Zack's Triathlon Blog

This week's schedule is looking pretty light. I think the coaches are having us taper off a bit in preparation for our trial weekend next week. Not this weekend, but next, we will be heading down to the location of the Wildflower Tri to practice doing the actual course over two days. That should be great!

In any case, today was my first day back at the pool in over a week. It was a nice change from swimming in the bay. I wound up doing 2350M (1.71 Zacklongs) at a pretty good (for me) pace. I tried to increase my speed a bit, but every time I pulled harder with my arms, I felt like I needed too much air. I also tried breathing less often and pulling less hard. All-in-all I was unable to make a serious dent in my overall average lap time which is still hovering at 90 seconds/50 meters. One note however is that this includes all of my rest time, in other words I was in the pool for 71 minutes and did 47 laps. 71*60/47 = 90 seconds.

Went for another beautiful bike ride today. This time in the Marin Headlands. Gorgeous views of the city, and breathtaking descents that take you right down to sea level. Summary for week 8 (what was supposed to be a light week - made lighter by my cold earlier this week):

	Duration (Min)	Distance	Calories
Swimming	30	0.16	202
Biking	367	69.1	2985
Running	113	11.32	1092
TOTAL	510	80.58	4279

After a short run in the rain yesterday with Amanda it was finally time to tackle the San Francisco Bay. I arrived at Aquatic Park shortly before 8AM. The air was nice and sunny, but the water was a bone-chilling 53 degrees. Everyone was feeling pretty nervous, excited and cold.

The goals of today's swim were to get used to the cold water, learn how to put on a wetsuit, figure out how to breathe normally despite the cold water, learn how to swim in a straight line, and learn how to swim with a large group of people.

1) Putting on the wetsuit, ear plugs, thermal cap, and goggles
We started out with one of the coaches walking us through donning our wetsuits, which included using lots of BodyGlide to lubricate our necks, wrists and ankles and lots of tugging and pulling. I managed to get my suit on without too much difficulty. It fit remarkably well, however the water is soo cold that we needed additional accessories to make us even warmer. We used wax ear plugs which apparently add 2-3 degrees and a thermal swim cap which adds another 3-5 degrees. With all of this stuff on me, I felt a bit isolated, everyone was yelling at each other in order to hear through the 20DB earplugs, and tourists were stopping and taking pictures of us.

2) Getting used to the cold water
After some more words of encouragment we finally got into the water. The theory of wetsuits (for those of you that haven't worn them) is that the cold water rushes into the suit and then sits between the suit and your body and warms up. In other words, the initial rush of cold water into your suit beats the pants off a cup of coffee. I mean you are AWAKE! We jumped around a bit in the water and then swam out to where we could no longer stand. I noticed a bunch of people treading water with their hands out of the water. At first I thought they were just showing off... but after I tried it, I realized that it was a great way to stay a bit warmer. Keep in mind that your hands and feet are totally exposed to the water.

3) Having your face in freezing cold, salty, not-so-clean water
There are many more pleasant things in life than sticking your face in 53 degree water, in fact I think most things would qualify. First of all, the coaches assured us that our faces, much like our hands and feet, would go numb eventually and like all of there other tips, this was true. The cold water also causes you to take quick shallow breaths. After a while, I was able to adjust my breathing a bit to get some deeper breaths and get some more air. Once we got to swimming, I was mostly concerned about the salty water getting into my nose and mouth. The water tastes terrible and burned my nose. I'll have to work on getting less water in both.

4) Swimming in a big group
Finally we started swimming around the buoys. There was a lot of chaos, and with all of the people around, bumping someone was a fairly common occurance. I got kicked in the goggles once, which dislodged them, prompting me to stop swimming and fix them. Swimming in murky water with earplugs and a tight cap on is a very isolating experience. You can't hear or see anything, and you are left to your own thoughts. Despite this, it wasn't as scary as I expected. I did have one moment of panic when I caught up to the person in front of me, the pale white foot floating the water briefly reminded me of movies depicting dead bodies in the water. But I put that out of my head quickly and went on swimming.

