It’s one week until Olympic Trials in San Diego. If you’re paying attention, you may have noticed that I’m not on the start list. A lot of people are paying attention, so I figured I would post a quick explanation of what’s going on, how the situation came to be, and what I hope to happen in the next week that will ensure I get to start the race.

Prior to the release of the San Diego start list, I was operating under the assumption that the International Triathlon Union (ITU) would be creating the start list according to the 2011 World Championship Series results. Under this method they would take the top 30 athletes interested in racing in San Diego according to their ranking on the WCS results from 2011. This was the assumption that I made based on information received from USA Triathlon, as well as the fact that the ITU website listed the 2011 rankings as their most current WCS rankings. The start list for these races is filled by taking the first 30 from the WCS rankings, then filling the remainder from the ITU points list, which is a point ranking that reflects all ITU races and extends from year to year. Last year I did very few races that contribute to the WCS ranking, so I was always planning to get in as one of the 40 athletes selected from the ITU points list. I raced early in the year and got my ranking up to the 40′s. This, I felt was high enough to ensure a start in San Diego so I stopped racing and focused on training. USAT seemed to be thinking along the same lines and they affirmed my decision. By the time the start list was created my rank had slipped ot the 60′s, but with 70 athletes on the start line and not all of the top 70 athletes in the world asking for a start it seemed safe that I would get in.

Wrong.

Instead of using the 2011 WCS rankings, the ITU chose to use the 2012 rankings. How can they use a ranking from a series that hasn’t started? Well, last year there was a race in Yokohama, Japan, which was postponed because of the tsunami. It was held a week or two after the World Championships in Beijing and at the last minute they decided to count the points toward the 2012 series, instead of putting them into the 2011 series post-finale. Now, the issue with that is that many of the top athletes didn’t race in Yokohama. Some were protesting holding a race in questionable waters, but most were just done racing after Beijing because they were ranked high enough not to need to race anymore. So while the top 30 on the ITU points list is almost identical to the top 30 on the 2011 WCS rankings, The top 30 finishers in Yokohama are very different from the top 30 on the points list.

What all that means is that instead of getting in as the first 30 from the WCS rankings, the top athletes in San Diego got in as the next 40, off the ITU Points list. The WCS Rankings drew in some athletes with very low ITU Points List rankings (as high as 180th). So the athletes chosen for San Diego were very different than expected, and the easiest way to get in would have been to race in Yokohama. It turns out I wouldn’t have even needed a very good result in Yokohama to get in to San Diego because not all of the top 30 finishers in Yokohama signed up for San Diego. Regardless, I was injured at that time, so I couldn’t have raced had I known they were going to use the race as the primary qualifier for San Diego.

Knowing that Yokohama was being used as the primary qualifier for San Diego would have changed my approach this spring, however. I could have race another continental cup and had my ITU Points LIst ranking back in the 30′s or 40′s at the time the list was created. It would have been pretty actually. I already have a Brazilian Visa and there were two races in Brazil after I got back from Mooloolaba.

Instead, I found myself in 10th on the wait list when the start list was created. As of Friday, I’m 4th on the wait list. Greg Billington is 1st on the wait list which means when I roll on I’ll be the eighth and final American.

Notice I say “when”. It’s only a week out, but I’m planning to race. I’m in San Diego now, I’m ready to race and when four people on that start list drop out – for whatever reason – I’ll be ready to go. The meeting is Wednesday, if anyone is missing, I’ll be there to take their spot. Hopefully the list rolls a bit more after this weekend. I’d like to know for sure that I’m racing as soon as possible, but I’m confident that it will move and I will get to race. So confident that I’ve invited a posse of friends and family to come watch. I don’t intend to have the biggest cheering section at the event without someone to cheer for.

I won. The race course was completely new for 2012. It was in a place called the Asia Country Club, which is a golf course with condos in the middle of a moonscape of sand dunes 100km south of Lima.

