Three sick Weeks

I arrived back in Colorado Springs today. Five days behind schedule. Today is the first day of 2011 that I’m not sick with a fever and a throbbing headache. I went home, got myself some 24 hour virus to enjoy, recovered from that and got a cold for Christmas. About the time I got over the cough and sniffles I came down with a fever of 103 and some awful chills. I spent a night in front of the fire place, scorching my skin and drenching my futon, because it was the only way to stop shivering. I went to Group Health twice, where the first doctor didn’t do any physical exam, but took a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia and sent me home on Tylenol. The second doc felt my glands, took blood and sent me home on more Tylenol.

I suppose taking myself away from the “source of all illness” (pictured below on his Radio Flyer Trike) may have helped the situation, but since my nephew is kind of cute and because my sister is adamant that a child without a cold or a fever can’t give me a cold or the flu escaping the little germ-pot was just not possible.

Finally I was able to see William, one of the guys from Inewmed who now runs his own practice in Edmonds (when he’s not off working for some big name athlete in Europe or Maui). He did a physical exam (he agreed that it was viral), then performed a Chinese Medicine procedure where he stabbed my fingers and bled me. Well, that’s what he did first anyway. He would take my hand, hold a finger, tell me “this will hurt” then take a small pin and jab it in near my cuticle. Then he would use a cotton ball and wipe the blood away rhythmically until the hole stopped bleeding before moving onto the next finger. In total, he did four fingers, two toes, and my SI joint, after which I was ready to stop. But no, the digit punctures were just a warm-up for the thrashing William was getting ready to give me. He starting smacking my back with something that felt like a brass brush, rhythmically, going up and down the sides of my spine.  At first it just stung and I wasn’t sure why he was whipping me. It didn’t hurt particularly bad, but it kept stinging more and more until he had been doing it for four or five minutes and I finally asked, “What are you hitting me with?” “It’s a stick with a bundle of ten needles on the end.”  “Why?” “We gotta get the heat out of you.” Which I guess is Chinese Medicine for “you have a fever, dumb-ass.” I also had a stiff neck, which probably had something to do with the spine work.

After the needling, William fastened a pair of glass suction cups to my back and started pulling blood out. It didn’t hurt, but it looked nasty. Really nasty. I had thousands of tiny pin pricks in my back and a suction cup sucking blood through. Ew. (Though since I really couldn’t see my back, I only got a glance of what he was doing, and my memory of the gore may be slightly enhanced by my imagination).

But… I started feeling better almost immediately after the procedure. My fever came down over a degree from the time I walked into his office to when I left. That night, Friday, I sweated a fraction of the amount that I had been drenching my mattress with the previous six nights, and the next morning I felt almost normal again. Much more effective than Tylenol. I wish I’d been bled earlier!

Garmin for 2011 and 2012!

I’m proud to announce that I will be working with Garmin International for 2011 and 2012! Garmin was one of my first sponsors, and my partnership with them has grown substantially over the past three years. It’s been a lot of fun testing out their products and sharing my stories, both here and on the Garmin Connect Blog, about the adventures they’ve helped me through. Below is one of those stories, but I want to solicit you, my reader, for some stories of your own about how you’ve enjoyed your Garmin devices. If you have a story you would be willing to share, send it to me at garminstory@bencollins.org – I’ll do my best to publish each of them, and if your story is particularly compelling I’ll put it up on the Garmin Connect Blog as well.

A couple of weeks ago in Seattle I decided to join in on a local group ride called the Rocket Ride. It’s a “drop” ride, where local cyclists (and the occasional pro) do their best to hurt each other for about fifty miles of rolling to hilly terrain. Unfortunately, when I showed up there was nobody there because the ride leaders from Herriott Sports Performance were in Tucson for a training camp. Instead I joined in with a group of cyclists from a local team and figured it was all for the best (I hadn’t been on a bike in a couple of weeks after finishing my last race of the season, so it was inevitable that I would be receiving more “hurt” than I could offer). This also happened to be my first time out with the new Garmin Edge 800, and my first ride of the winter season in my super-warm fleece kit from Northwave. The Edge 800 boasts a large touch screen that dwarfs its predecessor, the Edge 705 and allows you to have up to ten (TEN!) data fields on one training screen. As soon as I mounted my bike I looked down at my glove-covered fingers and thought, “oh no, I’m going to have to use my nose for the touch-screen!” WRONG! Even through thick wind-breaker fleece cycling gloves the touch-screen works flawlessly! So I was able to flip between my ten data fields and the glowing, crystal clear maps with just a swipe of my finger. It puts my smart phone to shame.

