Ben Collins

Tomorrow is my first race of the season, the First Annual Nautica South Beach Triathlon Presented by Toyota.

Tonight was a pasta dinner for all the athletes, hosted by Macca, which was the first I’ve had the opportunity to meet the champ. The pasta was unremarkable, but it was still fun to meet a bunch of athletes from all over the country. This race raised over $70,000 for St Jude’s Children’s Hospital, and I met some of the  big contributors to that.

K-Swiss had a booth set up and the new Ultra Natural Run shoes were selling like hotcakes (I dish out cliches like samples at Costco). I’ve been training in them the past six weeks, and I’m in love. Since I started running my feet have looked like Shrek’s: all blistered with black and blue. The K-Swiss shoes are the first running shoes I’ve been able to wear without having to grow calluses where the shoe rubs funny. Well, I liked my first pair so much I wore it out by running in it for six weeks. I had a newish pair of 2130’s (Asics), so I switched back for a couple runs. Black and Blue all over again! They just didn’t feel as smooth to run in as the K-Swiss.

Katya Meyers and I did a clinic at the race expo today where we talked about transitions. We stood on stage and asked for questions for the crowd of nervous looking racers, and did our best to calm their nerves.

From here on out, I’m going to nail all my transitions.

Miami gave me a loving welcome from the moment I got off the redeye from Seattle Tuesday morning. First, my flight took an extra hour, so I was able to sleep a bit longer, plus none of my bags were lost (there was a bent spoke on one of my wheels, but I can credit that to a rushed packing job). Then I had the pleasant surprise of being picked up by Jesus Gonzalez, who is among my closest friends from college. Unfortunately luck was still on my side, so there was no traffic, and I was only able to chat with Jesus for a short time on the way to the hotel.

The hotel is awesome. I’m staying at the Sagamore - "The Art Hotel" - in South Beach. It’s right on the water, has only 95 rooms, and each of them are suite style one bedrooms. I thought I would be sharing with Matt Lieto again, but he didn’t show, so it’s a Ben Party and nobody else is invited! (Or maybe they were invited and nobody showed…). The first thing you will notice about the hotel is that there is art everywhere. Sculpture and paintings to some extent, but mainly photography. And the biggest photographic displays are a series of nudes taken at this hotel in 2007 by Spencer Tunick (I didn’t link to his homepage for fear somebody would open it at work - it goes to a wikipedia citing). Basically, he had about 500 people pose nude all over the balconies of the hotel. None of it is particularly graphic, and aside from the shock of that many naked people, it’s not particularly great photography - but the shock does add something substantial.

Outside the hotel there are plenty more half naked people, high priced food, sandy beaches, and the ocean. I seriously missed the ocean. Lake Washington, or even the Puget Sound just don’t cut for me.

With that, I’m going to enjoy the beach a bit more.

Last month Chris Lieto stayed with me while he was visiting Seattle. He just released the first two products from his new company, Base Performance, and after hearing about it I wanted to try it for myself. The benefits of the Base Amino were fairly easy to grasp - by adding amino acids to your sport drink you are able to utilize the aminos without first digesting a complete protein. I used Base Amino for a couple of days and could immediately fell the difference. The other product, Base Performance water, was a harder sell. Apparently water molecules will naturally clump together in large groups, which must be broken apart before they can travel through the aquaporins that transport water across the cell membrane. Chris  boasted that Base Performance Water had been treated through a proprietary filtration method that would cause those molecular clumps to break apart, thus making the water more readily able to travel into your cells. Even harder to believe, it takes just an ounce of Base Performance Water is enough to "declump" an entire gallon of filtered water.

Needless to say, I was skeptical. water clumps were not mentioned in my freshman biology class (though I do remember a cool animation of a single water molecule doing a tango through the channel of an aquaporin), and - while I haven’t taken the course yet - I haven’t seen it on the Biochemistry syllabus. Thus, I decided to commission my mom to help me conduct a test. Sure, a larger study with definitive metrics would be ideal, but my goal was to see if I could feel a difference between filtered water and filtered water with Base Performance water added.

The Test: Over the course of three weeks I kept a jug of water on the kitchen counter. My mom refilled it, so I never knew if it was treated with Base Water or not. The first and second week were different, then the third week could be a switch back to the first week or the same as the second week. So the options by week were A B A, or A B B.

