The Latest Goings-on!

Lately, most people want to talk to me about my wife Kacie.  That's great!  And she's great!  She's training hard for RAAM, which is now only about six weeks away.  This past weekend, we had to abort a 24-hour ride with Dani because of rain, but otherwise, the training has been very good.  I've told several people that she's experiencing a lot of the same things that all of us experience six weeks out from a big race: she's nervous, she worries she hasn't done enough, she worries that there's not enough time to get in the training she still needs to do, she's scared of getting injured or sick, etc.  The difference is that all of that is amplified since RAAM is, after all, such an enormous undertaking.      

This week, I'm sending out letters soliciting support for Kacie, Dani, and Camp Twin Lakes.  Kacie asked me and eight other people to help with the fundraising so that she and Dani could focus more intently on the training.  (Truth be told, though, Kacie and Dani have done more fundraising than anyone else.)  A page is set up for my fundraising here.  If you're inclined, please donate!

The Cheaha Challenge Gran Fondo!

Even though my primary responsibility this spring is to support Kacie, I have done several races on my own.  Last weekend, those two things came together at the Cheaha Challenge Gran Fondo!  The Cheaha Challenge is, in my opinion, one of the hardest centuries in the southeast.  Between the climbs, the rough pavement, and the fact that the gran fondo is timed, I consider it my own "spring classic."  Last year, I won.  This year, I had low expectations since I haven't done a lot of long rides, and I wasn't really ready for a 102-mile ride with a profile like this:

There was a King of the Mountain prize on offer, though, to the person who rode the three-mile climb up Mt. Cheaha--the highest point in Alabama--most quickly.  Since that climb comes only about forty miles into the ride, I figured that I could hide in the pack until the tough climbs started around twenty-three miles, do a bit of work between twenty-three and forty, give it my all up Cheaha, and win the KOM.  That's what I did.  I crested Mt. Cheaha about a minute ahead of the next person.   

Then, a strange thing happened.  I descended the backside of Cheaha and continued riding, waiting for the folks behind me to regroup and catch up with me.  I kept waiting and kept waiting.  At the turnaround, though, I had put another minute between them and me.  So, I kept riding solo.  By seventy miles, they were still nowhere to be seen, and I began to think that I might have a chance to take home the overall prize via an epic solo sixty-mile breakaway.  Alas, it was not to be:     

  
Can you see the red car in the above photo?  See the bike on the ground next to it?  That's mine.  I'm standing just behind the person in the fluorescent jacket, changing my second flat tire.  About three minutes into my first flat tire change, the three leaders came by.  (They were not, by the way, the three guys in the above picture.)  I finished changing the tire and set out after them, only to get my second flat about 200 yards later.

Oh, well.  I didn't have big expectations anyway.  I ended up third--evidently something happened to one of the three guys--and I had a better ride than I thought I was capable of having.  That gave me a lot of confidence for the Mountain Madness Half-Iron this weekend--one of my big target races for the spring.  The only pang of regret or frustration I felt was when I read this article about the two guys who finished in front of me in the Anniston Star.

John Tanner Sprint Triathlon!

On to the next one, though.  This past weekend, I did the extremely-too-short-for-me John Tanner Sprint Triathlon.  My main goal was to get a good workout, get an open water swim, and practice my transitions ahead of Mountain Madness this weekend.  I got all three of those things, but the race was not entirely satisfying.   

I was in the first wave of starters.  I've been going to masters swim classes a lot lately, so I was eager to see what I could do.  Within the first few strokes, though, I think I forgot everything that I had learned in masters.  Instead, I feel like I just flailed along, ran into people, and swam off course.  Did I do better on the swim than I have in the past?  Probably--I was roughly the 80th fastest swimmer in the field of about 320 people, while in my first triathlon just under two years ago, I was the 298th fastest swimmer out of a field of 303.  All last year, I seemed to finish in the dead middle of the pack of the swim regardless of the size of the field or the distance of the event--with the NOTABLE exception of my swim at Kona--but at John Tanner, I was around the 75th percentile.  Finally, no one from any of the later waves caught up with me; that was a first for me in waved starts.  Nonetheless, I can't be really happy about having fallen far short of my swim goals and having given up two to four minutes to the guys who ended up beating me in only a 600m swim.  It is what it is, though; having a slower swim and then catching people on the bike and run is kinda what I do.  It's kinda what I will always do; even as I continue to improve my swim, I'll never be first out of the water.

Looking back on the race, it was T1 that was most frustrating.  Before the race, I actually practiced removing my wetsuit since I struggle with that.  During the race, I did an okay job with it, but my transition was still way too slow.  I was also cursed by having a terrible spot in the transition area--right next to swim in/run out.  That meant that in both T1 and T2, I had to cross virtually the entire transition area with my bike.  I gave up another 40-60 seconds to the guys who beat me in T1.  Thus, heading onto the bike, I had essentially given the field a five-minute head-start.

I brought back most of it, but not all.  Fourteen miles on the bike and five kilometers on foot is just not enough space for me to make up that much time.  I came off the bike having moved into the top ten in the race:

My bike split was the second-fastest in the race--only two seconds out of first--but I made the mistake of holding back too much in the last half-mile.  Onto the run:  

And from another angle . . .

My legs and body felt terrible, so much so that I thought I had overcooked the bike and destroyed my run.  Evidently not; I caught a few more people and had the fastest run split in the race.  I ended up fifth overall, only six seconds out of fourth, less than one minute out of second, and less than two minutes out of first.  I won my age group, but of the eight races I've done so far this year, this triathlon--my first triathlon of the year--brought the lowest overall finish I've had.  Hmm.  What does this say about my being a triathlete?  Actually, what does it say about my doing sprint triathlons?  Of course, it says what I said above:  sprints are too short for me.  They're fun, though, and my enjoyment of this one was heightened by the fact that about fifty people from the Atlanta Triathlon Club competed.  It was very cool seeing them on course.     

