The Legend of Aaron Scheidies (part 1)

In August I was laying on a couch in Tiburon reading the last of the Harry Potter novels when I received an email boasting the subject, “Love Mail” from a name I didn’t recognize, asking if I could “guide him through a triathlon”.. It was Aaron Scheidies, and a quick google search told me he was the fastest visually impaired athlete in the world. Not much can get me get off the couch when I’m rooting against Voldemort, but Aaron wanted to know if I could help him with something epic: He wanted to not only break the Physically Challenged World Record for Olympic Distance Triathlon, but he wanted to smash the record. His goal was to break the two hour barrier, and to do it he needed someone to be there with him the whole way.

Aaron asked me because I am from the Northwest, and he saw my name on the results from USAT Nationals. We’re both currently attending the University of Washington, and it was because of this geographic coincidence that I was given the opportunity to accompany Aaron on his mission.

Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity, but Aaron suggested a small race in the Northwest, and I had a bigger vision. If we were going to attempt a World Record then I wanted to do it with the World watching. Life Time Fitness’s final race, the Toyota US Open in Dallas, Texas was the right place. A few phone calls and some lucky connections between Aaron and Life Time Fitness, and within a day we had our trip planned and booked.

Aaron Scheidies suffers from macular degeneration, which has caused his vision to slowly deteriorate since around the third grade. Aaron’s childhood dream of becoming the next David Beckham was his toughest loss, but that may be the only thing he let go with his vision. I have two short stories from this week to demonstrate the type of athlete and person Aaron is. Continue reading “The Legend of Aaron Scheidies (part 1)”

World Record

He did it!

Aaron Scheidies is officially the first physically disabled athlete to break two hours in an olympic distance triathlon!

I’m writing a full report of the weekend, which is going to be long, but there’s no way to describe this experience without giving it the depth it deserves. It wouldn’t be fair to Aaron.

Tomorrow (Monday October 15th) Aaron is going to be on Good Morning America. Our flight was canceled and we ended up staying in Dallas where Aaron did the interview tonight. The weekend’s a blur, I’ll try to focus it onto paper tonight and I’ll blog as soon as I get home tomorrow afternoon.

Until then, google Aaron Scheidies (videos should be coming out tonight or tomorrow), read the newspapers, and watch Good Morning America. This was an amazing experience to be a part of.

Toyota Dallas US Open Life Time Fitness Triathlon

That’s a mouthful. The name is huge, and so is everything in Texas. I’m too busy to write much this morning, but I wanted to post a link to a video the Associated Press did on Aaron and me, and our attempt to break a world record this weekend.

Right now we’re off to meet with sponsors and then to pick up our racing bike: a 25 pound full carbon tandem made by Griffin. This is going to be a fun trip.

More later.

Ok, they’re running late, so I’ll mention a couple more things.

We’re staying in the Hilton, which falls under my usual complaint about fancy hotels: EVERYTHING costs extra. Internet? extra. The gym? extra. Banana splits delivered to our room? extra! The hotel used to host visiting basketball teams, but the players complained they had to walk to far to get to their rooms. It’s true, this place makes the Taj Mahal look like a shack.

There are some really fancy things here too. There’s a motion detector on the light switch in the bathroom. It works well too, after keeping the light on all night long, the detector knew to turn OFF the lights the moment I walked in the door. How did they know I like to shave in the dark?

We have a guy from Life Time Fitness who has been driving us around, but last night he had go to a meeting, which left us taking a cab to Life Time Fitness – North Dallas for a workout. The cab driver got lost, drove in circles for 20 minutes, then tried to charge us extra and told us it was OUR fault he got lost. Apparently after it was obvious we were lost, and he ignored Aaron and I’s request to stop for directions, that was our fault. Also, he said it was our fault that the address we gave him was “confusing” (but correct), and apparently a visually impaired guy and a kid who’s never been to Dallas should know how to direct a cabby (He actually said this stuff). We spent another 10 minutes agruing against similar absurdities. It was so rediculous that when we finally got into the LTF we were both laughing too hard to tell the front desk why we were there.

