to get some sleep.  I promised I'd let her know where they took me for surgery and when it was scheduled to happen.  I didn't see the point in her destroying herself to sit in an E.R. indefinitely while nothing happened.

Ultimately, in the middle of the night, Sibley decided to send me by ambulance all the way to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.  It was a pretty surreal scene staring out the back window of the ambulance as it bounced through deserted streets as I was tranquilized on morphine.  The only comparable instance was nearly 2 years ago -- coincidentally, in connection with another 24-hour bike race, in Texas, following a particularly nasty crash.  At least this time I was headed to a real hospital.  I let Amy know that I was in Baltimore with surgery scheduled for Friday morning.  Communicating that was about all I could manage between my misery and narcotic haze.

I don't remember much from that point until Saturday afternoon.  The surgery apparently revealed problems significantly more severe than the surgeon had anticipated.  Among the several infected abscesses was one that was about 4" long -- one of the largest the surgeon had ever seen -- and it was necrotic, meaning that the tissue was dying.  It also was in a particularly sensitive area.  They had to remove a tonsil just to get to it, and it was very close to the nerve that controls my vocal cords.  The doc was alarmed that such an extensive problem had developed so quickly, and feared that I may have contracted a flesh-eating bacteria.  The phrase "necrotic fasciitis" was thrown around.

I vaguely remember a conversation with the doc after the surgery in which he expressed concern that he might not have taken care of the entire problem.  Scans showed additional swelling further down my neck, and if the infection continued to spread, more surgery would be required.  My hazy recollection of that conversation involved my telling the doc to do what he needed to do -- if was another surgery, it was.  But my memory is pretty hazy, as I was on several different kinds of potent painkillers, had a breathing tube down my throat, and could barely even write on a board, much less talk.

Amy's experience was even more alarming.  Apparently the doc told her that the next surgery could require going into my neck from the outside, through the vocal cords, which meant that I'd never talk again, assuming I survived it in the first place.  He asked her the odd question: "Is Damon risk-averse?" and also whether being unable to talk would significantly impact my career.  As a lawyer who appears in court regularly, I think the answer to that is pretty damn clear.  I have no memory of this.

Meanwhile, the bacteria were being cultured to try to identify what had attacked me, and everyone was watching my white blood cell count to see whether it was moving in the right direction.  I was on four different kinds of high-powered IV antibiotics because no one was certain which one might prove effective.

I was only vaguely cognizant of this stuff.  I like to think I was at least partially lucid at the time, but I can't remember much of what happened.  At one point, I scrawled on a white board: I feel like post-Trump America.

For me, the most alarming part of things was that I'd gone to the doctor thinking I'd get just get some antibiotics.  From there, I'd learned I needed surgery, perhaps even a tonsillectomy, and the thought of spending a weekend in the hospital was nightmarish.  But now, no one could tell me much with certainty except that I'd be intubated for the foreseeable future and my hospital stay could last for weeks if things didn't play out in my favor.   A week-long stay was the best I could hope for.

Fortunately, things broke in my favor, and I recovered more swiftly than the doctors' most optimistic estimates.  I think my relative youth, good health, and strong immune system counted heavily in my favor.  The antibiotics succeeded in driving out the infection over the course of a few days.  I was intubated until Sunday, moved out of the ICU on Monday, and released on Tuesday -- 5 days after admission.

From here, it's going to be a bit of a road to recovery.  I'm on a liquid-only diet for several more days, and I'm exhausted and weak.  Given the blood I lost during the surgery and over the course of hourly tests, my hemoglobin levels are through the floor, and I wasn't able to sleep for more than half an hour at a stretch for 5 or 6 days.  ICUs are terrible -- loud, beeping machines, a tube down your throat, 800 wires and IVs connected to you, and nurses who poke you, draw blood, change drips, and ask you how you're doing literally every hour.  Several times I managed to fall asleep, only to be awoken by a nurse who just wanted to know if I was okay.

Ultimately, given the background terrible luck that put me in the hospital in the first place, I think I'm pretty fortunate.  The primary care nurse sent me to the ER rather than sending me home, which isn't an inevitable call to make for someone who presents with a sore throat and fever during flu season.  Had she done otherwise, I think my life could look significantly different going forward, because the infection was ballooning in a nightmarish area.  I also found myself at Johns Hopkins, which is about the safest place one could be; in many parts of the country, that wouldn't have been an option.  I had a tonsillectomy, but that's an afterthought in the grand scheme of things.

It's hard to know what conclusions to draw from this.  It's easy to say: "If you're sick, go to the doctor," but I'm almost never sick, and when I am, it tends to last about 12 hours.  Moreover, I think I have a high pain tolerance -- the sorts of athletic events I'm drawn to suggest as much -- and an allergy to drama.  Put it together and it translates into a philosophy of "there's nothing wrong with me that a little sleep won't fix."  I suspect many endurance athletes share some or all of these traits, so maybe this story will provide a cautionary tale to someone out there.

It'll take time to get my strength back, catch up on work, and get life back to normal.  Obviously there will be a lot of rebuilding needed on the bike, although hopefully it won't be a return to zero.  It's amazing how much strength you lose from being confined to a bed for only a few days.

On the whole, I'm a lucky guy.  Amy was an incredible trooper at a time when she really couldn't afford to be given her situation at work, and I had a steady stream of friends visiting me in the ICU from D.C. and Baltimore.  I had more messages and well-wishes than I could hope to respond to.

Perhaps this is best placed into the category of a near-miss.  Life is full of those, whether we know it or not.  Ten years ago, my brother Jaron -- for whom this blog is named -- presented at a primary care doctor with a headache.  His experience was the opposite of mine: he was prescribed pills and sent home, and then the same thing happened again when he went to the E.R. a day or two later.  No one even performed a CT scan.  By the time someone took him seriously, it was too late, and a treatable cyst in his brain had become fatal.  From what I'm told, my situation could have headed in that direction if my caregivers had been less concerned and diligent, and if my treatment had been delayed much longer.

We all rely on other people in life, whether we want to admit it or not, and regardless how recently we've read Ayn Rand.  Life is about making the most of the opportunities and gifts we have, but it's also about being lucky in countless ways -- from having a caring family and educational opportunities to people who look out for us when we desperately need it, even if we don't know it at the time.  I'm happy to say I've been deeply fortunate in all of the ways that matter.

And now for some justice...

