When I started the run nobody else was close to transition. I ran for a while before I saw Kyle and Brian come by me still riding, but I wanted to get in a good hard run, so I refused to back off. I pushed it hard enough that I didn’t even notice the Golden Gate Bridge looming in the foreground. It wasn’t until I ran though the small tunnel under the Golden Gate and hit the single track that I started to relax and really enjoy my surroundings. The Pacific ocean was misty with the morning sunlight just shining over the hill making the cliffs light up with glowing dew… It was quite a pleasant run until I dropped down onto Big Beach and realized that the new Tri-California course removed the 1 mile out-and-back section on the beach. With that extra mile in 2008 I had been able to run down to the hard packed sand and let my legs recover some from the hard decent. With the new course, you pop out onto the beach just a short distance from the bottom of the treacherous sand ladder, and there’s no time to run for hard pack. It’s about a minute of slogging through soft sand, which gets your already beaten-up legs to the point of furry, then up the “ladder” which is really just a big sand dune with some buried logs that help with traction. When I did this race in 2008 I had the fastest time up the sand ladder by 12 seconds. This time, I decided to go the slow methodical way - grabbing the ropes on the sides and alternating between walking and skipping my way up the dune. Through all the sand my K-Swiss Kruuz started to get some sand in them through the holes in the bottom (meant to drain water out of the shoes). I was worried, but when left the sand it drained from my shoes as quickly as it had entered. No harm done! At the top I started running again, and was glad for my conservative effort because the “top” of the sand ladder is really only half way up the final hill. As I turned onto the hard pack and continued up my mom was there telling me I had a three minute lead over Leto. At this point, I started smiling. I kept the pace fairly high, but chose to enjoy the last three miles: the Golden Gate, Crissy Field, the single track section and concrete stairs up and over the old bunkers. This is the most scenic and fun race in the world.

I surprised the announcer, who was not yet expecting me when I appeared in the finish chute. I was raising my arms and high five-ing spectators for 100 meters before the loud speaker announced that I was about to finish. So I took my time, smiled, high five-ed more of the crowd, took a bow, and then waited for four minutes to greet Kyle Leto and Steve Sexto (who had a great run) finishing in second and third respectively.

It was a tough race, a beautiful race, and a good indicator of my current fitness. Thanks coaches!!

This is my sister congratulating me after the race. See any family resemblance? Perhaps the smile, or the nose, or the way we squint into the sun? She says next year she’ll do the race - WATCH OUT!!

Me and my 9 month old nephew, Carter. He flew down from Seattle to watch me.

I would write more, but I’m off to the airport with a book bag full of books! I started an MBA program at the University of Colorado this week, and suddenly I have no problem keeping myself occupied. My first three courses are “Leading and Managing in Changing Times”, “Intro to Accounting”, and “Marketing Strategy”. My Management prof seems really cool. Our first assignment is to write a self assessment, in which we point out our own flaws, our goals, our strengths, and how we plan to become better people through self-management and life balance. Step 1 to life balance: enjoy life. (check!)

Next week is the San Francisco Triathlon at Alcatraz, which will be among the most fun events of the season. I could write all about it, but Victor and Terry did a great interview (complete with Ben Collins shout out!) on Comcast Sportsnet (CSN). Check it out:

That’s the new Blue Seventy endurance race kit. It’s amazing! Doesn’t restrict breathing, swimmable, tight around the mid-section (other suits bag up on me), and quite breathable. Plus it’s white and meshy in the back, which is great for summer races.

I just wish running with a mask and tube on a treadmill were a little more natural…

My biggest weakness this year has been my running speed. I’ve been trying and trying to run more with the idea that more is better. If college 10k runners do 80+ miles per week, then that will make me a better runner too, right? I’ve been in this periodic function of volume, injury, depression, excitement, volume, injury… At no point am I “fast” from this cycle. I swim well enough, I can ride with anyone in the ITU (disregard Madrid where I was dropped on the final lap), but when we start running there’s just no speed there. I don’t fade, I just can’t produce the speed I need to win an ITU race from the pack. Coach Victor and I talk about this frequently, and this week he encouraged me to use my USA Triathlon high performance funding to find a running specialist to add to my coaching staff. The search is on!