Peggy’s Post (#2)

I heard more from Peggy McDowell-Cramer. I asked for clarrification on how strong the “S” was when she said she had done IronmanS. “How many times? 6 times for kona, this is #7. It’ll be #11 total: 3 IMNZ, and 1 Florida.” Wow. I don’t even know how to respond to that, so here’s Peggy’s latest report from Kona.

Things have definitely come alive by Tuesday night, as most competitors are here. We just had the parade of nations, which ends up at the Expo Village, and that signals the official start of the activities. Since Kailua-Kona is a small little town, it’s pretty crowded.

I started Monday off with the usual swim and then got the ART people to work on my tight shoulders and neck. This group has a specific massage technique which is, in short, to push on a knot until it gives up. The practitioners do this for free each morning of the week, 15 minutes per person. They put up their massage tables under a huge canopy right at the pier, so the swim first and massage second routine is fairly standard. I’ve had wonderful ones, very normal, but today’s draw was a wannabe hepcat. He did loosen a couple of knots, so I can hardly complain.

During the day I did some modest workout things in the heat and visited an open house by a nutritional company (Hammer Gel). It was at a beach house 4 miles south of town and the company owner and family put it on just for the athletes….and so it was very much like just visiting friends. There’s something similar, I think, by another gel company the day after the race, at another rented house close to the first one. I’m not sure how I feel about those: thanks; thanks and I really ought to buy a bunch of your stuff now; thanks and I feel like a mooch because I probably won’t buy anything…….who knows?

Last night, per notice, I went over to the Iron Gents soiree at the King Kam hotel, which is at the pier/start/finish of the race/registration/etc. There were probably around 50 people there. I knew several, got to meet some I’d long heard about. It was a nice, fairly low-key event.

Today’s early morning swim had a fun factor added in because the fellow who has a Kona coffee company got a boat with an outrigger boom on it, went 1/2 a mile out from shore, and had iced espresso for us. You swam up to the boat, hung onto the boom as someone fixed your cup with or without cream and sugar, gave the cup back when done, then swam off. To sight on it they had an orange sail with appropriate wording on it, and it was an entertaining event. They’ll be out there the next two days, too. After the swim, registration opened and it was pretty much a breeze this year, which means quicker and more efficient. More along the lines of expecting competitors to be sentient and literate, so not much going through everything verbally with us.

From there it was off to riding the first part of the bike. It’s only about 7 miles long, but winds around town, with an out and back section going south, and I wanted to see how I wanted to do the gearing. During this venture I was reminded that my shoe cleats had developed a truly intolerable squeak. …both of them…which had driven me crazy on Saturday’s long ride. Fortunately there was a bike shop set up right at the King Kam hotel site and it took just one drop of oil in each cleat (total: 2 drops) to make life good again.

With the bike shop was the whole IM retail store and this year it had a notable difference: no posted prices. There’s nerve! The whole IM merchandising end of life is the subject of a good deal of athlete sarcasm (which apparently hurts sales not one iota), and this year’s top candidates for rolled eyeballs are the following: mattresses, and a Christmas tree ornament-ball with the mighty M-dot logo and some wording. I searched around and found the latter was to be had for $12.

The parade this afternoon was nice, and I got to meet more Americans while waiting for it to get going. We end up at the Expo’s opening, which is sort of entertaining in its own way. It’s a series of open tents with vendors, IM qualifier race reps, a stage with various rotating speakers, and a good deal of whatnot, and the mattresses were there. I tried out the medium and firm ones. As for me, I’m headed for the one right here in my condo, right now!

All remains well,
Peggy

How many Ben’s does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Thursday I’m leaving for Dallas to meet up with Aaron Scheidies. We’re going to break a world record, and come home happy. I’m really excited.

