Weapons of Choice: Ultracycling gear recommendations

Check out my new weapon -- weapon of choice.

-Fatboy Slim

On Saturday, I completed a 260-mile brevet with about 18,000 feet of climbing; all told, it took just under 20 hours, making it both the longest one-day ride I've ever done and the one with the most climbing.  I'm putting the story together, but I wanted first to discuss some of the gear I used during the event.  Much of this may also be very useful beyond the ultracycling context.

Garmin's new Edge 810

One thing I've found to be invaluable is Garmin's line of GPS cycling computers with street-level maps.  On some level these are a luxury: it's certainly possible to get by with a cue sheet and simpler device.  But a major part of the game in ultracycling is making things as foolproof as they can be, and the new Garmin Edge 810 offers a number of critical advantages over the traditional cue sheet.  First, it is extremely easy to upload routes and receive prompted turn-by-turn directions.  When backstopped with a cue sheet, this method is pretty much infallible, and I love the "distance to next turn" field, something a cue sheet can't provide.  There's a related, but less-advertised, benefit to riding with a GPS, in that the screen automatically zooms appropriately to your speed.  This means that, when you're bombing down an unfamiliar descent, a split-second glance down will show the shape of the road for the 1/2 mile or so in front of you.  I found this capability gave me considerably more confidence about laying off the brakes and making the most of my momentum.  A related ability is the scrolling elevation profile: when you upload a route, the GPS cross-references the upcoming roads with a topographical map, meaning that you can easily see what the next few miles of road have in store.  If you see that a hill is only a minor blip, there's no reason not to hoof it over with some effort, but a spike going off the top of the screen is very effective in mellowing one out for a few minutes.

The mapping and elevation features aren't unique to the Garmin 810; they're also available on the older, and slightly cheaper, Garmin 800.  But the 810 does add a couple of features that the 800 lacks, in particular the LiveTrack system.  LiveTrack uses Bluetooth to connect the GPS unit with your cell phone, and then leverages the cell's signal to upload coordinates and other information to a realtime tracking website.  You can then email the link to that website to anyone you want, or post it to Facebook; when the recipient clicks the link, he or she will see your current location (refreshed each minute), and also the ground you've covered.  Here's what mine looked like at mile 213 of Saturday's ride:

LiveTrack feature

Because I'd been on the road so long, LiveTrack had broken up my route into 5-mile segments, and it showed where I was down to the minute.  The blue bar at the bottom, labeled "graphs," opens to reveal realtime stats on speed, heart rate, power, cadence, and whatever else you choose.  In the picture below, mine shows a chart of speed imposed on an elevation profile.  (Had I been moving at the time, it also would have showed current speed, etc.)

LiveTrack with performance metrics

LiveTrack is an extremely useful tool not only for long rides like this, where it acts as a safety backstop and lets people check in on you from time to time, but it can also be a killer app for spectators at races.  All you need to do is start the LiveTrack application before the race, start your computer with the Autopause function enabled, and stuff your cellphone somewhere on the bike, perhaps alongside the spare tube.  Email the link to spectators, and they'll be able to tell where you are every minute and be ready when you zip by.  No more missing people as they blow by on the bike, and no standing around unnecessarily.  It's great stuff. In my case, I emailed the link to a few friends and also posted it, just as a precaution.  

I also installed an App on my iPhone that is similarly useful: Find My Friends.  It is a terrific stalking tool that allows anyone you choose to ping your phone's location, which is then superimposed on an extremely detailed street or satellite map.  It appears accurate to within a few meters, and is yet another way for people to find you should the need arise -- valuable peace of mind when you're riding in remote locations after dark.  I also think that Find My Friends could be a very useful tool for anyone sagging a group ride.  You'll never be forced to set off in search of the missing cyclist!  Note that you can turn the app on and off with a tap of a button, so there's no need to worry about privacy unless you want to.

A pretty obvious question: with Find my Friends, is there any need for LiveTrack?  It depends.  Find My Friends shows only a location; it provides no breadcrumb trail or performance metrics.  It also doesn't provide a webpage link that's constantly viewable by anyone -- it requires much more micromanagement.  So LiveTrack does provide additional value, although the two apps are redundant to some extent.

