Professional Triathlete
Here are some pictures from Hawaii.
Left: Me with three sea turtles (including one that stands upright)
Right: My uncle Carl shows his amusement in the cockatiel’s new nest.
Left: I’m chasing fishes, and they’re getting away.
Right: This was the closest to a whale we saw on our little whale watching boat trip.
ALOHA!!!
I’m heading to Australia!!! I’m on the plane With my bags, despite having mis-remebered the departure time. I showed up 30 minutes before an international flight! Luck was on my side, and they waited for me. By Hawaii!!
Sunday afternoon I competed in a local bike race here in Hawaii. It was a criterium put on by Momentum Multisport (great triathlon bike shop) at the Kaneohe Marine Core Base. I wanted to race just because I haven’t been in a pack for a while, and the crit format of short loops is pretty similar to most ITU races. The race was an hour plus one lap (they start the timer at an hour, when it gets to zero they call “bell lap†and then the race is over), and it took me a big chunk of that time to really get into the race. We weren’t going that fast, but the accelerations out of the corners were killing me for the first 20 minutes. And then I attacked.
I got away with my friend Ray from Boca Hawaii. As soon as we were far enough ahead to really call it a “2 man break†my legs began to scream at me for choosing to attack so early. I silently prayed for us to be caught quickly and a little less than three laps later we were.
I went to the back and talked to my old roommate Tai for a bit, then we threw a short attack together. It didn’t work. I countered from the front of the group. Obviously, that didn’t work either. The thing is, when they caught me, the other riders would just sit on my wheel and slow down, rather than anyone countering or just letting me get sucked up into the pack.
So I threw a counter to my counter attack, which actually worked better than the first two (but still failed). After that we only had about 10 minutes left, so I sat back to see if someone else would work. The group slowed way down as the Tradewind Cycling Team guys tried to force this guy Tony to pull. Tony would swing wide and try to fall back into the group, but the Tradewind guys would sit on his wheel and keep him in front. We slowed to turtle speed.
That’s when I got bored, and irritated with such a stupid tactic (anything I find boring qualifies as a ‘stupid’ tactic). With 6 or 7 minutes I saw that the Tradewind guys gave Tony about a bike length gap. I threw down some watts and got right in front of Tony as he sprinted and grabbed my wheel. Somehow we managed a huge gap within the first straight away, and we continued to work together and extend that gap until about a third of a lap to go.
The last stretch to the finish was a long straight downwind stretch, so, rather than a sprint, Tony and I had a drag race to the finish. I nosed him out for the win! It was exciting, I had no intentions of vying for a win. It was really fun!
Here’s my synopsis of the life of a swimmer (and then a link to a hilarious – ok maybe just disturbing but well written – story at the end.):
age 3-6: learn to swim
age 7-12: swim for a local summer team and decide to do year round swimming
age 13-18: start sacrificing “normal†social experiences in favor of swim meets, while your identity at school becomes simply “swimmerâ€. (which for high school is better than anorexic, or idiot, but on par with nerd and just below slacker and basketball player)
college: continue spending most of your time swimming, and pass up on opportunities to expand your horizons in other extracurricular activities. After all, by this time all you really care about is whether you make NCAA’s or break that pesky varsity record that’s been looming over you from the record board during the past four years of practice. And dispersing your focus – even briefly – would ruin your chances.
Graduation: You have a bachelors degree and a chiseled swimmers build – huge shoulders, skinny hips – you make suit manufacturers look good. The downside? You never want to see a swimming pool again.
Mid 20’s: You decided to explore your other interests. Art, pop culture, acting, drinking, sex, drugs, smoking, a desk job, etc. – something non-chlorinated and less hard. Those graduation suits are getting tighter in the waist and looser in the shoulders, and the square shoulders in your sport coats now look ridiculous.
Late 20’s or early 30’s: The comeback. You realize that you hate being 40lbs overweight, miss the endorphins and the early morning social calendar. You join a masters program and lose some weight. The metal burnout is over, and you miss the sport. Besides, swimmers can’t do land sports competitively and you miss being good at something.
Here’s a comeback story I just read that cracks me up (and validates the title of this post). The author kept his name anonymous in the post, but you may recognize his style. The moral of the story? Drink a lot of water when your fantasies come calling.
I’m not so into the whole beef culture in America. When I was swimming in college I noticed that during longer meets like Nationals (5 day)or our conference meet (3 day), I would feel sluggish on days following red meat consumption. At the time I just stopped eating beef before competitions (a rule I still follow), but then I acquired a fear of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).