There are certain things that cyclists just learn to accept as going with the territory.  Foremost among these are that cars will occasionally do stupid things (or worse), that bikes get stolen, and that, when they get stolen, they are almost never seen again.  They're commodities easily stripped down and sold off for whatever nickel a thief can get.  But every now and then, karma is on your side.  For me, yesterday was one of those times.

Last fall, I spent months researching a new ultracycling bike that needed to fit certain unusual requirements, and what I ultimately settled on was a completely custom-specced 2015 Felt AR1 from Tri360.  The 2015 AR1 comes only as a frameset -- that is, you buy the frame separately and choose each additional component to build it up:

The AR1 frameset.

I ordered it in October, but I didn't actually have the bike in-hand until December, because I got virtually the first 2015 AR1 frame to arrive at the warehouse.  Once Tri360 was done assembling it for me, though, it was a thoroughly customized racing machine:

Full side view.

Wind profile with TriRig front brake.

Bontrager base bar and extensions with Zipp clips and pads. 

Selle Anatomica Titanico X saddle.

Custom Wheelbuilder Zipps with Chris King hubs and red nips.

TriRig Omega brake.  

Stages crank-arm power meter.

It was a delightfully fun project in many ways, but it took a lot of thought, and the result was that there simply was no other bike like it.  From the first ride in December, it fit perfectly and was as comfortable as my titanium road bike, which is a heck of a thing.

My first race on it, at 24 Hours of Sebring in February, went amazingly well.  I put together a 475-mile non-drafting effort to break the previous age group record.  That was 34 miles better than I'd managed in 2014 on my Trek Speed Concept with disc wheel, aero helmet, and 18 cm of drop.  In other words, I loved the bike.

In Sebring, rockin' the 808s.

Needless to say, when you have a bike that nice, you don't leave it just anywhere.  I live in a condo building in a nice part of town, and one of the main attractions for me was that my unit came with a secured storage area to which only I had access.  This wasn't a bike cage or anything that would attract attention.  Instead, it was what looked like a utility room on the third floor of the parking garage, inside a residents' gate that requires a clicker to open:

My storage room, in all its glory.

The bottom line is, there was no sign that there was anything of value in that room, and it was hardly an appealing target from what I could tell.  Unfortunately, the residents' gate had been malfunctioning over the last couple of weeks, so it was in "permanently open" mode for the time being, but even so, my storage unit hardly said "come and get me."

On Thursday morning, I'd gone down to the unit to get a couple of bars for my trainer ride.  (I can't keep them in my apartment or I'll put on 100 pounds by the time the snow thaws.)  Everything was copacetic.  I repeated the trip on Saturday morning, only to find that my storage unit was unlocked, which was pretty strange.  It's possible to unlock it in such a way that it stays unlocked, and I've done it in the past, but generally I just keep it on the auto lock setting when I'm going in and out.  I wouldn't have left it unlocked on Thursday.  But there it was.  Weird.

Inside the unit, I quickly noticed that one thing was missing: My new Felt.  Nothing else seemed out of place, and there was plenty else to steal, including a set of new Zipp 404s sitting right next to the bike (which was sporting 808s at the time).  Initially, I wasn't alarmed so much as perplexed: Had I dropped the bike off to be serviced?  I've been known to be a little ditzy, so that seemed possible.  I checked the back of my car, the apartment, and the storage area again, but it was gone, plain and simple.

The feeling of complete sickness took over.  I couldn't afford a replacement.  I hoped homeowner's insurance would help, but who knew.  In any case, it would take a long time to put together -- there were no AR1 frames available.

I filed a police report, providing them with pictures, serial number, and so forth.  They were prompt and courteous, and sent a detective to take pictures and pull footage from the security camera.  That camera, which was facing the gate, had recorded every second of the 48 hours in which the bike had disappeared.  I figured it would have to show something -- that was the only way out -- unless, of course, the bike went up the residents' elevator, which would be arguably more disturbing.  I suppose someone could have driven a car into the residents' area, loaded it up, and left again, but that would have required noting the security camera and generally a level of planning that I thought unlikely.

Knowing how the stolen bike game worked, after I filed the report, the first thing I did was check Craigslist, but there was nothing in the right galaxy.  So, doing whatever else I could think of, I let a couple of bike shops know, called around to the pawn shops, and posted details on Facebook.  I figured the only thing I had going for me was that my bike was about as distinctive as they get.

A couple of hours later -- around noon -- David King and Bo Ngo on FB alerted me to a Craigslist ad for a Felt AR that had just been posted.  I was initially excited, but when I saw the ad, it wasn't quite right:

The ad was for a Felt AR, but the picture was of a 2014 model with different wheels, different bars, and different cranks -- not mine.  

To be clear, the text of the ad highlighted it as almost definitely stolen -- all it said was "Felt AR Model Fully Loaded, Rarely Used, Great racing condition.  Moving, Need to make some space."  He was asking $2800.  Anyone who knows bikes understands that this is not how one would sell a $10k bike, which is what appeared in his ad.  Sadly, although it looked like someone's stolen bike, it wasn't mine.

The next step is what cracked the whole thing, and for that, I'm massively indebted to John Scanaliato, who did some research and found that the photo in the Craigslist ad had been lifted from an article in Peloton Magazine:

In other words, the bike pictured in the ad was NOT the actual bike being sold -- he hadn't posted a picture of the bike in his possession.  That immediately set off warning bells, and closer inspection revealed that the Craigslist ad had been posted from a building only two blocks from mine.  Bingo.  And the seller had provided his cell phone number.

I immediately sent the guy a text message, trying not to set off warning bells.  I said I lived in Capitol Hill -- which I don't -- and asked some Craiglisty questions about why he's selling and whether price was flexible.  But I didn't hear back immediately.

My biggest fear was that he wouldn't respond to the message, or that he'd sell the bike off before I could see it.  Seeing the location where the ad had been posted, I even walked up and down the block, hoping that the bike would be on a balcony or something, but no dice.  I then called the detective's office to give them the guy's cell number, hoping they could execute a warrant in short order.  That was a bit tricky, of course: "Here's an ad for a bike that isn't mine -- that's probable cause, right?" But I was able to convince them that, given the stolen photo, timing, and description of the bike, it had to be mine.

While I was giving them the information, I received two texts back from the guy, who was willing to meet up almost immediately.  Gulp.  I told the police what was going on, and in no uncertain terms, they warned me not to go meeting this guy alone in some remote place when the seller thought I'd be carrying a pile of cash.  I appreciated their concern, and obviously I wasn't stupid, but what I really wanted was police support during the meet-up.  This turned out to be harder than anyone would have wished, as the guys who did plain-clothes stings weren't working at the time, and the police really wanted me to push back the meeting until the next afternoon.  I tried -- "Hey man, I just remembered my girlfriend is dragging me to a party, but I really want the bike, so will you hold it til tomorrow at noon if I pay full price?"  But "his friend" really wanted to sell it immediately, and offered me a substantial discount to do the deal then.  I was really concerned that he'd unload the bike before the next day.

