Zack's Triathlon Blog

So to wrap up this part of my life, I decided to put together a short video showing you the highlights of my training season. Don't forget to turn your sound on.

Enjoy!

You can find my WildFlower pictures at Flickr.

We drove down to Wildflower on Saturday. After stopping for some pre-race nutrition at In and Out Burger (well okay, it just tastes good) we continued down to Lake San Antonio. Upon arriving it was buzzing with nervous energy and excitment, packed with triathletes and their bikes. We watched and cheered as the half ironman race was drawing to a close.

The evening went by in a blur. We setup camp and did some eating, socializing and sleeping. Morning was upon us in an instant, and I don't think anyone slept particularly well. Thanks to coach Rand making us practice every part of getting ready for the event, I packed up my gear on auto-pilot. We all grabbed our stuff and make the 2-mile trek from the campground to the starting area.

The transition area was packed with thousands of people and bikes. Coach Rand suggested that we learn the route to and from our particular spot, and he seemed not to be the only one dispensing this advice. As I walked to and from my 18-inch wide transition spot, I battled through thousands of others doing the same thing. I couldn't help but think that to outsiders we must look like a colony of bees, doing a dance that no one outside could understand.

We lined up at the starting line. There was a start every 5 minutes, and mine wasn't until 10:05AM (which means that we subtract 1:05 from the race clocks to get our time). My group, a sea of purple swim caps, lined up behind those in yellow. We were all nervous and shuffling our feet, only minutes away from the inevitable. The air horn blared, and the yellow caps dashed into the water. A race official told us that we could get used to the water, and then line up. The air horn blared again, and the chaos... err race began.

The Swim:
My swim started out better than I expected. Other than swimming headlong into a lifeguard-type on a surfboard (I wondered why that muffled yelling had been getting louder), I was able to swim in a fairly straight line. Towards the end of the swim, I was getting tired, a bit disoriented and frustrated. I kept thinking that the swim should be over by now, and I couldn't help but stop and look at my position every few strokes. After eons of inching closer to the boat ramp, I was finally able to stand and stagger out of the water. I stumbled up the boat ramp into the transition area and shed my wetsuit.

The Bike:
I quickly changed into my bike gear and headed out on the bike. It was especially hot out, upper 80's and we had been training in the 50's and 60's. As a result, I wanted to take it easy on the bike, and leave myself enough energy to finish strong on the run. I rode at a good steady pace, took in all my food and fluids and glided along. In what seemed like no time, I was flying down Lynch Hill back into the transition area.

The Run:
The run was brutally hot, with no shade, and almost all uphill. The roads were lined with people cheering and occasionally spraying water on those of us crazy enough to be running up these hills in the blistering heat after swimming and biking. While the water was refreshing, it seemed to evaporate as fast as it landed on me and it was hard not to focus on the heat. As I was running up one hill, a guy on the side reminded me to enjoy the nice cool breeze blowing off the ocean. I suspect we was trying to help, but he only succeeded in reminding me that we were nowhere near the ocean and that the air was so still that not even a blade of grass was moving. Eventually I made it to the highest part of the course (about 5 miles in), excitedly, I began my all out run down Lynch Hill, this time, heading for the finish line. I felt energized and proud as I dashed across the finish line, the announcer calling my name and saying that I looked like I would be doing the half ironman next year. A cold wet towel was thrown over my head, and I grabbed some food and drink and hopped into the lake to cool off.

The breakdown of my times:

OVERALL	BIB	FINTIME	AGE	SEX
1290	7031	3:17:55	30	M

SWIM

TRANS1

BIKE

TRANS2

RUN

CLASSRANK

SEXRANK

SWIMRANK

SWIMMPK

BIKERANK

BIKEMPH

RUNRANK

RUNMPM

0:35:19

0:03:40

1:38:04

0:03:37

0:57:15

210

1026

1925

0:23:32

1460

15.1

1180

0:09:14

I wanted to thank all of you for your generous donations, for coming to my fundraiser, for your emails and phonecalls and wishes of support. I really appreciate your help through all of this and I'm proud to have met my fundraising goal, as well as completing the triathlon (you won't see it on my fundraising page as the money was mailed in instead of charged, but the fundraiser brought in an additional $350 plus some additonal checks that brought me well over my $3000 goal!).