Mophie Juicepack Powerstation Duo

If there's a downside to this reliance on technology, it's that one needs to power the various devices.  The Garmin 810 has a battery life about 15 hours, which is more than plenty for most purposes.  But it wasn't going to be enough for this ride, and the 15-hour figure itself is wildly optimistic in that LiveTrack's bluetooth connection with the cell phone drains battery life like wildfire, and using the backlight at night is also a massive burden.  So I needed a way to recharge both the iPhone and the Garmin on the fly, and the perfect solution was a gadget I'd picked up to recharge my iPad on an overseas flight: the Mophie Juicepack Powerstation Duo.  This thing is amazing: it's compact, has two USB ports that allow the recharging of multiple devices at once (including rechargeable lights), and its massive 6000 mAh capacity is more than enough to get through the day.  By way of comparison, an iPhone 5 battery is rated at 1440 mAh, and the Garmin Edge 810 is 1100 mAh.  The Juicepack can recharge both devices twice-over, with room to spare.  It's an outstanding insurance policy.  If you bring a wall-to-USB plug to recharge the Juicepack during stops, you can probably keep riding close to indefinitely.

Exposure Joystick mk7

Next up on the new-gadget train was a new helmet light: the Exposure Light Joystick mk7.  This is by far the most elegant light I've ever used, and any lights I get in the future will be from Exposure -- it was that impressive.  These lights aren't cheap, but when you're riding fast on dark roads at night, the reassurance is invaluable.  The Joystick has an integrated, rechargeable battery, and puts out a maximum 400 lumens despite having a weight of only 87 grams (about 1/5 pound).  Even on the lowest power setting -- which lasts a whopping 10 hours -- it's more than bright enough to light the way on most roads.  The small touches are great as well: the light simply clips on and off, so that you don't need to have it weighing down your head all day (not that it weighs much), and it has a "smart port" in the back that, in addition to recharging the light, doubles as a power source for various accessories, such as a flashing rear red light that attaches to the back of the joystick, or a backup battery that piggybacks on top of it.  As a year-round bike commuter, I've become firmly convinced that helmet mounted lights are the way to go if you don't mind a bit of weight on the head: having the light go where you're looking is crucial.  Oh yeah: the Mophie Juicepack can recharge this, too: its battery capacity is 2900 mAh.

Rounding out the new equipment purchases for this ride is... a handlebar bag.  I'd long held out against using these despite their popularity among randonneurs, as I knew them to be about as aerodynamic as a barn door, they aren't light, and they don't exactly scream performance.  Having said that, after this ride, I'm kind of in love with mine.  I opted for the Arkel Small Handlebar Bag.  It's waterproof, holds a cue sheet and cell phone right in front of you, and allows easy in-ride access to pretty much anything you could want: food, chamois cream, batteries, sunscreen, control card, or whatever.  The weight is noticeable, but when the rides get this long, for me it stops being about speed and starts being about ensuring that my nutrition is on track, I don't lose my control card (as happened last June), that the cue sheet is readily at hand, and so forth.  I'm a fan.

A rear bag is also very valuable, especially when the temperature's expected to vary widely during the ride.  It's great to have a place to stash jackets, arm/leg warmers, gloves, caps, and that sort of thing.  My choice is again by Arkel: the Tailrider Trunk Bag.  It's compact, waterproof, sturdy, and expands to hold an amazing amount of stuff.  There's a convenient loop on the back onto which one can clip a couple of lights, it's easy to remove and carry, and in general it's a great piece of kit.

Of course, one also needs a rack to hold it.  Topeak makes a common one, but I didn't care for it when I tried it: the single-beam clamp mechanism causes it to sway intolerably.  I'm a much bigger fan of Arkel's own Randonneur rack, which clamps to the seat rails as well as the seat post.  The whole system looks like this:

Arkel rack and tailrider bag

Finally, although I've mentioned them before, I've come to think that two pieces of equipment are indispensable for all-day rides.  First, I've become a huge believer in tubeless road tires.  I've now been riding my Hutchinsons for about 1.5 years, and they're about ready to be changed.  In that time, I've had exactly zero flats.  Equally important, tubeless tires can and should be run at about 90 psi, as opposed to 100-110 psi for regular road tires, and that lower pressure makes all the difference in soaking up road imperfections and smoothing out the ride.  It feels like a Cadillac rolling down the road.  And, with the imminent release of Hutchinson's Secteur 28 tubeless tire, which is 28 mm wide, the ride will be all the better.

Arm coolers in action at Mountains of Misery

Second, I think anyone who's not riding in arm coolers is missing out.  I use the Zoots, which provide warmth when it's chilly and reflect the sun when it's hot.  UV ray protection aside, it's amazing how much less tired you'll be at the end of a long, hot afternoon when you're not getting baked, and they keep the skin cooler as well.  No need to take them off: just put them on and forget they're there until you're done with the ride.

Next up: the epic ride itself!