The start line was about 100m from the edge of the water and it was one of those beach swims where it doesn’t get deep for a long time. The first buoy was way to the right and I started on the far left side of the line. So, I let everyone else run straight into a set coming in and I ran down the beach to the right behind them to enter the water in a channel where all the water from the set was pushing out. I was the last one in the water but was right in front once I got past the waves. I led the swim but just missed a wave on the way in. I ended up exiting behind a few people on the run out. I passed them all in T1, which was an 800m run. It was such a long T1 that they gave us boxes by the beach where we could leave our wetsuits so we wouldn’t have to run with them in the heat. That was nice. (Speaking of wetsuits, a brief shoutout to the designers at Blue Seventy, I was really impressed with the new Helix. It’s the first time I don’t feel like I need to adjust how I hold my body to accommodate for the extra buoyancy. Good job guys, that’s suit’s fast!)

I was first onto the bike and thought the guys with me would be motivated to push hard since the group was really strung out behind us. I thought at most we would have 5 guys if we hit if from the line, but the crew was unmotivated. They seemed more interested in waiting to see what other people did than to determine the race themselves. I got pissed. After a couple hard pulls it was clear that nobody wanted to make a race of it. We climbed the hill for the first time, which came about 2-2.5k into the lap. The hill was ~15% for 200m, then a false flat upwards for another 300m, then a technical descent with 4 hairpins then a hard left right into transition.

I love descending.

I stayed 3rd wheel up the climb then put it in the big ring on the false flat and put some elbow grease into the pedals. I sailed past the front of the group. Nobody was interested in my suicide mission. I wanted somebody to go with me, but they just acted like I was being dumb. (Not saying they were wrong, but haven’t you ever heard of dumb luck?) I got to the top of the descent with <5 seconds on the group and had 20 by the time I went through transition at the bottom of the hill.

2nd lap: The wind was killer for the flat section and I was pissed that nobody was with me. I tried to get as small as I could, but the officials had asked me to remove my mini-TT bars because they were too long (my own fault, I was trying to get away with more bar than is legal). I just perched on the bars, it worked well enough. The hill the second time was manageably painful.

The third time hurt. A lot. But somehow on the 3rd lap I turned my lead from 40s into 1:30.

(Thanks to Allen George, an American living in Lima who did his first Olympic Triathlon the morning before my race. He and his family cheered me on and captured a bunch of great pictures like this one where I’m starting my second climb, still in site of the peloton.)

4th lap I was sure I was popped. The kind of popped you don’t come back from. Like I was going to be walking my bike up the next hill – popped. It was hot… I really didn’t feel fit coming to this race… It hurt… wahwahwah… The nice mental boost was looking at my Edge 800 Garmin that was auto-lapping every time I went through transition. My fourth lap was roughly that same time as the first three. Fifth lap was a bit slower. Sixth was back on target and I had well over three minutes starting the 7th and final lap.  I was in survival mode. I lost a good amount of time on the final round, but still had about 2 and a half minutes over the field starting the run.

I felt completely blown. If I were a betting man, I would have said that I wouldn’t have held on. I had that bad pop song in my head, "You can go HARD or you can go HOME!!" you know the one? it just repeats that line over and over again. It’s pretty bad, but I felt like I’d put it on the line and was about to fall off the ledge. I went hard, right then, I just wanted to go home. Seriously, I was not optimistic. But then suddenly I was 5k in and I still had a lot of time and, better yet, the guys behind me had pretty much stopped gaining time on me. Or they weren’t gaining much anymore. I was lapping people left and right as well, which is always a confidence boost.

I got my head back in the game and thought, "Okay, just hold it together for 5k. Relax, run, nobody can run 5k 90 seconds faster than you." Well, maybe somebody can, but those were my thoughts at the time. I just stayed steady until about 500m to go. I knew I had it locked up so I slowed, started celebrating in the finish shoot, did a round of high fives, walked up to the line and did a BOOYAH. I raced with a lot of emotion and when I crossed that line I felt like I’d proven something. I’m not sure what it is, or to who, but that’s how I felt. I dropped to my knees like I did in NYC, only this time it was by choice. I dropped to my knees, put my head to the sky and shouted, "YEEEEAAAAAHHHHH!!!" Then I threw the banner down, got up, did my interview and hopped on the massage table.