Observations: I noticed that I drank a lot more water from the jug during the second week than during the first and third weeks. My training was fairly consistent, though the third week was certainly harder than the previous two. I felt best in the third week, but I was a bit broken down in week #1, and was trying to recover while continuing to train at a high level. Week #2 I had a track workout of 8×800 on 2 minutes rest, and I felt terrible. It was the first speed work I’ve done this season, but it didn’t go well at all. In week #3 I repeated the workout with only 1 minute rest, and I hit all my target splits.

Considerations: I’ve had training variations like this before, just based on outside factors. I have been studying hard for the MCATs and have been less consistent with my sleep than normal. The one observation that really struck me as independent of my study and sleep irregularities was the difference in volume of water I drank between weeks 1 and 3 and week 2.

Conclusion: Based on my final consideration, I guessed that my mom had supplied me A, B, A, by week, and that A was Base water. I was right.

Looking back I realize that in week number two I awoke to use the bathroom most nights, but in weeks one and three I did not. I drink water continuously throughout the day, but the amount I take in has to do with how hydrated I am. Much like I naturally drink more in a warm climate, I naturally drank less when I was using Base Water. This translated to fewer bathroom trips at night, faster rehydration, and better recovery.

Comments: My verdict is that Base Water works. $30 for 8 gallons worth of solvent will last most people about a month if you use it for all your workouts, and in the evenings. If you’re training full-time (over 20 hours), or live in a hot climate, it will go by more quickly (My guess is that the benefits are proportional to how much water you drink, so in Honolulu it would make a bigger difference than I observed in Seattle).  The weeks I was using Base Water I drank less, recovered faster, and rehydrated more quickly. If you’re the type of person who works all day, then trains in the evening, I would highly recommend Base Performance Water. When you train late it’s hard to get enough fluids in before bedtime, and if you do, you end up getting up to urinate during the night. Since the Base Water absorbs more quickly, I noticed on the Base Water weeks I could sleep the entire night without getting up (I sleep about 9 to 10 hours a night, so that’s a long time between trips to the bathroom for someone who drinks constantly). The extra rest alone is worth the price to me (and yes, I am buying the product; my endorsement is completely voluntary.).

It has been six whole weeks since I have been out of Western Washington, and I’m getting itchy feet. When I got home from LA in February I was sick of travel and wanted nothing but to be home for a few weeks, where I could get on a regular schedule and enjoy my own space. Six weeks took care of that attitude! I’m ready to get away from the rain, gray, cold (not that cold), and hit up some Miami thunderstorms. I’m packing about a gallon of Hawaiian Island Creations 2x Sunblock (I prefer the spf30), so that my pigmentless skin will survive two weeks in the sun. Sunday I race Chris Lieto and Macca in the first ever South Beach Triathlon.

Over the weekend I enjoyed a few Seattle favorites before I head out. I ran with Club Northwest, rode up Cougar Mountain (enough times to make it worth my while going over there) with Chris Tremonte, and swam a nice 7000 yard workout with Cascade Swim Club. All that translates to a tough-as-nails weekend of training, after a tough-as-nails week of training.

[I've put a lot of thought into how I can appropriately introduce my friend Brandon Basso. There's the basic "bio data" (a term used by our Indian friends at Columbia. Apparently their parents did not think our bio data was sufficient for their daughters): 5'11" 145 pounds, blond, blue eyes, grew up on Long Island (and can't wait to move back east)... None of that really describes him. He's unique, but then I guess you have to be if you graduated in engineering with a minor in English, worked on the Mars Rover, then went back to school for a PhD in Control Theory (translate that as robotics).

Brandon is the kind of guy you can't be mad at. I'm not sure if it's because he's genuinely an honest and nice person, or if it's because he speaks with inflections that make every sentence sound like a question (it's hard to take offense when someone criticizes you through questions: I feel like this would go faster if you were a little less lazy?). Forget it, the Sugar Bowl was a sufficient intro, so I'll turn it back over to Brandon. -ben]

I met Ben in undergrad because we both played a sport and were in mechanical engineering—a pretty rare combination. Ben will not agree with this comparison. I was on the crew team for one year and then decided I did not enjoy waking up at 5am every day to splash around on Harlem River. For this I am forever known as a “quitter”. Being labeled as such should be familiar to anyone who knows Ben and once did something that you no longer do.