Upon hearing this, frankly, the detectives went above and beyond and pulled the operation together even in their short-staffed state.  Although the Craigslist ad had been posted from near my building, the guy wanted to meet up across town, closer to Union Station.  I sent the guy what surely must be one of the least sincere texts ever: "Haha, f*ck it, ok lets do it.  But can we meet in a public place?  I trust you but sometimes people on Craigslist can be sketchy."  He happily obliged by suggesting we meet in front of a very busy hotel.  The detectives picked me up in an unmarked car, and off we went.

We arrived a few minutes early and drove by a few times, hoping to get a glimpse of the guy with the bike, but no luck.  Things got a little tense when the seller kept asking if I was there yet, and I had to keep putting him off -- we wanted him to show first.  But he didn't.  Eventually I asked the guy what he was wearing -- "Gray hoodie" -- and went to stand right in front of the hotel, dressed like a Logan Circle preppy.   I let him know I was there, and joked that "its cold haha!"

A couple of minutes later, a guy approached wearing a gray hoodie and wheeling my bike in front of him.  There was zero doubt it was mine -- even the tires were still deflated, since my last ride had been at Sebring 3 weeks before.  It was not the bike in the picture, needless to say.  And the guy pushing it did not look like an avid cyclist.  Realizing immediately that the bike was mine, I knew the goal was just to play along, so I did the whole "Wow, that's awesome!" thing, started feeling the bars, asking why the tires were flat, asking how much it had been ridden, etc.  All the while, the guy was keeping a hand on the bike to make sure I didn't grab it and run off with it.  After about 30 seconds of this, out of my peripheral vision, I saw the police descending on the guy, who didn't realize a thing until they were 6 inches away.  Game over, dude.

 

It all went perfectly, and the bike was 100% fine, aside from the serial numbers, which the guy had tried to file off with partial success.  I will say, there is something unreal about seeing your bike being sold back to you in broad daylight.  Until then, it was all very abstract: my bike is missing, but there was no telling where it might be.  At that moment, everything became quite real.  This was the guy with my bike, trying to sell it to me in the middle of town.  Indeed, even someone who knew nothing about bikes would have been compelled to realize he was buying stolen property in that situation.

This is basically every cyclist's dream.  So often we're simply the victims of life, whether it be careless drivers, thieves, or what-have-you.  When a bike disappears, even the police admit that it is basically gone forever.  We're forced to feel helpless and to hope for the best, when what we really want is to help take the asshole down.  It never happens, but I got to live it, every second.  Justice was served.

On the ride back to the police station, the sergeant and I chatted and he explained that he loved to get out on his Madone a few times a week for 50 miles or so.  In my mind, that explained a lot -- I'm not sure if a non-cyclist would have made it happen the way he did.  I'm immensely grateful.

There's only one real issue to resolve.  In looking over my text messages later that night, I realized I'd missed one, where the guy had offered to sell me a helmet and some other accessories as well.  Sure enough, I went and looked around my storage area, and noticed that a new helmet, Northwave boots, and a couple of other things were gone.  I feel pretty good about my chances of getting them back at this point, but even if I don't, in the grand scheme, I have to count myself lucky.

As grateful as I am to the police, I recognize that this never would have been possible without the great work of the folks on FB and Twitter, not only for pointing me to the ad (which hadn't been posted when I first looked), but even more critically, for identifying the picture in the ad as a stock image.  Without that help, the bike would be gone, and the perp would be free.  On the whole, a great day for justice, and the DC bike community made it happen through quick and clever work.

One mystery remains: I don't know how the bike got out of my storage unit in the first place, or how it then got out of the building.  I am 90% certain that the guy who tried to sell me the bike is not the one who took it.  So, I am still pretty disconcerted.  But those are questions for another day.  In the meantime, it's sunny and warm, and I'm heading out for a ride.

Am I your huckleberry? RAAM 2015

Ever since I qualified for RAAM at Sebring in February, I've been trying to decide whether to take that massive plunge in 2015.  For most of the spring, I thought it was a toss-up; I was taking a wait-and-see approach to my first season of ultracycling, with an eye toward deciding after the year was done.  Then, after my 488-mile performance at the National 24-Hour Challenge, I felt certain that I wanted to give it a go. There were all sorts of reasons why, ranging from the love of a good challenge to support from many friends, some of whom even volunteered for the arduous task of crewing.

As the summer wore into fall, though, I found myself drifting back toward uncertainty as certain realities sank in.  In my ill-fated race in Saratoga, I spoke for a little while with Rob Morlock, a 3-time RAAM finisher with a sub-10-day result to his name.  He volunteered that, toward the end of one of his recent attempts, his saddle sores had gotten so bad that, in places, there was no skin left -- his sit bones were visible through what remained of his flesh.  The more race reports I read, the more I realize that this may be closer to the rule than to the unfortunate exception.  The physical challenge is utterly serious for even the very best athletes.  Marko Baloh, a legend in the sport, lost part of his lung when he got pneumonia.  Christoph Strasser, one of the strongest racers ever, was hospitalized a couple of years ago when he spiked a 105-degree fever in the middle of Kansas.  And, of course, Bob Breedlove was killed in a head-on collision with a car in the middle of the night.  RAAM sounds like it's closer to going off to war than to any event with which I'm familiar.

At the same time, my own race experiences were underlining the gravity of the proposed endeavor.  My lack of heat acclimation in DC's unusually cool summer meant that, at the Mid-Atlantic 24-Hour Challenge in August, I was getting dizzy from dehydration after only 10 hours.  The situation wasn't much better at the Silver State 508, where, despite relatively clement 90-degree temperatures, I found myself throwing up on the side of the road 100 miles in.  The last half of that race was one of the most painful things I've ever endured, from 60-degree temperature swings to an inappropriate bike fit that made every minute agonizing.  Toward the end of that race, I reflected on RAAM -- which is 6 times as long, and which shoots straight across the low desert in the first couple of days before cresting over 10,000' peaks -- and thought, "Not a chance in hell." Of course, the mind rounds off corners, and in retrospect it's easy to remember the accomplishment while the pain seems more like an academic fact than anything real and consequential.