The Lara Brown visit continues to teach me about training opportunities that I was unaware of. Today I went to Eastside Multisport which is next door to the Microsoft campus in Redmond. The setup is fundamentally the same as Seattle Multisport: eight Computrainers set up around a TV, stereo system, and a projection screen. The difference, is that SMS is in the back of an old transmission repair shop, and ESMS is in the back of a really nice facility with a massage room in the front. Both are tough to find from the street, but where SMS has a 8.5×11 in white sheet of paper with the name on it in the window, ESMS has an actual sign. The 10 year old tv at SMS is up against ESMS’s 42 inch plasma. What’s not different, is that both places are a great place to get a quality workout in.

I showed up to ESMS this morning, put my bike on the trainer, and then realized that I had left my shoes drying in front of the fire place. Lara and Cindy (the woman running ESMS) are both married to guys named Ben, which was a little confusing to me at first, and only became more so as the conversation repeatedly referred to “my Ben”. Well, Cindy’s Ben had left his bike shoes at ESMS, and while they fit well enough, he uses Look pedals; I use Shimano. I went to switch pedals from his bike to mine, but discovered that my 6mm wrench wouldn’t fit his pedals, they take an 8mm. There was no 8mm around, but Lara offered to get her Ben to bring a wrench form their house (about 2 miles away).

By 7:45 I was on my bike with Cindy’s Ben’s Shoes and pedals, all thanks to the wrench from Lara’s Ben. So my question for the day is this: “How many Ben’s does it take to do a bike workout?”

After the workout I was running late to class. I had 20 minutes to get from Redmond to Seattle, then park, and run across campus. I made it on-time, but I was sweating profusely and I feel really sorry for the girl sitting next to me. Maybe my pheromones made her day, but my guess is she was counting the seconds for class to end. [Sorry, left handed girl. 🙂] (On a strange side note, the girl was wearing the same black TYR warm-up pants I always wear, and a Northface jacket just like mine, only in black. Is lack of style a Seattle thing?)

Other great news this week, Loren’s foot got him through his last race of the season, just a week after I saw him with a gaping hole from a embedded rock he picked up on the swim exit of Tinley’s.. Congratulations Loren! I can tell he’s in his off season because he’s already calling me to share stories of his daughter farting, and asking me to work on my eyebrow curl. Brian Davis has been MIA since he bought a new bike. I’m getting lonely at swim practice, and I’ve actually seen more of his wife than of him. I figured he was just cycling a lot, but then last night he called to say he’s blown his knee out. It’s either the saddle height or the cleat placement, but it sounds like before he gets back on the bike Marijana (his wife) needs to give him some TLC. [Marijana, TLC is NOT similar to BLT! Keep that kid off the bacon greese!]

Peggy McDowell-Cramer: 140.6mi in Kona (Part 1)

In 2006 I was in Kansas City for my first USAT Age Group Nationals. I had just found out the hard way that about 90% of the 1500 athletes who come to that event all think they should register within the first hour of an 8 hour registration period. The line was long, and I knew nobody in it. I’m not sure what started the conversation, but about half way through the line I was talking to the woman behind me about her son that lives in Honolulu, and how hard it is to be a Northern California person living in Santa Monica. That woman was Peggy McDowell-Cramer a masters athlete who boasts that most of her competition is dead, and therefor just finishing practically guarantees her a spot on the podium. Since we met 15 months ago, I have had the pleasure of seeing Peggy at plenty of USAT events. When she’s not focused on taking down her dying competitors, she organizes non-denominational services the night before races, and claims her “real job” is “preaching, at the Welsh Presby. church in L.A.”.

This week Peggy is in Kona getting ready for a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, and 26.2 mile run. She read my post about the ISM Adamo and wrote me let me know she was one of the crazies (I was shocked to learn that she’s actually done IM-Kona several times). Last year I was in Kona for the Ironman World Championships, but since I can’t be there this year, I’m letting Peggy do the reporting. This week is the pre-race report, and next week we’ll have part 2: post-race.

Ben Collins and Peggy McDowell-Cramer
Peggy’s the one on my right.