The ride started off casually. I introduced myself and chatted for a little while about triathlon and cycling and the usual handlebar small-talk. We weren’t doing the Rocket Ride route, so luckily there weren’t any big climbs to wake us up. Instead we meandered through the suburbs and eventually hit some country roads where the guys started rotating through a pace line. Each guy was taking a pull of about 2-3 minutes before pulling off, and you could tell this was the time to casually show off a bit. Now, because I was only in Seattle for a short weekend and was riding my old rain bike I wasn’t wearing a heart rate strap, my bike lacked a power meter, and I didn’t even think to add an Ant+ speed/cadence sensor to the rig. When I got to the front my only gauge of effort was RPE (rate of perceived exertion), which is a subjective measurement that quickly loses its accuracy with every day of the off-season. I felt fine, so I kept the speed set by the pull preceding mine, and ignored the increase in pitch (both of which were displayed prominently on my 800’s screen). After four or five minutes I had unknowingly dropped half the group, and was unaware of the dwindling amount of energy remaining in my no-so-fit legs.

We dropped down into the Snohomish River Valley and proceeded north along the base of the western slopes. The area is still mostly unclaimed by the insidious housing abominations that we call suburbs, and the expansive agrarian landscape is a welcome beauty to the pedal powered recreationalist. The five of us began rotating through a pace line again, only this time there was no showing off. We rotated continuously and kept a strong pace along the flatlands. At some point my mind wandered from the joy of riding in a group and the beauty of the valley to a more urgent issue: food. I had skipped breakfast and had not eaten for the past 90 minutes of riding. This is not a mistake I would make during regular training. I scarfed down a peanut butter Powerbar and soon forgot about the strong possibility of energetic depletion. At some point we turned east and headed to Snohomish, a small town with an abundance of antique stores and a fun little river-walk to attract the weekend tourists. My legs were not happy with me, but my 800 said we were holding a steady pace, and my companions didn’t seem interested in slowing as we rolled right past town and began to head back south toward home. I sucked it up, refused to make excused, and quickly forgot to continue eating. At some point I clicked “return to start” on my 800 and observed that we were still much farther from home than I wanted to be. I was no longer feeling very heroic and when we hit Broadway, a long steady climb that takes us back out of the river valley, I found myself dropped. The legs just wouldn’t turn over any faster.

At a stoplight we regrouped but the short break really didn’t help me. We kept climbing over the hill but as we approached a “Welcome To Woodinville” sign, I found myself dropped again behind those with enough energy to go for the sprint point. I was gone, bonking and too mentally hindered to realize it. Too far gone to remember that I had forgotten to eat for another 90 minutes of steady riding, and we were still 30 minutes from home. A few minutes later we were riding casually (slowly even) along a flat bike path and my legs just stopped turning. I looked at the cyclist next to me and just let out a laugh as he pedaled on ahead – I was bonking. Severely. I was two miles from my house and was wishing I had a cell phone to ask someone for a ride home. “Please god,” I prayed. “Let me get a flat tire so I can hitchhike home.” No such luck. I’d already gotten a flat earlier in the ride and that was the extent of my luck for unplanned rest stops. I was dropped on a flat trail with no wind going 15 mph. BONK!! By people will full time jobs, families and “old school” Garmin Edge 705s. This was not my finest moment. The 800 said I was about 1500 meters from home when I said goodbye to my companions, thanked them for the ride, and coasted the rest of the way down the trail. If nothing else, it was a ride to remember.