5) Swimming in a straight line
Once I got used to the crowd, and the water, and began swimming in earnest, I realized that swimming in a straight line is a lot harder than it sounds. I was going at a reasonable clip, enjoying the added bouyancy provided by the wetsuit and salt water, and I realized that I was no longer bumping people or being bumped into. I looked up and realized that I was swimming was off course. I tried to correct my line, and wound up crossing over the middle and ran into people who were on their way back. After a few zigzags, I managed to get to the end of the swim, but not very efficiently. I'll have to work on that.

Now, being a bay swimming veteran, I realize that these are all things that need a lot of practice. I'm thrilled that the mystery is gone, I know what to expect now, but I am not fooling myself into thinking that I've got it all figured out. Stay tuned to many more bay swims in which I will continue to develop and tune my open water swimming.

So Josh and I did the Paradise Loop aka Tiburon Loop ride today. On our drive over to our starting point, we heard a loud "bang" while sitting at a stop light. It sounded like a backfire to me, but Josh thought it sounded like a bike tire popping. Sure enough, when we parked at Sports Basement Josh found that his other tire had blown (his front tire blew a few weeks ago). Perhaps I have been lucky, or perhaps his tubes were old or poorly installed, but he has now had two flats to my zero (knock-on-wood). I asked to change the tire, since I have yet to attend one of the clinics and wanted the experience. So, once the change was done, we set out across the Golden Gate Bridge on our ride.

I knew this was a popular ride, but having it experienced it first-hand, it was truly breath-taking. Flying around the rolling hills and curvy roads was a unique experience. I love being in shape and having nice weather, and being able to take a 3-hour bike ride in the middle of the day is pretty nice too.

Here's a graph for all you graph lovers out there:



Don't panic - week 8 is still in progress and I was sick, so there won't be much swimming this week.

So after having a scratchy throat for most of the weekend it hit me on Monday. I was in bed most of Monday and Tuesday - missing my Tuesday swim. Being sick is never fun.

By Wednesday, I was feeling mostly better. I decided to go for the run on my own before the track workout because I had plans that evening. Given that we were supposed to do a 1.5 mile warm-up, a .5 mile drill, a 2-mile fast-as-you-can run and then a 2 mile cool-down, I decided to map out a relatively flat, mile loop near my house. As you know, living in San Francisco doesn't play too well with flat running, and even this loop had some somewhat steep portions. I used Gmap-Pedometer to map this out. I had a fairly good run given that I wasn't feeling 100% and it was hilly, crossed lots of traffic, and by the third or fourth lap I was getting quite a lot of stares. My favorite was running past Mitchell's ice cream shop, where I ran roughly two miles during the time it took most people to eat an ice cream cone. I'll have to go back there for a treat sometime!

My running speed has definitely increased, and I finished my 2-mile as-fast-as-you-can run in 16:32 minutes. I think I would have gone slightly faster on the track without the hills and traffic, but that's just pure speculation. I'm pretty pleased that my running speed has been picking up. Even during my half-marathon I was pretty much stuck at 9-minute miles.

So, today we swam in the pool at IVC and while I'm probably the only one that is pissed off about this, why oh why do we have to follow the totally illogical imperial measurement system? Let me explain... the pool at IVC measures 25 yards across, while the one in the YMCA is 25 meters. For a while I was pleasantly surprised each time I finished a lap (in what seemed to be my personal best) until I realized that I wasn't swimming as far as I was in the Y pool. I had to convert the units to Meters to get a fair comparison.