One final thought, with a plea for some advice.  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how my swimming was really improving.  In short, I went to the pool where I have swam a lot of yards in the last two years, and I did 2000y four minutes faster than I ever had before.  Given my obvious improvement, I was thinking about some specific reasons why I wasn't as fast in the water at John Tanner as I had hoped.  Specifically, I averaged just under 2:00/100m at John Tanner (if you take out the 50m run to the timing mat), which was about the same speed that I swam in the pool without a wetsuit a couple of weekends ago.  Given that I could do 2:00/100m without a wetsuit, I thought that I could probably go about 1:45/100m in a wetsuit at John Tanner.  But I didn't.  Sure, my lack of open-water swimming prowess is part of it; I certainly was not swimming in a straight line.  And sure, swimming in the pack was difficult; I am still not great at this, given that I've done less than a dozen triathlons.  Most of all, though, I have concluded that my work in masters so far has mostly improved my body position in the water, which is exactly what the wetsuit normally does.  That is, I believe that the four minutes that I gained in the pool a couple of weekends ago was because I have gotten strong enough to hold up my hips and feet so that--to use the imagery Matthew Rose gave me--I am better able to keep them "behind my shoulders."  On the day of my good swim, my stroke rate and distance per stroke were roughly the same.  I was only faster because I was keeping my lower body more hydrodynamic.

So, what's the takeaway?  My thought: that my slowness now primarily resides in my shoulders.  Sure, my kick is terrible; I literally sit still in the water if I try to use a kickboard.  But the wetsuit rendered my kick inconsequential.  The reason I was still slow was because my stroke was bad, both in terms of keeping my elbows up and in terms of plain strength.  After several arm, hand, and shoulder injuries in the past six years, my flexibility and my arm strength have both tumbled.  I feel like this lack of flexibility and strength has become my biggest limiter.  That's why there was so little difference between the speed that I was able to swim in a pool by myself without a wetsuit and what I swam at John Tanner with a wetsuit. The wetsuit doesn't make my shoulders stronger or more flexible.  It doesn't help me move more water, which is what I need to be doing.  

What do you think, swimmer friends?  Is my assessment sound?  If so, what now??  If not, then what???   

 (The flags flying half staff at Georgia Gwinnett College.) 

On Monday, I spent more time following the Boston Marathon than I ever had.  I watched the entire men's and women's races online, both of which were very exciting (for totally different reasons).  I also tracked five friends, including two athletes that I coach.  I had a ball.  Alas, my enjoyment turned to horror--just as everyone's did--at the 4:09 mark of the race.

The attack upset me for a lot of reasons.  My wife Kacie wrote a great blog entry about why it was particularly painful for endurance athletes.  I have read it several times since Monday afternoon.       

While I was watching the race, I wrote a blog entry, and it seems wrong not to publish it--as if, to use an incredibly over-used phrase, I'm letting the terrorists win.  At the same time, I think it would callous to publish a blog--especially a blog by an endurance athlete entitled "A Great Weekend!"--without first acknowledging the tragedy that befell Boston and the worldwide running community.   What I wrote follows.  

A Great Weekend!

Team Darden had a great weekend!  Kacie did the Tony Serrano Century on Saturday, then was the second female finisher in the mountainous, 108-mile Tour of Georgia Gran Fondo on Sunday.  I'm sure that she'll be writing about that stuff in her blog, so you should check it out.

Speaking of checking out other blogs, if you're not already following Power, Pedals, and Ponytails, you should be!  I wrote a race report for the Heart of the South 500 that Dani and Kacie won last weekend.  Read it, and be amazed at what the two of them accomplished!  They are starting to get a lot more attention, which they certainly deserve.  While you're reading, check out this article on Women Who Cycle, and this article announcing their sponsorship by Moxie jerseys.   

My good weekend started with a really good swim on Saturday.  Several months ago, I wrote that I was endeavoring to become "George the Swimmer."  (I've even used that hashtag on Twitter several times whenever I have had 140 characters to share about my progress.)  A few weeks ago, I wrote about how things were going at the Dynamo masters swim class that I've been taking since January.  Most folks who know that I've been focusing on my swimming have been asking me, "Do you think you've improved?"  My answer was always, "I don't know," because I felt like I never had an apples-to-apples comparison.  Certainly, I felt like I was better, but I wouldn't really know until I either raced or, more accurately, got in the pool at the LA Fitness where I've done so many swims and just put in a lot of laps.

Well, since I had a race on Sunday but I really didn't want to take Saturday completely off, I decided that it was the perfect chance for a swim at the LA Fitness.  I didn't aim to swim hard or fast, but just normal.  I wanted to see how my time for a regular 2000y swim would compare to what I would normally do for a regular 2000y swim before I started going to masters.  The result?  Four minutes.  Four minutes.  That is how much time has fallen off my 2000y swim time in only three months.  That's a minute per 500, or more than 12 seconds per 100.  That analogous to taking a minute off your 10K pace.  I could hardly believe my watch.  It was way beyond my expectations, and needless to say, it will serve to keep me going to masters for the next couple of months!

One interesting side note on my swim.  I wear a Swimsense watch which tells me my distance per stroke and my stroke rate.  Despite speeding up significantly, my distance per stroke and my stroke rate were the same that they always have been.  This suggests to me that the gain in speed is due entirely to improved body position and hydrodynamics.  Am I right about that, fishy friends?

On to the big show . . .

PT Solutions Cartersville Duathlon Race Report!
          
Sunday was my first multisport race in an Atlanta Tri Club kit.  I was excited, but also a bit nervous.  The race was a 5K run, a roughly 17-mile bike, and another 5K run.  A triathlon without swimming?  It sounds like my kind of event!!  Needless to say, I felt that I could do very well.  At the same time, I was unsure of my fitness.  I've certainly done some fast running in the past few months, but I haven't done much long cycling.  Like I wrote before, I've been experimenting with a lot of short and fast workouts, and due to scheduling conflicts and such, I haven't done anything long on my bike in a month.  On Wednesday night, I did an LT/FTP test, and I scored about 15-20 watts lower than I would have liked.  That was another blow to my confidence.  Combine my high expectations with my lack of certainty about my preparation, and that means I wasn't sleeping much on Saturday night. 