Man it feels good to win.

I would talk more about the other guys in the race, I just didn’t see much of what went on. (The graph to the right helps) I know that Bowden from the UK was running with Taccone and Nogueras from Argentina. I watched them carefully on the run because they cut a huge amount of time out of my lead in the first 2k. The Argentines took 2nd and 3rd in the end. Pretty impressive running by those guys so far this year.

And yes, it’s back, my graphing of races. I wish I had lap splits, it would make this much more interesting. For those who haven’t seen these graphs before, the x-axis is the race winner, the y-axis is the time difference from the winner. Points below the x-axis are a time deficit. Each line represents an athlete, so at each point on the line the displacement from the x-axis is that athletes time difference from the leader at that point in the race. As you can see, the group was about 2:45 starting the run. The positive sloped lines over the run course are of the people who out ran me, the negative slopes are people who did not.

There has been a lot going on in my life. You wouldn’t know if from my blog, but I swear I’ve been writing it all down. Over the next couple of weeks – as my training schedule allows – I’ll be posting my adventures since I left New York at the beginning of January. Everything from my training trip in Puerto Rico with the Columbia Men’s swim team to my recent win at the Lima ITU Triathlon Premium Pan-American Cup to a training camp in South Carolina with the Hincapie Development Team and the great George Hincapie himself. Stay tuned I’ll be posting frequently. You can also check out my posts on the Garmin Connect Blog for some training specific posts and links to my actual Garmin training files.

Stay Tuned.

Training has been going well. I spent the bulk of November and December building back into full swim and bike workouts, and running on the AlterG treadmill so that I could ease back into running on the foot that took me out of my last couple races in 2011. And all of that was terribly uneventful. There have been no setbacks, and my fitness has come back faster than I expected. So by the time the holidays rolled around I couldn’t see a reason to stay in Colorado. Instead I packed up and took 10 days in New York City with Abby’s family. There are three Olympic hopefuls in her family, which leads to a much greater understanding of “I need to go train” during the holidays. Basically I could train full time without ever feeling guilty about missing out of group activities.

One issue I had in planning the trip was in finding an AlterG treadmill for my last week of less-than-body-weight running. I checked out the AlterG website where they have a map of all the places that own Alter-G Treadmills so I started calling every place in Manhattan hoping to find someone willing to lend a hand. Two got back to me right away and said they would love to help me out. Equinox Fitness was first, which is a chain of gyms in New York that offer a five star experience. I walked in the first day and say Kiehl’s products in the locker rooms, models on the elipticals, and at the end of my run I was told I needed to hurry off so that Spike Lee could use the AlterG after me. There was a 25 yard pool, a boxing center, a TRX class was going on followed by kick boxing, and in the next room there was a cycling class lead by Robert Pennino, a triathlete who runs Terrier Tri Team on the West Side. This was the nicest gym I’ve ever been to.

The second place to offer me AlterG time, and where I ended up doing the bulk of my AlterG sessions was Finish Line Physical Therapy on 23rd and 6th Avenue. This was less of an “oh my god it’s Spike Lee” experience, but also less distracting. They gave me so much freedom that I sometimes wondered if anyone even saw me come in. From what I overheard and saw, the therapists seemed really knowledgeable. They used the Trigger Point systems and taught how to use them correctly, which I like because teaching people self-care is a big part of recovery and prevention from future injuries. I didn’t actually have any PT sessions, but if I ever need a PT with a good sport medicine base of knowledge I think Finish Line is the place to go in New York.