I’ve been taking advice from the resident swim coach, Mike Doane (also And Pott’s coach), and I talked him into helping me with adjusting my program. Mike has a very similar approach to Victor’s, but with a swimmer-esque twist to it. Given my background, I like the way that twist looks. I’m also planning to talk to Bobby McGee (running mechanist extraordinaire and Boulder resident), and anyone else recommended to me in the Colorado area. I think the biggest gap in my current advising situation is the lack of face-time I have with my coach, so I’m definitely planning to utilize someone local.

The first thing Mike did with me this week was to encourage me to take an unneeded (but completely necessary) day off. This is definitely a swimmer practice, so I’m not entirely sure how it fits into my plan to become more of a runner - but so far I like it. Today is my first complete day off in 2010. Even when I took a “week off” in June I was running every day. It’s nice to just relax.

Tomorrow I’ll start altering my routine as I get ready for Alcatraz in two weeks, then the ITU World Championship Series Grand Final in Budapest on September 11th (my first pro World Championships! Just qualifying was a multi-year process - I’m so excited to even be on the start line!!). Just five more races in the season, it’s time to follow Matt Chrabot’s lead and get serious (after writing this he was 4th in Kitzbuhel yesterday! That’s the best American finish at a WCS race this year - bravo Matt!).

Just to add one more thing about Matt, he’s becoming a pretty interesting writer. He’s a punchy guy who doesn’t care if you love him or hate him (it’s hard to be in the middle) , and who speaks his mind. Add him to your bookmarks, the updates are few, but worth the read. You can also check out this interview.

From the left: Matt Chrabot (51st), Jenna Shoemaker (40th), Chris Foster (53rd), Manny Huerta (DNF), Ben Collins (DNF) - not pictured, Kevin Collington (DNF). Clearly this was not our best effort. We’ll have to make up for it in Budapest next month, but, until then, this picture will be my motivation to stay focused.

So I bought the Aeropress, and it makes AMAZING coffee. It’s smooth, rich, (can be) SUPER strong, and, unlike french press, it lacks acidity and coffee grounds. In short, I like it better than any coffee maker I’ve used before it. So I recommended it to my mom and to Courtenay (who bought one for her mom as well) and a few other people with a need for the easy traveling, no mess coffee maker. Then Courtenay visited me a couple months ago, and she brought her Aeropress - which is made from a different plastic! She ordered hers off Amazon, and I - in an attempt to support local business - purchased mine from a family owned kitchen shop in Manitou Springs. Apparently, mine is from an old stock, and has the BPA in it. I called Aerobie, who makes the Aeropress and the woman sounded surprised that I ended up with the older plastic (mine’s blueish and the new ones are not). I fully expected her to replace it for the cost of shipping, at-most, but she said it would cost $20 (including shipping) for the replacement parts. I told her that I’ve recommended the product to several people, it didn’t change the price. $20? The original cost me $29.99: retail! I told her I thought they should replace them for free since their advertising of BPA plastic is why I purchased the product, but I ended up giving her my credit card info and agreeing to pay $20. So it goes…

Or does it? I was just finishing that last paragraph and trying to decide how I could recommend the coffee maker without having to recommend a product from a brand with poor customer service when they called me back. “Hello, Ben? This is Michelle from Aerobie, I just talked to our manager and we agreed that we could replace those parts for just the cost of shipping.” Sweet! That’s what I expected in the first place! Way to go Michelle! Moral? Wait at least 10 minutes for the company to call back before you post a nasty blog about a company’s customer service. And buy an Aerobie Aeropress if you want a low-cost, zero-mess, zero maintenance, easy to travel with coffee maker - which produces better coffee than machines ten times its price. (I would say 100 times its price, but the one $3000 espresso machine I’ve had the pleasure of using did make a very good cup of espresso - still, the aeropress can compete.) Just double check before you buy that you’re not buying the older blueish plastic (she told me they haven’t made them in over a year). The new ones are grayish, or just clear.