RIDE REPORT: W&OD is me! 200k

"We who are about to die salute you!" -Roman gladiators

This weekend I participated in my first randonneuring event of 2013, a 200k "permanent."  The normal rando event is known as a "brevet," and it involves riding a designated route (200k+) within a given amount of time, and getting signatures and time stamps at designated "controls" to prove that you covered the distance. A permanent is much the same, only it's not ridden as an official advertised event; instead, although the route itself is chosen from an officially sanctioned list, the ride is done at a time of one's own choosing, through coordination with the route's owner.

One of the challenges I'm facing this season is that, even more than in the past, I have some pretty substantial ultracycling goals in addition to my triathlon ambitions.  The big ultracycling event this year will be the 1200k (750-mile) Big Wild Ride in Alaska in July.  To qualify for that "Grand Randonee," I need to complete brevets or permanents of 200k (125 mile), 300k (190 miles), 400k (250 miles), and 600k (375 miles) by the end of June, but it's quite a juggling act.  I'm also racing a number of triathlons in the same period, as well as riding Mountains of Misery and the Diabolical Double at the Garrett County Gran Fondo, each of which is 125 miles of sadistic climbing.  And it would be good to have a life in there somewhere, too.  :-)

Put it all together and the bottom line is I needed to get started, which meant knocking out the 200k this weekend.  This route was quite a bit different from the rando rides I've done in the past in that it (1) started and finished only a mile or two from my house, and (2) involved 80 miles of riding along the W&OD bike path.  I commute on that path daily and run on it frequently, but Id never actually tried to cover any meaningful distance on it.  It turns out that the path goes clear out to Purcellville, VA, which seems like about the end of the earth when one's starting in Arlington.  I'd always thought of Reston as "out there," but it's only about 1/3 of the way to the end.

As it turns out, there's a lot to be said for riding on the trail: good pavement, easy navigation, and gentle grades.  There's also a good amount not to like: specifically, if you think running around Hains Point is tedious, it doesn't hold a candle to the sensation that you're pedaling forever and just not getting anywhere.  It all looks pretty much the same.

That sameness was, to me, a reasonable price to pay for convenience this weekend, because my longest ride to date had been 70 miles, and I had by far my hardest workout day in 9 months the day before the ride.  My philosophy was to knock out the distance as painlessly as possible.  The weather, unfortunately, was mightily uncooperative: it started in the 30s and didn't get much warmer, and once we started rolling, the skies began burping out a steady diet of rain and drizzle.  It's hard enough to cover this distance, but to do so when starting tired, in the cold, without a proper mileage base is just asking to get shattered.

Get shattered I did.  The first 40 miles of the route, from Arlington to Purcellville, doesn't involve too much climbing.  But from Purcellville, it headed south through Middleburg to a turnaround in Marshall, and that territory is seriously unflat.  There's nothing that quite rises to the level of a climb, but as the elevation chart shows, it is steep, chippy rollers pretty much the whole way.  It's gorgeous, but nothing comes easy.

I felt okay at the first control in Purcellville, but the proverbial wheels started coming off in dramatic fashion about halfway through the second leg to Marshall, which was about 28 miles.  My riding buddy was dropping me consistently on anything with an upward grade.  To be sure, I was fatigued, as I'd started the day that way, but it was more than that: I was getting frustrated and ill-tempered (though I kept it to myself), and nothing was working right.  I was having zero fun despite the beautiful views, and the rain was getting to me more than it should have.  I've been around this block enough times to recognize those symptoms as sure signs of lack of calories; being tired is what it is, but when it's coupled with mood swings and feeling off, it's a sure indication that one needs to pound the calories.  

At the halfway control in Marshall, VA, I did what I could to fix the problem, and that amounted to throwing any concept of dietary restrictions out the window: I had a tuna sandwich, large bag of potato chips, 24-ounce Coke, and an "American sized" bag of gummy bears.  We took a 20-minute breather or so to watch the rain pelting cars outside, which was restful but not entirely wonderful in that, when you're wet and cold and stop moving, the situation only gets worse.  So, we eventually forced ourselves back onto the bikes and reversed trail, back through the hills toward Purcellville.

My calorie infusion seemed to do the trick: I had by far my best segment of the day right after my worst, and I rode strongly back to the W&OD trail head before turning east to return to Arlington.  On a ride of this length, it's necessary to set intermediate goals to stay sane, and on this case, we'd pretty much agreed that we'd won the day if we made it back to the trail, since at that point one could turn off the brain and just power back home.  The thing is, though, that 40 miles on the trail is not trivial: it amounted to a solid 2.5 more hours of slopping along through the rain after we'd already been on our bikes for 7 hours.  To be blunt, it wasn't much fun toward the end: just when you think you're almost there, you see a sign for Sterling.  "Sterling?  Where the hell is that?  Nowhere near Arlington, that's for damn sure."  Then Reston, which I'd previously been conditioned to think of as "forever away."  