I made it to the race in plenty of time and got all checked in.  I had a nice warmup in Dellinger Park at sunrise, amongst the rabbits and deer.  And then I headed to the starting line.  My friend (and fellow RAAM crew member) Beau was there, and he got this picture at the start:

 
My goal was to run a relaxed 17:15 to 17:30 for the first 5K, then keep my wattage around 260 on the bike (which I figured would give me about 43:00), then another 17:15 to 17:30 for the second 5K.  I was heading into unknown territory, though.  I'm still less than two years out from doing my first ever triathlon, and I've only done one other duathlon ever.

Even though my goal meant the first mile should have been about 5:40, a group of four of us went through the first mile at about 5:25.  I was running relaxed and felt fine, so I just went with it.  I feel like I have pretty good running "instincts."  By that, I mean that I can run according to perceived effort for various distances really well.  It's a skill I've built up over many, many years!  Thus, when my effort feels right, even if my times are off, I tend to trust my instinct.  In fact, I felt good enough to take the lead just after the mile mark, and my second mile was about the same.  One of the other three guys dropped off the pace.  In the third mile, I backed off just a bit in the last half mile to save some for the bike, but the mile split was nonetheless still the same.  I came into T1 in 16:45, a few steps in front of the two other runners.  I was pretty charged by this first run.  The effort felt perfect, and yet it was a good thirty seconds faster than I expected.                

I then gave back too many of those seconds in T1.  I need to work on my transitions.  I was a little bit shaky as I tried to change my shoes, but more importantly, I don't yet know how to do a "flying mount" on my bike.  Both of the two guys I led into transition changed faster than me and got out of T1 faster.  It took me 48 seconds to change my shoes, put on my helmet, and run my bike out of transition, but then I spent another ten seconds or so stopping, throwing my leg over my bike, and starting pedaling.  By that time, both of the other guys were down the road.  I had no trouble catching the first one, but the second would prove a bit more difficult.   

There were several speed bumps on the way out of the parking lot.  I hit the first one, and nearly lost my bottle.  I fixed it, hit the second one, and nearly lost my bottle again.  I fixed it, hit the third one, and DID lose my bottle.  It didn't matter all that much--I didn't really need the nutrition--but I would have liked to have had a bit of liquid!  Anyway, I caught one of the two cyclists in front of me in the first half-mile, and I knew that I wouldn't see him again.  The fella that got out of T1 first, though, was out like a shot.  I could see him way in front of me on some long straightaways, but for the whole of the bike ride, I was solo.  That's a unique experience for me since I'm used to getting out of the water in the middle of the pack and passing a lot of people on the bike.  It was what I was expecting in this race, though, so I wasn't thrown off.  Anyway, the bike course was actually harder than I thought it would be.  There were some pretty big hills in the first half, and there was a bit of wind.  Happily, though, most of that was in the first half of the course.  In addition, I actually rode with more power than I thought I would.  By the time I came into T2, I couldn't see the leader in front of me, but there was no one in sight behind me.  In the end, my bike split was the second-fastest bike split in the race, but it was almost three minutes behind the guy in the lead.  My split (43:31--23.4 mph) was slower than I would have liked, but I'm chalking that up to the wind and hills.  My average power (280w) was higher than I had expected.  T2, with its simple change of shoes, was much better.  It only took 30 seconds. 

As I was leaving transition, the race director yelled at me that the leader had three minutes on me.  I knew that I needed to run well and I needed the leader to blow up.  Three minutes--I couldn't even see him.  It was possible if he ran 20:00 and I ran 17:00, but I figured it was a long shot.  Unlike the first 5K where I had people to run with the entire time, the second 5K was an entirely solo affair.  It went well, though.   

From having done a lot of triathlons and bricks, I know that I always "feel slow" when I start running off the bike.  This was no exception.  My legs kinda felt terrible, too, but I could tell I was moving okay, and the rest of me felt good.  By the first mile or so, I found my running legs.  My first mile was a little bit slower than my first mile in Run #1 (5:25 vs. 5:35), but it was still in the ballpark of what I wanted to do.  The second mile was comparable to what I did in Run #1 (both about 5:25), so at that point, I knew that I would have a good second run.  I also saw the leader during an out-and-back portion in the second mile, and I knew he was too far in front of me to catch.  I was okay with it, though, because I felt like I was having a good race.  I ran my third mile faster than I had run my third mile in Run #1 (5:30 vs. 5:15) since I didn't need to hold anything back for the bike.  I ended up running my second 5K with exactly the same average pace as the first--5:24 pace.  The second one was just a touch longer than 5K, though, so the splits don't quite match (16:45 vs. 16:54).  My friend (and also fellow RAAM crew member) Keith was also there, and he took this picture of me coming in on the second run:

 (I think that all of the swimming has been worth it just for the way my arms look in these pictures.) 

My final race time was 1:18:28--comfortably under my "reach" goal of 1:20:00.  I was very happy about that.  On my way back to my car, I talked to the winner, Bert Harrison, a bit.  He lives in Boone, North Carolina--pretty much the best cycling grounds in the southeastern U.S.  (No wonder he smoked me on the bike!)  He also finished in the top ten at Age Group Duathlon Nationals last year, so he's clearly no slouch.  I finished just under 3:00 behind him, and in fact, I did roughly the same time that he did last year before he went on to finish in the top ten at Nationals two weeks later.  Needless to say, that has me rethinking what I might want to do with my time after IM Wisconsin.  There's this race in Tuscon, Arizona, on October 26, where I might do well if I ride my bike a bit more, do some more speedwork on the run, and hone my transition skills.  Hmm . . .  

Here I am on the podium, thanks again to Keith: 

 

Overall, I would say that this is a very good start to the multisport season!  After riding the Cheaha Challenge Gran Fondo next weekend--where I'll try to ride well, but I'm not aiming to defend my title after not riding many miles so far in 2013--I'll hit the water at the John Tanner Sprint Triathlon on April 27.  On to the next one!  

