Wildflower Leftovers

* I want to do another triathlon now. NownownownowNOW. This isn’t anything new for me after races (see also: registering for Miami right after Nike, almost registering for three separate marathons within 48 hours of finishing my first half), but it’s more intense this time. There’s something about the actual experience of racing a triathlon that I love — as opposed to running, where I love the training but am so-so on racing — and I’m still trying to put my finger on why it’s different, especially because neither Wildflower nor Ice Breaker were perfect races. Partly, it’s just new and shiny, and I was able to go in with no time or performance expectations. But I think there’s something about the actual structure of the event itself that works for me. With running, if something doesn’t go well within the first few miles of a race, it’s harder for me to be mentally present. With triathlons, it seems like there’s always something new to do, some way to make up ground or at least find peace with the performance. Again, now that I have a better handle on what I can expect from myself, maybe that will change, but I hope not.

OK, I’m stealing this one photo, because: look how happy I look! There’s actually a good running one, too, but hat = I look like I’m running with my eyes closed.

* I’d been semi-planning on doing another Olympic tri the first weekend of June, but it’s not exactly compatible with my pre-Berlin-training running break. I could do it as an unofficial aquabike, but that’s a lot to pay and a long way to drive for what’s essentially a DNF (though I would get to go outlet shopping after). I know some people can balance marathon training and triathlon training, but I suspect I’m not one of them. I have my eye on a couple of late-season races that are technically within driving distance (Marin in November? Palm Springs in December?) and I assume they’d be doable as long as I keep my biking and swimming volume where I intend to keep it during marathon training, but I have no idea what I’ll want to do this fall (and I still have my eye on a half PR), so I’m staying away from any registration screens for now. Being responsible sucks.

* There is, however, a swim-run event that could fit rather nicely with the early part of my marathon training … if I could train myself to swim two miles in five weeks. Is that even possible? As far as I can tell from dailymile, my longest swim to date is just over 2600 yards. Getting the training time in my stupid 30-minute-limit pool might be the hardest part, but I’ve been thinking about switching pools anyway, and it would certainly help with the whole 50K in May (er, as many K as I can manage in May) effort … hmm.

* When this triathlon adventure started, I clearly had no shortage of anxiety about training with a group. On top of my regular social awkwardness, I was afraid to be the worst. I’m also a control freak who likes setting her own schedule and doing workouts that start outside her front door versus 45 minutes north. Training with a group was a big adjustment, and it was a source of a fair amount of stress during the first 2/3 of training — the constant travel, the inflexible calendar and inability to just swap a workout time or day if the weather wasn’t cooperating, the constant awareness of where I was in the group no matter how hard I resolved not to be competitive. But after Wildflower, I can say this with certainty: Training with a group — and with this group — was absolutely the right thing for me. There were at least 1,800 athletes on the Wildflower Olympic course, and fewer than 50 trained with my group, and yet it felt like we were everywhere. Especially the women — I’m sure I saw at least 10 women I knew on the bike course and another five on the run. Having people to cheer for, and to cheer for me, and to find and debrief with and hug and swap pasta salad for pretzels with after the race — that was huge. And Neil — it took me a long time to get used to being coached, to understand Neil’s style, to know when to admit he was right and when to push back. But to take more than 40 rookies and turn us into Olympic course finishers at Wildflower in 10 freaking weeks? I have a ton of respect for that, and I’ll train with him again.

* I’m shocked at how quickly I felt back to normal after Sunday. I thought I’d be sore and stiff enough that my grand plans of Nothing would feel like sweet relief, but by Tuesday morning I was ready to swim and ride again rightnow, thankyou. I am, however, completely exhausted — as in, I was thrilled about going to the dentist this week because it meant I could lie down for an hour. I’m going to hold firm to Nothing-ness at least through the weekend in Palm Springs, where it’s currently forecast to be 107 — yes, that’s one hundred and seven — degrees and I think moving from pool chair to bar will be plenty of exertion.

* One thing I really want to work on between this year and next is getting faster on (relative) flats on the bike (relative because I’m not sure there are real flats in San Francisco. The Embarcadero, I guess, maybe?). I can climb, and while I know I could also get more efficient at it, I’m confident that my climbing isn’t holding me back. I’m a terrible descender, but I think comfort there will come with time and practice. So speed on anything that isn’t a huge hill seems like the place where I have the most room to grow. How, though? I’m guessing the answer is “ride more” — and I plan to, in the hopes that if I can handle Wildflower I can also roll with whatever the Marin Headlands or Sonoma County can throw at me. But what else? My natural cadence is fast, but it doesn’t come with any oomph.

* Now that I don’t need to worry about getting my hair into a swim cap, under a bike helmet, and through a run without moving or changing anything, I desperately need a haircut. It’s been more than six months and that suited me fine, but now I’ve reached a tipping point where every day I don’t get a haircut is pure torture.

Race Recap: Wildflower Olympic Triathlon

“It’s about that white line,” Neil said on Saturday as we gathered for our race briefing. “Ten weeks of training, the early mornings, the hours of workouts — it’s all about that white line.

“So don’t you dare take a finish line photo where you’re staring at your watch. You smile.”

Mission accomplished.

The quick story of my Wildflower is: 3:36:36, almost all of it smiling. Great swim, great-for-me bike, and a hard run during which I was happy not to have my watch broadcasting split times (more about that later), all adding up to 20+ minutes faster than the fastest I thought I could do. That’s never happened before in my racing life, and it quite likely could never happen again, so I’m going to bask in it for as long as it’s appropriate to bask, and maybe longer.

For all of the blank peacefulness of last week, I now have a whole little three-ring circus of thoughts dancing around — about the sport, about training, about how maybe I am a group-exercise person after all — but since I can write 2,000 words about breakfast given the opportunity, I’m going to try to keep this one focused.

Pre-Race

I don’t camp. The last time I “camped,” my yurt had an outlet to charge my phone. Camping was the fourth discipline of my Wildflower and easily the one that put me most on-edge.