Normal Life

ben-with-olympiansWell it’s back to training. I did a blow-out of winter fun time at the end of November with two days of cross country skiing and a very long day of downhill at Breckenridge. All that skiing ensured that my first full day of swimming biking and running felt like overtraining, and I had no trouble getting into the habit of napping. This time of year is when I realize just how abnormal my “normal” routine is. First of all, I live at the Olympic Training Center. How cool is that? It’s like a dorm, only instead of being surrounded by teenagers I have the nations best athletes living next to me, and instead of mystery meat loaf the Cafeteria will serve us an abundance of quality food and has staff willing to make a run to Whole Foods to fulfill special request (god forbid I have to drive there myself if I’m craving a gluten-free ginger cookie or a bottle of Nancy’s Kefir, right?). I live across a small courtyard from one of the nicest 50 meter pools I’ve ever swam in, and in the basement of my dorm is a Computrainer cycling studio. Somehow with all this we still find reason to complain that the closest dirt running trail is two whole miles away, and sometimes Colorado College doesn’t let us run on the inside lanes of their track. Plus, Sports Med is closed on Sunday, so if we crash our bikes on the weekend we may have to call the 24-hour on-call med staff to help us get cleaned up. Yeah, there’s nothing like the off-season to remind me just how well I’m treated here in Colorado Springs.

My roommate is a shotgun shooter named Collin Wietfeldt who goes hunting in the off-season and treats me to his antelope summer sausage for study breaks. Thanks to Congressman Bart Stupak of Michigan, Collin, I, and the rest of the students on campus have our tuition paid for by an Olympic Scholarship program. That scholarship encourages people to continue their education while they train for the Olympics and means there’s never a shortage of people to study with around campus. Hopefully the scholarship remains after Stupak retires this year.

What else is odd about the training center? Is it normal to be offered 90 minutes of massage each week or to have your massage therapist knit you a hat to thank you for coming to her? Is it normal to have an entire organization of people who know you by first name and are being employed with the purpose helping you achieve your goals? Is it normal to have all-stars like Michael Phelps or Lopez Lamong walk into your kitchen? Well, as amazing and unique as it it, it’s normal for us and it leaves us with no excuses for being anything less than our best.

Thanksgiving

A week before Thanksgiving I went to Seattle. It was for my nephew’s first birthday, and despite the fact that he will not remember a moment of it, I’m glad I went. The trip also served to give me a pass on going home for Thanksgiving. I love my family, and I love spending time with them, but Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that I would rather spend with friends. I invited myself to Rory and Mojdeh‘s place in Boulder, and then brought my friend Ileana – a paralympic swimmer from Cuba who couldn’t make it to Miami to see her family for the holiday. This was my second Thanksgiving with Rory, and, much like the first one, it was really fun.

I drove up early with Ileana on Thursday morning because I wanted to help make food. Rory, however, had some pretty specific ideas of what Thanksgiving dinner would look like, so I was only allowed to make biscuits and cranberry sauce (the key to my cranberry sauce is a healthy amount of Grand Marnier). Mojdeh and Martin (their landlord who lives upstairs) made the 20lb turkey, Ileana kept the dogs in check and Rory ensured that the stuffing and the potatoes were free of non-Irish  contamination (a suggestion to add garlic received a reaction fit for someone pissing in his herb garden). Dinner was great. We prepared well beyond our needs and feasted like royalty with excess food, excess wine, excess beer, excess electricity and internet service and water and everything else that makes the “new world” unsustainable.(Meanwhile Chet “the jet” Blanton was in Hawaii working on an excess of swimming biking and running during his 2nd Double Deca Ironman, which he’s hoping to finish December 12th at the Honolulu Marathon.)

All that was wonderful, and it’s what makes Thanksgiving what it is, but what I get the most joy from is observing the interactions between people. For instance, I was just 10 days into a gluten-free diet. I do it because it makes a difference (for me) with regard to inflammation and it’s my job to push my body to whatever limits it can take, but Boulder is full of new-age hippies who think gluten-free is some kind of religion. They look at people eating a sandwich as though they believe that whole-wheat bread will send the person straight to hell. Rory lives around those people, and so he treated my offer to make gluten free biscuits and to bring gluten free bread for the stuffing as if I were inviting him into a cult and asking him to drink the punch. Martin, however, invited a woman to dinner who makes a living by teaching yoga and lecturing about gluten-free living and writing about…this. She was exactly the type of person who makes Rory cringe at the thought of a gluten-free diet. I must admit, it bugs the hell out of me when people try to push their own choices on other people. It’s one thing if you don’t eat certain foods or choose to keep your lawn manicured like David Duchovny’s beard – just don’t try to force me to do the same. And don’t blur the lines between science and religion in order to “prove” that your choice is better than mine – it’s like an anorexic triathlete calling swimmers fat. Okay, end of rant. I’m gonna go drive my SUV around to hand out healthy eating pamphlets to people leaving the Taco Bell drive through.