Experimenting!

Recently, Steve Magness, the cross-country coach at the University of Houston, wrote a very interesting blog entry.  In short, he argued two things.  First, he said that there are numerous ways to accomplish a desired training end, be it increased strength, endurance, VO2, speed, or whatever else.  When it comes to workouts, one size does not fit all.  Second, and more interestingly in my opinion, he said that seasoned athletes need to employ new means of accomplishing the same ol' physical goals (faster, higher, stronger, and all that) given that their bodies over time become adjusted to the workload.  For example, if your go-to lactate threshold workout for the last few years has been to do a forty-minute tempo run, you might get a better training response from doing a different LT workout (like, say, cruise intervals).  This has a particular relevance for adult athletes, such as myself and the folks I coach.  If we're looking for a performance breakthrough after years and years of training, we can potentially attain one by doing new things.

Of course, "changing it up" is not a novel concept.  It's the basis of a lot of well-known programs.  P90X, for one, expressly attempts to "confuse your muscles," the basic idea being that your body--which masterfully and quickly adjusts to any abnormal stimulus in order to maintain its current state--cannot successfully adjust to an ever-changing workout routine.  Therefore, P90X keeps your body constantly on edge by giving it ever-different challenges, never allowing it to settle into a homeostatic state and thus prompting continual fat loss and muscle growth.  The science on which this is based, however, is not rock-solid, and a lot of folks vehemently argue that regularly switching up your routine has a sort of "jack of all trades, master of none" effect on your fitness.

Unlike those who buy P90X in an attempt to build muscle, lose fat, and simply "get healthy," Magness has a specific goal in mind: to make faster runners.  As such, it would be a mistake to think that you'll find Magness's runners doing Kenpo.  He still believes that runners need certain basic elements to run fast--a high max VO2, a high lactate threshold, etc.  It's just that there are numerous ways to develop each of the particular elements an endurance athlete needs.  That being said, the underlying presumption is the same: ultimately, if an athlete does the same thing, workout after workout, year after year, he'll reach a plateau.  It will be impossible to go on to the next level unless you change things up.  It may not take only two or three weeks like the folks at P90X say, but it will ultimately happen.

In that spirit, I've been experimenting a great deal lately.  As I've already written, I started going to a master's swimming class in January, and I'm planning to continue attending it three times a week between now and June.  In class, I use equipment and do drills, none of which I had ever done before.  It is my hope that the buoys, fins, paddles, and kickboards, along with the head-taps, underwater recoveries, straight arm catch-up strokes, and chicken strokes will make me stronger and faster in the water.  We'll see when I do my first triathlon of the year, the John Tanner Sprint on 4/27.  More importantly, we'll see what happens when I line up for my first big target of the year, the Mountain Madness half-ironman on 5/5.   

And as I've already written, I've been running some shorter road races over the last few months.  Since that post, I've run two additional 5Ks, the Marietta Mentor 5K and the Janeen's Run 5K.  Here's a photo taken by Don McClellan at the Mentor 5K that is so blurry as to almost be artistic:             

  

It's not the photographer's fault: the weather was pretty terrible.  That was a tragedy, because it kept a lot of people from showing up for what was a great event. 

Besides the weather--which for Janeen's Run was gorgeous--the two races were very similar for me.  I showed up to run them mostly because I wanted to support the causes they were raising money for.  In each of them, I ran to the front in the first 200 yards or so, and I won by over 2:00.  In each, I ran about 16:30, which feels much easier now than it did in January.  I believe that that was the whole point of doing all of the short races.  Like I said about the swimming, though, we'll have to see whether it makes any difference in how well I run off the bike.  My first chance to try that will be next weekend at the PT Solutions Cartersville Duathlon.    

I have also changed up my run training a bit.  I've spent a lot of my life running in circles, be it around a track or around the dirt path in the park across the street from our house.  6x1600 w/ 400 rest.  10x400 w/ 100 rest.  4x1200 w/ 300 rest.  I've done each of these workouts countless times.  That's not to say that they weren't valuable; they were!  It's only to say that I have a certain modus operandi, and it's likely that my body has become accustomed to it.  This winter and spring, I've been doing more repeats on the road (like 10x1:00 w/ 1:00 rest on a hilly course) and on the treadmill (like 4 miles at 6:00 pace with gradually increasing inclines).  In addition, I'm going to experiment with adding tempo miles at the end of my long runs.  I think that I can run faster than I have been; we'll see if these things help.

Bike training?  That's different, too.  Right now, I'm riding four times a week, which is about the most that I can ride in a triathlon schedule.  Three of those rides, though, are only an hour long, and they're on the trainer.  Each of them features some amount of intensity, even though the overall rides are short.  Once a week, I'm getting a longer ride of three to five hours.  I'll bump up my overall volume when I start training for Ironman Wisconsin after RAAM, but for now, I'm going shorter and harder, much like what Chris Carmichael suggests in The Time Crunched Cyclist.  Of all of the training changes I'm making, this one makes me most nervous.  I worry that I'm not getting enough volume to be able to do well on the 56-mile hilly bike course at Mountain Madness.  We'll see.        

Also in the name of approaching old things in a new way, I decided to join the Atlanta Triathlon Club, as you can see from my shirt in all of the pictures of me running recently.  The ATC has a wide range of athletes, and they provide a lot of group training opportunities.  Last year, I trained for Ironman Coeur d'Alene and the Ironman World Championships almost entirely solo, save for a few group rides and some time I spent with my wife.  I've resolved not to do that this year.  Tonight, I'm heading to a group run staged by ATC.  Tomorrow, I'll be doing a trainer class that they offer at Energy Lab.  So far, I'm very impressed with the community.  