Of course our borrowed tent was the one the tri club volunteers couldn’t figure out how to set up, and of course we hadn’t read the instructions. I made the dusty, two-mile walk to the expo while Pete fielded questions from our camp-neighbor’s kids about why our tent kept falling down; he eventually located the magic spring that locked it into place. On the walk, I spotted some of the long-course racers I’d met at training weekend hauling their bikes back up the hill (people told me a lot of alarmist things about Wildflower, but nobody mentioned walking your stuff back up the hill) and hugged them and asked about their races and started to pick up some of the Wildflower energy I’d heard so much about.

We ate a quick dinner, I arranged and re-arranged my gear bag about 6,000 times, and the Cal Poly kids ran naked past our campsite, during which not a single woman was legitimately nude. I expected much more noise and partying from the long-course finishers (see above re: alarmist things people told me) but things seemed calm, and I fell asleep sometime around 10:30. I slept solidly till 4, then dozed off and on until 7, when a tent neighbor’s alarm (eight bars of this) started going off incessantly and I became convinced I was going to spend my entire race yelling “RIGHT HERE! RIGHT NOW! RIGHT HERE! RIGHT NOW!”

I was not looking forward to any part of transition set-up — not biking my stuff down Lynch Hill, not hanging out for 90+ minutes in transition before my wave, not sweating off my sunscreen before the race even started. But there were enough little things to do — get marked, eat breakfast, get in and out of the portapotties only to get right back in line — that I was surprised how quickly I was pulling on my wetsuit.

The Swim

The swim start is on a boat ramp, and the warm-up takes place in the minutes between wave starts. It turns out I love this. That quick heart-pounding-OMG-go-now! feeling showed up, but since all I had to do was splash around, it was fine. A lot of ladies from my training group were in the same wave, and we used some of our nervous energy to karaoke “Don’t Stop Believing” along with the loudspeaker until a few seconds before our start.

I usually count 10 right-arm strokes and then sight in open water, but I rarely got all the way up to 10 on this swim. I felt distracted; someone bumped my timing chip early and I worried about it falling off, and then I idly wondered how everyone else’s races were going, and I tried to guess whether any of the guys in my group would be done by the time I was out of the water. But my breathing was calm and my stroke felt as smooth as it ever gets.

I remember getting a side stitch after the second turn, but it didn’t stick around. At the third turn, I felt a little seasick, and I popped my head up to see a huge swell coming at us. (I thought, in the moment, that I might have made it up, but after the race I mentioned it to my parents and three separate women turned around and said, “Yeah, what was that?”) As it passed, I realized that some of the fastest swimmers from the wave behind me had caught up to my group, and I was momentarily discouraged, but then I thought: Use this. I followed some fast feet all the way in, and while I could have done a better job of sighting to the finish — the only left turn on the course — I was out of the water and running up the hill with a 32 on my watch.

The Bike

So I got to transition, and I forgot what to do. My order of operations was all messed up — I put my sunglasses on, but my hair was dripping on them, so I took them off, and then I couldn’t figure out where to put my wetsuit. The woman next to me kept saying “this is the longest transition ever!” and I was thinking, come on, it’s not taking that long, but uh, my T1 was 6:28.

This is also when I discovered that I’d somehow turned my Nike watch on — maybe in my backpack, maybe at transition — and the stopwatch had been running for hours, and when I tried to re-set it, the low battery warning flashed on. My swim watch was still running, though, so I shoved it in my pocket and headed to the bike out.

Then it was uppppp Lynch Hill. People were packed pretty tightly, and I was fighting for space to climb. A woman from the training weekend was a few people ahead of me, and she’s a much stronger cyclist, but I can climb, dammit, and so I resolved just to keep her in my sight till the top and not let anyone slip between us.

My watch died for good somewhere in the first 5K, and I spent the next 5K or so debating the merits of trying to get the other watch out of my pocket (pro: I’d know my time and could eat/drink accordingly. con: if I dropped it, I wouldn’t know anything ever). I settled on leaving it in my pocket and fueling by distance rather than time. I downed my whole Nuun-water bottle during the ride, and I also managed to take two water bottles from aid stations (!) (this is a milestone I would have never imagined in November) and execute the drink-and-toss.

I got my watch out of my pocket long enough around 22K to realize I’d been on the bike around an hour and was more or less on pace with my training ride. There were a few stupid moments with people trying to pass inappropriately or riding in the middle of the lane — a wake-up call for me, because I’m always afraid I’ll be the most discourteous rider out there — and a few times, the desire to get the hell away from some nonsense was the spark I needed to push past a group.

On a downhill somewhere in the last 10K, a bee stung me on the lip and held on, and it was one of those “um, what happens now?” moments — like, I’m not allergic, but how much is this going to hurt? and how do I get it off me? and what if it flies into my mouth and stings me inside of my mouth? — and eventually I shook it off like a dog shaking a stick. And really, for the worst thing that happened during the bike to be a bee sting? Not bad.

I spotted my parents and Pete at the top of Lynch and then started my ride down, which turned into a long, coasting “OMG WHY ARE YOU HUGGING THE YELLOW LINE” ride — and yes, the last thing I wanted to do was crash on Lynch, but some people were being way too cautious, and the age-group-competitive men were finishing their run so that was another layer of activity in the same little lane. I finally squeezed past one woman and had clear road all the way to transition.

The Run

Helmet off, shoes off, hat on, swap watches. I wasn’t doing math particularly well, but my total time was in the 2:30s, and I knew I could walk in most of the 10K and beat four hours. I headed up the stairs and out onto the course, sipping water and wondering if I’d regret not taking the salt packet out of my bike bag and shooting it along the way.

And uh. Yeah. I regret that. I have no idea if salt would have made any difference, but my stomach cramped for the first 45 minutes of the run, and I wish I would have at least had the option of trying it. I used to get side stitches regularly when I started running, but my nutrition/hydration plan usually works. Except, it turns out, it doesn’t work on an 85+-degree day, after 26 other miles, on a hilly and exposed course.

I had planned long before Sunday to walk through every aid station, but there were a few spots in that first handful of miles when I also walked every time the hill felt too hard, or every time my watch hit a 5. I was so happy not to know my average pace or be able to see it drop; I might have fallen apart more mentally if I had.