To the left is a picture from I ride I did with the president of the Columbia University Triathlon Club. Last summer I tried to be included in the Ivy League Championships, which was contested at the Nautica New York City Triathlon, but they left me out of the results. I guess having Columbia win the title by some 30 minutes would have been a little ridiculous.

We rode to New Jersey and did the same route of my first road bike ride in 2004 with my former college friend, Mark Backman. We go across the GW Bridge (above) then down to the banks of the Hudson. Ride north a few miles, then there’s a climb a little over a mile long. In 2004 I was riding an old Schwinn with down-tube shifters. It was so hard that I could barely get myself back to Columbia. I loved it, and that ride is what drove me to buy a road bike after graduating nine months later. Honestly, had Mark not taken me over there I don’t think I would be a triathlete now. Thanks Mark. This is your fault.

Needless to say, this time was much easier, and not just because of the badass bike that I was riding.

I swam with the Columbia Men’s Swim Team for my week in New York, which was a bit of a preview for ten days I’m spending with them in Puerto Rico for training trip. I rode around central park on my BH road bike, which I recently outfitted with some high end components from Full Speed Ahead and Vision. Then, just after Christmas I got the call I’ve been waiting for since my first day working at Speedy Reedy in 2005… It’s something so exciting it requires a post of it’s own, but I’ll leave you with this teaser photograph of Mojdeh playing with my dream machine.

This was my first week back at my normal training schedule. I’m delightfully exhausted, but the week was rather uneventful. My first ride in several weeks involved my buddy Aaron Trent helping me up a hill by letting me grab onto his jersey. What’s great about this time of year is that every workout is better than the previous. So yes, I had trouble getting up a short mild hill, but Aaron was the only witness, so if none of you tell anyone, then only a five or six thousand people reading this will know.

I also got my first flat of the off-season, which is good to get out of the way. Every year I get a gnarly flat in my first week of training, this year it was a carpenter’s nail stuck all the way through the tire and tube and into the rim of my wheel. Luckily it didn’t do any damage to the frame.

Last noteworthy event is that my parents finally made it to Colorado to visit me. It’s their first visit since I started training here other than when I was in the hospital with some crazy Hawaiian bacteria a couple years ago. It’s nice to have them here, but in some ways it makes me miss being home. Seattle is just such a great city.

I just had an incredible weekend in Los Angeles. It was the final lap of my off-season and I made the most of it. After all the fun I’ve had over the past 6 weeks, I’m exhausted! Delightfully exhausted, and really excited to get back into the grind. The trip to SoCal was prompted by Abby getting an interview at UCLA. Basically I was invited along as chauffer and activity coordinator for a weekend of fun. And it was!

Thursday we walked around Venice Beach and fulfilled our desire to smell some salty air and get our feet wet in the ocean. After that we met up with my college buddy Mark Backman for his birthday party in Hermosa Beach.

Friday morning I drove Abby to her interview, hung out at a local espresso bar for a bit, then met up with Peggy McDowell-Cramer, who you may remember as an occasional guest blogger on this site, a 16-time Ironman, and an extraordinary person who I met at my first Age Group National Championships in Kansas City. She took me to the Westwood pool and we swam together. I was just going to play in the water, but she made me do a real set. In return, I made her finish that set and go faster than she thought she could.

After the swim Peggy made me lunch and we chatted until it was time to pick up Abby from UCLA. From there we checked out Santa Monica’s Pier, rode the ferris wheel, shopped some, and had a Sushi dinner (these are all things we can’t do well in Colorado). The only part of the day that didn’t rock was the LA traffic, which is terrible.

Saturday Abby and I went to the Getty Villa museum near Malibu. There was a Picasso exhibit that showed his earlier works. It was cool to see how he started drawing classic antiquities, then slowly began to dissect his paintings as he developed cubism. The art, however, was not the reason for going to the Getty Villa. The museum itself is gorgeous!

From there we spent some time at the beach in Malibu, had dinner with Peggy and her husband Pat (I finally got to hear the story of how Peggy’s sailboat sank and she spent 15 hours in San Francisco Bay before being rescued. I wouldn’t be able to do the story justice, but I wish I’d had a tape recorder so that I could share it with you. Remarkable.)