But, ultimately, we made it.  And by "it," I mean 135 miles, instead of the 125 that a 200k is supposed to involve.  The owner of this permanent thought it would be a shame not to enjoy the scenic roads on the way to Marshall, so he stretched it out.  10 miles in the grand scheme of things doesn't seem like much, but it's a long additional 40 minutes when you really just want a warm shower and all the coffee in the world.  We cruised back into Arlington with a ride time of about 9:40, not too bad considering the conditions, time of year, and extra distance.  I finally got that shower, but found I was basically too tired to do anything but lie on the couch in a daze for a couple of hours before going to bed at 8:00 and sleeping for 11 hours.  Yes, apparently this is my life.  :-)

I'm definitely about ready for some spring, and I hope it arrives soon, because the brevets wait for no one.  Next up is a 300k out of Harrisonburg, VA on April 13, and then a 400k out of Leesburg on May 4.  Hopefully at some point in there my legs will remember what they're supposed to be doing.  In the meantime, I took two days completely off of everything except commuting, and I came out the other side feeling almost human.  Up and at 'em!    

Of Surgeries and Strategies

About two months ago,  I went under the knife to have my IT band fixed.  Today, it's my dad's turn: he's getting (at least) a triple bypass.  If my problem was predictable, given my penchant for sometimes overdoing things on the endurance front, his seems markedly less so: he's been thin his whole life, eaten very well, was a competitive runner in the 1980s, and ran two marathons beginning at age 65.  To my way of thinking, if he can wind up needing heart surgery, anyone can.  What's most disturbing about it is that he was entirely asymptomatic: he was diagnosed with severe blockage only during a routine screening resulting from his being hospitalized for a week with pneumonia.  If he hadn't been forced into the ICU with that unrelated problem, it is scary to think what might have happened during one of his regular runs.  If ever pneumonia could be described as a blessing in disguise, this may be that time.

This is a lot to contemplate at the same time that I'm finally back on the road to health.  I was cleared to started running again last week -- although the term "running" might be giving me too much credit at the moment -- and I've headed back to the pool for some fun with hypoxia.  My cycling is going reasonably well, at least, and I have a smoking new road bike that I'll profile in the next week or so.  It's an exciting time, what with the Ignite squad swinging into action and my plotting a way to survive the epic 4-day, 750-mile ride around Alaska that I have planned for July.  As I write this, the sun is breaking through the clouds and it seems a travesty to have to spend time behind a desk.

The sudden onset of my dad's health problems has served as a stark reminder that there are no guarantees in life, and nothing lasts forever.  (My posts about my younger brother highlight this even more starkly.)  Part of me instinctively reacts to this reminder of impermanence by trying to do as much as I can while I have the chance, and there's something to that notion.  But, at the same time, my own surgically-imposed time off from training has underscored to me that the notion of doing "as much as I can" is not self-defining, and it is maddeningly difficult to quantify.  I don't want to do the most I can in a particular facet of life if it means doing less than I want to in another.  To be sure, I could probably achieve my best in races if I go to bed at 10:00 every Friday night so I can get up to train all day on Saturday.  But frankly, I'm not willing to say no to a concert with friends I see too infrequently simply in order to improve the quality of my training ride the next day.  Ten years from now, I probably won't remember a thing about the ride, but I'll remember a lot about that evening.

Likewise, I've sometimes skipped training sessions simply because I was buried in a book that I didn't want to put down.  Is this lack of discipline?  I'm not sure -- it depends what I'm trying to be disciplined about.  If one's paramount strategy in life is to capture that bleeding-edge 1% of performance on a couple of days a year, then any distraction from it is corrupting.  But again, I don't think that, looking back ten years after an event, I'll consider my life to have been appreciably richer merely because my race history shows that I was a couple of minutes faster on the day.  For me, the strategy is to do what I'm passionate about, even if it doesn't quite add up to coherence.

I certainly have my goals.  I'd like to crack 3 hours in my marathon this December, and to put on a show at Ironman Lake Tahoe in September.  Riding around Alaska ain't trivial, and the D2R2 is calling my name.  I get excited just thinking about those events, and a few others, and I want to do well.  But I only want to do as well as I can while ensuring that it's fun, not an obligation or a second job.  If I find myself struggling up a hill on my bike because I was out late with friends, or falling off the pace on a long run because I missed a couple of runs in the week before in order to take a vacation, that's something to smile about.  We can't do it all.  Getting the most out of one's self, and being as disciplined as one can be, is something to celebrate.  But for me, it's increasingly important to keep in mind the idea that "getting the most out of myself" is not something determined by sole reference to the clock at the finish line.

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!