While researching this conversion, I decided to find out why a mile is such a screwy measurement (5280 feet) in the first place. The answer according to Wikipedia (and several other internet sources) was that "the international mile is equivalent to 8 furlongs, 80 chains or 5280 international feet". Well... apparently, the mile was 5000 feet during the rule of the Romans, but went to furlongs after the decline of the Roman Empire. See, all of the land holdings in England were measured in terms of furlongs (which is the distance a team of oxen can pull a plow before needing rest). In order to keep all the paperwork simple, Queen Elizabeth I decided to change the definition of a mile to 8 furlongs.

Now, it occurs to me that the physical fitness of the team of oxen probably varied significantly and while imagining a bunch of English farmers lining up their teams of oxen while the scientists were measuring the distances and finding an overall average is quite amusing, I'm guessing that the process for determining this distance involved much less research.

In the end, I have decided to resort to the old (and completely useless) mantra "if you can't beat them, join them". Clearly the precedent has been set for me to name a new unit - the swimlong. Henceforth, the swimlong is defined as the distance a human (namely Zack) can travel by means of swimming (in highly chlorinated water) over the course of one hour. In order to avoid any future disputes, hostile takeovers, or other attempts to change the unit, we will fix the swimlong as the distance Zack traveled in an hour during today's workout, which included a wide variety of drills, water swallowing, coughing fits and other humbling events.

You see, leading up to today, I was beginning to think that my swimming was pretty good. The problem is that I'm really a one-trick pony when it comes to swimming. In my haste to swim distance, I have neglected all other (apparently important) swimming skills. Up until now, I have just been following phrases on our training calendar that say things like "back - kicking only". As a result, I developed a "back" swimming method that involved having my arms at my sides and kicking my feet. That worked fairly well, until today, when one of the coaches told me that I was doing it wrong. I am supposed to hold my hands straight over my head. Attempt after attempt, this resulted in my head going under water, which in turned meant that I was either swallowing water, or blowing clouds of water out my nose and/or mouth. Right about the time I was able to complete a lap without this unpleasantness it was time to move on to the next drill "spotting".

Spotting requires you to raise your head out of the water and actually look at where you are going. You see, in open water (which we will encounter for the first time next Saturday) there are no lines for you to follow on the bottom of the pool and you have to take the time to occasionally make sure you are going in the right direction. While spotting seemed to come to others naturally (I keep telling myself that they had done it before to make myself feel better), every time I attempted to "spot" I began to sink, flail and drown. Picture a person who has fallen into the water, splashing their arms wildly and yelling "Help! I can't swim!" and you should have a fairly good impression of what I looked like while "spotting". In the end, I was able to complete 1500Y or 1 swimlong.

After getting out of the water and a quick transition, we headed out on the bikes. It was a beautiful day with shorts and short sleeves. Compared to last weekend's snow and freezing cold, it was a nice surprise. I wish I had some good stories about the ride, but it was fairly routine. We went further than I have ever gone before, and I ended up drinking all of the water and gatorade from both of my water bottles and I even finished the refill I got at a water stop. I also had a power bar, a power gel, and numerous cliff shot blocks. In the end I felt that I was just about right on carb consumption, but I could have used even more water. I'll have to keep that in mind for the Wildflower, because it will be even hotter there than it was today.

In summary week 7 was quite a record breaking week. I set new personal records for average bike speed, total bike distance, average run speed, total swim distance and total calories burned. If you are impressed, or at least entertained - please donate! I'm still well under my minimum.

	Duration (Min)	Distance	Calories
Swimming	187	3.77	1346
Biking	284	63.1	2386
Running	146	15.26	1528
TOTAL	617	82.13	5260

It's been a few days since my last post, so let me catch you up.

On Thursday I went for a bike ride with my friend Roland. We ended up going for a 24 mile ride, through Golden Gate Park, through the Presidio, over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and back again. It was a beautiful ride, especially once we got out of the traffic-laden streets and over to Golden Gate Park. Going over the bridge was a lot of fun. The wind was at our backs and it was smooth sailing all the way. The way back however, took us straight into the wind, which made the entire bridge feel like one big hill. I'm guessing that some of the wind was created by the 4 lanes of traffic that we were next to. Perhaps next time I'll try coming back on the other side of the bridge. I have to say that despite all my training, I was still trailing Roland going up most of the hills. Ahh well, it seems that no matter how in shape I get there are tons of people who are in even better shape.

