So what are you doing for the long weekend? A hike? A scenic bike ride? An awesome music festival that used to be the highlight of your year when you were a teenager, but has since gone up in price by three-fold and now seems like way too much effort for what it’s worth? (That’s a reference to Seattle Bumbershoot Festival, which was the four day end-of-summer extravaganza for everyone that started school the following Tuesday in Seattle).

I have no desire to go out this weekend. If anyone wants to hang out, they can come over to my house. They just have to leave by 8pm so I can get ready for bed. Do I sound like a senior citizen? Believe it or not, I’m actually enjoying myself the past week and a half that Victor Plata has been here. Just training with somebody is a lot more enjoyable than my normal athletic solitude. Brian Davis has been showing up to some of our swim workouts, as well, and it seems his broken clavicle has finally healed, because I can’t seem to drop him off my feet.

I’m learning a lot. My reading list (which I have been working to shrink down since Peter and William at the institute of new medicine let me borrow a stack of books on eastern medicine) has suddenly grown to the largest it has been since I was taking classes a year ago. This is a good thing, because now I have a good excuse for why I haven’t read anybody else’s blog in weeks.

Ok, that’s my update, now for a story.

Black Barley. This is a nickname for something that should be called, "takes forever to cook and will make tomorrow suck." My dad brought this product home one day last week and seemed anxious  to try it. He made chicken thighs and black barley. The cooking process started at 5:30 and it was estimated that food would be ready at 6:30. At 7:30 the grain was still a little more chewy than any of us would like, but we just decided that must be how it’s supposed to be. I was starving, and Victor and I both had substantial portions.

Fast forward to swim practice. I had to get out twice. I was happy we rode on the trainers so I had a bathroom nearby, and when I went for a short run I couldn’t believe how good the bushes looked. I’m just glad Big Leaf Maples are indigenous to the Northwest because their leaves are quite soft.

There are certain people that have criticized me for eating a lot of fibrous foods, and it’s true that I really enjoy cooking greens like Kale, Collards, Chard and Mustard Greens. I even like bran cereal and grape nuts, but I have never had anything quite as disruptive to my day as black barley.

Tuesday I had this bright idea that after a long hard workout I would go hang out with a friend in a boat on Lake Washington. There’s not a lot of activity involved in this, but I did have to go to the gas station, help carry gas tanks, help prep the boat, dive in the lake, sit in a hot tub… you get the point. It was fun. Victor, meanwhile, had done similar training in the morning, but had spent his day relaxing, self-massaging, eating, drinking water… you get the idea.

When I got home he asked me how I felt, and I answered honestly, “great.” The next morning however, I was dragging my butt. Everything was supposed to be easy, but even the easy swim hurt. Swimming doesn’t hurt me! I’m not supposed to hurt on an easy swim! We finished out workouts and Victor asked how I felt. I answered honestly, “horrible.”

That was my first “learn from experience” lesson from my new coach. The lesson is": when you’re just getting used to a new training program, get as much recovery as you can.” and more importantly, “recovery is recovery.” Which is a little different than my previous philosophy, “if it doesn’t hurt, it must be recovery.”

Wednesday I took a slightly different tactic. After telling Victor how I felt I did my normal eating stretching and DVD watching routine, and kept my feet up, and ate more food, and took a nap. This morning I felt awesome. I got up on the first beep of my alarm, I had one of the best swim workouts of the season, and I was smiling through it all. I even got to beat up Victor on the bike, which was great fun.

Tomorrow I’ll feel great because I recovered today. I learned my lesson.

I’m currently watching the Democratic National Convention. C-Span is way more tolerable than the other channels because there is no commentator. I don’t understand why they pay people to talk about nothing during the breaks. They’re just talking heads. I’d rather watch Superbowl commercials.