Around 6K, I worked to catch up with a couple of friends from training and also started chatting with a runner who had been next to me for a while. I could talk easily, so I couldn’t have been pushing that hard, but I could not imagine moving even one second faster. Our conversation (which mostly consisted of listing things we wanted at the finish line; mine: “A Diet Coke. No, a Coke. No, a Coke Slurpee.”) got us near the top of a hill, at which a) a teammate took a gulp from some Cal Poly kids’ beer bong and b) the crowd noise picked up as people pointed 200 meters ahead and yelled, “That’s the last hill!”

At the top of Lynch, I spotted my boss, who’d done the long course on Saturday. He jumped in next to me and I fought to keep up as he said things like, “Am I running too fast? Cause you’re running really fast!” and asked me how the race was (me: “hot”) and how the bike course had been (“hot”) and how I was feeling (“hot”). On the way down Lynch I started to see some carnage — one girl was standing stock-still in the middle of the road while a guy poured water over her head — but most people looked strong. I remember thinking, “In less than 10 minutes, I can stop moving.”

Then it was a left down the finish chute, and I saw the clock, and my mind was on whether I should try to kick or let the woman in front of me finish with a good photo, and I crossed and smiled and saw my coach and parents and Pete and smiled more and it was done.

The Aftermath

I stayed in the finish area for a while, finding friends and walking between the one strip of shade and the water table to get tiny cups of water (my only complaint, again: why not bottles?). Pete ducked the line to the finishers’ area and asked me if I needed anything, and I explained my Coke Slurpee fantasies, and he found a slush machine at the general store, and I have possibly never been so happy in my life. No, wait — I was happier about 15 minutes later, when I was drinking cherry slush and eating string cheese in Lake San Antonio.

My final stats were 32:20 for the swim, 1:50:27 for the bike (negative split by about 20 seconds), and 1:03:01 for the run, which is so much faster than I would have guessed I was moving. I was more or less the halfway point in my age group and had not-unsurprising rankings for the three disciplines (run the best — even with a 1:03! — and bike the worst).

I suppose I’m curious to know what I could have done if I hadn’t cramped so badly on the run, but realistically, I think I’d cramp on that run in those conditions no matter what; I have so few opportunities to train in real heat. I wish I’d taken the salt, and I wish I’d had a Gu before the swim, and it would have been nice to spend less than almost 11 minutes in transitions, but these are good lessons for the future; I raced a little better than I trained and a lot better than I could have predicted, and there’s nothing to complain about there.

I like this distance. I’m curious to know if I could go under 3:30 on a less-punishing course. Not to say I’ll never go longer — swimming in the Russian River got me interested in this crazy sport, and to do that in a race requires a 70.3, so yeah, that’s out there, it’ll happen someday — but Olympic is exactly enough of everything right now. I’m dedicated to respecting the Nothing, but if this had been a training day and I needed to hop in the pool today, I happily would.

And yes, I have more thoughts, but it’s already been too many words, so I’ll save them. I’m just happy, and proud, and excited about whatever comes next.

After Wildflower

I started to write about my goals for Wildflower, and then I realized I don’t have much to say — not because I’m not excited but because the zen feeling that settled into my bones during the training weekend still hasn’t let up. I often roll my eyes at “the race is just the celebration of the training!” and similar sentiments, but in this case, it really has been about the process. I think about where I was six months ago — and where I was, incidentally, was still walking my bike on any street that wasn’t JFK Drive — and I’m stunned at how different I feel, physically and emotionally. I stopped being scared of my bike, and I stopped being (quite as) scared of looking vulnerable in front of strangers. When I think “triathlon” right now, the image in my brain is of swimming in Lake San Antonio, looking at my favorite mini-mountains, sun shining, water cool, deliciously calm — and I have no desire to lose that anytime soon.

So I do have goals for Wildflower, but my main hope is that I can keep relaxing into this race, rather than thrashing my way through it. Assuming there are no major race-day disasters, the only thing I want is to race to my potential. A pro and a con of having trained on the course is that I can’t quite divorce that goal from times. Training weekend wasn’t a race-day simulation, in ways both good (it will be less hot, though still hot, on Sunday) and bad (I didn’t run a 10K at 2 p.m. in the sun with 26 miles already on my body). But if I hit anywhere near those times, I have a shot at breaking four hours. When I registered, I put my estimated finish time as 4:30, so anything faster than that would be, literally, better than I expected. And if not, well, that’s not really the point right now, anyway.

I’ve been thinking more about what comes after the race — and, more precisely, how I can keep this peaceful feeling going as I roll into the vast uncertainty of marathon training. I have all this momentum, I want to go-go-go-go-go, but I also want to heal. I want to know not just that my head is in the right place as I stare down the summer months but that my body might be able to follow.

A couple of weeks ago, I got out my calendar and all my training ideas and ran them by my physical therapist (whose role has definitely been heavy on the “therapist” lately). He’s a runner and triathlete himself and I was nervous that he’d say there was no way I’d be ready for a marathon in September doing what I had in mind, but he actually thought I could dial things back even further. I’m still working out some of the details and editing the actual training plan, but I have a month to do that, because all of May is about recovery.

For at least one week after Wildflower, and ideally two, I’m doing nothing. Big-N Nothing. Exceptions to Nothing include foam-rolling and, I guess, walking when necessary, but that’s it. It hasn’t ever gotten out of my head that I first felt the pain in my leg while swimming, and sometimes swim days are the worst even now, so I’m going to shut everything down and sleep a lot and catch up on magazines. The first week of Nothing ends with a long weekend trip to Palm Springs, which will be spent doing Nothing by a pool during the day and Nothing in a hot tub at night.

The second week of Nothing brings the one major deviation I will allow from my Nothing-ness, and that’s my running analysis with my podiatrist. I have four pair of shoes already waiting at her office, along with Adrenalines and PureCadences new and old, and I’m hoping that 45 minutes on her treadmill will start aiming me toward some shoes that work. This will be my only run till June.