I haven’t spent any time with Rory in a few months, and I was excited to stay in the fancy new apartment he got with his girlfriend Mojdeh. Unfortunately, Rory works in a restaurant and our schedules don’t mesh up well. Over 5 days we saw about 15 minutes of each other.

The training, however, was better than I expected. I swam at Scott Carpenter - an outdoor 50m pool - where I ran into several other pro triathletes. I ran around the CU Cross Country course, and saw some pro runners. I rode up through North Boulder and saw some pro cyclists… It’s strange to me that there are more athletes to train with, and better tromping grounds than the Olympic Training Center. But then again, there’s no Matt Chrabot.

So after a very pleasant week, I gave in to obligation (to get my MBA class schedule squared away, show my face at the Elite Development Camp USAT is holding, and to get free massage) and drove back down to Colorado Springs this morning. On the way I went to Tri-For-The-Cure, a very large all-women’s sprint triathlon with 3000 women competing and raising money for cancer research. Courtenay was racing (just for fun) and I figured it would be an excellent way to recover from the monster training day I did on Saturday. (Note to anyone who suffers from training plan stubbornness like me - if you’re supposed to run off the bike, and it’s over 90 degrees and you just did a long ride up to 9300 feet for the first time ever and you don’t have a water bottle holster - take a nap and run later in the day, that hour-long slog will make you tough, but certainly not fast.) So I played Super Fan for an hour while Courtenay rocked the socks off the elite wave. She was wearing a Wonder Woman suit that was designed by Taigraphx and printed by Splish. The coolest part of her outfit was that it matched her K-Swiss KRuuz perfectly, and after the race she couldn’t stop complimenting my sponsor, “I LOVE these K-Swiss SHOES!!, they’re AMAZING!!” (is it the shoes or just her?) Tai does my suits as well, and I’m a little bitter that my race uni doesn’t look nearly as supremely awesome. Perhaps if Splish starts making men’s triathlon racing apparel (or if the ITU makes their uniform rules less strict) then I can rock a superhero look. But which Superhero am I?

When the race officially started I was flying though the air. I have no idea what was going through my head, I just remember being so focused on getting out fast that when they said “take your marks” it didn’t occur to me that I should wait for a horn before diving whole heartedly into the Serpentine and sprinting for the first buoy. I clearly remember pushing off the dock and seeing everyone else holding back, thinking, “oh crap, that’s going to be a penalty”, then hearing the start horn just before I hit the water. It was only a fraction of a second, but it felt like I was suspended in time.

A false start is rewarded with a 15s penalty. There are times when it seems worthwhile to get the 1s advantage on the way to the first turn buoy, but 15 seconds is quite a while when you realize it only takes two seconds for a break to form out of the first transition

Knowing that I would have 15 extra seconds in transition I decided to push the swim extra hard. I lead for 500 meters, then realized I probably wouldn’t be able to hold that same pace for another 1000 meters. I hopped onto some feet in a tight front pack and relaxed. Swimming with the leaders is never hard once you’re there, and since we were swimming three or more across it was was like riding an escalator, the water just carried me.

In transition the official didn’t seem to expect me there so soon. I stopped and he didn’t start the watch. He looked flustered. I said, “go, c’mon, start the watch, I’m here.” He fumbled around for a moment then started the stop watch around his neck. It was probably four or five seconds after I had arrived and stopped moving, and he made sure to count all the way down to zero. The concentration of adrenaline running through my veins was so high that each second took an eternity. Between each number I felt like I could have swum an entire extra lap of the course, but I obediently stood there gaping at him, wondering if he was taunting me with the slow pace of my 15 second penalty.