….

After Dinner we (the basement dwellers) played Risk while Martin and his guests went to see the new Harry Potter movie (I’m saving that for when I can see it with my mommy in December). I discovered that a) I’m no good at Risk, and b) I am way too competitive to play a board game where you know you’re going to lose hours before the defeat occurs. I still had fun, but I’m pretty sure everyone around me was glad when I left the table (and consequently the yelling stopped).

It wouldn’t be a cliche thanksgiving post without a list of things I’m thankful for, but I just did that so instead I’ll post pictures of all the fun we had over the long weekend. (My friends are awesome.)

DinnerFood is EXCITING!Ileana pissed because Cuba does not exist on this mapIleana and RoryMojdeh Rory Ileana and BenIleana and Ben at Winter Park

To summarize:

the food was good, Mojdeh is a great cook!

Ileana realized that Cuba doesn’t exist in Risk, then she beat Rory.I’m still bitter that I lost.

On Black Friday we all went to see the Nutcracker put on by Boulder Ballet Company. The last time I saw the nutcracker was with my Grandfather who fell asleep and started snoring when Clare and the prince started dancing through the Sugar Plum Fairy’s palace. I enjoyed this much more.

Saturday I went to Winter Park with Ileana where she saw her first ski resort and took a full day sit ski lesson (she was the best they’d ever seen, and the instructors told me we had to come back).

Flying Without a Bike

There’s a lot of outdoor stuff to do in Colorado that I don’t have the energy for during the season, like hiking, rock climbing, skiing, and fishing. The problem is, I don’t have much of my gear in Colorado because when I moved there in February I was expecting to leave for Seattle for my winter fun time. Now it’s November, the season is over, and I just want to stay in Colorado to play. Fortunately I was convinced to fly home this weekend.

Today’s my nephew’s first birthday, and my sister was pushing me pretty hard to come home for it. At first I was thinking, “what does the kid care about me being home?” Then it occurred to me that I love my sister and if she cares then it’s worth it for me to be around. So I booked a trip home that turned out to be perfect timing for the start of winter training playing. I’m bringing back my skate skis, snow boots, gloves and a few extra pair of winter socks, and my climbing shoes. If I’m going to be in Colorado for the winter I’m going to make sure I’m enjoying the cold. Sure, I’ll be training 30 hours a week again soon, but at least if I have my skis with me I’ll be able to choose not to go skiing rather than just wishing I were able.

The Lucky Buzz

ben-with-olympiansThis week I was ordered to take time off from training. It’s weird, but as soon as I finished my last race all I could think about was getting ready for next season. I just had what Mr. ITU calls a breakthrough season, but to me it seems like a lucky season. It was lucky that the chase pack at Treasure Island didn’t catch me. I peaked two weeks early for Worlds and benefitted by winning Alcatraz, and if Cameron Dye hadn’t been worrying about how he would ask Natalie to marry him at the finish line of the Amica Triathlon he may not have let me get away on the run. But I’ve always thought luck was way overrated, and certainly not an accident.

The real breakthrough this year was in my attitude. The past few years I’ve tried diligently to become a loner. To suppress the spontaneous, fun-loving, outgoing and silly parts of my personality because they aren’t the head-down, single focused, “serious” athlete character that fits the paradigm of a successful endurance athlete. It all came to a head this year once I was living at the Olympic Training Center and for the first time had the opportunity to completely shut out everyone from my life – to prioritize my training above everything – including all my extrinsic sources of happiness. I trained my ass off, fought perpetual injury and illness and found myself alone, knee-deep in summer with an awful case of depression and no real hope for improvement. How could things get better when I was already living the “right” way according to everyone I looked up to and trusted?