It’s a quiet Sunday night here in Kona, and a good time to start a report. I arrived here Thursday afternoon along with my bike and suitcase, which seemed to be a good start, considering my Hamburg saga [baggage trouble… it happens – ben]
Getting settled was pretty quick and easy, as was putting my bike together. That’s a happy report, as it doesn’t always go that way. A run up to the grocery store took care of food, I got the computer/phone plug thing arranged, and all was well.
I went for a long swim Friday morning and there were plenty of others out there, too, although nothing compared to what it’ll be, say, tomorrow and after. There are always fish underneath, but not too many colorful ones on this morning. I was nearly back in when, right underneath me, came 8 bottlenose dolphins, one a baby. They were big enough that it was plenty surprising. not overly alarming as they were swimming fairly swiftly in the opposite direction, but close enough for me to think that (1) a little farther away would be fine, and (2) ask myself: are you nuts? This is entirely wonderful, and furthermore, people pay lots to see something like this, this close. Continue reading “Peggy McDowell-Cramer: 140.6mi in Kona (Part 1)”

Seattle Triathlon Training Venues

This week we have a special visitor in Seattle. Lara Brown is up here for the first time visiting her new home in Redmond, Washington. Her husband, who is lucky enough to be named Ben, just got a job at Microsoft, and has damned his wife to soggy gray winter training. Lara will stay in San Fran until the end of the year, but this week and next she’s visiting her man before she gets into her peak training cycle leading up to the Clearwater 70.3 (where she’s going to take names and leave bruises).

While visiting, she’s been asking a lot of questions about where, when and who to train with. I’ve grown up here, and been training for the past nine months, and this made me realize that I still haven’t answered those questions for myself. Referred her to Chris Tremonte, who lives in Redmond, but his answers were so detailed and long that we were both more confused than before. The fact is, Seattle doesn’t have much of a pro triathlete scene, and finding people to train with is tough because everyone has very different schedules, and lives nowhere near each other.

I was able to find a couple cool training venues while trying to help out Lara, and it may really improve my training as well. Here’s a bit about that: Continue reading “Seattle Triathlon Training Venues”

Jesus Gonzalez: A new perspective on Sport

My first week at Columbia Univeristy I met a guy named Jesus. It took me a while to figure out that “Hey-Zeuss” was spelled with a J and an S, but then I guess those lessons are a big part of why I wanted to live in New York. Jesus was the first person I met, besides my roommate, and ended up being one of my closest friends at school. We were both mechanical engineering majors, so our schedules were identical. Now he works for an engineering firm in Miami that fixes Endoscopic Scopes (which do cool things like colonoscopies). Jesus was a wrestler in high school, and has always been more of a fast-twitch athlete. He kicks my butt in basketball (not saying much), and, although he’s the same size, he could always put up way more iron than me in the weight room. When we hit the pool or the track, on the other hand, I always wondered what happened to the kid. This week I asked Jesus to tell write about his view on endurance sports, what he learned by being a friend to swimmers, and how he makes sport a part of his life in a different way than most of us.

Ben Collins, Mark Backman, and Jesus Gonzalez
Los Tres Amigos: Ben Collins, Mark Backman, and Jesus Gonzalez

