Can’t do a proper post

I haven’t forgotten about my website! It’s the last week of classes, and I’m swamped with schoolwork. I promise to post about my 10k race last Thursday, and about how I missed out on everything I planned to do this weekend in favor of well deserved over-sleeping. Just as soon as I finish this abstract for a term paper on effects of altitude on Oxy-Hemoglobin affinity.

Giving Thanks

Yesterday I had a thanksgiving theme to my spin class workout. First we did a really hard VO2 max set, then we did a short recovery lactate tolerance set. It went like this:

A) Standing at 80% of max effort, B) Sitting and sprinting in the same gear, then C) changing to a harder gear and pushing 100%.  We did it six times around, with no rest between sets, and the set lengths were: 15s A / 5s B / 15s C, then 30A / 10B / 30C, 45/15/45, 60/20/60, 90/30/90, 120/40/120.

Then we did a turkey of short sprints. A turkey is a term from bowling, where you hit three strikes in a row. A turkey sprint is 3 short sprints with short rest, so we did:

Thanks, then 3x (20s sprint, 10s rest), and we did that for each of the ten people that showed up for class.

2008_10_9_Incline 018 I’m not sure why our attendance has been so low, but I’m hoping people start coming back next week for our last week together. On Thursday I’m going to have an 80’s day (what’s good 80’s music? do I just play the Breakfast Club soundtrack? I was way too young to be cool in the 80’s), where I’ll hand out some cool prizes (like clif bars and Garmin tote bags filled with Hawaiian Island Creations 2x Sunblock  samples so they don’t get sunburned cross country skiing over the winter break.)

It’s a long weekend, and I’m filling it with fun stuff. Tomorrow I run a 10k, then I pick up Courtenay from the airport on my way home for turkey/ham dinner. Friday I’m going hiking with my guest while everyone else is risking death buying stuff at the malls. Saturday I have no plans, but will likely go sailing or on a long ride if the weather is nice, Sunday morning is the Seattle Marathon, where I volunteered to help out the medical staff at the finish line, and Sunday night I’m taking my sailboat out in the holiday light parade on Lake Union.

If I don’t write about it this weekend, I’ll give a full recap on Monday before I write a second part in the saga of Aaron Scheidies. He thought my last post was funny, but it seems I could be a little nicer. He’s a funny guy, but it’s not because he’s blind, it’s because he’s Aaron.

Aaron Scheidies: Blind or Faker?

image Recently Aaron Scheidies, my visually impaired friend / training partner, wrote about my daily routine, and what he “sees” me doing everyday. Today, I’m retaliating with insight as to what Aaron sees on a daily basis. If you’re short on time I can give away the ending: Aaron may be a little weird, but he is not disabled.

Aaron graduated from PT school at U of Washington last year, and now he’s spending his time studying and training. In a normal week I can expect a call from Aaron on Tuesday morning. It goes like this:

Aaron: “Hey dude, I was thinking of coming up for dinner tonight.”

Ben: “alright, I’ll let my mom and dad know.”

Aaron: “No it’s okay, I already talked to your mom.”

Now, when I call my parents to let them know I’ll be home for dinner it rarely elicits a change in their behavior. Aaron, on the other hand, is able to decide when and what we’ll be eating. So when I get home at 5:30 starving there’s nothing to eat, but when Aaron walks in at 7pm my parents have prepared a steak and salad because “that’s what Aaron requested.”

Also, Aaron may show up a little late for dinner, but since he can’t get home, he’ll just stay the night…  And the next night too… Actually, in my experience, asking to come over for dinner on Tuesday means he’ll be there until the Michigan State football game on Saturday.

How does he get away with that? Simple – my parents like my guest better than me. It’s jacked up – but I’m getting off topic. Back to Aaron’s typical day.

When you spend time with Aaron, you’ll notice that he volunteers for roles that are visually dependent. For example:

A few weeks back when the lane lines were messed up I couldn’t see the clock from the end of the pool. No problem, Aaron had a watch, so he was able to keep us on sendoff. [insert long pause to give the reader enough time to see the irony in that I have a blind kid watching the clock for me because I can’t see it.]