I’m now in engineering grad school at Berkeley, and am on the club triathlon team. Good thing engineers, as Loren pointed out to me, don’t have social lives. I spend the majority of my free time training and catching up on Lost episodes now that it’s free online. I guess I could have started any sport when I moved out here—I’ve always been into running, I like soccer and a few other team sports, but triathlon caught me. Triathlon - a sport that constantly strives to eat all of your time, money, and social life, while, in return, making you feel mediocre at three sports rather than decent at just one - was probably not the most practical choice. But I was bitten by the bug, the glitz of the sport, cool looking fast bikes, and the deep-seeded human desire to wear lycra for as many hours as possible in a day.

To all of you out there who do this crazy sport while juggling school, work, family, my hat is off to you. We’ve all had to make some significant sacrifices; I’ve been stuck on season 2 of Lost all semester. So to make life work I’ve had to adopt some guerrilla time management skills.

My day really starts the night before. I put a water bottle next to my bed, lest I wake up with a headache and have to walk all the way to the bathroom to get a drink. I’ve also taken to putting a box of granola on my night stand for reasons I will explain. If I can get 6-7 hours of sleep, I’m pretty golden for working out the next day at 7:00. Alarm #1 goes off at around 6:30. This is the alarm next to my bed—a mere warning shot across the nose of my day. I will hit snooze at least 5 times, unless I have alarm #2 (my cell phone) across my room. It goes off around 6:45 and I am forced to get up or listen to all of “Heaven is a Place on Earth”, possibly the most abrasive thing to hear at that hour. Here’s where the box of granola comes in. I invariably will sit, maybe lie back down, but I force myself to start eating so I don’t have to run on an entirely empty stomach. I admit, I have woken up at 10am with granola up my nose, but it’s pretty rare.

So after a little water and granola I’m out the door. The problem with morning runs in Berkley is that they pretty much always involve going uphill. The other problem is the people of Berkeley. They don’t know how to walk, anywhere, anytime. Without fail I will run up behind two or more people completely blockading the sidewalk. I will give a firm “ahem!” and slap my feet a bit harder as I approach. At best, the morning fitness walkers will move from their stable, blockading pattern, to a chaotic one, making it even more difficult to pass; at worst they will continue to sip their Peet’s coffee, remaining oblivious. This kind of frightens me because I feel like it translates to their driving as well—another thing the people here seem to have difficulty mastering.

Now I typically spend the first half of the run thinking about nothing in particular, but if there is anything they’ve learned how to do well, it’s multitasking. I’m not saying I’m like the people at the gym who study on the exercise bike, or pretend to study while checking people out. I just like to keep the momentum going once I get back home, so I think about what I need to pack - will I be working out later? If so, should I make an extra PB&J (remember, I have no money)? Do I have any early meetings? Will I need to wear more than jeans and a t-shirt? Will there be any free food on campus (remember, I am cheap)? There is nothing that kills my spirit more than packing a lunch and eating it, only to find there was a career fair or town hall meeting with free pizza.

As soon as I get back home, I will make coffee, start undressing, and put toast in the toaster for my sandwich at the same time. Shower, shave, back to sandwich making/eating breakfast/listening to NPR/having a semi coherent conversation with Deena and Zoe, my roommates. It’s a good thing all these activities require different portions of my brain, but sometimes I overload myself and give Deena my toast when she asks me when I’m coming home, or for some reason, put a banana where I keep my razor and put my razor in the fruit bowl.

Like other readers of this blog, I bike commute every day. I tell people this is to offset my (or their) carbon footprint—major bonus points in Berkeley. I really do it because I don’t have a car. My bike is a 1980’s Cannondale black lightning. It actually says black lightning on one of the chain stays, I kid you not. This was about 75% of my reason for buying it, as well as my intolerance for wasting precious time walking to campus, or even worse, waiting for the AC Transit bus, which has neither a schedule nor a notion of the very foundation of public transit—moving lots of people from A to B. For this reason, riding to campus is one of my favorite parts of the day; it makes me feel as if I’ve stolen back time that Berkeley has tried hard to waste for me. While some fellow bike commuters may be preoccupied with defeating other commuters, I’ve moved on to beating busses. This is actually not that hard because they stop every other block, but I still derive immense satisfaction from beating the very system put in place to make commuting more efficient for people. Take that Berkeley.