So, here I am, 8 months out from RAAM, facing the big decision: do I take the plunge?  After thinking it over more than I'd like to admit, my answer is: No, at least not next year.  There are many reasons, but here are a few.

(1)  The financial cost.  If you do it on a shoestring budget -- i.e., without an RV, and with neither rider nor crew having much in the way of creature comforts -- the cost would probably come to at least $25,000, and it could well be higher.  Even if I could defray some of that with a full-court fundraising campaign, it still would still be a monumentally expensive undertaking for someone who works for the government.  There are many reasons why RAAM competitors skew older, but I think one of them is that younger people often can't afford it.  I'm not sure I can, and I'm not willing to take on huge amounts of debt for the sake of a single bike race.  There are shorter events that provide rewarding challenges without threatening insolvency.  And, anyway, since when is a 500-mile or 24-hour race considered too short?

(2)  The social cost.  There's no avoiding the fact that, to race 3,000 miles in June, you really ought to be riding something close to 10,000 miles in the 8 months leading up to that point.  We're talking 300 miles a week, and often quite a bit more, week in and week out.  That is serious business for someone with a demanding full-time job, a relationship, and aspirations of reading the occasional book.  The event would consume more than half of my vacation time for the year, and more than all of my budget.  I'm not sure any event is worth living like a hermit for the rest of a year.

(3)  The professional cost.  I'm starting a new job with the United States Attorney's Office next week, and by all accounts it is a more intense place than the one I'm leaving.  I'm excited about the opportunity to be a "real lawyer" with all that that entails, but it will be a pretty steep learning curve, and there will be times when it will displace workouts or races.  Given RAAM's monumental difficulty even for those who are ideally prepared, it seems exceedingly irresponsible to commit to racing it at the same time that I'm trying to get my feet underneath me in a new, demanding position.

(4)  FOMO is B.S.  In the last year, I've stumbled across a new, insidious acronym: FOMO, or "fear of missing out."  It's up there with "YOLO" in terms of things that no one above age 12 should ever write or say, but there is a point to it: People sign up for things that their friends are doing because they think they might otherwise regret not having been there.  There's a significant element of that with RAAM; it's the Kona of ultracycling, and many of my friends and competitors will be there.  But, the thing about fear of missing out is that it's unavoidable.  If you can't do everything in life -- and no one can -- you're always missing out on something, and it's only a question of prioritizing things in the right way.  There's certainly a part of me that will find it hard to sit on the sideline for RAAM, but I'd also find it hard not to do all of the other things in life that RAAM would force aside.  "Fear of missing out" isn't enough: I have to be utterly certain that I want to do RAAM for its own sake, and I'm not there right now.  Sometimes you just have to say no to things.

I've been mulling over this tentative conclusion for the last couple of weeks, and it's only getting stronger.  It's the right call for me, at least right now.  In many ways, I'm like the first-year triathlete who's done reasonably well at a couple of sprint triathlons, and who's thinking of signing up for an Ironman the next year.  I've always told such athletes that there's no rush, and that developing their chops at the shorter distances is an admirable and worthwhile things to do -- it's not "Ironman or irrelevance."  In this instance, I'm taking my own advice, and I'm looking forward to everything that life will have to offer in 2015.

Big Wild Ridin'! Start Your Engines

I'm in Alaska, preparing to set out on the 6-hour ferry ride from Whittier to Valdez, where the ride will start tomorrow night.  It has been amazing here so far: cool temps reaching highs near 70 and lows around 50, clean air, and rings of snow-capped peaks in every direction.  Yesterday morning I went for a 30-minute easy run on a bike trail along the coast, and then on an utterly amazing 30-mile spin along the Seward Highway.  It's quite a thing to be bombing down the road with cliffs on the left and ocean on the right, with mountains across the water.  It's easy to see why people choose to live here, although I understand that the winters are quite another matter.

Last night was the bike check and meet-n-greet.  There are about 50 riders -- a very sizeable field for an event like this.  Among the riders is a healthy D.C. contingent, maybe 7 or 8 total including me and Max, and they're universally friendly.  There's a guy from England, another couple of guys from Japan, and at least one triathlete on a tricked-out Cervelo P5.  He confessed that he was trying to figure out how to carry food on it.  Maybe not quite the weapon for this fight.  There was the usual assortment of recumbents, vintage steel with fenders and downtube shifters, and carbon racers.

I'm the youngest person riding, at a not-so-young 36.  Max is the only other person under 40.

The ride starts tomorrow night (Sunday night) at midnight local time (4:00 a.m. EST), which will be strange in many ways, not least because it is dusk at that time of night, and sunrise will be only a few hours later.  Unfortunately, the schedule has us riding the prettiest part of the course in those few hours of darkness; the schedule evolved to this form in order to ensure that riders wouldn't be in the truly remote, cell-signal-free region during the night.  It's safety over scenery in this instance, which is fair enough, though personally I'd prefer it the other way.

The ride is 1200k (750 miles), and the time cutoff is 90 hours -- that is, riders have until 6:00 p.m. on Day 4.  Most will take 85-89 hours for the trek, but our plan is a little more aggressive.  If all goes wells we plan to cover 3 legs of 400k (250 miles each).  That distance usually takes 18 hours or so.  Thus, each day we will ride from midnight until about 6:00 p.m., then sleep for a few hours before setting out at midnight for the next day.   The big picture is that we plan 3 legs and two snoozes; if we manage it, we'll likely finish under 70 hours, but a lot of things can go wrong in that period, even assuming one has no need for bear spray.  If we meet our goal, we'll finish around 8:00-10:00 local time on Wednesday night, which would be sometime after midnight on Thursday morning on the east coast.

I'm feelings pretty good about the ride.  Nervous, yes; but the nerves aren't due to the challenge of covering the distance.  I know that will be completely exhausting, of course, but like many things we'll take it mile by mile and get there eventually.  My nerves have to do with logistics -- what am I forgetting?  What might I need that I haven't thought of?  We'll have access to drop bags (equivalent to special needs) at about the 400k, 700k, and 1,000k points, but that means we have to guess what we might want or need.  That's difficult when I've done nothing like this before.   We're lucky in that the weather should be consistent and favorable, but you don't want to be caught off-guard.  If you shred a tire or fall off your bike in a remote region, it could be quite awhile before help arrives, and what is comfortable clothing while riding might be utterly inadequate if you're on the side of the road for hours, at night, in the rain.  That probably won't happen, but you have to plan for it anyway, or at least you should.