Saturday night we went to a comedy show at The Improv in West Hollywood. They sat us in front and we ended up being a pretty big part of the show. The comedian, Ian Bagg,  struck gold, an Olympic rifle shooter, triathlete, the owner of True Religion jeans, Snoop’s agent, and a poor couple on their first date made up the front row of the audience. It was among the funniest standup comedy acts I’ve seen.

Sunday it poured the entire day in LA. We sat around and watched movies in the morning, then went to an organ concert, which was remarkable. The pipe organ at the Walt Disney center (picture on left) is a piece of art in itself. Plus, I never realized how much work goes into playing an organ. It looks like a serious workout, just the foot solo alone was impressive, but playing four keyboards, and fifth on your feet takes an incredible amount of talent. I was impressed.

Again with Disney, the concert was icing. The real treat was to see the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is a sculpture by itself. It was a great way to finish a weekend in Los Angeles. Abby and I were both craving some culture after spending so much time in Colorado Springs, and LA delivered.

Now, back to kicking my butt at swimming biking and running. I’m sick of off-season, time to get faster!

When it comes to analyzing data, I’m a total geek and my Garmin devices are total enablers of this obsession. In an attempt to share the method to my madness I wrote about how I use the data fields on my devices while I’m training. Check out the post over on the Garmin Connect Blog.

This week I reached an agreement with Racermate, makers of Computrainer, for sponsorship starting in 2012. I’ve been training on a Computrainer for a couple of years now, so the partnership is a natural fit. The hard work that’s taken me from an average cyclist to Hy-Vee prime winning cyclist has been overwhelmingly indoors on a Computrainer. In the past I’ve used only the basic functions of the Computrainer, but I’m looking forward to working with Raermate to laern how to use features like Spinscan pedal stroke analysis, real course simulations, and customized workouts. By maximizing my use of indoor power training I’m hoping I can reach a new level of cycling ability next year. Booyah!

[Above: Ben Collins and Mark Fretta riding Computrainers in the Olympic Training Center’s Triathlon Training Room (a.k.a “the basement”)]

I’ve been struggling to blog regularly ever since I got an Apple computer last year. I know it’s a bad excuse, but there’s just no good blogging app for Mac OSX. So today, after over a year of begrudgingly blogging in html, and hating the process of adding pictures and hyperlinks to my posts, I’ve caved in and loaded Windows 7 on my Mac, just so I can run Windows Live Writer – hands down the best weblog writing software around. Hopefully this will help me simplify my Halloween resolution (I couldn’t wait until New Year) which is to write more.

We’re well into the off-season (for me) even though there are definitely still races going on. 5150 Clearwater was cancelled, but there are two World Cups left. I called it a year after Huatulco World Cup. It was my 15th race of the year, and I have been trying to push through a tender foot for a couple months. It’s time to give it some rest and really heal up. Next year is going to be a big one, so to do well it will take a body at 100% going in.

For the next few weeks I’m following some advice I heard years ago but never had the guts to listen to: I’m doing nothing that’s like triathlon. I’m visiting friends, kayaking, sailing doing daily Pilates classes, playing with my nephew, watching lectures on iTunes U and sleeping 10 hours a day (okay that last part is a lot like triathlon training). There’s nothing routine about my days here in Seattle, and it’s really fun. It’s also making me crave the hard training and routine. I’m already counting the days until I get back to the grind.

The Pan-American Games triathlon was a really important race for the US men, as well as the Canadians. That race may have been both our Countries’ last best chance to earn a third quota spot for the London Olympics. The Olympic quota process is a little confusing for most of us, so I’ll try to break it down.

Eight countries get to bring three people to the Olympics, and those 3rd person quotas are given to the first eight countries to have three athletes eligible for the Olympics. All other countries can have a maximum of two quota spots. If you take a look at the Olympic Simulation it makes more sense.