And, finally, I've been experimenting with new footwear.  In December, my parents purchased for me a pair of Newton running shoes.  Newtons are all the rage in the triathlon community, but since I come from a running background, I have been loathe to jump on the bandwagon.  I spent a long time talking to the Newton rep at an event for Power, Pedals, and Ponytails, and then I spent an even longer amount of time talking to my knowledgeable friends at West Stride.  When my parents offered to give me a pair of Newton Gravitys for Christmas--thereby relieving me of the guilt associated with gambling a lot of money on a pair of shoes that I may actually dislike--I decided to give them a try.  They came in bright red:

  

Newtons are not minimalist shoes," the rep told me with the full knowledge that I was a long-time runner who was skeptical of the barefoot running movement.  (Yes, I believe that human beings were "born to run."  No, I don't believe that we were born to run on concrete or that all running injuries emerge from improperly sloping shoes.)  He was mostly right.  While they are lighter and lower profile than many trainers, they still have a decent amount of cushioning.  They have a feel analogous to an old-school well-cushioned racing shoe such as the Nike Dualists that I used to wear back in the day.  The lugs on the front took a few steps to get accustomed to, but they really didn't bother me.

So, am I a hardcore convert to Newtons as so many people seem to be?  No.  Have I benefited from running in them, though?  Yes, I believe I have.  I don't think that Newtons are the best thing since sliced bread, even though I did like them enough to buy a second pair--the slightly lighter but equally loud-colored Distance model, which I have used in races:

 

Why buy a second pair?  I have come to believe that heel drop matters.  In the same way that a high heel will cause you to stick your butt out, lower heels will cause your hips to tuck under you.  Since I have struggled in my career with running injuries related to my hips, a shoe that stabilizes my stride by putting my hips more squarely under me is a good thing.  My next pair of shoes, whatever they are, will have a heel drop of five millimeters or less.  

I'm due for a new pair of shoes in the next few weeks, and I've spent plenty of time scouring the internet in search of a pair of shoes with a low heel drop that aren't also feather-light.  They are hard to find.  Virtually every shoe that has a heel drop of five millimeters or less also weighs eight ounces or less.  Under eight ounces has always been racing-flat territory; my beefier training shoes were normally upwards of twelve ounces.  I liked it this way for a variety of reasons, including the fact that donning racing flats made me feel springy and fast and put me in the right frame of mind to race.  It appears that the time may have come for me to give up my "heavy trainer but light racer" mentality in favor of a "light shoes all the time" mentality.  After all, as this outstanding article from Running Times points out, shoes in general are getting progressively lighter thanks to the influence of the minimalist shoe movement.  Even the clunky old Air Pegasus has slimmed down to ten ounces this year.     

Of course, only time tells whether experiments pay off.  If I am truly committed to experimenting with various things, I should only judge their effectiveness in the long term.  Check back with me this time next year. 

Swimmin'

In October, I wrote that I was going to start focusing on swimming and that as a result, there would probably be a lot in this blog about swimming.  Since that time, I've written four blog posts: three about cycling and one about running.  Doh! I've swam a lot since the New Year, though, so it's about time to reflect on what I've learned so far.

I attended my first masters class not long after I wrote my blog entry about becoming "George the Swimmer."  I put it off and put it off until I got this tweet from Andrew Shanks, one of the coaches at Dynamo, a highly-respected swimming and multisport group here in Atlanta:

I couldn't just ignore that:

As you can see from the screenshot above, it was promptly re-tweeted by my supportive wife (who has a pretty good sense of what motivates me), thus solidifying my commitment.  And as if that wasn't enough, she responded to it and tagged several other people, some of whom began responding: 

So, as I said I would, I went on that Thursday morning.  And to be honest, I regretted not having gone sooner.  In mid-November, there was hardly anyone there.  The coach, Maria Thrash, put me in a lane by myself and gave me a lot of attention.  I went two more times, and then I broke my arm falling off a mountain bike.  That was a shame, because when my arm was finally healed, I spent another full week or so re-building my confidence to go back again.  I finally bit the bullet on Monday, January 28th.  This semester, I'm only able to fit it into my schedule on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, given that my first class starts at 7:30 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

In my life, I've had two real swimming goals.  The first was to swim 4224 yards (roughly the Ironman distance) in the pool.  I accomplished that in November of 2011, about five months after learning to swim from scratch and about two weeks before competing in Ironman Cozumel.  The second was to have perfect Monday/Wednesday/Friday attendance at masters for six weeks--from my return on January 28th until the start of my spring break on March 8th.  Barring anything unforeseen, I'll accomplish that second goal at the end of this week.

Have I improved?  I really don't know.  I can certainly do some of the drills better than I could when I first got there, but I'm not sure if I am actually any better at getting through the water yet.  Masters consists of a lot of swimming with "equipment"--buoys, paddles, kickboards, and fins--and a lot of short repeats.  All I had ever done in the pool prior to going to masters was swim the yardage my coach put on my schedule.  Thus, I have very little basis for comparison.  I won't really know whether I'm any better until (a) I get back in the pool and swim long distances, or (b) race.  Neither of those will happen until May at the earliest, so until then, I'm going to take it on faith that I'm getting stronger and more proficient.

There are other things I have learned so far.  In no particular order:

--Don't speed when you leave the Dynamo parking lot.  There's a school just up the road, and the police hang out and wait for people who are rushing through the school zone.  Oops.

(Yes, I'm a teacher.  Yes, I got a ticket for speeding in a school zone.  Let's try not to read too much into this.)  