I'm also pretty worried about saddle and foot pain.  Toward the end of my 600k, my butt and feet were killing me, and this is twice as far.  Having two short sleep breaks should help, and I'm trying a lot of new/different things this ride in order to make life more comfortable, but I'm pretty sure I will have trouble sitting down toward the end of each day.  Maybe a new randonneuring saddle is in my future, but for now I'm dancing with the one who brought me, so to speak.

In all, I'm pretty excited.  A couple of years ago I thought events like this seemed completely absurd. I still do in many ways, but if 5,000 people can cover this distance at Paris-Brest-Paris every four years, then surely the challenge is surmountable.  At this distance the challenge is largely mental.  In all, though, I can't think of a better way to experience Alaska for the first time.  It'll certainly be memorable; one can't make it through an event like this without some colorful stories to tell.

I will do my best to tweet/post to FB status updates at least once a day, and there will be a full ride report afterward, come what may.  For now, I'm off to catch a ferry!

5 Days out from Surgery: All Signs Point to "Yes"

It's now been five days since I got my IT band sliced, and so far my reaction is: I had knee surgery?  Really?  I was able to walk without crutches or a cane as soon as I got home from the operation, and was even able to climb up and down stairs after a fashion.  I figured the pain would set in once the local anesthetic wore off, but really, it never did.  The most challenging thing to deal with in my recovery has been the itching caused by the high-power narcotics I was on for the first three days.

But today?  Well, I haven't even had Advil in a couple of days.  I'm limping a bit, and there's some pinching on the outside of my knee, but I suspect that both of these problems are primarily due to the stitches, which I'll have removed on Friday.  After that, I'll be able to swim, and perhaps even enjoy some light spinning on the bike.  No running for a few weeks yet, but I'll be hitting the deep-water running to the extent I can.

In general, I agree with the instinct to make surgery the last option.  But at the moment, if I'm honest, my main question is why I didn't have this done months ago.  I'm so enthusiastic about my progress that I'm even spending my days arguing with myself about whether I need a new bike.  Any avid cyclist knows what the answer to that question is.

Way to Make Race Weight 357: Cut A Piece Out Of Your Knee

In about twelve hours, I'll be heading into knee surgery for the lamest of all reasons: to fix an illiotibial ("IT") band injury.  Last May, June, and early July, I basically buried myself with ultracycling.  Every other weekend for two months, I had a ride that was at least twelve hours long, with the longest approaching 18 hours.  During the week I'd ride my trainer twice, run intervals, lift, do yoga, and swim.   To exactly no one's surprised, this eventually caught up with me, although it happened in a surprising way.  During a 5-mile brick run (that's a run immediately after a bike ride), I felt a bolt of pain on the outside of my right knee, like I'd tweaked something.  I hopped a bit and tried walking it off, but I found I basically couldn't put weight on my leg.  It was bad enough that I hopped to a cab in the area and hitched a ride home.

I'd heard people complain about IT band injuries before -- they're quite common among runners and cyclists.  Essentially, the IT band runs from the outside of the hip, along the outside of the femur, around the outside of the knee, and connects to the tibia just below the knee.  IT band friction syndrome arises -- at least according to most physicians -- when the IT band rubs along a bony point on the outside of the knee, becoming inflamed.  Because it's an overuse injury, I assumed it would come on slowly and be somewhat easy to remedy with rest, icing, and foam rolling, but neither was true.  When it came on, it felt like I may as well have sprained my knee: running was not remotely an option.  I did everything humanly possible to treat it, from getting massages 4x/week, to icing, stretching, and using a foam roller until I couldn't stand it any more, and then some more beyond that.  I was lucky enough to be able to finish Ironman Mont Tremblant four weeks after the injury, but I could only run for about the first three miles.  After that, my fall was a series of false starts; I just haven't been able to shake the injury, as much as I've tried.

From what I've learned, if this injury doesn't go away quickly, it can turn into a life partner.  There are many stories out there about runners who give up the sport entirely for years, only to have the injury flare up again a couple of miles into their first easy jog.  I could have kept up with the anti-inflammatories, icing, rolling, and stretching, but the fact is that it's utterly demoralizing: it's hard to motivate oneself to put in hard work when you're pretty certain that you won't be able to run more than a mile or two, and when, after a hard bike workout, it hurts to walk for several days.  Enough is enough.

So, tomorrow morning I'm having what's known as an IT band release.  In my case, this means that a nickel-sized piece will be cut out of the inside of my IT band, i.e., the part that rubs over my knee will no longer exist.  I know several people who've had this surgery, and their main thought is regret that they didn't have it done sooner.  Because nothing has to grow back together afterward, recovery is somewhat quicker than with, for example, an ACL repair.  My understanding is that I'll be on crutches and unable to do much at all for a week or so, but that I ought to be back up to spinning on a bike without resistance after a couple of weeks, and that things should progress from there.  Jogging can resume, slowly, after 5-6 weeks.

This is quite the opposite of how I'd like to be spending my January and February.  But, taking the long view, it's not really optional -- I just need to get it done.  And I've found that I tend to bounce back relatively quickly after layoffs like this one; indeed, some of my best seasons have come after my deepest fitness troughs.  It's never fun to rebuild running fitness, but I've done it before, and I'll do it again.  I just need to know that, when I head out the door, I won't pull up limping after a mile or two.

My positive spin on the whole thing is that this will give me all the motivation I need to become good friends with the neighborhood pool.  In the longer term, it's just a bump in the road.

Houston, We Have Ignition!

The blog's been a little quiet lately, but things have been afoot behind the scenes.  Indeed, they've been a big 'ol foot just lookin' for some ass to kick.  And now those feet are kickin' like Pete Jacobs on the business end of an Ironman.

EXIT TEAM Z

But let me back up.  Back in July, I posted about my decision to leave Team Z after nearly five years.  It was a difficult decision, as I had deep affection for the team and had done what small things I could to help it become more things to more athletes, so to speak.  I was quite fond of the coaches individually and collectively, and through the team, I'd met terrific training partners, many of whom eventually became close friends.

The problem was that I've always had trouble standing still.  In fact, thinking back on it, I probably could have become a better triathlete than I am merely by finding a coach, sticking with him, finding training routes and a routine that work, and practicing until perfect.  That's how greatness is achieved, I think: focusing on results, controlling the variables, and building brick by brick until you've built the Great Wall.  It's about steady progress and evolution, and it works.

