Wildflower 2014

We’re the heirs to the glimmering world

I think it’s taken me so long to write about Wildflower 2014 because Wildflower is never just a race. It should be everything I hate: I don’t like crowds, or camping, or drinking when I can’t drink because I have a race the next morning and shut up you stupid kids, isn’t it time for bed? And even in the immediate days and hours before, when I’m checking the forecast to see how damn hot it’s going to be or dreading the drive or remembering I need to find a tent to borrow, I hate it a little. Why can’t I just do a race where I sleep in a bed the night before like a normal human being?

But then I get there, and I’m in some kind of weird magic camp where triathlons are normal and people are exceeding their expectations of themselves and everyone’s smiling, and I feel a sense of community I don’t get many other places. Maybe it’s the beer. Maybe it’s the generous coating of dust that settles on everything. Maybe it’s the shared knowledge that you are about to do something totally dumb with a few thousand strangers who also thought sleeping on the ground and then exercising strenuously for a few hours and then hauling several pounds of gear up a hill before sleeping on the ground again would be a capital way to spend a weekend.

Whatever it is, I keep going back.

We were here, we were here

Last year at the finish line I fell hard for Wildflower. This year, I resolved to go back and do it “right” — meaning, arrive early (vs. slipping in just before the close of packet pick-up on Saturday, my usual M.O.), race on Saturday, and cheer my brains out on Sunday. I had no interest in tackling the long course myself, but if I was going to bike 160 miles I might as well try to bike 56. A relay team formed, fell apart, formed again; enthusiasms rose and fell along with the water levels in the lake (well, actually, the water levels just fell); and finally, come late April, I knew I was showing up at Lake San Antonio on the first Friday in May as the biker on a relay team better known as There Better Be a Swim.

Friday was a whirlwind of work, drive, drive, drive, stop in King City to blow it out big at the Dollar General for cheering supplies, drive, drive, stop. Was I excited to race on Saturday? Hard to say. Was I excited to wait near the bottom of Lynch Hill with our relay swimmer to jump in with our runner so we could cross the finish line wearing $1 foam crocodile hats we bought for some reason? Yep. Was I excited to get out the bubble stuff and the clapping hands and the kazoos and the fancy duct-tape-and-poster-board signs and put together the best cheer station ever on Sunday? YOU BET.

Perhaps my priorities were misplaced.

We’re the heirs to the glimmering world

It became a joke: How many times did I cry during Wildflower weekend? “All of them,” I would say. “All of the times.”

But the first time was a few miles into the bike course, after the sweat-fest of Beach Drive, after the turn out of the park. There was this big farm — ranch? — parcel of land of some sort, anyway. And there was a long driveway leading from the farmhouse to the main road, and at the end of that driveway sat an older couple in camp chairs, ringing their cowbells.

Snuffling behind my sunglasses. Singing The National in my head. Legitimately moved by all the little things. That’s my Wildflower.

For the first 30-35 miles, I honestly had the best bike ride of my life. I wish I had data from when I rode the Olympic course in 2012 to compare, but I don’t need to see numbers to feel my progress. I was skipping up the hills and sliding down, leapfrogging with a sweet Team in Training rider, waiting for a couple of friends I’d passed on Beach to catch back up to me on the straightaways. (50+ men, all of them, always: my true racing age group.)

It was hot, but I was handling it, dousing myself with a full water bottle at every aid station. Each time I’d start to flag, it seemed there were volunteers right there to revive me with a fresh bottle of cold water. It absolutely helped that I was just doing the relay, and a few times, I felt like a jerk: Yeah, I’m riding hard and passing people, but I’m also just doing this; I didn’t already swim and run and I’m not about to run again. This is my whole race. I better push it.

My team had asked me my predicted time, so they could be back in transition to meet me. I rode 3:55 with plenty of untimed stops on a cooler day at our training weekend, so I thought around four hours would be right. But when my runner came in for the handoff on race morning and confirmed, “four hours?” I for some reason said “3:30.” That would be a crazy time for me. That would only be five minutes slower than Vineman on a course with 1200+ more feet of climbing. It would make no sense. But for the first 30 miles of the bike course, I thought I might pull it off.