Week three brings the end of Nothing in the form of Bay to Breakers, which I will not — will not — run. I am going to wear something ridiculous and tipsy-walk 12K with a water bottle mimosa and take pictures of the ridiculousness. It’s going to take forever and be sort of obnoxious but hey, I already paid for the race entry, and the real party happens at the back of the line anyway. I ran it semi-for-real last year; I might as well experience one drunken Bay to Breakers in my life.

After Bay to Breakers, depending on how I’m feeling, I’ll get back on the bike and back in the pool and — I’m really excited about this one — back on the climbing wall. I’m debating joining the gym that has the pool-running belts or just buying an endless string of day passes, but either way, I’ll probably start working in some pool-running, too. Pete and I want to find a yoga class that we’ll stick with during marathon training, so the second half of May is for studio-hopping.

The last week of May, if I’m still feeling good, I’ll be starting the schedule I want to keep for the summer, minus the land running. That’ll probably mean at least one swim, ride, and climb per week, plus a yoga class and strength training. This is sort of the “test” phase of my marathon plan — if I’m wiped out by the schedule before I’ve even added in any running that’s not in the pool, I’ll readjust. The first week of June, I’m walk-running a few miles a week in whatever new shoes and with whatever foot strike we’ve settled on by then. And, assuming all of this goes well, it’s Go Time on June 11 — 16 weeks to Berlin.

This plan means I’m not doing a second Olympic triathlon at the start of June, and the amount of sadness I feel about letting that one go tells me something about where my heart is, sport-wise – but I’m still hoping to find a July or August (or November) tri that gives me a reason to keep using my bike and stay in my wetsuit. I never actually registered for the June race, and I’m not signed up for anything else except the San Francisco Half at the end of July, so while I’ll probably add a few more things, I’m not even going near Active.com until June 11. I’ve realized that a big part of my stress about running comes from having to commit to races months in advance, and I don’t want to have the “if my body doesn’t hold up, I’ve wasted money” logic hanging over my head anymore. If things sell out, they sell out; there are more races, and I’ll do them when I’m ready.

I feel — I know I keep saying this — at peace with this plan. The best part about it is that I have a month to work with and still get 16 weeks of Berlin training in. When I envisioned the year, I thought I’d be hitting June with a good Olympic-tri-built running base, but I won’t be, really, and that means my marathon plan is going to ramp up slower than I expected. But that’s fine. I honestly have no goals for Berlin besides showing up, running it, and loving the process as much as I’ve ended up loving the process for Wildflower. And if it takes a lot of Nothing to get me there, so be it.

What I Bought for My First Triathlon

One of my biggest worries at the start of triathlon training — and there were many, many worries — was how to pay for all of the gear. I read You Are an Ironman earlier this year, and it includes some pretty stunning statistics about triathlon expenses, the average income of triathletes, and other things that made this sound like a sport for the very, very rich.

I remembered reading this post about doing a triathlon for less than $10, so I knew there were ways to do things relatively cheaply. I already had a lot of running gear that I figured I could use or repurpose, and I’d been swimming for a while, so that covered most of my non-bike basics. I also hoped that I’d love triathlons enough that I’d get several seasons of use out of most of what I bought (spoiler alert: I think that’s true) … or that I could sell some of the bigger-ticket items if I ended up hating it. Still, at one of our first group workouts, one of the other triathlon newbies said her weekends had become an endless string of “What $200 item should I buy this week?” and I couldn’t disagree. It was overwhelming, at first, trying to figure out what was necessary, what was optional, what was a good price, what I could wait to buy, etc.

So, in the hopes that this might be useful to someone somewhere, I took an inventory of what gear I’m using for my first triathlon and what it cost. Yes, I’m going to talk about money on the internet.

First, a disclaimer: When it comes to money, I can be a little completely nuts. I created a spreadsheet of all the things I wanted to buy, their priority, their expected cost, and what discounts I had coming my way. I jumped on every Groupon/Amazon offer/Living Social deal for sporting goods stores, which got me discounts at my bike shop, REI, and Sports Basement. My triathlon club has a constant 10% discount at Sports Basement and fairly regular 20%-off shopping nights. I often ask for REI, Athleta, and Amazon gift cards for birthdays and holidays, so I had a few of those around. The shop where I bought my bike has a loyalty program that gives a percentage of what you spend back in rewards certificates, and buying a bike meant lots of rewards certificates. And training coincided nicely with the arrival of my REI dividend, so while there were a couple of weeks where I was basically sitting on my hands to keep from online-ordering a ton of stuff before the check arrived, getting $200+ of free stuff was very much worth the wait.

In other words, I did not pay for everything below out of pocket, nor did I buy it all within the last three months. But the prices I’ve listed are either what I actually paid OR what I would have paid had I a) not already owned it or b) not had a discount offer. I’ve linked to some things in the list that follows, but the links are purely informational, not somehow putting cash in my pocket. (Belieeeeeve me, I’m making no money on any part of this.)

I’m also well aware that I didn’t always take the cheapest way out. My wetsuit, in particular, was an unnecessary investment that I’m really hoping pays off (meaning I need to swim in it during at least five different months; who wants to jump in the Bay with me?). I could have done this on a tighter budget; I also could have spent far more.

My biggest advice — other than hoarding gift certificates and coupons, which really cannot be overstated — is to buy all of the things you absolutely need to get started (for me, that was everything I’d need for the first four weeks of workouts) and then set a cap for how much you’ll spend after that. My fairly arbitrary cap was $800, including the cost of the training weekend. I almost made it, and would have come in a little under if I’d remembered to budget for a bike tune-up.

I really tried to include e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g on this list. So it’s long. Just saying.

The Last Surge

My bike is in the shop for a tune-up. My borrowed tent is probably in the back of someone’s van, awaiting transport to Wildflower. It’s race week, and my thoughts are a mix of “where did that 10 weeks go?” and “I want to ride one more time!” and “uh, where can I quickly buy earplugs in San Francisco?” and “please, please, please let my favorite Shot Blok flavors be in stock!”