In addition to putting to shame the poor excuse for a transit system, I also get in a bit of bike practice. I’ll cut turns like I’m in the break of a big-deal crit. I get into my drops and sprint to make lights. I do track stands, and quite well. This is also a great time to get in some drill work—stomps, high cadence, one leg, etc. It’s a good thing that a lot of people in Berkeley walk around talking to themselves or playing imaginary instruments, otherwise pedaling with one foot might seem odd. I think I just about fit in.

So when I get to my office, I’m usually pretty sweaty. My lab-mates are use to this, and don’t ask questions anymore, they just judge quietly. Before they even get a chance to say good morning, I’m out the door again, probably late, with both pant legs still rolled up. I have actually gone entire days, 9-5, without taking the precious few seconds to roll my pant legs down and avoid looking like a fixed-gear riding, chrome messenger bag wearing hipster.

One very vital part of my day, and anyone’s day, is eating. Anyone working out more than once in 24 hours knows how important it is to eat well, and at the right times. People who vales their friends and R&R will take time for a proper sit-down lunch and dinner—I don’t. Some days I will do 100% of my eating while walking to and from class. On less busy days I’ll eat in my happy little cubicle. I even once had an entire meal of GU (I was desperate and short on digestion time). Rubbermaid should sponsor me; I probably have 90% of my meals out of Tupperware. But that’s ok; I don’t miss relaxing meals too much. The satisfaction gained from knowing that I saved a half hour by shoveling-down cold leftover pasta and a bag of tuna far outweighs the cost. By the way, did you know it comes in bags now?—a lot easier to open than a can.

So clearly my life is being held together by Tupperware and coffee. It’s also being held together by two remote bases of operation: my desk and my gym locker. My desk has enough supplies to sustain me for 10 days. Granola bars, water, extra clothes, it’s all there. I also have one of those stretch cords which I take out every now and again to get in some swim strength work. I think all of this stuff sometimes makes my lab-mates wonder—“Brandon, why do you have a pair of boxers, a granola bar, and surgical tubing in your desk drawer?” –It makes a lot of sense once I explain it all. My gym locker is pretty much the same story, just with shampoo and deodorant. Both of these locations are extremely important, because there is nothing worse than forgetting something and having to bike all the way back home and all the way back.

One would think that with such efficiency, I would be entitled to some serious downtime. This is not the case. I just find more and more places to cut the fat out of my day. It’s a vicious vicious cycle. And let me tell you, once you have your first GU dinner, ingesting 400 calories in mere seconds, its a slippery slope to similar activities: eating entire meals on the bike, stretching while in meetings, composing entire stories in your head while on a run, and writing them down with sweat dripping all over the keyboard, while simultaneously replying to emails from the person expecting those stories – who is exactly the type of person who should empathize with the author of the aforementioned hypothetical stories – but who can’t understand that I’m busy sometimes.

Yesterday I took an extended break between my Physics and Verbal sections and threw on my old Ironman Stealth wetsuit (my new helix isn’t here yet and I left my old one in San Francisco), plus my new Blue Seventy skull cap and swim socks, and I headed out for a little Lake Washington open water swimming. The lake this time of year is empty, and since the snow storm has passed, it was nice and sunny. A gorgeous day for a swim, even with 47 degree water.

Actually, with all the accessories the water really wasn’t so bad, and since the winter has been unusually cold, all the lake weeds are completely dead, and I could see the bottom (about 5ft down). Without the hundreds of wake boarders, water skiiers, inner tubers (they’re the worst), fishermen, and yachts out the swim was far more enjoyable than my summertime excursions, despite a numb face and hands.

Alright, so I promised to post Brandon’s article about time management, but I didn’t find time to write a proper into (he deserved better than his own self deprecating story of salty coffee). So I’ll put it up early tomorrow morning.