The first lap of the bike I rode like Andy Schleck. I closed the nearly 20 seconds (due to the late start of the 15s penalty) in about 3 km. I was riding with Stuart Hayes, who is an excellent cyclist, but when I told him to pull through, he tried and failed. Looking back at my Garmin 705 / SRM power data, I can see that I was riding really really fast. It was four minutes until I caught the leaders. Stuart, who ended up in 8th at the end of the day, thanked me after the race, and complimented my bike strength, which is a small consolation after what happened right after I bridged up to the leaders.

At the end of the first 5km lap Alister Brownlee was riding like a chucklehead. He swerved onto someone’s wheel, took out Peter Croes front wheel, and knocked him to the ground. Peter was laying to the right of his bike. To the left were a bunch of cones and people. I knew I had nowhere to go, and had yet another slow motion moment as I tried to break, knowing that it wasn’t about preventing the crash so much as make it less painful when I hit the ground.

As far as crashes go, it was not bad. I have a few scrapes and bruised hip, but my frequent crashing has helped me learn to crash lightly. I got back up, fixed the chain, started riding hard again, then realized that I didn’t have another monster bridge in my legs. I had also lost my water bottle and was left with only strongly mixed Powerbar Endurance and gels. I waited for the chase pack and helped them to close the 40 seconds they had between them and the leaders. At that point I was in a pack of about 55 men, and things got sketchy on the narrow, poorly coned course. I stayed out of trouble and conserved energy. Every time I saw a familiar face I asked for some water, but all I got were more sugary drink mixes.

We came off the bike and I felt pretty good starting the run. I was sure this would be a good run for me, though with the quality of field I wasn’t sure what result that would provide. I ran right behind Matt Chrabot for the first mile, which is great for me since he normally goes out really fast, while I normally come back in the second 5 kilometers. After that I started feeling much worse. Over the second mile I slowed considerably and started dropping back. I was told by a spectator that I was in 48th place, just before two more people passed me. My stomach was cramping from all the sugar and the lack of fluids, and pretty soon I was struggling to breath. After a kilometer of shallow breathing and ascending pace I realized that my day was not going to get better. I saw Kevin Collington and one of the coaches at the turn around half way through the run and I stopped, explained that I couldn’t breath, then joined them on the other side of the fence.

The DNF never feels good. You have to question whether you could have continued, if it was worth finishing, what you could have done to avoid getting yourself to the point of dropping out. For me, it all goes back to my false start. Had I not done that I wouldn’t have been in a dangerous position when the crash happened (I don’t normally ride boxed in in the back of a pack), I wouldn’t have lost my bottle, I would have been helping the lead pack extend their lead, rather than the chase pack, and I probably would have had a decent run. That said, I didn’t have a lot of fight in me for this one. When my stomach and diaphragm tightened up and stopped me from breathing I felt happy to have an excuse. Perhaps it would have been different if I were running for 15th or 20th or even a 30th place finish, but making myself hurt that bad for a 50th place after everything else that had gone wrong… I just didn’t have the fight.

Me

Katie

Team USA Getting Ready

Jill’s instantaneous happy face. (She’s quick)

Yup, he’s an Olympian…

Hooray!!

Hopefully when I get some of the photos Peter took, they’ll look as pro as him.

Which is slightly less pro than I look.

Jenna Shoemaker and I have cool watches

Ben and Abe. I know President Lincoln is awesome, but I’m not sure why there’s a statue of him here in the UK.

Ben and Kevin. Collins and Collington. We’re awesome too.

Chris Foster. He’s soooo GQ!

Exiting the underground. Photographer in tow.

I let Jill borrow The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. She’s finding it difficult to put down.

Oh NOO!! Parlament is about to be attacked by a homeless robot!!! Somebody! HELP!!!

Look, it’s euro-trash, it’s an American Tourist… NO! It’s Super Ben!!
…
Super Ben and Big Ben. Together at last. The world is safe.