In January Victor Plata (far right back row) invited me to race in Brazil with him and Matt Chrabot. I didn’t really know either of them, but over the course of five days in South America we were able to get to know each other pretty well. Victor has been racing ITU for 10 years, and had a wealth of knowledge and stories. Speaking to him was like flipping through an encyclopedia of triathlon. When I came home we stayed in touch, on-and-off. So in June when Victor graduated from Law School and told me he was going to start coaching – it got me thinking. I get along very well with Dr. Mike, and I was very successful under his instructions, but I am also eager to learn from someone who has actually done the races I’m going to, and who has succeeded at the level I want to be at. It was a sad farewell, but I’m excited for Victor to take over as the new CEO of bc.org. (which is my dorky way of saying he’s my new coach)

I started working with Coach Plata this week. He arrived in Seattle Wednesday night to show me in person how to train under him. This week was equal to my highest mileage week for running ever, and my highest volume week in the pool since I was in college. I’m totally wiped. I feel good, and I’m sleeping gloriously, but I also have no desire to up my social schedule. Actually, I haven’t even seen my friends in Seattle yet, and I was gone for most of the past three months.

Ugh I have to get work done, but I’m tired.

Sunday I raced in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. It was unusually hot before the race, which had me a little nervous, but as a storm approached the heat dissipated a bit, so by the time we started it was below 90 degrees.

The swim was a beach start into Okanagan Lake. (as a geographic aside, Okanagan Lake is 60km long, and is home to the Ogopogo.) I stayed with the leaders for the first lap, but lost feet on the second lap, and fell back. I really like leading the swim, and this is the second time I’ve missed the front pack. Basically I either need to start swimming again, lose the ego, or – more likely – both.

So out of the water I was about 35 seconds behind the leaders, but still ahead of the chase pack by enough that I came out of T1 having to decide if I should sprint to the people in front or wait for the people behind. I started off strong, but realized there were only a few in front of me, and a lot behind. I let them catch up and we ended up catching the next group a lap later. The course was six laps with one big hill on each lap (8% for 600m), and not many technical corners. At the end of the 2nd lap we were in a group of about 10 guys, with three more 40 seconds ahead, including Daniel Wells and Brent McMahon. We finally closed the gap on the fifth lap, and the pace came to a halt. We had minutes on the rest of the chase packs, so there was really no incentive for anyone to ride hard.

  On to the run. 4 flat laps around the waterfront park. It was really nice not to run out and back like I have at almost every other ITU race I’ve done. I had frozen this water-holding neckerchief that my mom gave me, and put it inside my hat in T2. It was in case it was 100 degrees like the day before, but I figured that since it was there I might as well use it. I think I heard fans making fun of me for my red neckerchief, but it really did work to keep me comfortable.

I was a bit nervous about the run, since my training before the camp was a bit inconsistent, but I was able to hold a steady pace and beat almost half of the people in my bike pack. I ended up 8th overall, which earned me 116 ITU points, and will bump up my world ranking over 100 places. Hopefully that means better start position at the next race!

Here’s Dave Messenheimer and me. He always seems to have great advice for what I should have done better during the race, which makes me wonder why he was watching me instead of the three guys that beat him.

After leaving the training center on Tuesday I stayed with my best friend since 7th grade, Noah, who lives in Denver proper and works for the National Renewable Energy Labs in Golden. He is the brain behind the newest developments in ethanol production – mainly making it feasible as a source of energy.

His house is called the Tea-House, and true to it’s name, while I was there we made Kombucha, which was much better than the $4 a bottle stuff you can buy at health food stores.

During the day, while he was working, I drove up to Boulder to visit another good friend, Rory, who I know from living in Hawaii. Rory is in the middle of his world tour, but is waiting for summer to begin in New Zealand before he continues. He took me inner tubing down the Boulder Creek, which is the only memory I have of my family vacation to Boulder 15 years ago.

I think boulder is populated by people who don’t work, but have really nice laptops, which they bring to coffee shops to enjoy a soy latte with vegan brownies (my vegan brownie was not very good). It’s a really yuppee town, and while I didn’t really do any training there, I didn’t quite see the appeal of living there.

From there I flew to Seattle, where I wrote last night’s post from the comfort of my own bed. It was the fist time in 50 days that I’ve been in Seattle, but it was not for long. This morning I flew to Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada (I <3 BC) where I was picked up by my host family, the Rule’s. My hosts are really nice people and are trying hard to make me feel at home. It’s working. I took a wonderful nap this afternoon that may be the first good sleep I’ve gotten.