The limit to Aaron’s visual abilities seems to end when he discovers an attractive girl to help him out. Actually, I think he spends his day finding women to sympathize with his “disability” and help him to accomplish tasks that would be hard for somebody that was actually blind. Some examples of this:

  1. When his phone rings he turns to the most attractive girl in the room, holds his phone out to her and says, “can you tell me who this is?” Usually he ignores it if he’s with a group of people, which further reinforces my theory that he is only doing it for the female attention.
  2. Aaron spends at least an hour or two in Carrie’s office (she’s the fitness coordinator and the boss to both of us) asking for help with anything from burning a CD, to reading contracts to doing homework, to asking for advice in how to untangle his scattered life.
  3. When I have gone to parties with Aaron it goes something like this: We arrive to the party, we get a drink, I see somebody I know, he sees a bunch of people he knows, and ten minutes later he has a semi-circle of attractive women surrounding him, enthralled in his lengthy stories about nothing. I guess we can call it “charm”. I’m not sure how this relates to his disability other than I can’t seem to have that effect on women.
  4. Most afternoons Aaron heads to the Delta Gamma sorority house and has one of several women help him with studying for the Physical Therapy Boards. I think this is the highlight of Aaron’s day. Never once have I heard him complain about having to study with the DG girls. Instead, he spends his morning planning whether to bring them homemade cookies (which I made) or a muffin from Great Harvest Bread Company. I’ve asked him why he doesn’t ask out his tutor if he likes her so much, but his response seemed almost offended, “She’s doing community service to help me out! I’m not going to ask her out! That would make things awkward!” 

Poor guy, surrounded by beautiful women that love him, but completely lacking in guts.

I have a lot more. Enough to fill a novel, so instead I’m taking some video of how Aaron manages to be better at life than me, and I’ll continue this as a series of posts explaining why I’m so freakin’ jealous of Aaron (I mean, besides the washboard abs).

Boring?

2008_11_16_Tahoe 020 I heard through the grapevine that my posts recently have been boring. Thus, I am not posting about how I ran a track workout today, and am really excited for my turkey trot next week. Nor will I write about how my spin class was awesome because I had them simulate the San Francisco Triathlon as a workout this week (minus the pit-stop on the run). Instead I’m planning an epic blog post, which I’ll put up the moment I have time and energy. maybe tomorrow.

All Play and No Work Makes Ben Way Behind

2008_11_16_Tahoe 002 I have a ton of homework to do this week. Or maybe not. It really depends on how my meeting with the registrar goes today. See, I’ve been taking a class that I got booted from because I wasn’t able to pay before the registration deadline. Now, 6 weeks into the quarter I’m petitioning for late registration. I’ve already taken the midterm and done almost all the homework, so there’s no reason to deny me (in my mind), but if you’ve ever dealt with bureaucracy you’ll know that logic rarely enters into the decision making process. On the positive side, if I get denied I won’t have to make up all the work I missed while recreating in Tahoe for the past week.

The Logistics of Professional Racing

image It’s that time of year again. The season has ended, training is unplanned and often completely absent from my schedule. And Quicken has become my most frequently opened application. During the season I often neglect to balance my expense book and I tend to focus only on the balance in my checking account. Now that the season’s over, however, I get to look through those piles of receipts from my travels, and figure out where I was appropriately frugal, where I spent too much money and where I should have just stayed home. There’s also some things I would have like to spend more money if given the opportunity. Aside from moving out of my parents house, I think the most bang for my buck would be spent at the Institute of New Medicine, and hopefully next year I can afford to bring them even further into my recovery, training and racing regimen.

2008-4-13_South Beach_Tri 025So once I figure out where my money went last year, I will make a plan for the 2009 season. This brings me to the point where I figure out where I’m getting the money for racing. Luckily, I have a base of sponsors who I am really excited to work with again. This is thanks to some advice I received from Chris Lieto about a year ago. He told me to make a list of companies who I could see myself working with for my entire triathlon career. He then told me to contact those companies, and let them know how much I like their product, and why I can see myself representing them for years to come.

At first it seemed wrong of me to turn down companies that may be offering better sponsorship packages, but a year later I see the benefit. For one thing, I’m not racing on equipment that I dislike. The list 2008_11_03_Taper_Week 013that Chris convinced me to make is now displayed as a banner on the left side of your screen, so whenever I am asked about my sponsors I can respond with excitement and honesty: “I love my Beyond Fabrications road bike, it’s the best bike I’ve ridden. And if you’d like to see where I’ve been riding it you can check out my Garmin Connect account.” or “Have you seen my new K-Swiss Kona Racing Flats? They’re totally sweet!” or “I eat about four Clif Bars a day because they’re perfect for an athlete on the go, and they have enough flavors that  I never get sick of them.” You get the idea. Plus, for 2009 I have the added benefit of knowing exactly who I want to work with. I may add a sponsor or two for next year, but for the most part I have my bases covered.

What does all this mean? Well, by the end of the month I’ll know if I should sign up for classes next quarter or start sending out resumes for part time work. (As much as I’m enjoying biochemistry, I may actually prefer a job).

That was a really big hill.

I decided that I wanted to run a Turkey Trot this year. It’s my 4th day of off-season, and I’m beginning to regret that decision. I haven’t touched my bike since riding from transition to the rental car, and I haven’t been submerged in water since 12:18 pm last Saturday. My legs, however, are still really sore, and I’ve already run about 30 miles since the race ended. Victor says if I want to do a 10k turkey trot, then I need to keep running. Basically, I’m excited about running because I love doing it, but I feel like the degree of difficulty has increased significantly since my brain went into off-season mode.