Luckily, I spent my birthday in Seattle and realized how much energy and happiness I receive from the people who care about me. I’m not the quiet passive selfish athlete that I’ve tried to be in the past, and what makes me tick is not the same battery that drives my competition. Mental health, I’ve come to realize, needs to be the priority. I started the sport because I love competing, I love training, and I love the dedicated and methodical lifestyle. But in order to really enjoy triathlon, I have to balance that lifestyle by including education and friendship in my priorities. No more pretending to be a hermit. No more selfish, unbalanced, lifeless living. This year I learned to believe in myself and what I’m capable of, rather than pretending to be someone I’m not. I have the greatest support network of any triathlete, with great sponsors, a family that will stand by me no matter how crazy they think I am, and friends who have stuck around through some of the most one-sided relationships I can imagine. I’m not your average Joe, and I’m done trying to act like it.

So now my mind is buzzing. I’m taking my time off, but my body is twitching with excitement for what’s to come. After a few changes in my approach to the daily grind I’ve become a lot happier. I’m recovering faster from the hard work, excited for training, excited to be a professional triathlete, excited to be a student, to have people involved in my life, and to be entering the final season before the Olympics. And, yeah, luck seems to have come knocking on my door.

Halloween’s Super Sprint Triathlon Grand Prix

Let me set the stage: Oceanside California. Just a few miles up the coast from San Diego, Oceanside is a small town that has managed to preserve the old-California feel that many believe to exist only in the writings of the beat generation. The town is lifted up from the beach by a tall bluff, on top of which runs a street buzzing with bike cruisers, weekend warrior cyclists and wetsuit-clad surfers heading down to the sand below. At the base of the bluff is a boardwalk, which was converted for a day into the first course in what will prove to be the most exciting triathlon series in the United States – the Super Sprint Triathlon Grand Prix.

Marc Lees, the owner of Race Day Wheels, and the director for the series decided to mimic the Australian Grand Prix series from ten years ago because of the drama rich, made-for-television format. This series is made to showcase the pros. The course, which was just one of several different Grand Prix formats which all take less than an hour to complete, was a 400m swim through surf and chop, an 8-lap 8km bike and a 4-lap 2.4km run – twice around. That meant that during the bike and run stages alone there were 24 laps, but the course was so small that the athletes were really only out of sight from the grand stands when we were duck diving waves during the swim. The race was set up for the fans, and it made it incredible for the athletes.

We started the race from the sandy beach to a vocal “GO!” by Marc Lees. Beach starts have never been my forte (short legs don’t get me very far before I have to start swimming) but as soon as we hit a couple waves I was moving forward. I thought the roughness was over after I made it past the breakers, but I found myself swimming next to a big guy with a death wish (I’m not 100% sure who it was, and if I said who I thought it was some people may think I have a problem with World Champions – I don’t). I’m not one to back down when someone’s being overly aggressive, and my line was perfect, so it wasn’t me that needed to turn. I hit back, rammed back, and eventually left the guy behind when I dove and dolphin kicked around the first buoy. From there I started catching the guys who had gotten away from me on the start, and by the time we were swimming in (looking over our shoulders in hopes of catching a wave) I was up near the front. McClarty and Zaferes (both excellent swimmers who live near the beach) managed to catch waves ahead of me and they had a sizable gap heading back across the beach toward transition. To my surprise, Jarrod Shoemaker came out of the water with me. It turns out he used to do beach lifeguard competitions and – while he does hate cold water – he’s quite good at surf swimming. I hopped on the bike and cleared transition ahead of everyone else. The first lap I thought I could catch Zaferes and McClarty, but the firepower of Cameron Dye, Shoemaker, Brendan Sexton and Chris McCormack behind me made my mission suicidal. I backed off and let the group catch me so we could work together. My plan was to go hard the first round, and hit it on the second, so going all kamikaze in the first ten minutes of the race would have been the dumb choice. We caught up to the leaders, but Dye and myself were the only ones working for the first few laps. I turned to Macca, who was sitting comfortably third wheel and said, “c’mon you lazy [can’t remember the noun I used, but it wasn’t nice]”. That seemed to light the fire because he came around with an acceleration that was all I could do to hang onto. I haven’t been able to look at the lap data from my Garmin Edge 705 yet (it automatically laps by position, so I have lap splits and wattage data for all 16 bike laps during the race – I’ll upload it to Garmin Connect when I get back to Colorado), but I’m pretty sure our laps with Macca at the front were the fastest laps of the day. Hitting T2 I had a transition so fast that I started the run in the lead. If you’ve followed my results you know that my T2 times are rarely exceptional, so this was a good sign for me (especially considering we had to set up our bike and helmet so that it would be ready for the second round). I lead for about two laps before Brendan Sexton came past me. The run course was really fun. It went 100m out of transition into a 180, then back 20m into a right turn up a steep ramp to the top of the pier, then a 180 and half way up another ramp toward the top of the bluff, then a 180 and back down to the boardwalk the way we came, a right turn 200 meters to a 180 and back to transition to start the next lap. This meant that we were visible to the fans and TV cameras 100% of the time during the run.