So last night was my fundraiser at the Elixir. First of all, a tremendous thanks to Sarah and Jessica, friends from college, for volunteering to help bartend. It went very well once things got rolling. We showed up around 8pm to get trained in the ways of bartending in preparation for our night. We sat and chatted for a while until the bartender was ready to give us the tour, unfortunately people were already showing up and it ended up being a bit rushed. Information flew by quickly, and I missed most of it the first time through, but it turned out to be valuable by the end of the evening.

There were some very generous tippers out there, and the tip jar was overflowing - I even saw a few $20's in there. Thanks to everyone for showing up and having a good time. It was tons of fun, and (provided we get the money from the Elixir) I would recommend it to others as a fundraiser.

For more pictures of the event click here.

This week was my most intense week yet. We didn't cover that much distance, or go that fast, but in terms of overall calorie burning this week topped 6000 calories - yowch! With the race only 2 weeks away, I feel well prepared. It looks like we will be tapering a bit over the next two weeks, and then off to Wildflower!

Here are all the graphs and totals for all you fellow numbers geeks:

	Duration (Min)	Distance	Calories
Swimming	175	2.42	1654
Biking	245	46.7	2608
Running	174	17.33	2119
TOTAL	594	66.45	6381

Today was a 100 minute run - the longest of the season. Not only that, but the course started and ended at Land's End (see photo), ran up to the Legion of Honor and then ran loops around Lincoln Park golf course until we got to 100 minutes. For those of you who are not familiar with this part of San Francisco, it is ALL HILLS. It was a tough run for sure, and I didn't get a great night sleep last night, but all of my hill training must be paying off because I had no trouble doing it. I was passing people on the hills - even people on bikes, and then recovering on the downhill parts.

Amanda decided to join us for the run (she ran with the 60 minute group) and she managed to run the entire course for the first time. Given that the people she was running with had all been training for 3 months for this type of run, we were all very impressed at her strength and endurance.

I also wanted to take a moment to reflect on just how beautiful the Bay Area is. I've been trying to post some pictures to give you a sense of the truly amazing places that we have been biking and running. I guess I'm a bit more appreciative now that the rain has finally stopped (knock on wood).

After running the actual course at Wildflower during out training weekend, it occurred to me that while I was already capable of covering the distances necessary, the Wildflower course is really freakin hard! As a result, I felt the need to do more hill training, and apparently I was not the only one. Crammed into the last few weeks of training seems to be lots and lots of hill training. Today we started off with speed drills in the pool. 5 minutes of steady "race-pace" swimming, followed by 5 minutes of sprint-swimming, and repeat. After doing that for almost an hour, we staggered out of the pool and into our bike clothes. Primarily due to the fact that it gave me an extra hour of sleep, I decided to do the 25 mile ride instead of the 40 mile ride today. My justification (clearly an hour of sleep wasn't good enough) was that if I trained at the actual race distance, but did it as fast as I could, that would be better training for the race. In reality there were tons of stop signs and turns for the first, and last 5 miles of the ride. As a result, I rode the middle 15 miles fast (all hills) but had to stick with the group at the beginning and end to avoid getting utterly lost. It was the first group ride where Josh and I were riding the same distance, so we stuck together for most of the ride. My favorite part of the ride was climbing the switchback roads and being able to look down at the roads that I had just climbed. I felt a great sense of accomplishment. Heading back down the hills was a bit scary, and I'm usually pretty comfortable on the descents. There were sharp hairpin turns with loose gravel and potholes in the road. I had to stay very alert and keep my brakes armed and ready.

I went for a fairly long run this morning, around 55 minutes. I decided to run around Dolores Park, which is just down the street from my house. The whole park is on a hill, which gave me the opportunity to do some hill training. I ran hard up and over the Church street hill, which was a first for me - I was never insane enough to try it before.






I met up with some other team in training people at Aquatic Park in the evening to try and get some more open water practice. The water was pretty rough, but it was sunny out, and the water didn't seem quite as cold as usual. The waves were breaking on top of me at times, which resulted in an above average bay-water-consumption-rate *blech*. I had to adjust my breathing to avoid inhaling the oncoming waves so I know the lake swimming will be quite a bit easier than this was. I still had a hard time going straight, and spent a lot of time and distance zigzagging around trying to get to the next bouy. All in all, I felt okay about the swim, I just hope I can get lucky and go on a straight(ish) course for the race.