This weekend was our final push: open-water start drills, a mile swim in the San Francisco Bay, and a 6.5 mile run on Saturday, with a chaser of 20-plus miles on Paradise Loop and a 40-minute run on Sunday. I drove straight from Sunday’s ride to the bike shop and dropped off Penelope, then headed to a different bike shop to leave my tent with the tri club’s volunteers and “refuel” with free pizza. Had I not been still in my workout gear and fairly damp and disgusting, I doubt I would have moved for the rest of the day, but I eventually dragged myself out for some ice and a silly frozen coffee drink and collapsed into an ice bath followed by one of the greatest showers ever taken.

I am so excited about this taper.

I read enough blogs of people training for marathons and Ironmans and ultras and other serious, terrifying distance races that I feel a little wimpy being pumped about a taper for an Olympic triathlon. But I also need to respect where I am. No matter what happens this Sunday, it will be the longest continuous workout of my life (save for a couple of all-day hikes and the Avon Walk). If I race the best I can possibly race right now, I’ll still be out there for more than three and a half hours. It’ll most likely be more like 4:15-4:30 and could be plenty longer. My slowest half-marathon is 2:15ish, and before some of our longer bricks in training, that was easily my longest sustained effort. While none of these race distances taken alone are any great shakes for me — save the bike, maybe, of which I’ve only done the full 25 miles once — putting them together is a much different story. It’s not six hours, or 10 hours, or 14 hours, but it is still a long time to be “on.”

I do feel ready, though. There was a point in early March when I was calculating the weeks until the race and thinking there was no way I could possibly be ready. I have a lot to say about my first experience training with a group and a coach, and 85-90% of it is positive; it’s only now that I see the logic behind some of the things that were maddening at the beginning.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what comes after Wildflower; I’ll write more about that later, but it’s going to start with as much nothing as I can handle — a week, if not two. A weekend of sun-basking and poolside cocktail-drinking in Palm Springs after the race seems like a solid way to force some recovery. Yes, part of my brain wants to start registering for things and Google Calendar-ing my prospective marathon training plan, but I’m just … not going to do that yet.

Instead, I want to enjoy this last week of workouts. One final swim tomorrow, easy yards with just a little bit of race-pace work. A two-mile time trial at track on Wednesday. A ride out to the ocean on Thursday, presuming Penelope makes it back to me by then. And lots of packing and list-making and food-preparing and eating. Plenty of eating.

Two months ago, I was a total basketcase about this entire endeavor. Now I’m a triathlete with a goal race less than a week away. And after doing essentially 1.25 Olympic-distance triathlons between Saturday and Sunday, I feel completely relaxed about it. Maybe I’m just too worn out to be keyed up, but it’s not a nasty/sore/beaten-up kind of tired; it’s more like the sun-drunk laziness that sweeps over me after a day at the beach. Now I’m just letting Wildflower come to me.

Wildflower Training Weekend

I spent a long time debating whether to go to my coach’s group’s Wildflower training weekend. On the one hand, I figured it would be helpful to see the courses ahead of time — in particular the bike course with the monster hill that everyone had been warning me about since October. On the other hand, the weekend alone cost nearly as much as the rest of the training program. I waited and wondered and tracked my gear budget, and finally, with 10 days to go, I booked myself a cabin.

It was more than worth it. I went down there nervous and scared. I’m back here more confident, more aware of my strengths and weaknesses, and feeling almost — almost — like a legit triathlete.

Lake San Antonio: Ahhhhh

I got in late on Friday, well after dark, so I didn’t get my first glimpse of the lake until Saturday morning. I did, however, get a taste of the heat — it was still warm at 10 p.m., which my San Francisco-acclimated body didn’t really understand. The forecast was for sunny, 90-degree weather all weekend, and given my history of melting in the heat, that was less than ideal, but I figured I’d rather feel it now than for the first time on race day.

Saturday started with a round-robin intro, calling out our names and our biggest triathlon fears. Mine: “The bike — being on it, moving it, that sort of thing.” We wriggled into wetsuits and walked down the path to the lake and across a rickety boat ramp, and then one by one we jumped in.

From the second the delightfully cool water hit my skin, I was completely blissed out. As in the Ice Breaker swim, I swallowed more water (and more air) than I usually do in the pool, but I just didn’t care. I got to the Olympic turn-around and thought about doing the long course swim instead; I wasn’t ready to be done yet. I did want a realistic sense of what time I could shoot for at Wildflower, though, and so I turned back, feeling like I was gliding. I clocked in around 34 minutes, never feeling anything but relaxed.

We didn’t start biking until after 11, smack in the day’s heat but close to when I’ll be riding on race day. I was jittery and nervous and kept remembering places where I’d forgotten to put sunscreen. But then — well, here’s the thing. I’ve been faithfully putting in my time on hills every week, biking out to the Legion of Honor, crawling up El Camino Del Mar at 5 mph over and over again. I’ve been doing it alone, and while I love the solitude of those rides, it’s also meant losing track of climbing as something that potentially sets me apart.

I’ve been trying not to compare myself to others on the bike, because every ride remains a tiny miracle, and I know my overall speed is slow. But I can climb — relative to my own bike abilities, yes, but also relative to others. And as I passed people going up Lynch Hill, hardly flying but going my own pace, I remembered that. Sure, I wouldn’t mind having another skill on the bike — speed on flats, say, or the ability to go down a hill without white-knuckling the brakes — but climbing’s the one I’ve got. So I hit the top of Lynch, and I thought, “Yeah. I can do this.”

Not that it was easy. Lynch turned out to be one of the better hills for me; there’s a tricky climb between 13K and 15K where I thought, “OK, so maybe I can’t do this.” And it was SO hot, and I had a harder time finding those flat spots where I felt comfortable getting my water bottle out on the return, and giant bugs kept smacking into my sunglasses so loudly I’m sure they gave themselves little bug concussions on the way down. By the 30K mark, I was pretty ready to be done, and the last climb in the park seemed exceptionally cruel, but still: At one point, I got overwhelmed by the realization of just how far I’ve come in the past five months, and I was so happy in that moment, I might as well have been flying.