Then again, maybe it’s just where I’m choosing to run.

image Today I went for a 14 mile run. I didn’t want to spend much time on pavement, so I decided to follow a mountain biking trail that I read about on Courtenay’s blog a few months ago. It’s called Flume Trail, and the trailhead is about 2.5 miles from her apartment in Incline Village. On the map it looked like a great idea, and it really is quite beautiful. The problem is, the first three and a half miles are straight up. I mean, over 10%, and since I started the run at 6300 feet, it meant I was already gasping for air when I arrived at the trail head. The other mistake was in starting the run from across town, because by the time I got to the flat section of the trail I was already six miles into the run and only got to enjoy two miles of flat-ish trail. image Ok, I’m done with the complaint part of the post, here’s what’s cool about this trail:

Every mile or so the plants and terrain change significantly. The run starts off on a ranch with tall evergreen trees and pavement, but very quickly becomes a trail through those same evergreen trees. Soon, however, the trees become thinner and you look down to see Lake Tahoe. At this point on the way up it seems like you’ve already climbed quite a bit, but coming down you notice that you can see wind ripples that were invisible up higher.

Then the trail gets a lot steeper, and begins to switchback around large boulders.  This continues until suddenly you find yourself in birch trees with white bark. The boulders are less abundant and so is the sky. Then it’s back to thick evergreens, the trail opens up and the light takes on a certain glow that only seems to happen when huge trees are sucking all the energy they can get from a dim sky (chlorophyll rules.).

Once the trail flattens out it goes along a cliff and weaves back and forth with the terrain. There are places with no trees and a sheer drop-off and there are places thick with evergreens and a more mild slope. This was the best part of the run by far, and actually made the uphill worthwhile. Next time I’ll ride a bike to the base of the trail and start my run from there so I can have another few miles on the level.

Oh, and the view of Tahoe was amazing from so high up. If only I had a way to carry a camera with me. (Hint Hint to the engineers at Garmin: add a camera to your next watch.)

San Francisco Triathlon Race Report

IMG_8444 I finished up my season last weekend in San Francisco. This is my second year racing the San Francisco Pan-America Cup, and there were almost no similarities between the races.

Last year an oil spill forced the race directors to cancel the swim leg of the triathlon and convert the race into a run-bike-run duathlon. This was extremely disappointing to me at the time because running was my weakest leg of the race. So last year I ended up in a chase pack on the bike, leading into a run where I completely felt like I hit a brick wall and was barely able to stumble across the finish line.

This year, however, we were able to dive into the 56 degree water of San Francisco Bay for the 1500m swim. I lead the first half of the swim, but, after managing to swim so far off course that I would later be a hot topic of conversation among spectators, I decided to sit on the leaders feet for the second lap, and finishing the swim second, comfortably in the first bike pack.

image Once on the bike I looked around and realized that about 5 of the top 7 runners were in the pack with me, and the other two were closing in quickly because a pack of fast runners typically doesn’t see the point in working hard on the bike. I followed suit, knowing that even with a recent knee injury I would be much faster on the run than in previous years.

I had my Garmin Edge 705

collecting data during the race, including power data from my Quarq Cinqo power meter (pictured on a crank above). That data is all up on my Garmin Connect account. The really interesting part of the power readout is to see what happened on the bike when Matt Reed and Matt Chrabot caught our group and started a series of relentless attacks. That was around 25 minutes into the 40km ride, and on the power graph you can see a number of large spikes in power. The speed of the group also changed from fairly steady to anything but smooth. We ended up losing a couple people off the back of the group, which pleased me greatly.

I started off the run with a lead pack of about 5 people, but just a half mile in I started have stomach pain and had to make a pit stop at a bathroom. I’ve never had problems like this during a race, and I’m not exactly sure what I did wrong in preparation, but it definitely took some wind out of my sails. While I was off the course I had about 12 runners pass me in a huge chase pack. Regardless, I was able to run each of the 3 lap, 10km course faster than the previous lap, and my final run time was almost 5 minutes faster than last year, even with a pit-stop. I reclaimed a few of the spots I lost and came in 15th overall. That makes me pretty happy, and it bodes well for the training I have been doing with Victor Plata.

Speaking of whom, Victor ran away from everyone and won the race, followed shortly by Brian Fleischmann Joe Umphenour and Matt Reed.

Next up for races, I’m going to do a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning. I haven’t figured out where yet, but I can either do the 5k I did last year, or a 10k in Gig Harbor. Both are not that close to home. :( 

I guess that’s it for my rookie year of triathlon. I’m already excited for next season to start! Take a look at my freshly redone schedule and results page where I already have a tentative 2009 schedule in place.