The Friday swim was nice, as the pool was not as crowded as my last few trips. I got into a fairly good rhythm though having to turn around every 25M is starting to get annoying. I either need to learn how to do those cool flip turns, or get into some open water soon. I'm actually looking forward to our first open water swim next Saturday! My total distance today was 2200M, but there were various rests throughout the workout. Still, it is nice that 2200M feels like no big deal.

I woke up this morning with a bit of a sore throat, and I have had a huge knot in my left shoulder for the past few days now. However today is a beautiful sunny warm wonderful day, and we were doing 2 laps around Lake Merced. The lake is about 4.5 miles around and is a common running/walking/biking route for hundreds of people. I have been trying to increase my running speed, and I was hoping to get my average for today under 9-minute miles. Given that last weekend I ran 8 miles in 80 minutes, running 9 in 81 was probably a bit ambitious in hindsight. I took it easy on my first lap around the lake and was chatting with June, who is now training for her third triathlon. It is always nice to have someone to chat with, and it was nice to hear about June's success in losing 60 pounds and keeping it off. We ran together for the first 4.7 miles at a 9:37 per mile pace.

After my 4.7 mile "warm-up lap", I ran ahead and tried to get my average down to 9:00. Running on my own was a little tough. It's always hard to pace yourself and having a watch that tells you how fast you are going is not nearly as helpful as a person who is also going through the same thing as you. See... the watch doesn't understand hills, or being tired, it just tells you "speed up you slowpoke!". In any case, I was able to complete the second lap at an average pace of 8:44. In the end, I wasn't able to get my overall average down to 9:00, but I did finish in a respectible 83 minutes, or 9:10 minutes per mile. I was actually fairly pleased with myself... that is until one guy returned from running 3 laps in 90 minutes (an average of 6:12 minutes per mile)! That bastard... I mean... good for him.

I wanted send out a huge thanks to everyone for donating so far! Last night I was reminded of why I am doing this. One of our teammates asked to speak before our track practice. As she stood before us, voice trembling, she descibed how a friend of hers had supported her during her first fundraising triathlon in 2004. Ironically, her friend was diagnosed with leukemia the following summer and felt invigorated by having an entire team of triathletes pulling for her recovery. Despite all of the support and dedication, her friend passed away on Friday. As she finished her story in more tears than words, I glanced over at one of the leukemia survivors that trains with us and is a marathon runner and a triathlete himself. It occurred to me that the difference between his life, and the one just described can be bridged by research, medication and treatment. These are the exact things that our fundraising dollars are supporting. Asking people for money has been one of the most challenging parts of this experience for me, so I wanted to let you know just how much I appreciate your contributions.

So after my milestone swim on Friday, and the snowy, rainy, cold, never-ending weekend, I would have to say that training this week has been rather routine. I suppose that must mean that I'm getting in shape, because a month ago swimming a total of 2500M (Tuesday) or running half a mile at a 6-minute pace (last night) would have been quite eventful.

To summarize, I was able to swim 2500M total, on Tuesday in a very crowded and choppy pool. The longest consecutive distance was 800M and after Friday's 1500M, it was quite do-able. At the Wednesday track workout, we worked primarily on recovery. We alternated running hard with easy recovery running. I was able to maintain a fairly consistent pace which is what fabulous coach Steve recommended.

I am beginning to look forward to all of the various workouts. I think the next big hurdle will be swimming in open water, which everyone tells me is pretty scary. I'm also looking forward to getting used to the feeling of the transitions from swimming to biking and from biking to running. I'm told that eventually I'll get used to running on jello legs. Let's hope!