But it's not how I work.  I thrive on novel challenges, not incremental gains.  The first triathlon I ever signed up for was an Ironman, and I signed up for it at a time when I didn't own a bike, couldn't swim, couldn't run more than three miles, and was heading into knee surgery.  The novelty -- and, ok, sure, the sheer terror -- pulled me so far out of my comfort zone that I felt my brain was expanding in time with my lung capacity.  I joined Team Z shortly after I survived that ordeal, and the newness of the rides, the people, and the training kept me going for quite awhile.  Over time, though, I came to feel like I was spinning my wheels, no pun intended.  The workouts and races individually were satisfying, but part of the joy of this sport is the feeling that one is out in the world exploring new places, visiting new towns and cresting new mountains.  I began to strike out on my own to an increasing degree, signing up for nutty races and rides in exotic (and sadistic) locations, and generally making my own way.  And others I knew were doing the same.

Cutting through the considerable drama, the basic problem was this: my training partners and I found ourselves doing our own thing more often than not, and it is difficult for a large organization to maintain an identity and coherence while tolerating factions going their own way.  The coaches on Team Z did their best to offer to bring our idiosyncratic race and training schedules into the team fold somehow -- to support our rides hither and yon, and to designate some of our chosen races as team races.  But it simply wasn't working; no organization can be everything to everyone.  Eventually the tensions became palpable, so we struck out on our own, and formed a new team with a core membership of the group of us who'd been training together for years.  Team Z would be just fine; indeed, it just won Competitor Magazine's award for "Best Tri Team: Mid-Atlantic"!  For a team that didn't exist until 2005, that's quite an achievement.

ENTER IGNITE ENDURANCE

On one level, founding a triathlon team is pretty straightforward: you get together and decide you're a triathlon team, and there you go.  Hopefully you can come up with a name that somehow combines "Superheroes" and "underpants," but I couldn't.  What did crop up in my mind was "Ignite Endurance," so named because our athletes compete in all sorts of things that aren't triathlon -- their common denominator is that, by the time you really wish they were done, you're about halfway to the finish line.

Of course, the notion of an endurance sports team is fundamentally odd considering that they're purely individual sports.  Even in tennis, swimming, track, and bowling, individual scores are aggregated to determine a winning team.  Not so in triathlon or marathoning; on some level, you're only a team insofar as you identify collectively with one another and train together.  You don't actually need to be on a team to do those things, and many aren't.  Yet triathlon teams are ubiquitous for the simple reason that people enjoy belonging to something larger than themselves, and that's a terrific thing.  In fact, the proliferation of amateur endurance sports teams is one of the only areas I can think of that's actively cutting against the trend of social atomization, where we live behind electronic walls and even phone conversations are sometimes deemed uncomfortably intrusive.  Yes, we may be Bowling Alone, but we're riding bikes together, dammit.

Interestingly, my experience in founding the team turned out to be easy in the ways I thought it would be near impossible, and exceedingly challenging in ways that never even surfaced on my radar.  We had about eight founding members, and our first task was to try to find a main sponsor, i.e., a bike or triathlon shop.  We imagined that this would be difficult, but we were fortunate to get a welcoming reception at a couple of shops, and we quickly agreed on the most natural fit: Tri360, a store that had yet to open.  Indeed, when we signed our sponsorship agreement, the store did not even have walls.  We were convinced to work with them because the founders, Kate and Blaine, were in the same position we were: starting a new venture and looking for a flexible, enthusiastic partnership.  And, more than that, they're the sort of people one doesn't often find owning a triathlon shop: down-to-earth, terrific folks who are genuinely interested in helping new athletes find their way in what can be an intimidating environment.  As someone who's spent a fair bit of time in bike shops, I can tell you that there's no more welcoming place for a new athlete -- especially a female athlete -- to go.  It's a pleasure to be sponsored by a company one really believes in, and they're obviously doing something right, having been awarded Competitor Magazine's award for "Best Triathlon Store: Mid-Atlantic" after less than a year in business.  We've also had a surprising degree of success in finding partnerships beyond Tri360: so far, we've linked up with Blue Seventy, GU Energy Labs, Skratch Labs, Rudy Project, Zoca Gear, and other terrific companies -- no bad shakes for a team that, until today, didn't even have a website.

But it was not all easy sailing.  The surprising part is that the most intractable challenges have been purely aesthetic.  Put it this way:

Me: "So, we need to settle on a color scheme."

Men: "We want to look like Batman."

Women: "No."

Men: "Aww, come on.  You'll look like Catwoman.  That's hot."

Women: "We have the sudden urge to shove this bike pump somewhere you didn't apply Body Glide."

Men: "So what do you want the colors to be?"

Women: "Teal."

Men: "Batman does not wear teal."

It burns!!!  It burns!!!

See, it turns out that men and women have almost entirely different taste, and ne'er the twain shall meet.  Eventually we settled on black and white, with a neon blue and accents of yellow.  Think that's the end of it?  Hah!  YOU try coming up with a logo that seven people agree on.  We were fortunate to have a skilled graphic designer on our team, but we drove the poor lad to distraction with such minute as the shape of our flame.  It ultimately turned out to be this, which I think is pretty kickass for something created from scratch.

And then, once you have team colors, and you have a logo, you need... kits.  Uniforms, that is, in cycling cool-kid jargon.  And here, you're faced with almost literally a blank page staring at you.  It's possible, of course, to work off of a template offered by one of the major companies, but these have a way of looking like exactly what they are: off-the-shelf models with your colors and icons.  It's not a bad way to go, but we wanted to do things right.  The problems will be familiar to anyone who's ever watched a team challenge on Project: Runway.  Triathletes, like fashion designers, are Type-A people with strong opinions, and when those opinions are combined, often the result is not a happy medium, but something that would make Tim Gunn bite his knuckles, inhale sharply, and say, "You know, I really like you as a designer, but I have to tell you I have some concerns about what the judges are going to say here."

But, after burning the midnight oil for a couple of weeks, we're getting there -- yesterday we sent our proofs off to Zoca, our apparel sponsors, and they look terrific.  What's more, Christmas came two weeks late to our humble collective, bringing with it a brand spanking new website!  (We're also on Twitter and Facebook.)  The end is in sight, and stepping back, it's amazing what we've put together.  We have a terrific group of 20 athletes who are ready to take on the world come the spring, and I'm not sure how I've gotten this lucky.

To infinity and beyond!  After my knee surgery.  What?  Oh, right, I didn't actually mention training or racing in this post.  How refreshing.  An oversight soon to be remedied!  Until next time, friends.

Am I MIA? What's been up.