I saw the first half-mile of the run course on Saturday’s transition run, where I ran into a Wildflower veteran who promised that if I ran 10 minutes out, I’d see “the big hill.” Having run the course on Sunday, I now have no idea what she was talking about; the first four miles seemed to be one “big hill” after another. It reminded me of being in the climbing gym on a route that’s exactly at my level, where I know I could do it if only I could get a moment’s rest. After mile four, though, it levels out ever-so-slightly, and then mile five is the downhill push down Lynch. It’s a rough run, but I did it; I can do it again.

It’s a tough course, but now I’ve seen it. I put up times that seem reasonable — one better than I expected (the bike), one worse (the run), one exactly right (the swim). I’m starting to think the estimated finish time I put on my Wildflower registration was a slight underestimation of my abilities.

And most of all, when I think about the weekend, I see this hazy collage of great moments: cresting a hill and seeing 30+ on my bike speedometer for the first time, the sun sparkling on the water as I drifted through the swim, racing a deer down Lynch Hill, pomelo limoncello by a campfire. I don’t think about the struggles; I only think about the peace, and I hope that carries all the way through race day, if not far beyond.

Weekend Report: I Swam in the Bay, and I Hate Socks

A coherent narrative just isn’t happening today, so how about I word-vomit some bullets?

+ First open-water swim in a wetsuit = done. On Saturday morning we got into the water at Aquatic Park for some drills and short swims. I don’t think we were in the water for more than 5 minutes at a time during the whole half-hour or so of the session, and I don’t even want to know how cold the bay was, but it was good to, uh, get my feet wet (sorry). I’m not a disaster in cold water — I’ve always been part-reptile when it comes to that sort of thing, just ask my mother, I’m sure she’ll verify in the comments — but actually, purposefully swimming in it dredged up its own set of issues. Such as: when I can’t see anything past my hand, I have no idea how to judge how hard I’m swimming, so I sprint and end up exhausted after 15 strokes. It turns out I’m also one of those people who gets nauseated transitioning from swimming to running, and there seems to be no way out of that one but through; we did a drill that involved swimming three sides of a rectangle and then exiting the water to run the fourth side, 5 times in 10 minutes, and while I repeatedly wanted to lose my breakfast on the beach, I somehow did not — so hopefully repetition will beat the wooziness out of me.

Stolen from my coach's Facebook page. Thanks, Neil. I'm the one in the wetsuit.

+ Along those lines, we spent Sunday’s practice running through transitions. Over and over again. Shoes off, socks off, socks on, bike shoes on, bike shoes off, running shoes on, grab your race belt, run around this cone with your bike, ohmygod. We rode maaaaaybe six miles and ran maaaaaybe another .75 in the whole two hours, and I was spent at the end of it. I thought years of dance recitals would have made me good at quick changes, but I never had to put on socks for dance. Fing socks.

+ Perhaps having three different preferred hairstyles for the three sports involved in triathlon is not optimal.

+ I need to investigate spray sunscreen, stat. How the hell do you get that on as part of transition?

+ Also: I think there may be no sunscreen in the world that can keep a girl this pale from burning in a tri. I’m used to shellacking myself with a layer of sunscreen before starting a race. Now that heavy coating gets washed off inside of a wetsuit. We ran six miles after Saturday’s swim, no biking involved, and I burned. And I reapplied! I think it might be time to bring back the Water Babies formula that goes on like paint.

+ I am annoyed with all of my gear. I know I am not good enough at any of these sports to be annoyed with my gear, because the issue is me, and yet I’m still annoyed with my gear. My tri shorts chafe when they get wet. My fancy new sunglasses suck for city riding because every time I stop, they fog up. My good goggles fogged on Saturday. I think my bike shoes are too big.

+ That said, I tried my likely race outfit of tri shorts, Athleta tank with pockets, sports bra during the swim on Saturday, and while it was definitely a soggy run after, it wasn’t the least comfortable I’ve ever been. (It was nothing compared to, say, Miami.) And the bike leg is for drying off, right? Right?? A lighter tri top wouldn’t be the worst idea, but it’s not going to make my sports bra dry any faster, so this will work for now.

+ I rode my bike this morning, because I wanted to get some good hill repeats in (versus Thursday’s white-knuckle nightmare). The weather forecast for the rest of the week looks bleak, and I didn’t want to go into my first tri not having ridden my bike outside with anything resembling confidence since sometime in March. I rode to the Legion of Honor and managed 5.5 hill repeats (the .5 was to take the picture below). Bonus of morning riding: not heading directly into the setting sun.

And then Instagram sold for a BILLION DOLLARS.

+ As good as this morning’s ride was, I really am very slow on the bike. Very, very slow. It’s hard for me to know how to interpret this, because all of my rides involve city traffic, so I’m rarely going full-out, and when I am it’s either for three blocks between stop signs or up a crazy hill. I’m very curious to see how I do at the Ice Breaker, because if I rode at my city riding average at Wildflower, I would be legitimately afraid of not making the cutoff.

+ I still haven’t ridden more than 22 miles on my bike. That freaks me out. Should that freak me out? I’ll get to ride the Wildflower course in a couple of weeks, so maybe I’ll table any freaking out until then.

+ My follow-up appointment with my sports doc is tomorrow. I know he’s going to ask me what’s happened since I was last in, and I kind of want to just print out this blog and say, “Here.”

Triple Brick Fail, Shopping Success

This winter was the mildest one I’ve experienced in my 7+ years in the Bay Area. It barely rained in October, November, or December. When the calendar flipped to 2012, all the snow-sports people were getting desperate. In late January, it finally stormed a little — enough that Sports Basement canceled its “20%-off-everything-until-it-snows-in-Tahoe” discount — then went right back to weirdly dry conditions, save for a few sprinkles every now and then.

But March. In and out like a freaking lion. Three weekends now of crazy rain, or howling wind, or some other havoc-wreaking weather condition, usually placed exactly over the calendar hours dedicated to group workouts. And obviously, with 43 people to corral, you don’t just look at weather.com and say “oh hey, looks like the sky is clearing around noon, let’s wait it out.” You cross your fingers, and hope, and throw a garbage bag over your bike seat and drive to the meeting point anyway — only to find out that the needle-like rain and gusty winds mean riding is only recommended for the most experienced rain-riders and you’ve just driven 40 minutes to run for 40 minutes in a downpour.