Hey love, we’ll get away with it
We’ll run like we’re awesome

I didn’t make that particular crazy goal, and it shouldn’t have been a surprise, because the first 40 miles of that course is an easy flatland jaunt compared to the final 16.

The issue wasn’t really Nasty Grade. I was prepared to be slow on Nasty Grade, and I was, basically losing in five miles all the time I’d spent banking in the previous 40. What really got me were the five miles immediately after, heading back toward the park. It’s yet another place where I think the Wildflower conventional wisdom hides the real issue. It’s miserable climbing up a 900-foot hill for two miles? No shit. Everybody knows that. Nobody talks about the fact that after you come down the screaming descent, you spend the next several miles losing all that momentum you worked so hard to gain by climbing a substantial portion of the way back up.

(Other examples where Wildflower’s conventional wisdom lets me down: It’s not the heat, it’s the dust; it’s not the race, it’s the climb up the dirt hill with all your gear after.)

I should have known how awful that part would feel; I’d ridden the course before. What I didn’t appreciate is that on that course preview day, I was having a terrible ride — period. It was windy; I’d wanted to quit a bunch of times. At some point, though, I’d managed to pick up a few friends riding similar paces, and we’d groaned and chatted our way through the final 10 miles. It felt bad, but so had everything, that day.

On race day, things had felt great, so I was unprepared for the final push to feel like such a slog. I went from smile-crying and thanking every volunteer to groaning and trying not to make eye contact. But once we were in the park, the hills to the finish didn’t seem as bad as I remembered, and I whipped down Lynch and into transition so fast I could hardly believe it was over.

Lying in the grass, post-bike, post-watermelon slushie drink

And then we failed to catch our runner with the crocodile hats, but that’s fine. We were here, we were here. We finished 13/26 relay teams in our division, in a cluster of teams that all finished between 6:30 and 7:00, and all three of us beat our individual time goals. I can’t be disappointed with a 3:48 on that course, especially considering that was a faster average pace than I biked the Olympic in 2012.

Serve me the sky with a big slice of lemon

As for the rest of the weekend: After getting my bike out of transition, I went to a Picky Bars-hosted happy hour and awkwardly chatted with four-time champ Jesse Thomas about which Picky flavors we ate on the bike. (Mine is Smooth Caffeinator, his is Need for Seed. If you were wondering.) (He was, for the record, incredibly nice. He asked how my race was, and I thought of the best possible answer only later, which was “Great! Almost twice as long as yours and we had three people doing it!”) There were beers. I hiked back to the campground, where there were more beers. At some point I discovered an Oreo in my jersey pocket and couldn’t remember where it came from. I found many, many uses for dollar store craft supplies.

And then Sunday, otherwise known as CryFest 2K14. We cheered for a couple of hours at the top of Lynch, making sure we saw all the TAG athletes go out on the bike course. Because of the huge gap between wave start times (about 1.5 hours between our first athlete and our last), we actually saw everyone go out on the bike AND most of the guys come in on the bike AND some of the guys head down to finish the run. After our first three women biked back down Lynch, we repositioned at the finish, where we then stood for the next couple of hours clapping these clapping hands as though they would actually will people across the line.

Best dollar I’ve ever spent

I’m sure the clapping hands were annoying to everyone around me, but I had nervous energy to burn and a lot of people to cheer in. I also had dollar store maracas, which I offered to anyone who started to whine about the clapping. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?

Everything after that isn’t really my story to tell, but almost everyone from our group finished strong and happy. There were high-fives, tears that weren’t mine, lots of hugs, so much cheering. Anyone who tells me triathlon is an individual sport has never been at that finish line.

I don’t know if I’ll go back next year. I said one more Wildflower, said I had to do it right to know if I was done. But doing it right just made it all that much harder to quit.

Italicized bits throughout are from The National’s “The Geese of Beverly Road,” which I had stuck in my head for all of Wildflower weekend, and which prompted more than one person to suggest that possibly my version of “pump-up music” was different from theirs.

This is Not a Race Report: Lake Tahoe Triathlon

This is not a race report because there was no race.