I’m sitting at home today taking a practice MCAT, which means I have nothing to write about. Instead, I am going to show you a preview of the treat I have in store for tomorrow. My friend Brandon Basso, who is a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Cal, wrote an article about time management. It’s long, so I instead of writing a long intro when I post it tomorrow, I’m going to post an email I received from Brandon about a year ago. It explains a lot. -Ben

So you guys might find this story funny.  I’m a pretty big coffee drinker but since i moved to my new place about two months ago, i hadn’t had a single good cup of coffee.  Every time i tried to make one, it would start out tasting ok but then would get really salty and gross.  I had cleaned out my coffee maker and at first thought that I may have left some soap inside.  So i completely disassembled it and cleaned it again–no luck, still salty coffee.  This was bothering me so much that one morning ( I have to teach Matlab discussion every day at 8am) i actually threw my coffee cup at the sidewalk, and yelled something like "[not appropriate for ben's blog]"–i was pissed.  So the next logical thing to assume was that an oxide had formed on the inside of my stainless steel coffee urn and was reacting with the coffee.  This is plausible because coffee is acidic –> reactive, and it would explaining the time delay in the salty taste since reactions take time.  So i cleaned my cup out as well, but no luck, so i resigned myself to drinking salty coffee for the past few weeks.  Last weekend i was home making some breakfast with my roommates.  Just as I was spooning some sugar into my coffee cup, Deena commented, "you put salt in your coffee?"  yes folks, salt in my coffee.  I almost never stir, its just not my style, so this explains the time element.  I had in fact gone through 1 pound of coffee and a crap load of salt.  I actually went through so much salt that i distinctly remember Deena commenting about a month ago, "we really go thought a lot of salt" to which i replied "hmmm, never seen the salt."  Let this be a lesson to you all: don’t stay in school, you get stupider.  on the plus side I’ve rediscovered good coffee and have switched to brown sugar, just to be sure.

I’m going back to competitive swimming. Friday and Saturday nights I was able to watch the NCAA Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships in Federal Way. I missed seeing the one event I really cared about seeing, thanks to the dilly dallying of a delinquent friend (it was actually another friend, but since Chris drove I figured thank him with a link). I also missed the mile by being late the second night, but, really, who cares about distance swimming?

Here were the highlights of the meet:

1. 100yard freestyle - World Records are cool. (40.87)
2. 200 fly - NCAA records are cool too. (1:41.something)
3. 10m diving - Far more exciting to watch the hot tub sitters when their mistakes actually hurt.
4. Hearing Brian tell me for the 100th time that he is no longer pursuing the sport of triathlon, and will be returning to "the greatest sport known to man". (I’m going to skip pointing out the obvious flaws with this, like how it’s hard to judge a sport you’ve never actually put any effort into [tri implies there must be something besides swimming and cycling], or how people like me and Brian only ended up swimming because we were too clumsy to play soccer, too short for basketball, and too smart to play football [that's a joke - see? smiley face!]). I agree with his sentiment, swimming is an awesome sport, I’m sure I could still improve from my previous bests, and I’m ready to find out just how much.

That’s right. I’m done with Triathlon. I would say I’m throwing in the towel, but to be honest, I’ll need that towel much more often when I’m competing in a real sport. (Also a pure sport, unlike the mutt collage of mediocrity that we call triathlon.) In the combined words of Eric Cartman and Towlie, "Screw you guys, I’m going to bring a towel." (that really seemed like it would be a more effective quote before I started typing it.)

Here is why multi-sport is a waste of time:

1. Sport is about pursuing personal excellence, how can we do this if we make sacrifices in every sport we do?
2. Being skinny does not help in the mosh pit at a Black Sabbath Reunion concert.
3. Spandex.
4. Saying "Sorry I can’t go skiing, I have a five hour bike ride" and thinking that’s normal.
5. When did coupon books to Performance Bike become more appealing than Victoria Secret Catalogues?
6. When did $6000 for a bike begin to seem reasonable?
7.  Triathlete Blogs
8. Age Group Triathlete Blogs
9. A Blind guy asks you to race with him, then six months later decide to go to the same race that you’ll be doing, but doesn’t even ask if you want to be his partner again because he’s become so famous he doesn’t need you anymore… (is there an emoticon for crying?)
10. 4am is a time for last call, not a wake-up call.

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Today (Tuesday April 1st) is Troy’s birthday (my cat). That’s not a joke.

But everything else in this post is.

Happy April Fools!!!