--My lack of swimming prowess stems from a few factors, some of which are more readily fixable than others.  First, I have phenomenally inflexible ankles from years and years of running.  As a result, my feet contribute absolutely nothing to my forward progress.  In fact, they stunt my forward progress; my feet are so unpointed that the whole lower half of my body sinks into the pool when I try to get horizontal.  (And yes, this is also due to a weak core.  I'm working on it.)  If I try to use a kickboard, I literally stop still in the water.  I have to use a single fin in order to make any progress down the pool if I'm not using my arms.  Second, my arms only do so much to overcome my dragging lower body, given that I don't have a great deal of strength in them.  Several shoulder injuries in the last few years has meant that I've had numerous two- to three-month periods in which I was hardly doing any work with my arms.  That has left me much weaker in my shoulders than I was five years ago.  Third and finally, I don't have the sort of coordination that good swimmers have.  I imagine that this will improve with time, but I don't know if I'll ever match the coordination of accomplished swimmers, such as the UGA Swim and Dive team show off here:

--As someone new to swimming, I'm bad not only at the actual swimming, but also at the skills that accompany swimming.  I'm all over the place during some drills, flailing my arms and gasping for air.  In addition, I suck at petty things, like putting on my paddles and turning while using the equipment.  This makes sense--most new cyclists aren't very good at cornering or changing tires--but it serves as a persistent reminder that I'm new to this.  

--My speed goals in swimming actually seem fairly moderate (read: achievable) if I think of them in terms of time spent in the water.  At Ironman Wisconsin 2013 (with a wetsuit), I'll be very happy if I swim seven minutes faster than I swam at Ironman Coeur d'Alene 2012 (with a wetsuit) and five minutes faster than I did at Ironman Cozumel 2011 (without a wetsuit).  That only amounts to 7 to 10 seconds faster per 100y, or about one second per 100y a month since I started masters in January.  If I qualify for Kona 2014, my goal will be to go twelve minutes faster than I swam at Coeur d'Alene and ten minutes faster than I did at Cozumel.  That amounts to 14 to 17 seconds per 100y, or less than one second per 100y a month since I started masters in January.  I don't think that that is unreasonable considering how much room I have to improve and considering that I'm already planning a major swimming block in November, 2013.  (You may note that I've left my Kona 2012 swim out of my consideration.  Although I'm sure that I will one day look back on it as a key moment in my sporting life, I don't consider it an indication of what I was capable of doing at the time.)         

--Masters is not nearly as intimidating as my wife made it sound.  (In her defense, I probably inferred a lot from her stories that wasn't there in order to justify my staying home.)  For one thing, it's not judgmental.  The coach has enough experience to have seen slower swimmers than me, and besides the people with whom I'm sharing the lane that day, none of the rest of the people that come to class can see what I'm up to in the guppy lane.  We all just do our thing.  Along similar lines, it's not nearly as stratified as I once thought.  I thought that the lane you were in was paramount, and you had to try and stay with the people in your lane.  It's really not that way at all--at least not at my end of the pool.  I'm in different lanes with different people pretty much every time I go to masters, and I may exchange a word or two with my lane-mates about what exercise was just assigned.  Other than that, I hardly have any interaction with the other swimmers when we're actually in the pool.  If I do, it's normally positive.  

At times, I've found that I actually look forward to masters.  I like having a structured practice with other people (even if I don't interact much with them) and a coach telling me what to do.  Once I got over my initial issues about feeling stupid, I have actually found it easier to motivate to go to masters than to do many other things.  The 5:00 alarm comes early, but only a touch earlier than it would be if I was not going to masters.  Plus, with Kacie's RAAM training, she's in bed early and up early most weekdays anyway.  It's easier to crawl out of bed when she's crawling out of bed, too.             

Running!

A couple of weeks ago, my dad and I went to an event at the Carter Center with Al Gore.  The former Vice President was promoting his new book, The Future.  There were about 500 people there.  It was fun for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the event was held in the same room where my wife and I got married five years ago.  (It was my first time in the Cecil B. Day Chapel since then!)  It was also cool because I got to hang out with Mr. Gore for about twenty minutes before the event.  He gave me a signed copy of his book:

   
My dad was in Congress for eleven years, and by the time that Bill Clinton was elected President, my dad had some experience under his belt.  Given that President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and my dad were all southern Democrats, they got to know each other well.  This meant that I got to have some really cool experiences growing up, including running with the President when I was a sophomore in college.  (This also meant that my dad was voted out of office in the "Republican Revolution" of 1994.)  My dad has continued to be friends with former President Clinton and especially former Vice President Gore as all three of them have transitioned into life after public service.

Near the end of the program, Al Gore was asked about one of his other books, The Assault on Reason.  In it, Gore basically argues that various things have led us as a country to prefer short-sighted, a priori explanations and solutions rather than thoughtful discourse and reasonable propositions.  (I agree, but that's beside the point.)  When asked why he thought that Americans seemed particularly susceptible to knee-jerk public policy, he responded that he thought that our passive digestion of media was partly to blame.  "We watch, on average, five hours of television a day.  That's bound to affect us!" he said.  "Imagine if you did anything five hours a day. What if you played tennis five hours a day?  Your body and mind would certainly change.  What if you ran five hours a day?  Well, George Darden probably does run five hours a day, but what if we all did?"  [Emphasis added . . . because how cool was that???]    

Despite what the former Vice President said, I haven't been running five hours a day.  I have been focusing on my running a bit more lately, though.  I'm convinced that I can run faster than I have in the last year or so.  Thus, in addition to going to a masters swimming class three times a week--more on that in some other blog entry--I have been training for short-distance races.  So far, I have competed in three of them, and they have gone well!  I have lost a few steps, but I have done all right for a 38-year-old triathlete who until January hadn't run a straight-up road race in nearly ten years.

The first of the three races I ran in the past month was the Polar Bear 5K.  It was my first event as a member of the Atlanta Tri Club team, as you can tell from the shirt I'm wearing in this race picture, taken by one of my new teammates, John:

It may look like I'm in the lead of the race.  I'm not.  I'm in second.  Less than a quarter-mile into the race, a guy moved into first, I moved into second, and that's the way we finished.  My time--16:29 according to my watch--was almost two minutes slower than the PR that I ran as a twenty-year-old collegiate runner, but I was nonetheless very happy about it.  My goal had been 16:40. 