This has been sitting in my drafts, in varying stages of done-ness, since the day after we got back. It’s funny trying to figure out what to say about a race that didn’t happen. But in some ways, I still did what I went to Tahoe to do, which was ride up a giant hill on Highway 89 to prove that I could and celebrate with some of the best friends a girl could ask for. Victory?

We got our first inkling that something was wrong the Friday before the race, via an email from the race organizers announcing that all of Friday and Saturday’s events had been canceled. Wildfires more than a hundred miles away had sent massive amounts of smoke toward Lake Tahoe, and the smoke was now sitting there, dragging the air quality into the unhealthy and potentially dangerous realm. There was hope for Sunday, the email said; the winds could pick up and blow the smoke away, and projections looked positive. They’d let us know on Saturday at noon.

The email came just minutes before Emily and Diana got to San Francisco. Frustrating timing, but it’s not like anything else would have been better: the flights were booked, the Airbnb was paid for, and the girls’ weekend was long anticipated. One way or another, we were going to Tahoe. The next morning, we set off driving, nervously checking email as the noon deadline approached. We got the final word somewhere near Davis: nasty air, no race*.

The organizers promised a party — but we were a little late for that, finding one tray of quinoa salad and a few sad veggie burgers pieces of chicken left in their trays. We scavenged for what might well have been the final free beers, got our goody bags (goggles, cute T-shirts), and wandered down to the lake.

“Well,” said Diana, looking at the deep blue water, “I’m definitely going to be swimming in that.”

That statement set the tone. No, we weren’t going to race. We weren’t going to get a medal. And we weren’t going to get our highly anticipated relay finish photo, the planning of which might have involved purple clothing and the cross-country transportation of a Northwestern porch flag. But we could still swim, bike, and run in Tahoe, as much as the smoky air would let us.

That first afternoon, Diana and I swam a mile in the lake — crystal-blue, totally clear, the biggest bathtub I’ve ever been in. We were staying on the west side of the lake, about halfway between north and south, and when we started out, the smoke rendered the mountains on the eastern shore as little more than hazy outlines. But over the course of our swim, the wind picked up, the smoke blew on, and we were rewarded with clearer views. I could have stayed in that lake for hours, but there were tater tots to eat.

Instead of rushing around in the wee hours doing race prep, Sunday was low-key. We walked to a bakery, wandered around the lake, and hung out in a sporting goods store instead of using any actual sporting goods. (Bought nothing but tried on Hokas for the first time. Capsule review: Intrigued by the Bondi B’s, hated the other model I tried, felt like a circus clown.) Dinner was salads and sandwiches, with a dessert of Pepperidge Farm cookies, gossip, and Boggle. Not the day we expected but a great one nonetheless.

I’d decided to wait until Monday to ride, hoping for less smoke and less traffic. There was a winding bike path heading north from our rental house all the way to Tahoe City, which I knew would eventually connect to the wide-shouldered segment of Highway 89 near Truckee. But I didn’t want to ride north. I wanted to go south on 89, along the race course and up the hill I’d been training for. I wasn’t sure what riding 89 would be like, but I knew the hill came early, and I at least wanted to give it a good shot. If that was all I was comfortable doing, I could turn around and ride north instead.

Before starting, nervous:

I biked about a mile from our cabin to 89 and had another two or so of bike path to start. The path was narrow — technically two-way, but I’m not sure how — and I got stuck behind a texting dude for a bit. My relief at losing him when the bike path ended greatly drowned out my fear at suddenly being on a state highway with no shoulder to speak of. The road would have been open during the race — but I think a few hundred other cyclists around me would have helped me feel safer, whether deservedly so or not.

The first bit of the course was quiet, though, with only a handful of cars passing by and one other cyclist heading the other direction. I was on a part of 89 that sits a bit inland from the lake, so I’m not sure if I would have had a view even without the smoke — but with the smoke, I couldn’t see anything beyond the trees lining both sides of the road. They were spectacular trees, though.

Around six miles into my ride, I hit the hill. Pretty quickly, I was in my lowest gear and cranking away. Up, up, up. Around a curve and up. Like Alpine Dam, but with longer stretches between the curves and pines instead of redwoods. The same advice applied, though: Eyes front. Don’t look for the top.