The first five quota spots go to the countries that win their continental championships. So the countries of the athletes that win in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceana, and America all get one quota spot. The next three quota spots go to the 2011 World Championships podium.

After that there are 39 more spots given out by the Olympic Points Ranking, and then a handful of spots are given to emerging countries that wouldn’t otherwise have a representative at the Olympics.

Further, no athlete can earn more than one quota spot for their country, meaning that because Alistair Brownlee won both the European and the World Championships, his World Champs quota spot rolled down to 4th place, which was Javier Gomez. And since Gomez already earned a quota spot at Worlds, it doesn’t matter that he is first on the Olympic Points Rankings, he can’t earn a second spot for Spain.

Now remember that only eight countries can have three quota spots, and those quota spots are dealt out in the order described above. That means the third place person from each country is really only racing against other third place athletes. In order to earn that third quota spot a country must have a third ranked person in the top eight of third ranked people.

Right now, the third ranked American is Hunter Kemper, but he is the ninth or tenth third ranked guy in the world, meaning the US does not currently have a third Olympic quota for London. The eighth place third ranked person is Bevan Docherty from New Zealand, with a little over 2000 Olympic Points to Hunters 14 hundred and change. Manuel Huerta is another 100 points behind that, but beyond that are Kevin Collington and myself with just over 500 points. Meanwhile, Matt Chrabot and Jarrod Shoemaker are sitting in first and second for the USA with plenty of points.

The beauty of the system is that an athlete can earn a quota spot for their country without any previous Olympic Points Ranking at all by winning one of the automatic quotas at continental or world champs. So if a US athlete other than Matt or Jarrod had won the Pan-American Games then they would have earned the first quota spot for the US and Matt and Jarrod are ranked high enough that they would easily secure the second and third quota spots.

Now, the original plan was for Chrabot and Mark Fretta to domestique for Kemper at Pan-Ams, but then Kemper crashed in South Carolina a couple weeks ago and broke his elbow. Manny was the alternate and he did an excellent job. With Fretta and Chrabot’s help he stayed comfortable in the breakaway of 15 men, then ran with Renaldo Colucci from Brazil and McMahon from Canada. Since Canada is in a similar situation to the United States, they were equally motivated for a win, while Brazil is lower in the ranking and Colucci is their top ranked male (meaning his motivation was purely to win the Pan-American Games, with no ulterior motivative). Huerta and Colucci ran together the entire 10k, but in the final sprint the Brazilian took the tape. (I was at home watching the twitter feed and cheering loud enough that even though Manny couldn’t hear me, my neighbors definitely could.) Manny stepped up and did a great job. It was the best we could have done as a country, even if it wasn’t Gold.

Unfortunately what that means is that the US men are in a bad spot if we want to take three men to the Olympics next year. Kevin and myself are realistically too far back with too few races left to get back into the mix. Hunter is still injured, and there’s no telling how soon he will be back to winning world cups. Manny is 700 points behind Docherty, but that’s quite a bit considering that both of them well be racing and earning more points. Manny would basically need to place top 5 in two World Cups that Docherty doesn’t go to, and stay even with him in all the races he does.

And why should Manny go to every race from now until the end of the Olympic Points Qualifying Period? Even if he earns the third quota spot for the US it wouldn’t actually put him on the team. He still needs to be one of the top two Americans in San Diego for that to happen. In 2008 Matt Reed was in the same position, he raced every World Cup he needed to and just barely squeezed high enough in the rankings to earn a spot for the US. He qualified for the US team, but he was toast once he got to the Olympics, and the whole process burned him out on ITU racing. As much as the US wants the third quota spot, I don’t think the US wants to repeat what they put Reed through.

So realistically, what this means is that we’re all vying to be one of the top-2 Americans in San Deigo. If we’re top 2 and in the top 9 we get a spot, if we’re top two outside the top 9 then USAT has some discretion, but how that will play in is pretty uncertain.