For some reason my Garmin Edge 705 didn’t figure out that I’m no longer up at 1800m elevation, and it tried to convince me that Kelowna was really high up. WRONG! I just checked google, and it’s only 344 meters here. It’s pretty hot though, Sunday is supposed to be 36 degrees when we race at 2pm. That’s 96.8 F according to google, with water temperatures of 24c (75.2F which is wetsuit Illegal). I’m learning to love the heat. It’s becoming apparent that it’s no coincidence that every race I’ve done this year has been unusually hot. The fact is – I bring the heat. I’m not sure if it’s my boyish good looks, my magnetic personality, or my heart-stopping smile, but I am obviously radiating like plutonium.

The Olympic coverage in Canada is much less US-Centric, which is refreshing, until you realize that all you get to see is Canadians losing! I feel bad, they had a few really good athletes and it’s just not working out for our Northern Neighbors.

Still, almost everything I’ve seen of the Olympic coverage has been amazing. Like Phelps .01 second victory in the 100m butterfly, followed by a quick loss of a Canadian woman wrestler.

Speed-walking is amazing in a different way. It’s not very original to make fun of the sport of speed-walking, but seriously, why is it in the Olympics? They have a rule that you must always have one foot touching the ground, yet judges are not allowed to use video playback to verify. They “walk” in a pack, so judges have no clear sight of everyone’s pair of feet, and they don’t have judges watching each athlete all the time. I figured they were probably pushing the limits, but I was way off. Coming back from a commercial the Canadian Broadcast Channel showed a slow motion clip of the “walking” group. It was just a short intro back into the regular coverage, but it showed about four steps. All three athletes visible in the shot made obvious leaps. There was NO question that those three “walkers” had BOTH feet off the ground between strides. Why is a sport in the Olympics where the object is to cheat discretely? That is infuriating to me. It’s like making a rule that doping is illegal, but, rather than testing athletes, they have to be caught in the act.

And not even a full half day. More like most of a night, actually. I have an 11.5 hour layover in Seattle tonight, so I’m sleeping in my own bed before driving back to the airport and heading to Kelowna for a race this weekend. I was really excited for a race in the northwest (southwest if you’re Canadian) because it would be nice and temperate. Last year it rained, which would thrill me. This year it supposed to be 100 degrees. It seems there is a heat wave following me around the world this year.

I’ll try to find internet when I get to Canada so I can write about my adventures in Boulder and Denver the last couple of days. It’s been fun.

Above is John Dahlz inside the OTC Caf’. I miss that place already – especially Flower, who told me to come back soon, then handed me a scramble that was made with pure love.

Saturday was the USA Triathlon National Junior Championships, held here in Colorado Springs.

This is Peter Mallett and me working hard out on the course. I don’t want to say the event wouldn’t have happened without us, but it certainly wouldn’t have been us much fun.

This is the Junior Girls (women?) rounding the final swim buoy. The leader was Lauren Goldstein-Kral by about 30 seconds. She’s been in this camp at the Olympic Training Center with me, and I expected this type of performance after seeing her swim a 19:30 1500m time trial one morning. She had only been at altitude for a week.

This is Lauren starting the run with a 50 second lead over the next person.

This is Kate Ross, 50 seconds behind Lauren. She’s also part of the Elite Development Camp here in Colorado Springs. She had a group on the bike, and they still lost 20 seconds to Lauren’s awesome TT abilities.

Kate, however, can run like a cheetah. She took down Lauren in the first 5k and extended her lead by (as my roommate Kevin Collington says), “a shit ton.” (He also asked me to add in that a “shit ton” is the time equivalent to a ton of bovine manure, or about a minute and fifty seconds.)

Here’s Kevin Collington helping to clean up some broken glass in the hallway after an unnamed triathlete knocked a picture off the wall. I don’t want to say the picture wouldn’t have fallen without kevin, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.

That’s it for now.