Builds character, right?

Being done with a sloppy run calls for jazz hands.

So instead of Saturday’s triple brick — 8 miles of riding, 30 minutes of running, 8 miles of riding, 20 minutes of running, 8 miles of riding, 10 minutes of running, fin — the few/proud/foolish of us banged out 4-ish miles through muddy trails and flooding neighborhoods. (One lady in the picture above did actually manage one loop of riding; she told us she decided to call it quits after nearly running over a duck who could no longer tell the bike path from the bay.) My tri buddy and I then drove back to the city and continued our workouts at our respective gyms, only to text each other furiously at noon when the clouds broke. The triple brick is one of those workouts I’d never do on my own — for motivation reasons as well as logistical ones — and I hope it shows back up on our training schedule at some point. But once again, I just had to let the plan go.

Sunday was sunny and gorgeous, still windy, but a great day for a group run on part of the Escape from Alcatraz tri course to the Sandladder, 200 or so stairs above Baker Beach. We ran up Lincoln and then looped down a trail, onto the beach, and up the ladder. I’d be lying if I said I ran even a single one of those stairs, but my power-walk got me to the top with a teeny bit of energy to spare every time.

(Photo: jdnx via Flickr)

Four Sandladder loops + the run there and back (ending with a cool-down to Hopper’s Hands to tick another San Francisco running landmark off the list) left me with 5.8 miles on the day, and just over 10 for the weekend, and today I feel … great? My sparkle leg continues to baffle me, but I’ll take this type of baffling.

Sunday’s real endurance event came in the afternoon, when Pete and I headed to REI for our annual dividend shopping spree. I got the REI credit card a couple of years ago, and now Dividend Day is basically a second Christmas. Last year — our first of getting the giant dividend — we both did a full upgrade of our exercise wardrobes and I banished crappy Old Navy cotton tanks for good. This year I came home with a big bag of triathlon goodies, including tri shorts, a real waterproof jacket (…that I could have used on Saturday, I know, etc.), a bike pump, proper sunglasses, and one of those absorbs-much-more-than-its-weight pack towels.

I’m still kicking myself for walking out of there with a gift card still in my wallet, but I might yet use that to upgrade my helmet, since I have to go back anyway. (I can’t figure out how to change the lenses on the sunglasses, and after breaking the bike cadence sensor I bought by doing a similar “huh, maybe I just pull on THIS part” thing about 20 seconds after taking it out of the box, I’ve decided that all bending and tugging on sporting goods will now only take place with a qualified salesperson present.) That plus a race belt and I think I’ll be good to go with gear. Still deciding what to do about a tri top, but my favorite tank-with-pockets is going to get a try-out under my wetsuit during our first open-water swim this weekend and then I’ll decide.

Which is good, because my first tri is now in less than two weeks. Eep! Guess I should find a hotel…

Monday Musings: Has Anybody Seen My Hamstrings?

Some assorted thoughts to start the week:

Wind and water
Those were the dual themes of this weekend. After five straight days of rain, I expected Saturday’s long ride to be the fail, but somehow the storm blew over and the roads dried out and we got the all-systems-go message right as I was hopping out of the pool, so I managed to complete my first swim-bike-run brick (more-or-less) as planned.

Sunday, though? I made it to my corner, where a flag on a building was whipping disconcertingly in figure-eights, and thought about quitting then and there. But that seemed wimpy, so I put my head down and started riding. The wind got worse every block, though, and by the time I reached the second segment in the Panhandle — and felt like the wind had stopped Penelope at the red light without me needing to brake — I flipped around, rode home, and finished out my ride on a spin bike at the gym.

I’m not super-proud of this — what if there’s wind on race day, I know, I know — but I also know it was the right call, because Saturday’s ride was good but Sunday’s would have been awful and would have snapped me right back into this weird, bipolar pattern of GREAT ride, TERRIBLE ride, and I don’t think I have the emotional stamina for that. Fifty-odd more blocks of that wind sounded miserable, and I’m trying to keep the misery out of my biking for the moment.

And, it turns out, I’m capable of giving myself a pretty good spin class. And and and I managed the clip situation quite well on the two city-traffic-y miles I did ride, thankyouverymuch, including the hill that I hate stopping on even in sneakers.

No, but seriously, where are my hamstrings?
So about Saturday’s ride: We were supposed to ride 25 miles, but a couple of the more-experienced riders planned to lead us on two trips around an 8-ish-mile, hilly loop — 16 or so miles that they figured would be the rough equivalent of 20-25 miles anywhere else, without ever leaving us too far from our cars in case it started pouring.

That didn’t exactly happen, for a variety of reasons (a late start, a flat, me classily bringing up the rear on a hill repeat), but we got in one loop and then I rode another several miles on flat but crowded paths around Crissy Field, practicing riding positions and clipping/unclipping and daring to dream that I might someday drink out of my water bottle while riding. (It remains a dream.)

I continue to manage the clips well, but I’m also not getting the full benefit out of them. I know I’m supposed to be using my hamstrings to “pull” rather than my quads to push, but so far my body is only giving me two options: hammer away with my quads or yank myself along with my calves. My hamstrings aren’t exactly reporting for duty.

I’m getting lots of tips — think about pulling up, never point your toe down, your ankle is a hinge, knees to the sky — and I can tell that something is happening because my legs don’t feel quite as torched when I run off the bike. But I’m starting to think this is another symptom of a bigger problem. I’ve had issues with my hamstrings and glutes not engaging when I run, and I recently flashed back to being 12 and in ballet and not ever understanding how to lift my legs with my hamstrings instead of “gripping” with my quads. (That is why I could never stretch my leg up by my ear and leave it there like all the kids on Dance Moms do.)

My current working theory is that I just don’t have hamstrings. But um, that’s probably not it, is it?

Loner
After four weeks of training with a group, Sunday’s workouts were solo. I got to leave at my own time, and ride and run at my own paces, and not worry about where that put me in the group or where my carpool partner was or if I was making all the right turns on the route or if it would be rude to put in my headphones.