Wow, it looks like it's been about six weeks since I last posted.  I haven't blogged for awhile because my mind simply has been elsewhere, and I never want triathlon, or the accompanying write-ups, to cross the line from an enthusiasm to an obligation.

Despite my lack of posts, though, a lot's been up, from injuries to races to founding a new triathlon team!  Here's the skinny.

I've been injured

In May, June, and July, I kept up kind of a ridiculous schedule.  Every other weekend I either ran a marathon or did a bike ride of 9+ hours, including the Boston Marathon, Big Sur Marathon, a 300k ride, a 400k ride, Mountains of Misery, 12 Hours of Cranky Monkey, and the Saratoga 12-Hour TT.  On my "off" weekends, I raced a couple of Olys.  It was all great fun, but I was left in mid July facing Ironman five weeks out, and I really hadn't done much in the way of consistent running.  So I started cranking up the running volume, and almost immediately got sidelined in a serious way.

It started out innocuously enough: an interval session on my trainer, followed by a 5-mile easy transition run.  Only, about three miles into the run, I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my right knee, and could barely put weight on it.  I had to gimp my way to a cab in order to get home.  This was not ideal.  It turned out that somehow I had completely trashed my IT band, an injury I've seen many times in others but never experienced myself.  My take-away is that it sucks in a very serious way.  In the five weeks before Ironman, I was not able to run a step, and I was getting massages 3-4x each week, foam rolling, and doing everything I possibly could simply to get to the starting line.  I also couldn't ride my bike; I had to bail after 30 minutes on an easy ride only two weeks out from Ironman.  Very, very bad.

As explained below, I did somehow make it through Ironman, but in doing so inflamed the injury again to such an extent that, once again, I couldn't do any real training.  So, at the moment, I'm almost 10 weeks out from the injury, and I've been unable to run or do serious riding for almost the entirety of that span.  Fortunately, I think I'm finally on the mend, but it has been an exceedingly discouraging process.

I've been racing, in the sense that I've participated in events known as races.

My seminal event for 2012 was Ironman Mont Tremblant, which I raced in August.  Readers of this blog will know that, after past Ironman events, I've written up pretty epic race reports.  After much consideration, I'm not going to do that for Tremblant.  It's been a very discouraging time athletically, what with the injury and all, and I've found that, with triathlon, I'm either "all in" or kind of unplugged.  In a time of discouragement and inability to train or race to my ability, it's been hard to imagine putting 8 or 9 hours into drafting a race report.  So, I'll simply provide a short recap.

It doesn't get more convenient than this.  I stayed at the Marriot.

The short and the long of Ironman Mont Tremblant is this: it's the best race I've ever done by a considerable margin.  It was simply spectacular from beginning to end -- gorgeous swim, bike, and run courses, the most convenient race staging I've ever seen, and flawless execution. One really can't ask for more.  Here's the view of the top of the finishing area from my hotel room balcony:

The finishing area itself was a Disney-esque festival scene:

And the village was pedestrian-friendly:

Here's a video taken from the free gondola, which soars over the village from the finish line/transition area at the bottom to the alpine slide at the top.

In the days before the race, the village really put on a show.  And, by that, I mean that they literally put on a show.  Specifically, a rock concert followed by fireworks.

The Friday night concert.  It was surprisingly outstanding.

You might think that fireworks before a triathlon would consist of a dude lighting off bottle rockets that fizzled into a vague M-Dot shape.  But this was an actual, honest-to-God show.  There were three songs -- care to guess?  Survivor, Journey, and U2.

Lake Tremblant.  Not suck.

As for the race, well.  I had a moderately crappy swim (1:05, compared to 1:00-1:02 for my last few races at this distance), but I'm not sure quite what I did wrong.  I simply found myself boxed in behind people swimming very slowly, and I couldn't make any meaningful progress for large stretches.  Eventually I just decided to take it easy and relax, so I moseyed on out in 1:04 or so and made a run for the timing mats, which were some distance away.

The bike course was a thing of wonder and joy.  I'd been riding well all summer, so I thought I could move pretty well on this course even with my 5-week injury layoff.  The course was a wonderful balance of long flats, long climbs, and steep rollers; in all, the elevation gain was pretty close to Lake Placid.  Fully 70% of the course had been repaved in the months before the race, so it was glass-like tarmac as far as the eye could see.  I touched my brakes all of 6 times in 112 miles, and 4 of those times were to do 180-degree turns around cones.  I executed exactly as I wanted to, turning in a split of 5:11, with the second half 5 minutes slower than the first due to easing off at the end in order to save something for the run.  This was a pretty big personal-best on an Ironman bike leg, but it was not an all-out effort by any stretch.  I thought I could have gone sub-5 if I'd been willing to leave it all out there.

One odd thing was that I basically had a personal draft marshal for about 30 miles straight -- he was never more than 100 yards from me in that entire 1.5-hour stretch.  I'd pass him, waive, and he'd stare at me in a vaguely Canadian way.  Occasionally he'd suggest that I drop back from 6.98 meters to 7.0 meters behind the person in front of me.  Annoyingly, though, the fact that he was right there all the time interfered with my pacing strategy on the climbs, which I tend to ride more slowly than comparable cyclists.  I take it easy up 'em, which means that people pass me routinely.  My normal approach is to mind my own business and keep chugging at my designated pace, and allow them to pull away -- they're going faster, after all.  But you can't do that with a best-buddy draft marshal next to you, or you risk getting flagged for not respecting the rules on being overtaken since you might not drop back quite quickly enough.  So I'd have to let off the gas substantially, thus causing more people to pass, and the cycle would repeat itself until I was doing little more than trying to coast up 1/2-mile-long climbs.  This is not awesome for average speed.  On a couple of occasions I probably made a poor decision by getting fed up with it and just blowing up the climbs at 450 watts for a minute or so, but it's what I felt like was the just and moral thing to do.   Dammit.

The run wasn't much to write home about, but I suspected it wouldn't be, given my complete lack of running.  The first and last miles of each run loop are quite hilly, and I was both injured and under-trained (as a result of the injury).  The constant up-and-down caused my ITBS to flare up pretty quickly, which meant the last 20 miles was a gimpfest.  All told, a 4:22, well off of what I'd have liked.

Despite a poor swim and run, I chalked up a 10:47, which was a 40-minute PR, so I can't be too upset about it.  The only tragic thing about Ironman Tremblant is that I'm not racing it next year.  What a race.