My last 5K was in 2003 at the Crisman Memorial Road Race in Amherst, NH.  I won that race in what I consider one of my finest moments in sports, but that's another story.  Since 2003, I've ridden a bike far more than I've run, and when I have run, it's mostly been of the "find a comfortable pace off the bike and stay there" variety.  In the first 200 yards of the Polar Bear run, I was screaming at myself to get out of my comfort zone.  "Go, go, go!"  I felt like I was sprinting nearly the entire time.  I told Kacie afterwards that I felt like I had one fast gear.  I got into it almost immediately and just stayed there.  My first mile was my slowest mile.  My final mile was my fastest.  I'm clearly not accustomed to this anymore, which is precisely why I decided to do some shorter races this winter and spring!    

A week later, I ran the Chattahoochee Challenge 10K.  Here's a shot of the start from the race web site:

The race played out very similarly.  In the first mile, two guys ran away--the guy in the middle of the photo with no shirt and the guy on the right with the yellow singlet--and I settled into a third place group with two other guys.  Just past the one-mile mark, my companions dropped off, and I was left chasing the two guys who were twenty seconds up the road.  They remained twenty seconds up the road for the remainder of the race, and  I finished third overall in a time of 33:53.  Of note, I won two Rubbermaid coolers for my run.  That was a bit random, but certainly welcome!  My goal had been 34:10, so I was even happier about this race.      

Two weeks after that, I ran the Run the Reagan Half-Marathon.  This race has a particular meaning for Team Darden because it was the first endurance event that Kacie ever did.  It was five years ago, and we had been married for under a year.  During that first year of marriage, she realized that being out of shape and non-competitive didn't really suit me.  Thus, she suggested that we train for a duathlon together.  We did this race as part of our buildup.

[For those of you who might be doing a double-take right now, let me be clear: Kacie did her first endurance race--the Run the Reagan 10K--in February of 2008.  She did her first Half-Ironman in 2009, her first Ironman in 2010, and her first Double Ironman in 2012.  In the summer of 2013, she's part of a two-woman team racing bikes across the United States.  Kacie don't play.] 

I was coming off a four-year hiatus from running in 2008, and I ran just under 1:27:00 for this half-marathon then.  My goal this time this year was to run sub-1:16:00, but I felt like it might be a stretch on this out-and-back course.  Why?  Here's the profile, snipped from Strava:

On race day, it was cold and windy, with a pretty stiff headwind to the turn-around point at 6.5 miles.  Then, as is clear from the profile, the way back was predominantly up, with a couple of real leg-breakers past the ten-mile mark.

The race started, and I settled into third place.  (Malcolm Campbell, local bad-ass and two-time defending U.S. Masters cross-country champion moved into first.  I had no expectations of being able to run with him.  He consistently and very easily put 10 seconds per mile on me, and he ultimately won the race by a little over two minutes.)  I soon passed the second place guy, and as had become the norm, I ran alone for the next long while.  At the turnaround, I could see that the guy I passed was about 100 yards back, and then there  was no one for a long way.  Around mile nine, he caught up with me, went by, and put about twenty yards on me.  He had a terrible habit, though, that kept me in contention: he constantly looked back.  Hardly ten seconds would go by without a glance over his shoulder.  Clearly, he was faster than me given that he had caught me, but he was so hung up on where I was that he lost focus on the road ahead of him.  Let that be a lesson to all who run: if you focus on what's behind you, it will slow you down.  

I could tell by the way he ran that he had more "pop" than I, but because I would close the gap to him every time the course went uphill--which was a lot--I could see that I was a bit stronger.  Thus, I caught and passed him on the last hill, just before the thirteen-mile mark.  Wouldn't you know, though, that the course ended on a downhill.  He out-kicked me, and I finished third.  I had run 1:13:24, though--more than two minutes faster than my goal and more than thirteen minutes faster than the last time I ran this course.  I'll take it!  I'll also take the $100 I won.  Woo hoo!

So why all the running?  Like I said above, I do feel as if I can go faster than I have been.  Indeed, I made it to Kona largely on the strength of my run, but I feel as if I have more in my legs.  And I believe, both as an athlete and as a coach, that the best way to improve one of the three individual disciplines in triathlon is to focus on it at the cost of the other two sports for some period of time during the "off-season."  (The quotation marks are because there's no real off-season for endurance sports.)  I'm doing two or three high-quality rides a week, but cycling is on the back burner for a little while right now.  And even though I'm going to masters swimming classes and certainly improving in the pool, my main focus is running.  It's coming along well.  I'm hoping that this 1:13:24 on a hilly course in February will mean that I will be able to run closer to 2:50:00 on a rolling Ironman run course in September.  There is a lot of work to do between now and then.
      
Moreover, I missed running.  Running is what I did first, and it's where my roots are.  I enjoy cycling, and I'm willing to spend a lot of time in the water in order to take part in triathlons.  Running is where I come from, though.  It's who I am.

The next couple of weekends are focused on Kacie's RAAM training, and then I'm heading to London with my mom for spring break.  I'll return from London the day before the Publix Georgia Half-Marathon.  I'm running that and looking forward to it, but there's no telling what effect the jet lag may have on me.  We'll see.    

       

Training Camp!

Over the last month, I have been woefully lax in writing blogs.  There are about ten things that I need to be writing about, including:

--Joining a new triathlon team, the Atlanta Tri Club;
--Getting a shout-out from former Vice President Al Gore during a speech he gave in Atlanta;
--Healing my arm and getting back to masters swim class;
--Renewing an old sponsorship with Cycleops and getting a new one with Swiftwick, both of which I'm really psyched about;
--Finishing on the podiums at two recent road races;
--Experimenting with Newton running shoes
--Helping my wife train for RAAM;
--Joining Strava;
--Breaking the rear derailleur off my road bike, thus requiring me to get a new bike (which I haven't yet bought);
--Starting work as a coach; and
--Gearing up my own training for my spring goals and for my big goal of the year, Ironman Wisconsin. 

As I look at that list, I realize that 2013 is off to a rockin' start!  (We also re-financed our condo, but who wants to read about that?)  I'll certainly be writing about each one of the things above, but it would make for an unweildy blog if I tried to condense it all into a single entry. 