There are great things about having the group, especially when it comes time to celebrate/commiserate/drink after a workout. But deep down, I’m a control freak, and sometimes I just want to do my own thing…even if that thing involves fleeing the wind and bailing on a ride and somehow ending up 45 minutes behind my own schedule. It’s weird. In theory, I want to train with friends. In actuality, I think I’m a jerk who likes being alone.

Complications
I think the whole “running is so easy! You get dressed, put on your shoes, and run!” thing is overplayed — I mean, I can easily spend two hours eating breakfast, planning a route, updating my Shuffle, charging my watch, locating satellites, debating between long sleeves and no sleeves, etc. But triathlon training — especially with a group — is such a different beast. There’s so much stuff to consider, and everything requires a million steps.

Leaving the house for Saturday’s bike ride = wrangle the bike rack out of the closet, walk to the car (parked within 3 blocks of my apartment, if I’m lucky), attach the rack to the car, walk back to the house, grab my backpack (ideally pre-packed with gear) and bike, walk back to the car, get the bike on the rack, throw the rest of the stuff in the car, drive 15 minutes up a giant hill to the other end of town to our meeting point, park car, un-rack bike, un-rack rack, put rack in car on the assumption that nobody is going to break my window to get a bike rack, switch shoes, ride. Getting home = reverse that. Dailymile says I spent less than 3 hours actually working out during Saturday’s swim-bike-run brick, but I left the house at 8 a.m. and got back after 1:30 p.m. The efficiency nerd in me is dying right now.

The First Time I Clipped In

“Nah, you go tour the bike studio,” I told my friends. “I need to run. I have some anger to work out.”

“But…” C looked at me, confused. “If you didn’t fall, what’s there to be angry about?”

I didn’t really have an answer, in the moment. But I gave the best one I could, which was that today’s ride took all the positive feelings I had about cycling after last week and — to put it delicately — shit all over them.

It was inevitable. Take a girl who actually hyperventilated at the thought of getting on a bike for the vast majority of the 14 years preceding November 2011, present her with a bunch of new challenges all at once, and she’s eventually going to crack. Today was just my day to crack.

There were a handful of us clipping in for the first time, and another handful who were still pretty new, so our coach hung back to ride with us. I thought that would be awesome. Instead, it turned into a long session exposing all of the things I do wrong on the bike, and — god, why am I even writing this on the internet? — at one point I ended up crying on the side of the Paradise Road ride I’d totally dominated less than a week earlier.

I’m not proud of that. And I am proud of a lot of things that happened today, e.g.: I rode my bicycle clipped in! For kind of a long time! And I dealt with stopping and starting in traffic, and I even figured out that just because I can never get my left foot clipped in fast enough, I can just ride kind of on top of the pedal and eventually it will work out.

But. Buuuuut. I was kind of in a good place with riding, last week. I’d cobbled together this weird way of doing things, sure, but it worked. Today felt like being asked (or forced) to change too many things too fast, and now I’m feeling angry and resentful of biking and cyclists and the day I decided to do a triathlon. It will pass, but ugh.

It’s novice-cyclist-ranting-on-the-internet time! Ready? OK!

Here’s the list of all the things I do wrong. I don’t come off the saddle to start or stop; I just lean to the left and get my toes down. I ride in my drops almost always and hate being up on the knobs. I brake too much. I know these things. Some of them I’d like to fix; others, I don’t really see what the big deal is. Maybe someday I will see what the big deal is, but right now, look: I am 5’1″ and I buy my mittens from the kids’ section of REI and there were approximately three bikes in this whole damn city that were small enough for me to even test-ride. I am used to hacking lots of things about my life to make them work for me, so I didn’t think twice about doing the same for riding.

On Thursday, when I bought my shoes, I rode on the trainer in the shop for a bit, and the guy who was helping me was horrified that I was riding in my drops almost exclusively. He told me I needed to start sitting up, and I’d have better control that way, and anyway, didn’t my hands go numb all the time? (Foreshadowing!) I said no, my hands don’t go numb, and actually, I thought I’d like riding on the knobs but I feel like I can’t reach the brakes well enough. He said, “Oh, I can fix that,” adjusted my handlebars up, and sure, on the trainer, it felt good.

But in the actual world, on a road with cars and OMG CLIP SHOES, I still wanted to ride down. It’s where I’m comfortable. It’s where I know I can stop. And so when we started today, I just rode how I always do — and rode myself straight into the same lecture about riding up, this time from our coach. I tried it, I wasn’t comfortable, I went back down. I tried it, I wasn’t comfortable, I went back down. Eventually he went to help someone else, and I was free to go back in the drops.

Except: With the handlebars at their new angle, my hands went numb within five minutes.

Plus, at every intersection I was getting a speech about starting wrong. And I was attached to a bicycle. And my left foot was going numb inside my shoe. And every time I stopped, I’d ride what felt like a mile with only one foot clipped in while I kicked my left foot around like a flopping fish. And people kept saying, “Isn’t it sooo much better to ride clipped in?” and I knew yes was the right answer, but my hands were numb and I was riding in an uncomfortable position because of that and everything sucked and finally I just had to pull over and stop and shake it out. And at that moment, my coach rode up and said, “See, I told you your hands would go numb riding like that.” And I was done.

I get that I should ride up more. I get that I should stop and start differently. I do. But getting me on a bike at all requires some concession to where I feel comfortable. I’ve been happier in the drops since the day I brought Penelope home. It took me a frustratingly long time to consistently start and stop without panicking, and the way I do it isn’t “right,” but see, it’s still a freaking miracle every day that I get on a bicycle.

I’m happy to do the work. I’ll ride up for 10 minutes of every ride until I get comfortable with it. I’ll try to start differently at one start every time I go out. But I can’t just change things all at once. That’s not me. I have to ease into it. I have to do it when I’m ready. And today I was ready for exactly one new thing, and that was the clips, and everything else will have to wait.

But hey: I didn’t fall! So there’s that. And my handlebars are back in their normal position. And it’ll be OK.

I really thought this story was going to go, “OMG! I fell over at a stop sign! But then things were awesome.” It’s funny that neither part of that turned out to be true.