It happened when I was driving home from swim practice (I remember the practice, it was in Issaquah and I had just told my coach, Kyle, that I wanted to keep competing post-college and was thinking of buying a bike for triathlon) and listening to NPR. The interview was with a guy who had run a beef processing plant. He was talking about the methods used by big cattle companies, and how beef is processed. He basically said there’s not way to avoid BSE without completely removing beef from your diet. He went on to talk about how Organic and Grass Fed and the other forms of hippy beef are a safer bet but still not a safe bet. I went home and told my family not to include me in the dinner count if they were buying beef. This, justifiably, took some getting used to. For instance my dad decided to have beef for Christmas that year, which was one of three days I had been able to travel home from Hawaii. I didn’t eat it, yelling ensued, my determination became apparent, the next time I was home we had ham.
I also took a lot of crap from my friends. Including my roommate/teammate/friend/occasional reader of this blog, Mark, who – rumor has it – no longer eats beef. Consider me a pioneer, a trend setter, a forward-thinker!
That lasted for about 2 and a half years. One night during a hard training cycle I had a dream about a juicy rare steak, and I decided that I should have my hormones checked because obviously I was having my first period. I ignored the dream and it started reoccurring until I eventually gave in and told my mom (who I was again living with) that I wanted steak for dinner. She went to this little butcher shop in Seattle, A&J’s on Queen Anne Hill, and bought me a 6oz steak that cost $20. She reasoned, “If you’re only going to eat red meet once in a while, you might as well eat the best quality beef you can find.†And I’ve tried to stick to that logic. I still get the dream during hard training cycles. Typically it happens after hard run workouts, but pretty much any training that really breaks me down. My body will fight back and ask for a nice natural does of zinc, magnesium, iron, and B-12. I find 6-8 ounces is plenty – I’d rather have a small steak of superb quality than a 16 ounce heap of cholesterol and mad-cow from Outback.
As for hamburger – grind it yourself or give it up. Call me paranoid, it’s just not worth the risk.
We don’t practice daylight savings time in Hawaii because Hawaiians are smarter than the rest of the country. Daylight saving time is unhealthy, and has also been shown not to improve electrical usage (the original purpose). I also discovered that Queensland voted down the use of Daylight Saving Time, which is cool because it means my race will be slightly less noonish (1:50pm, which would be a solar 12:50pm if Australia were on DST).
Meanwhile, the mainland US, except Arizona, is going the opposite direction from Queensland, and has made DST last about a month longer than it used to. The US now observes DST for about 7 months of the year, and of the 300 million Americans (or however many we have after the past few years of abstinence education-induced teenage pregnancies) I have yet to hear from somebody who a) likes the idea of taking an hour from our spring and putting into our autumn, or b) can give me a logical and intelligent explanation as to why we do it. Then again, my sampling may be biased due to the fact that I spend most of my time in a) the Northwest, where summer twilight lasts until after 10pm so you can’t get to sleep, or b) the Tropics, where getting home from work with an extra hour of summer daylight means waiting an extra hour for the house to cool down enough for sleep. (Notice my main reason for hating DST is that it messes with my sleep schedule?) I would be happy with year round DST, or no DST, but the switch is lacking in logic. I’d much rather have the extra hour during the winter when it gets dark at 4pm in Seattle.
That’s how long I’ve been in Hawaii, and it’s also how long I have left in Hawaii this year. I found out this weekend that I will be racing in the Mooloolaba World Cup in Queensland Australia. This is my first World Cup start, so needless to say, I’m stoked!!
Yesterday I rode up Tantalus with Oahu’s two local pro triathletes, Tim Marr and Jon Flanagan (though we were each riding alone and had no idea the others were also doing the same ride and never once saw each other.). I nearly stayed in and rode on the trainer, but I had talked to Courtenay earlier and she told me about how cold and wet it was for her ride in Seattle, but she still had fun. Here was my mental monologue as I eyed my trainer while putting on cycling clothes:
“Ugh, it’s windy and rainy and my bike is sort of clean… ok it’s not that clean…. who rides a trainer in Hawaii? How many times do I have access to my favorite ride ever? Is it getting nice out? I might as well go.â€
And it did clear up. At least it cleared up until I started climbing, at which time it started raining with better water pressure than most hotel showers. Climbing Tantalus was wet and cold, but the descent was far worse. I never realized that drenching rain renders Shimano break pads worthless. Here’s my internal monologue as I approached turns:
“Ok, there’s lots of water flowing across the road, I should probably be careful… um, I’m squeezing the brakes, why aren’t I slowing down? …Please slow down please slow down.. THANK YOU GOD!â€
So all-in-all a great training experience.