After Tremblant, my leg was once again in limp mode, and training was out of the question even if I'd had the motivation to do it, which, immediately post-IM, I clearly did not.  I was already signed up for Nations and Savageman Olys, so I raced to the extent of putting up a pair of rather lame 2:23's (I was sub-2:10 in June), but they were enjoyable anyway.  One thing that's clear to me is that success at shorter distance races requires an enthusiasm for suffering; without it, one simply can't do well.  It's never a good thing for achievement when, in an Oly, I find myself thinking that various competing riders look solid as I'm cheerfully getting dropped without protest.  On the other hand, though, this is all about fun at the end of the day, and I'll get 'em once I get back into competition mode.  There's nothing wrong with actually enjoying the scenery every now and then.  Maybe my injury was life's way of telling me to do more of that.

What's on the horizon

Lots of exciting stuff!

The biggest piece of news is that, in July, together with a group of longtime friends and training partners, I founded a new tri team, Ignite Endurance: Sparked by Tri360.  I'll have a lot more to say about the team in a separate post, but suffice it to say that things are going very well -- we have a terrific roster of down-to-earth athletes, and we're thrilled to be working with a great new shop with a refreshingly welcoming attitude toward athletes of all levels of experience.  We'll be leading regular rides and runs for athletes of all ability levels, and also doing our level best to make a splash on race day.

Beyond that, this week I've been able to start running and riding again, and I'm delighted to be on comeback road.  Tragically, my scale has reminded me that there's a little too much of me going around at the moment, so I have some work to do.  But I'm not rushing myself to get back into it -- I do my best racing and training when I let my body and brain decide when it's the right priority to have.  My next race will probably be the Waterman's half-Ironman in September.

More soon!

A Change of Seasons: Moving on from Team Z

"Remember, when God closes a door, he makes lemonade."  

-Servant of Two Masters, Shakespeare Theatre Co.

In late 2007, just a couple of years into my triathlon career, I was fortunate enough to join Team Z, an amazing community of triathletes of all levels of ability.  Back then, I think the team might have been 100-strong, but now it numbers well over 500 athletes, a glowing testament to the effectiveness of the training program, the welcoming atmosphere, and the way it's changed lives for the better.  Although it is not an Ironman-focused team, I believe that over 700 Team Z athletes have completed Ironman races since Ed founded the team around 2005.  Many of those Ironmen had no athletic background and could never have imagined what they were capable of with a little belief coupled with proper preparation.

I'm one of those success stories.  When I joined the team, I'd never done a Vo2-max test to establish training zones, nor had I trained in a group environment.  I had finished two Ironman races, but I lacked direction and felt as if I spent an inordinate amount of time on my bike, by myself, in the middle of nowhere.  The team changed all of that for the better.  I met some amazing people, started training according to scientifically proven principles, and improved markedly in all three disciplines.  

How the time has flown.  I've now been part of the team for approaching five years, and over that span, I progressed from being a relative neophyte to becoming a mentor to newer athletes and leader on the team.  I helped to design and lead several clinics that have been successfully incorporated into the team's remarkable educational structure, and I facilitated the creation of a periodic cycling time trial series that allowed athletes to test themselves in a consistent and relatively controlled environment.  I've also delighted in giving advice every now and then to athletes facing certain daunting events, such as the Mountains of Misery ride.  I'd like to think that, in some small way, these efforts have helped to repay the team for everything it's given me in the last few years.

In recent times, however, I've found myself being increasingly drawn to novel athletic challenges and approaches to training.  I've raced first-year Ironman races in places like Wales that haven't aligned with the team race calendar, and lately I've been dipping my toes into the ultracycling world, a discipline that requires its own type of training.  Moreover, as a self-coached athlete, I've treated myself as something of a physiology experiment with n=1, adopting different philosophies and approaches over time in the effort to keep things fresh and interesting.  The result has been that, in small increments that have added up to something larger, I've found myself becoming less active in the team's training and racing environment.  I've enjoyed leading clinics and providing guidance even while forging my own path athletically, but recently I've come to realize that I've had my feet in two different worlds that have been drifting apart.  I therefore made the difficult decision this week to separate from Team Z, and to chart a new direction.

I don't know what's next for me.  Regardless, though, much as one always remembers one's first love, I'll always think back on my time with Team Z with great fondness.  I'm a strong believer in the coaches, the mission, and, most important, the amazing athletes who drive each other to make the most of their talents.  I hope to keep in touch with the friends I've made, and to continue helping people in whatever way I can.  I'll always cheer for the green jerseys.   

Thrilled to be back in the chase

"Even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward."  -Victor Kiam

Keep up the chase and you may reach your goal, even if the prize is only a mouthful of metal rabbit.

The last three months have been extremely difficult ones, with challenges ranging from a host of injuries after Cozumel to a neverending series of tough briefs to write at work.  At times, it's seemed as if every dawn is a bit false, and it's showed in my workouts and races.  

Two weeks ago, I had perhaps the worst race of my life when I ran the first leg of a 3-man marathon relay.   My part was just under ten miles (I got the short straw), and I realized about three miles in that my head was anywhere but in the game.  It's amazing how much mindset affects our physical capacities, and as I was trying charge up tough climbs, my heart and mind were in another place entirely.  I think that, had I not been on a relay, I'd have just abandoned a couple of miles in.  As it was, I wound up walking on many stretches of the course, and trudged into the relay handoff zone nauseated with turmoil.  I suppose I was tired, too, though I can't particularly recall.  My teammates were very kind, all things considered.

Despite it all, for the last six weeks, I've gotten my training in, even when I just had to force myself out the door sometimes.  And happily, in the last week or so, things have suddenly started to come around: Last weekend I knocked out a 22-mile run, and both of my hard midweek runs have suggested that I'm rapidly getting back to my form of last fall, when I was tearing up PRs.  I've even managed to make it to the pool four times in the last week, and I think the crossover benefits are beginning to reveal themselves.  I'm not where I need to be yet, but my weight is plummeting according to plan, and I'm raring to go.  I'm optimistic that, by the time Boston and Big Sur roll around next month, I'll be ready for 'em.  I've even knocked out the first half of my forthcoming book!

I'm not quite the same athlete I was last fall, though.  I've learned some things about myself, and a big one is that endurance training and racing are deeply imperfect substitutes for the things that matter in life's final analysis.  We have to enjoy the process, not merely idolize a possible result about which no one but us truly cares, and we must remember that, as much as we love to run, ride, or swim, those things do not care equally about us.  At their best, endurance adventures can teach us a lot about ourselves, but only if we don't mistake the messenger for the message.