My lead lasted for the first two laps of the run, then Brendan Sexton passed me and stayed just ahead of me until we dove back into the water out of T3 (run-to-swim). We managed to gap the group behind us in the second swim, despite the pain we all had to endure to get out past the waves. Believe me, swimming after a full-tilt 1.5 mile run is not easy! Out of T4 (swim-to-bike) Sexton and I had about 15 seconds over the chase group of Dye, Shoemaker and Filip Ospaly (who managed to run and swim his way up the ranks after a terrible first swim). Dye is a beast on the bike and Sexton and I couldn’t hold him off. Ospaly and Shoemaker sat on Dye’s wheel doing as little work as possible (with sixteen 180 degree turns in five miles the accelerations hurt everyone, no matter how well you draft), and when their group caught us it was pretty clear that their legs were fresher than ours. As we lapped Zaferes and Brian Fleishmann (he was sick, this is not normal for him to get lapped) the two of them recovered on my wheel for a lap then took over in the lead and blocked the wind for the final two laps. It was definitely helpful, but I wish they’d joined in a little sooner to hold off Dye’s group. (a quick aside, lapped athletes were allowed to stay in and even join in groups ahead of them. It made for a unique strategic opportunity if you could lap a strong cyclist). Out of T5 I was in the lead again, but this time it only lasted until the first hill. Ospaly and Sexton came by me fast, and it was all I could do to hang on Sexton’s heels for two laps. In the meantime Jarrod seemed to be accelerating from behind us and it was when he passed me that Sexton’s pace became more than I could match. I feel back with Dye right on my feet, ensuring that I kept the accelerator floored all the way to the finish line. I placed 4th, just seconds ahead of Dye, and not far behind Sexton and Shoemaker. Ospaly put together a blazing fast run that left us all in the dust.

That race was by far the most fun I’ve had racing professional triahtlon. It was the proximity of the fans, and the energy of the day that made it so much fun. This series will a lot of fun to watch next year!!

Checking Back In

After my last crash in Huatulco a few weeks ago I’ve had some serious motivational issues. I barely trained in the week after the World Cup (which showed in Puerto Vallarta), and after the Pan-Am Champs I took a few days off entirely to enjoy my Mexican vacation. Back in the states I put in a bit of time for training, but my motivation has been rock bottom. In the middle of the season I would show up to swim practice in the morning and dive in the moment Mike gave us the warmup set. The past two weeks, I’ve been dragging my feet out of the locker room five minutes late and standing dazed, staring at the pool for another five minutes before I finally tell myself, “just pretend for an hour” and dive in. I asked Mike Doane about it and he told me that the term for my mental condition was being “checked out” and that “everyone needs a break at some point.” Well, I signed up for two more races, and I had no intention of backing out now – even if I couldn’t get through a 60-minute Computrainer session to save my life (that’s an exaggeration, it just took some True Blood DVDs and embarrassingly low watts.)

I started to feel a little better late last week, a couple of days before I left for San Diego to race the Super Sprint Grand Prix, and managed to get in a couple decent training sessions to sharpen me up for the weekend. Actually, my head started to come around at 2am Thursday morning when I woke up from a dream about out-kicking Chris McCormack, Matt Reed, and Jarrod Shoemaker to win a four-man sprint in San Diego on Halloween. Macca is probably the most winning athlete in the history of triathlon, Matt Reed is among the best American triathletes we’ve had (I’ll give him the American label, even if he didn’t start off that way) and if I ever beat Jarrod (2008 US Olympian and National Cross Country Champion while at Dartmouth) in a finishing sprint I’ll probably decide there must be a G-d who cares about endurance sports after-all. It was good dream, and got me fired up enough to think about “checking back in” for the weekend. Racing is fun and hard, but sprint races are over so quickly that the pain is much less memorable.