Yesterday I went out for a ride from my cousin’s house in Laie, which is on the northeast corner of the island near Turtle Bay Resort. The area has a combination of North Shore swells and Windward Side wind, meaning the ocean by their house this time of year is filled with white water as far out as you can see. It’s really windy, though I’ve heard from some people in San Francisco that the winds there have been brutal lately too. And Chris Tremonte claims that when he did the 200w 0% grade test in Austin over the weekend that he only managed 10.5mph, which is pretty much the same as I’ve been getting here.
Yesterday I went for a ride toward Haleiwa, and was amazed that I made it there in about 40 minutes without really trying. What I should have realized is that if i was going nearly 30mph without effort, I really should be turning around well before half way through my ride. It took about 50% longer to get back, and there was no “easy†riding involved in it. Just crouching over and taking a windy beating. So what I started thinking was, what if my Garmin Edge 705 (along with the Quarq Cinqo powermeter – pictured above on my Beyond Fabrications Radius Road bike) gave me some clue as to how much assistance I was getting from the wind. It could tell me my Coefficient Of Environmental Assistance, which I would like to name the ‘Collins Coefficient’, and it would basically take my power output, my speed, the % grade and some estimate of aerodynamics (or lack thereof) for a big shouldered swimmer type like myself. Basically, when I’m flying down the road with a tail wind, or drafting off a school bus it would be large positive coefficient and the screen would read something like, “don’t be too proudâ€, or “going the other way is not going to be funâ€. Whereas when I’m fighting a 20mph headwind uphill the coefficient would be negative and the screen could read, “I told you this wasn’t going to be fun.â€
The trade winds have been blowing on Oahu with a ferocity greater than I remember from my time here on Oahu. Last week they were strong – I started measuring wind speed by seeing how fast I could ride into the wind while pedaling 200 watts. The lowest I saw was 13.0mph for that test. This week the winds were supposed to go back to normal (10-15mph steady trades), but instead they’ve picked up even more. Each day I think the wind is the strongest it’s been since I got here, so testing as I just described is my best estimate as to how much the winds are actually changing. Two days ago I was pedaling 200 watts and going 10mph on a flat road. Today was 11mph, which I thought was horrific until I turned into a valley were the wind was funneling at me. I looked down and saw I was pushing 230 watts and going 8mph on a 1% grade. (Thanks Garmin Edge 705!!). It’s so windy I’m getting blown all over the road – while running. If I wanted to be in this much wind, I’d move to Chicago. (Ok, I take that back, nobody wants to live in Chicago and it’s not just because of the wind).
Today was an awesome day. I finished up a short training block, which means the next few days I get to rest up and visit Jaco Van Delden Physical Rehabilitation (or just Jaco for short) and get my muscles stretched out and ready to rock again.
This morning I swam my longest solo pool swim this year, and maybe ever. 5600m, which isn’t that far, but I hate swimming by myself, and I’m pretty sure every time I’ve attempted that kind of workout in an empty pool it has ended up finding a way to shorten itself. After that I headed off to Tantalus (yup, it’s still my favorite ride – Marin County may have more miles of climbing, but this place is special.) Above is a screenshot from my Garmin Connect. The info is off of a Garmin Edge 705 and a Quarq Cinqo crank mounted power meter.
After I finished training for the day (including a stretch and some calories) Uncle Bob (a.k.a Bear) gave me a guitar lesson (I’m learning to play Jimmy Buffet – Another Hotel Room), then took me out whale watching. We saw a few whales coming up for air, but nothing like the full on jumping breaches I saw a few days ago when I didn’t have my camera.
But what really made today an awesome day, was a belated Valentines present from my beautiful and nice and wonderful girlfriend in Seattle: THREE NEW CUSTOM SPLISH SUITS!!
There’s the I <3 BC “don’t frown†design, the pink unicorn bencollins.org design (which I’m calling Unicorn Planet, though if you google Unicorn Planet, you’ll get something a little different) and the ever so Valentine’s appropriate < CB+BC 3 (that’s an attempt at a text heart around the initials – I accidentally wrote “CD†there last night, and this morning I ad an angry email…) plus butt kisses. Can you guess which design I made? Oh, and all three have unicorns front and center. I’ve said it before, unicorns totally kick a**.
I can’t decide which one to wear tomorrow!!! Rachel Ross is going to be there, so I have to look good. Otherwise I’ll hear about it from Courtenay, who will have heard about it via stalkerbook from RR.