Kelly Dunleavy wrote an article on Bohemian.com about the environmental impact of triathlon. Many of us think that we’re green just because we ride bikes, but that is far from true. Kelly’s insight into  the reality of the state of sport is a little troubling. I know that 5430 sports has put on a couple of events which were advertised as being carbon neutral. I haven’t been to one, and I’m going to take their word for it that they were in fact able to achieve their goal. The other 2500 races in the US alone, however, are probably not even close. Just think of the ITU races where they require water stations to pass out fresh bottled water to the elite athletes in order to ensure no banned substances are given to the athletes. That’s pretty far from carbon neutral.

I don’t want to repeat what Kelly wrote so elegantly about, so please take a look at her article.

If that doesn’t convince you to read it, she also quotes both me and Chris Lieto.

I posted on the Garmin website today.

Really really good. The Olympic Training center has a cafeteria that serves a huge selection of healthy foods. It’s open from 7am until 9pm, so pretty much any time I want to eat. I’ve actually decided the only way to do justice to the oasis of culinary goodness that is the training center’s Caf’ is to describe it though a story.

The night I arrived at the OTC I was pretty hungry. I had been traveling for ten hours on nothing but diet sprite and a chef salad. It was 11pm, and the cafeteria was closed. At night there are ample supplies of cereal, instant oat meal and fruit, so I grabbed a bowl of raisin bran before heading to my room. By the time morning came around I was ravenous. I headed to the Caf’ and grabbed a tray. I started at the entry end of the lineup and grabbed yogurt and fruit, passed the bagels and bread (they have all sorts of stuff to put on it) then poured a small bowl of oatmeal (they always have two kinds of hot cereal, usually steel cut oats and either grits or cream of wheat). Next I grabbed some pancakes with blueberry syrup, plus a couple slices of bacon. My plate was piled up pretty high by the time my eyes fell on the omelette station. I needed to clear space, and quick, so I sat down near a big screen TV and watched the Tour De France coverage.

The omelette station is awesome. Flower is the woman who works there most mornings, and she learned my name after one visit. Now I walk into the Caf’ and she says, “hi Ben, how are you feeling?” (To which I have yet to respond with anything but, “tired”.)

Also on the breakfast menu is a cereal bar (including All-Bran, a few of the Kashi brand cereals, and Low-Fat Granola, which are some of my favorites).

And all that is just the first meal of the day.

Lunch is usually the best meal served. There’s almost always a theme – either Asian or Mexican – plus some standard American and European grub, and the food is always very different. I’ve had chicken Caesar wraps, sushi, tacos, enchiladas, roast pork, bbq ribs, hamburgers, steak, all kinds of grains, fresh veggies, grilled veggies, steamed veggies, and so on.

Dinner is like lunch, but from my experience not quite as good. Always different though.

The two highlights of the Caf’, however, are the grill (slash omelette bar), and the dessert bar. The grill always has grilled cheese, hamburgers (or veggie or turkey or chicken), sweet potato fries (so good), plus a daily special like steak sub sandwich or beef wraps, or stir fry.

The dessert bar is killer. everything baked here is awesome, from the breakfast muffins to the chocolate cake and pie. There’s also low-fat soft serve, yogurt, sorbet and ice cream. I try to limit my dessert intake, but sometimes it’s hard to do. Tonight, for instance, there was coffee cake with blueberries that went really well with my glass of milk, and last night the low-fat chocolate cake and caramel swirl ice cream was begging to be tried.

The last thing I’ll mention is the nutrition labels. They have them on everything in the Caf’. You can make count calories if you want, or make decisions between the beef burger and the turkey burger (the beef is actually lower in fat). Also, when you grab dessert, you know just what the damage is. They even have a sign next to the ice cream that says, “Every athlete has a dream, every choice makes a difference.”

Normally my parents will call me when I’m away from home and tell me about all the wonderful food they’ve had at home. It’s their way of making me a little anxious to come home (and sometimes it works), but on this trip, I could care less. My dad starts describing some salmon dish with veggies, or my mom talks about cookies she bakes and my mind starts wondering. I just don’t care. Food is completely taken care of here. I don’t have to give it a second thought.

(I would totally take pictures of my food and post it if I had a cable for my camera. But I don’t. The picture of the eating area above is all I could find online)