2013 began for me in Florida, at a training camp with my wife.  The Dardens know how to do a training camp.  Even though they seem to be suddenly in style, we've been taking long weekends in Asheville or having stay-train-cations at home for the last several years.  For our late December/early January training camp, we went to Fort Lauderdale and rode our bikes.  Then we rode some more, and then a little more.  After that, we rode a lot more.  Then I ran a little bit while Kacie rode some more.  By the end of our eight days in Florida, I had ridden nearly 700 miles.  I set a new one-week personal record of 676 miles.  Dern.

On January 4th, I was leading the Strava Cycling Base Mile Blast, a challenge to see who could get the most miles in the first month of the year.  Of the over 40,000 participants world-wide, including pro cyclists, I was sitting in the overall lead with about 440 miles.  (Kacie had not yet joined!)  Once I returned to real life, I dropped in the rankings, and I finished the month just under 5000th place.  But I was in the lead on January 4th.  Don't forget that part.  

Most of our rides were on the A1A between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Springs.  Along the way, we saw some of the most stunning houses we've ever seen.  

In addition, we did a group ride that went through downtown Miami:

And with a lot of help from Anne, we did a 133-mile ride that went from Homestead, FL, on the mainland, to Key West:

We hung out there for a few hours before we returned to Fort Lauderdale:

       (Note the shorts and short sleeves in the first week of January.  That's the reason we went to FL!)

The downside of riding in southern Florida is that there are no hills.  I had less than 1000 feet of climbing the entire time we were there.  It was an easy price to pay, though, given that (1) I was still a bit out of shape as a result of my broken arm and sprained wrist, and (2) Kacie could more easily stick on my wheel on the flat roads, so we got to do all of our training camp riding together.

We've gone climbing a time or two since we've been back in GA.  Last month, we had our first of what will undoubtedly by MANY trips to the North Georgia mountains with Kacie's RAAM partner Dani and our friend Zach:

(How do you like that jersey I'm wearing??)

Between training camp and all of the time I spent at Energy Lab in November and December, I was actually good-to-go when we got on the climbs.  As you can probably tell from the shot above, though, I put on a few pounds in the last few months, so carrying those over some 10-15% grades was not a lot fun.  Why the weight gain?  Even though I still trained a bit in the two months after Kona, I completely relaxed my eating standards, and things like this found their way onto my plate:

Believe it or not, that's a crabmeat meatball on top of some homemade pasta with vodka sauce.  Holy crap.  Things like this actually exist.  And they're kinda awesome once in a while.

So now, I'm back to my regular routine, with a few twists given my goals this year.  I've been going to masters swim class three mornings a week, and I have the short-term goal of not missing any Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes until I leave to spend a week in London on Friday, March 8.  (Three weeks down, three to go!)  I'm also running more and doing more fast running, given that I'm convinced I can be running faster than I have been.  (I have a half-marathon tomorrow!)  Cycling has taken a backseat volume-wise, but I'm still spending three sessions a week working on my power and maintaining my fitness.  After I get back from London, I'll start riding my bike more.  And finally, I've been laying off the crabmeat meatballs and slowly taking off the weight that I put on during my off period.  At age 38, that happens more slowly than I might like.     

Biting the Dust

Since I became a cyclist, I have broken my right hand, shattered my left scapula, broken my left clavicle, cracked my right humerus, chipped my right scapula, and picked up road rash on both elbows, both hands, both knees, and both hips.  To that all-too-long list of dubiously honorable injuries, we can now add a broken right radius.

Here's the x-ray:

And here's the cropped and edited version:

The radius, or radial bone, is one of the two bones in the forearm.  Essentially, I broke the bone by shoving it into itself; the dark section that I circled is where the bone is overlapping itself.  This diagnosis makes sense to me since my upper forearm has felt "jammed" since I hit the ground last Friday.  I believe that I probably broke it by reaching out with my right arm to break my fall as I was going down. 

I was riding mountain bikes at the time with Kacie and her little brother, Patrick, at Raisin Woods in Whitfield County.  It was my first time on the mountain bike that I bought from a friend over a year ago.  In fact, it was my first time ever mountain biking, period.  One day of mountain biking = One broken bone.  I could probably be talked into selling you my mountain bike pretty easily.

Alas, it's not QUITE as stupid as it sounds.  Or more accurately, I'm not QUITE the klutz that this might suggest.  There was a seesaw near the beginning of the trail, like this one:

I went over it a few times successfully. Patrick did, too.  I was trying to convince Kacie to give it a shot.  In retrospect, I was probably trying to make it look easy, and I was definitely not paying close enough attention.  On my fourth time over it, rather than riding off the back end as you see in the video above, I lost my balance and fell off the right side of it, almost exactly like this:

 

(Ha, ha!  What a noob! Oh, wait, that's what I did . . . )

I waited for a week to go to the doctor because I didn't think that it was anything worse than some bruising.  After a few days, though, I still couldn't straighten or bend my arm entirely.  That's when I decided it was time to get an x-ray.  In addition, even though I told myself that it was probably nothing, I suspected that I might have a small break or crack in my radius.  For one thing, in the immediate aftermath of the spill, my arm felt the way that it had after I cracked my humerus and chipped my scapula in 2010.  (That was a car's fault, not mine.) For another, I learned in Ms. Love's health class in 1989 that the radius is the bone that is affected by the forearm's twisting, and twisting motions--such as turning a key in the ignition or removing the top of a jar--hurt a lot.  I wish that my suspicions had been unfounded!    

All that being said, if the universe felt that it was time for me to break another bone, this is the probably the best-case scenario.  I don't have to wear a cast or get surgery (for now) since the bone is not out of place (for now).  Moreover, I don't have any major competitions for several months.  There will be plenty of time for this to heal.  The only real drawback--besides the whole being in pain thing--is that I can't swim or lift weights for a few weeks.  Swimming and lifting were to be my primary foci for the next few weeks.  Doh!  This definitely complicates my efforts to make myself  a swimmer!   

Sigh.