I had always considered myself an athlete. At the very least, one could say that I am athletic. I played little league football from age ten through highschool, wrestled all through middle school and high school, and generally spent most of my time outside of home at the park playing any number of sports, none of which were running, swimming, or biking. Did I run? Of Course! Did I swim? I was raised in Miami, of course I swam! Did I bike? Certainly. But these were not things that I considered to be sport. Cycling was what I did to get from point A to point B. Swimming was a strictly recreational activity barring the few races my friends and I would hold from one end of the pool to the other. And running, well running was either done with a ball in your hands, between bases, or for conditioning. In other words, a means to an end, certainly not an end in itself.
I met two of my very closest friends in my first week of college. The first person I met was my roommate: Tall, very lean, very white, with hair that was in dire need of something, CPR possibly. Pool water is not good for hair. The second was a young man who happened to have the same advisor that I did, and we both happened to misinterpret our orientation documents in exactly the same way. We were the only two idiots to get lost. This one was even whiter than the roommate I had just met, and his hair …. oh the hair …. blonde afros on white guys was definitely a new concept to me. Both of these gentlemen were swimmers on our varsity team, GO LIONS!!!! The latter of the two was Ben Collins and the two of us didn’t know it at the time, but he was on his way to becoming one of the most dominant male swimmers in our school’s history. Not to mention, my definition of ‘sport’ was on its way to expanding considerably.
My swimmer friends introduced me to world of competition where your competitors don’t necessarily train to defeat you, they train to defeat their former selves. The clock is the real enemy. In most sports, although mistakes can be costly, its usually entirely possible for a player to recover. Swimming was a sport in which the smallest lapse in focus could, and almost certainly would, cost you the race.
During the off-season my friends and I would work out together. We’d go for a good lift then go warm down in the pool. Not enough can be said for how incredibly efficient swimmers are with their strokes. Now I swim, and I swim well. But swimming is not like running. It is not something that we as humans inherently know how to do. I’d feel like was I was swimming with a parachute on while my swimmer buddies glided through the water like merry mer-people. It was a humbling experience to say the least. But as I mentioned, swimming was not like running. I know how to run. And I’ve always kept myself pretty active, so I’m in decent shape. So, on some days we’d go for a run. These guys were swimmers, not runners, so I’d be able to show them what us landlovers could do with our feet. Right? Nope!!! Turns out that years of rigorous cardiovascular training in the water made these guys run like Kenyans. Once again, I was ashamed to call myself athletic.
I now compete in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and wonder how much better I could be if I had the cardio fitness that my, once swimmer friends, now triathlete friends have.

ISM Adamo

ISM Adamo Saddles

I’m getting my winter commuter bike and my Beyond Fabrications Radius Carbon Road bike all set up for training on. I want to have all my bikes fitting exactly the same, and the key component is going to be the saddle. On my Blink Carbon TT bike, I ride an ISM Adamo. It’s a funny looking saddle, but honestly, it is the greatest thing to happen to my groin area. Imagine riding 50 miles in your aero bars (or 56, or 112 if you’re crazy), and experiencing no numbness, no pain, no need to shift weight and sit up for blood flow… It’s amazing. You don’t sit on the seat the way you do a normal saddle, the two prongs go right into your hip bones and you can sit comfortably with any hip angle. It’s amazing. I’ve been pretty happy with a Selle gel saddle that I’ve had on my road bike since I started riding, but when I raced in Poland my saddle region was sore for days from going in and out of my ITU bars (little aero bars that require more core support than regular aero bars). It was so bad that using the restroom hurt. That was my last straw, I’m going to save my future family, and put ISM Adamo saddles on all my bikes.

Site Updates

Believe it or not, I’ve spent more time on my site the past couple of days than I normally do. Yet there’s nothing new posted. Web development is not something I know much about, so this site has been quite the learning process. Soon there will be a new home page for my site, which will make navigation and finding stuff easier, but first I have to figure out how to do it. Until then, I’m going to balance memorizing everything about 20 amino acids, keeping up to speed on Organic chemistry, working out, and posting to the site.

This morning, while walking to the bus stop on a typical Seattle day (drizzle and gray) I looked down at my shoulder and saw that a bird had pooped on my jacket. It was already dry, so it must have happened Monday without me noticing. Then I got to class and was told by my friend Mike that I had a nice boogie hanging from my nose. The bird poo, that’s supposed to be good luck, but walking around campus with boogers? There’s nothing good about that. It’s amazing how a day of lectures and poor weather can make you feel too exhausted to function. (ok, so racing, and travel are probably factors too). More sleep. That fixes everything.

Greta (Loren’s wife [normally I would call her his “lovely” or “beautiful” wife, but then Loren would make sure to put me in Pipers room before Treasure Island.]) gave me a haircut before I left. I’ll post pictures soon.