Ouch. It has been a long week, filled with tons of exercise. Today started out cold and rainy again. And once again, I was headed out into the weather to go running. Thanks tons to Amanda, who joined me for the first half of my 8 mile run this morning, despite the cold and the rain. She's hardcore!

So after 6 weeks of training, I have completed each part of the race individually and am starting to string some activities together. By the weekend, after 6 days of consecutive training, I can't wait to take a rest day tomorrow. Yesterday and today have pretty much consisted of waking up, exercising, getting home, showering, eating everything in sight, and then falling asleep in some random part of the house.

Whoever said that exercising a lot gives you lots of energy must be in a lot better shape than me.

	Duration (Min)	Distance	Calories
Swimming	123	2.49	998
Biking	212	46.7	2028
Running	190	18.1	1915
TOTAL	525	67.29	4941

So, today was a bike/run day. Every time I think I've gotten over the muscle soreness and fatigue, they throw in some curve balls to keep me on my toes. Today was a 32 mile bike ride followed by a transition run. First of all - it was freezing cold. I mean literally. Last night it actually snowed in the Bay Area - it even stuck around long enough for us to see it in the morning.

I have made some major leaps in efficiency for getting ready for the bike rides and managed to have everything organized and ready to go this morning. However, the cold weather forced me to wear just about every piece of breathable warm clothing that I have. For the first few miles of the ride my legs, toes and fingers were numb. This made shifting and breaking quite difficult. Eventually everything warmed up to a tolerable point - though my fingers were still pretty cold throughout the ride.

The route started out the same as my previous rides - up the steep climb to the aptly named "big rock". However, this time we descended the other side of the hill through a breathtaking redwood forest with houses tucked away in all corners. All-in-all the ride went pretty well, I tried to remember to drink lots and eat some Cliff Shot Blocks - a great source of calories. Upon getting back to the parking lot, I tried to transition as quickly as possible. I have to say that trying to run after 2 hours of cycling is one of the strangest sensations I have felt. Someone described it as feeling like your feet were baloons and your legs were like jello. I asked the coach if this ever goes away - could I run faster and get to a normal feeling sooner. The answer I got was that while there isn't much you can do to avoid or even shorten the transition sensation, you do get accustomed to it.

Well, okay, maybe not über but definitely elite within the context of the triathlon training schedule. So today was the long distance swim. The elite group was supposed to go 1000M without stopping. Given that prior to this, the longest consecutive distance that I had gone was only 400M I was quite worried.

I got in the pool and started warming up and began to wonder how this was going to be possible. I didn't want to warm up too much because I didn't want to tire myself out. So, I started into the long swim. By about lap 4 of 20 I was dying, and pretty sure that there was no way I would be able to keep going. I swam a lap on my back to regain some energy. By around lap 10, I started trying out different things on the various laps, catchup drill, focus on breathing, focus on looking down at the bottom of the pool (which in turn causes your butt to float to the top making you more streamlined). Finally I got to a point where I could keep a consistent pace without killing myself and before I knew it, I had done 1200M! At that point I figured if I added a few more laps, I might be able to hit 1500M - the actual race distance.

I realized that unlike most things in life, I could acheive this goal just by pushing myself a little harder. If only everything in life was this easy to control. In any case, this realization, and the fact that imaginary finish line was within sight, saw me through to 1500M (or maybe 1550 ... I lost count). Needless to say, I felt truly victorious today. This was something that I was not even sure I would be able to do 2 months ago!

I did a short cool-down, and then went for an 'optional' run on the treadmill. I only ran for 20 minutes - which is supposedly the time it takes your body to 'transition' to the next activity and let me tell you - running on legs that have been doing something else for an hour is a sensation like no other. Somewhere between the feeling of having no legs, to the feeling you get when you get off the treadmill and feel like you should be moving but you are not. Tomorrow we are doing a 30 mile bike followed by a run, and Sunday we are doing an 80 minute run... oof.