I wish I could say it felt easy. That all my training had clearly paid off, and that I sailed through that 2-mile chunk at 4.7% average grade like it was the little speedbump I cruise up and over on the way home from the ocean. But that would be lies: It was rough. I was working, pushing, breathing hard — some combination of the smoke, the altitude, and the fact that the climb was just f’ing hard. I never hit a stretch that I thought I couldn’t do, and I knew from the tenths of miles that somehow kept clicking off on the Garmin that I was making progress. But it was not fast, and it was not pretty. No style points on that climb.

The downhill that followed was even more of a mess. I was heading toward a couple of major parks and roadside viewing areas, so traffic had picked up, as had the wind. I’m sure I didn’t actually descend as slowly as I’d climbed, but it felt like that. I hope I would have felt safer in race conditions, and a little bit more capable of going downhill without squeezing the brakes so hard, but who knows? I passed some beautiful things I couldn’t look at because I was so focused on the road, and crossed a wild little section with lots of wind and no trees or guardrails where I first thought “I’m done,” and then kept going and ended up in this crazy U-turn-y descent, where I made it through one of the (apparently — I looked it up later) two zig-zags before saying “Nope, I’m really done” and pulling over to a campsite where I could safely unclip and turn around.

The climb back up through that U-turn included the steepest stretch of road I encountered on the whole ride, but once I crested that hill, it was smooth sailing all the way back. This surprised me; I thought I’d have to do a climb similar to the initial one again, just heading the other direction. But I’d misread the map, and I had just one little hill on the return before a flat-to-downhill ride back to the park. There were a couple of scenic overlooks on the way, and as one of the benefits of this non-race, I stopped near Emerald Bay to take it in.

Back in January, on my birthday, in a hotel room in Dallas, I took a hard look at the Tahoe course for the first time, and I wrote this to Emily and Diana:

To be honest, I’m less than 100% sure that I could do the Tahoe bike course (I’ve yet to climb anything nearly as hard as the biggest climb here — and that’s at sea level!). But, it’s only January, so anything is possible by August. … I guess what I’m saying is that the hills make me want to throw up in my mouth a little but what the hell, in the spirit of OWNING IT during my 32nd year on this planet, I’m in!

In the end, I rode 23 miles — all but about a mile of the course, whatever mile would have come after those sketchy downhill switchbacks — and climbed 2200 feet. It took a little under 1:50, and if I’d raced exactly like I rode the course that day, it would have been my slowest Olympic-distance bike leg by far, as well as my toughest course. (Some might consider Wildflower a tougher Olympic course, but the altitude and the nature of these hills made this one harder for me, and the total gain is about the same on both.) But I’m so proud of what I did. I’m glad I didn’t chicken out, and I’m glad I rode smart — to my edge but not beyond it. And I’m glad I was able to pick up my race shirt, because it has the Highway 89 logo on the back and it makes me smile to think that I rode that on my own.

We spent the rest of our trip in Squaw Valley, passing on the $30+ trip up a mountain in a gondola for lawn games (cornhole, croquet) and Olympic rings-spotting. No, it wasn’t a race. But we still got a weekend outside, an adventure together, and plenty of stories to tell. Who needs a medal when we can have all of that?

And … who wants to bike around Tahoe and/or swim across it? Because now I would like to do both, ideally in a year with no forest fires.

{*And a note about that. My personal, highly unscientific opinion is that canceling the race was the right call. The smoke smell, “feel,” and haze were the worst in the morning on both days we spent in the area, and while I didn’t have any noticeable problems breathing on the ride that wouldn’t/couldn’t have been caused by altitude alone, I was coughing more than normal for a couple of hours after. I know having to cancel a race puts organizers in a tough spot; there’s a lot of money spent that they can’t recover. That said, I think Big Blue Adventure could have done a bit more than they did, at least initially. We ended up with an offer for 50% off registration for any of their events next year, but the initial offer was 25% off the same event only. Bike the West, which had a trans-Tahoe ride the next weekend, transferred registrations to next year’s event for free for any participant who wasn’t comfortable riding in the conditions — even though that event was held. I don’t know their financial situation, and the note specifies that their contract required producing the event no matter what, but I think that’s an impressive response, while Big Blue Adventure’s was more along the lines of adequate.}