So, the daylight is definitely returning - tonight there was still an inkling of light when we got to Kezar. The workout was basically the same as last week's run. It was fairly uneventful, except for the fact that a large number of people seemed to be in the 'injured' category - including Josh. In fact, there were sooo many injured people, that the coaches made a seperate workout routine for them. Yowie!

My run went pretty well but no matter how fast I run there always seems to be someone flying past me. I was averaging around a 8:35 min/mile pace during the fast stretches, and I felt like I could keep going after we finished, so that felt pretty good for me.

A bit of Zack trivia - my fastest half-marathon time was 9:15 min/mile. Respectible, but it would be nice to improve on that a bit given that I will be running a shorter distance.

So, after getting back from Tahoe, I seemed to have a fairly major headache - maybe from tweaking my neck during a fall, or maybe from dehydration, I wasn't sure. In any case, I took it easy on Sunday and Monday, and was hoping that I'd feel up for the pool today.

I felt okay going into the pool and started on the elite workout. Unfortunately, I got a few laps in and the headache returned. After another lap or two it was all I could think about... it was pounding and very distracting. I got out the pool and over then 10 minutes, drank an enormous amount of water... did some stretching, sat in the jacuzzi for a while and finally convinced myself that I could finish the workout.

There were lots of people in the pool and almost every lane was circle swimming (see below for an explanation). As a result I was getting a fair bit of water in my mouth as a result of splashes from other people. I figured it was good training for the event. I even found that I was able to use a cough as a breath out to get some water out of my lungs. After a serious struggle, I was able to complete the workout, though I can't say I did it exactly, as it certainly didn't include a 10-minute break. But given my headache, and feeling extra fatigued, I think I did well. It definitely reminded me just how tough and humbling swimming is going to be for me.

Swimming Etiquette Note: When there are two people in a single swim lane, it is customary to "split" the lane. This means that one person swims on the right side and one on the left side. However, when there are more than two people, you have to swim in a circle (typically going counter clockwise). The downside of circle swimming is that if you are too slow people pass you, if you are too fast you have to pass other people. Ideally everyone in a particular lane is swimming at roughly the same pace.

So I didn't stick to my training schedule that closely due to my going to Tahoe for the weekend. Wednesday was a coached run at Kezar, but I decided to do it on my own instead so that I could attend a convention-thingy in the evening.

So here's a quick recap of my week:

Wednesday - rode my bike to Kezar and did the Pro (hardest) running workout. I felt great. After the workout I decided to try running one lap as fast as I could, and was shocked to see my pace meter showing 5:15! I've never run a lap that fast in my life! Don't get me wrong, I certainly couldn't have kept that pace up for a mile, but it was still exciting. After that I rode my bike the 4 miles or so home.

Thursday - Since I was leaving for Tahoe on Thursday, I decided to try to squeeze in some extra exercise. I did a long, but not very intense, bike ride with Josh and then followed it up with the elite swim which included 5 250's in a row. It was quite a lot for one day, but I knew I was going to missing some of the weekend training, so it was worth it. I quite proud of my progress in swimming - I may not be a pro yet, and I'm even hesitant to call myself an "elite" swimmer, but I do think that I have graduated from "beginner" status.

Week 5 Summary:

	Duration (Min)	Distance	Calories
Swimming	115	2.08	826
Biking	147	21.9	973
Running	65	6.3	652
Snowboarding	480	?	?
TOTAL	807	30.28	2451

So... week 5 doesn't look so impressive, but keep in mind that this was only 3 days of training (half of my usual training week). Plus, I'm sure I burned tons of calories snowboarding. My friend Byron took his heart monitor with him and burned almost 3500 calories in just 3 hours of boarding. Granted he is about twice my size, but if we scale that down to Zack-calories, I would guess that I burned roughly 3000 calories during my two days of snowboarding.

Here's a fun graph for you - my speed over time: