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Saturday, November 15, 2014

Sprint Triathlons Fall 2014

The fall race season is always a fun one. I had come off a summer where I had done three Ironmans and had raced Zurich Ironman on Sunday. Then on Monday waking up at 4 am to drive over to the airport for a trans Atlantic flight, actually Vienna, then to Washington DC, followed by a 6 hour drive to the Outer Banks in North Carolina to meet up with the family for beach week. I really don't like to travel and if given a choice I think that I would stay in my chalet for the rest of my life, but I do like to concoct crazy travel plans that revolve around racing. 

Big jet plane takes me places


I had made good progress on the Ironmans. I had taken nearly two hours off my Zurich time and in my second year of competing in them felt that I was on the right track. My summer vacation ended the first week in August. I was back to work at Leysin American School. The first few weeks are not very intense because the students have yet to arrive but I am back to work and my activities become a weekend pursuit as oppose to my life. Because of all of my physical activity I feel super human in the fall. I have such a base built up from the summer that I usually crush the events that I enter. 

Finishing Zurich Ironman 2014



Being back at work meant that I was back among my racing colleagues. Two in particular, Finn and Stephanie, both were game for some triathlons. They are both new to triathlons so they  were more interested in the shorter sprint distances, which is 500 meters swimming, 20 km bike, and a 5 km run. I have only done one sprint tri in my life and I was curious how my body would adapt to short and fast after doing such long events all summer. 

Transition Area

First up was the Lausanne triathlon. I had done this one a few years ago but the Olympic distance, 1.5 km swim, 40 km bike, and 10 km run. It is nice that it is so close and in a short 45 minute drive we are there. We are all in different waves, Finn first in the junior wave, me next in the men's, and Stephanie last in the women's. 

20th year


It is a good event for me since the biking is extremely hilly. The swim is in Lake Geneva. They start you off in the water off a dock so there are 300 people crammed together. I have adopted a new swim strategy. I wait 30 seconds until everyone is past and then start. I need a good 100 meters to ease into the swim. The strategy works to perfection. My swim has gotten better and after a slow start I hit a steady rhythm and settle into a pack. 
Packed swim start

In biking you can draft off the rider in front of you and this gives you a huge advantage. They block the wind and since you are in their slipstream it is much easier for you. This principal holds true in swimming and I am trying to learn to find feet to follow. If I swim right behind someone then I draft off them. I found a few feet to follow and I think this helped me have a good swim. I exited the water roughly two thirds in the wave, which is good for me. The swim takes all of 17 minutes.  
Drafting in a bike race

The bike is 3 laps. But first is a never ending run around the transition area.  It was at least a half kilometer of running in the wetsuit to get to the bike. The worst part is that you are in bare feet on the pavement and my feet got chewed up from that jaunt. The bike is great because immediately you start climbing. 
Powering up the hills

Lausanne is a hilly city. The course takes you up to the Zenith. I had remember the course from previous years so I knew to go easy on the first lap. Even so living in Leysin has made me a good hill climber and I streaked by most people on the climb. After the limb is a nerve wracking curves descent. I really pushed it on the descent but I am sure one day my aggressive riding will lead to a spectacular crash. 
Zooming down

After the descent the is a few km of flat and then repeat. With each lap I tried to get a touch faster. It is so hard to gauge yourself against others since there are different waves on different laps. It is futile and you are never sure if the person trying to burn you is just starting or finishing. 
Racers on undetermined laps

The bike ended quickly and I was back to the infinitely long transition area. Usually I get my feet out of my bike shoes while they are on the bike engaged in my clip less pedals.  Not this time. I wasn't going to torture my feet so after the dismount I kept my cycling shoes on and ran it in with them. Running in cycling shoes is awkward at best and I wobbled along in essentially reverse high heels. 
Heading to the transition from the swim

The run is only 5 km which seems incredibly short. It is 2 laps. Again you are in this tangle of people and have no idea who you place compared to them. I pushed it as hard as I could. I felt good and caught a lot of people. The best was just at the end. I had tracked down a few people and just a few 100 meters from the finish saw two guys ahead of me. I sprinted the final bit and passed them. I love ending in a sprint and it always feels good to catch a few people. 
Sprint to the finish
My final time was 1:16 which was a personal record in sprint triathlon for me. I was which is top quarter. I was happy with my result but could tell that I am not really a sprint triathlon. I don't really train for such a distance and it takes me nearly an hour to get into the groove. It is hard to just explode into such a fast pace. It is a lot of fun though.  It makes you really focus on the transition. Usually I like to take my time as I change from one discipline to another but in the sprint you really need to be dialed in and change fast because it really effects your time. 
Finished

A week later I was back at it with my team. I usually compete and travel alone. I must admit to being somewhat of a loner. I like the uncompromising nature of traveling by yourself. You never have to negotiate decisions or plans you just do what you want. But the team aspect is also pretty fun. It is nice to have someone to talk to as wait in the dossard (French for bib) line and to relive the race with after it is over. So the team and I went down to Vevey, which is even closer than Lausanne for the next race. This is a sprint plus. It is not really a regulation race and each discipline is a bit longer than a regular sprint. 
Run course

I was determined to have a record setting swim. We were there early enough that I could get a good swim warm up in. Usually if I start too fast in the swim I get this horrible out of breath asphyxiation which causes me to nearly drown. I thought by warming up hard I could get this out of my system. So there I was at the front of the pack readying to go. The gun went off and I charged out. Big mistake. The horrible asphyxiation grabbed me after about 30 seconds. I had to go into full on dog paddle as the pack swam around me. It took me a few minutes to regain my composure. I was in tough shape. I managed to at least swim properly and thankfully it is a short swim so my suffering ended mercifully quickly. 

Pack of swimmers
Almost all triathlons it is illegal to draft on the bike. For some reason this one is draft legal. It starts off with the mandatory Swiss triathlon huge hill. Then it is totally flat. My strategy was to go hard on the hill and then find some speed demons to for a pack with. I blasted up the hill and right near the top two guys absolutely flew by me. I put it in high gear and caught them on the descent. 
Racers hanging on to my wheel

I have never been on such an intense pace line. We started out as about 7 but these two guys would absolutely hammer in front. When someone else took a turn to pull if they didn't go fast enough these two guys yelled at them. At one point frustrated with our pack the two of time out on a big time acceleration and burned everyone in the pack but me.  It was the three of us. So as not to incur their wrath on my pulls all out sprinted. 
Drafting can be miserable on a rainy day

I was hanging on for dear life. These two guys were hauling. All I could do was stare at the ground and pedal as hard as possible. We blazed by other packs going so fast that no one could jump on with us. We got to the turn around and zipped back to Vevey. It was exhausting. Rarely does my heart rate go above 145 on the bike but it was well above 160 the entire time. We caught two other guys who were moving fast too and luckily they joined our pack. This meant we had 5 to share the work which saved me. 
The bike is always painful

With 1 km left I was destroyed from the effort. So I eased up a bit to try for a quick recovery before the run. The run was another flat 6 km loop. I felt good on it and tried to keep my pace high. I caught my usually number of people and it seemed that it was a solid run especially considering my effort on the bike.  
Trying to keep the pace high


I finished 6 minutes quicker than last year. Mostly thanks to the bike. My average speed was 36 km/hr which considering the big climb is fast. Again I was in the top quarter which is a good place for me. I don't expect too much more than that. The pacing was super fun. You think that it should have been easier but really it was the hardest that I have ever worked on a bike. Keeping our pace so high and then just staying up even in the draft required incredible energy. 

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Ironman Austria

I have had a busy race season.  I discovered duathlon and worked really hard this spring to try and make Team USA so I could race in the World Championships back here in Switzerland.  I made it and then with the coming of summer turned my attention to Ironman season.
Quick trip to the US for this race.
My summer vacation started on 13 June.  I celebrated this with a weekend combo race of the Guebertal Duathlon and the 200 km long Santis classic, a bike race.  With the training for the duathalon which has a very early season I came into the summer in much better shape than usual.  I had done an Ironman in Los Cabos over spring break as preseason training.  I also did on 1 June the Half Ironman Switzerland in Rapperswil - Jona.
Third time the charm?

The half ironman had been my nemesis.  Three years ago I ripped the zipper off my wetsuit right before the swim and wasn't allowed to start so DQ.  Then last year it was raining so hard and so cold that they had to cancel the swim and turn it into a duathlon, which was great for me.  But just as I had biked 10 km the police came and turned everyone around.  A mudslide had covered the road in the bike course and the race had to be cancelled.
Beautiful day, no mudslides this time.

So this year was the first time in three tries that I successfully completed it.  I was nervous because of the swim.  The swimming always makes me nervous but the water temp was 16 degrees C and on the practice swim the cold took my breath away and the cold water on my face gave me an instantaneous ice cream headache.  I have learned how to deal with the swim though and as I tread water waiting for my age group to start I decided to dog paddle the first 100 meters and relax.  It worked well and I was able to get comfortable and then have a pretty decent swim.
Out of the swim.

The bike was good, I was faster than expected.  I ran a 1:38 half marathon to finish off the day.  I was really happy with the run.  It was a good time for running just a half marathon by itself.  I felt good on it and really was able to push my pace.  As I have done more long distance racing it is amazing how short even a half Ironman felt.  It was only the second one that I have ever done.  I finished at 5:15:13.  It was a morale boosting start to the season.

On the bike, Rapperswil-Jona
My mom and step dad arrived 18 June.  They had coordinated their European vacation with the Ironman in Klagenfurt that I had planned on 29 June.  The original plan was to rent a nice car to tour in.   My old car, the Green Gremlin, had to go through the tough Swiss inspection that all cars go through each two years.  If you have ever driven on Swiss roads you will be struck by two things.  The first is that every car looks practically new and you never see cars broken down on the side of the road.  This is in part to the expertise, the inspection of vehicles every two years.  It is very strict and some rust or small defects in a car will get it quickly banned from driving in this country.
Green Gremlin covered in snow.
My car had miraculously passed two years ago and now it was due.  From casual observation I believe that the Green Gremlin was the worst car on the road.  It had two big dents in it from two collisions while parked, ironically I believe both times it was hit by same person.  I was the sixth person to have owned the car and it had been passed around the school community.  It has duct tape on the bumper and numerous scratches on the side from skis and bikes.  It was due to the auto service on 18 June.  I took it in to the garage and after they looked at it declared for the chance to have it pass expertise it would cost approximately 3200 chf.  Since this was nearly 1200 chf more than I had paid for the car it was time to say good-bye.

Last picture of the Green Gremlin.
Since I plan to remain in Switzerland for a good deal longer, just signed another 3 year contract, and now that I am securely in my 40's with a good job I decided that I could afford a real car.  The prospect of car buying in a foreign country is unnerving, but I wanted the experience.  I had decided on trying to get a recent model of a car but after looking through the car ads online saw fairly decent deals on new cars.  So off I went down to the valley.  I drove around Aigle and stopped by all of the dealers.  They were all small so my choice was limited.  I ended up driving to the big city of Lausanne were I could find bigger size dealers.  After a day of searching I had settled on a Subaru Legacy Station Wagon.  It had the three things that I was looking for.  It was big enough to carry bike and skis along with people, it was diesel, and it had all wheel drive for the winter.  After long and difficult negotiations, mostly because the salesman only spoke French, I had bought a car.

During my conversation with the sale man I asked him about a trade in.  He asked to see my car, and I took him out to the Gremlin.  I didn't understand much but I did hear merde and demolition but he said that they would give me 500 chf for it.  So with a heavy heart I bid good-bye to the Gremlin.  It had been a great car.  I had driven it through snow storms, around Europe loaded with bikes, into the mountains, and it had performed beautifully.  It is true that it was loud, had no AC, for a long time no stereo, and over 120 km/hr scarily shook, but it had been dependable and gotten me where I needed to be for 4 years.  I like having names for my cars so I needed a new one for the Subaru.  The Silver Bullet seemed fitting but it was a little too cliche and common.  So I translated it into French which is la Balle d'Argent.  That might be the car's formal name but I just call it Argent.

Argent
So with Argent, I packed my triathlon bike, triathlon supplies, mom, and step dad into it and off we went.  Our itinerary was to drive to Venice and do a whirlwind tour of the city, then off to Slovenia for a few days.  Then they would drop me off in Austria and continue touring while I prepared for the Ironman.  They would meet me and support me for the race and then we would drive back through Austria.  The first part of the trip was great.  I had needed to see Venice and definitely was awed by the spectacle.  It is colonial Williamsburg on steroids of Europe.  We took the vaporettos around and saw all of the famous sights.  The highlight for me was an early morning run.  The town has these impossibly small streets that I just would go down and somehow connected all of them together to form and amazing tour of the city, including running through St. Marks courtyard and stumbling on an early morning photo shoot with a very beautiful woman in a very small bikini.
Mom and Ken at St. Mark's

With Venice checked off the list we jumped back into Argent and drove to Slovenia.  I am woeful ignorant of the former Yugoslavia.  It was a great history experience for me as we traveled in the north west of the country in the Julian Alps.  We stayed in the resort town of Bled which was hopping and then drove the famous Vrsic pass.  After that it was a couple of days in Kobarid which has amazing history during World War 1.  Earnest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms is based on his experiences in this area.  So after a few days of learning about the country it was time to go to Austria.  They dropped me off at a hotel in Klagenfurt which I made my base for the next few days to prepare.
Beautiful pass in Slovenia

Racing Ironmans is a very slow learning process.  These races, which take even professional athletes 9 hours to complete and mortals 10 to 16 hours, require and incredibly complex logistic plan.  Between the obvious fitness element, the equipment is much more subtle skills that need to be learned such as nutrition, pacing and hydration to name a few.  After trying to follow a few online plans I had been looking at trying an online coach.  I decided to give it a try so at the beginning of August I signed up for D3 coaching services.  There a coach looks a my progress weekly and gives me a week training plan based on my feedback.  I wanted to see if it would make a difference.  Racing is very scientific and a good training plan can make a big different.  I had been just sort of stumbling my way through becoming an endurance athlete and while I seemed to be doing well I was pretty sure that I could be doing better and maximise my training time.  So for $150 per month I was going to try this out.



So I had a plan that I had followed moderately well for the race and was really focused on very specific goals for each interval.  Aside from better planning the psychological aspect of knowing what I was in for was a huge benefit and having a few of these long races under my belt gave me confidence.  I spent the day before the race walking around with my parents showing them the course so they would know where to watch.  I took a quick swim to try out the water and then took all of my equipment over to the transition area.  I was all set for the race and had given my parents a list of predicted times for each section and placed all of these on the map of the course.  It is incredible how well I followed these the next day.  It becomes such a strange sport when you can so accurately predict your performance.
Mom helping me get on my wetsuit

Race day.  The usual sleep-less night followed by the 3:45 wake up.  I had a nice breakfast and then waited with about 10 fellow athletes for the shuttle bus in front of the hotel.  The morning was beautiful and the day promised to be perfect weather wise.  Everything was just as planned.  My bike was ready and all of my equipment was in order.  Ironman Austria is an extremely popular race.  It is a relatively easy Ironman.  The bike course is pretty flat, the swim includes a 1 km stretch in a canal which supposedly has a small current.  The run is also totally flat.  In the race briefing the day before it seemed that nearly half of the audience had raised their hand when asked if this was their first Ironman.  So with the 3000 other competitors I made my way to the swim start.
5:30 sunrise over transition area


Like many beginner triathletes I had struggled with the swim.  While I had biked and ran most of my adult life aside from splashing about in pools, lakes and oceans hand't swum as exercise ever.  My two years of triathlons had made me focus on learning and I had been training in the local pool.   It was getting better.  The two factors that make it more intense are the huge number of people and the nature of long distance open water swimming.  Starting the event with the swim also means that you go from a standstill to full on which is a hard transition to make.
Swim start day before race

I did an early season triathlon which had a pool swim in which you snaked up and down the lanes of an outdoor pool for 400 meters.  It was the Thrugauer triathlon in Stettfurt, Switzerland and I was gleeful about such an easy swim.  I started the swim at a full sprint and after a few minutes my body freaked out.  I was breathing really rapidly and gasping and felt like I couldn't breathe.  As I was in the middle of the pool I thought it ironic if I was to drown during a swim that seemed so safe compared to the big open water swims that I had done.  That event and thinking on my past swim experiences I have realised that if I go to fast my body overacts which is really bad to occur in the swim.


Learning this lesson I now start the swim legs very slow.  After the gun goes off I wait about a minute and then slowly walk into the water and go at a very easy pace for the first part of the race.  At the start of Ironman Austria i used this technique.  I was on the farthest right part of the beach and determined to go slow.  The gun went off, I waited and then I walked in and off I went.  The plan went perfectly and soon I was comfortably swimming having avoided my body freaking out.  

I learned though that now I have a new problem.  I am still a relatively weak swimmer but an capable enough that I am not in the very back.  I caught up with a lot of swimmers and then ended up in a pack, which was okay but I miss when I was in the very back and just had the lake to myself.  The swim was good and I felt like I was doing well.  We rounded the buoys and headed back towards shore.  The sun is right in your eyes at this point and I could not tell where I was going.  I relied on following other swimmers but every now and then I would look up and see the helper boats herding athletes in the right direction and use those to direct me.  From the amount of directions being shouted from the volunteer water crafts it seemed that many people where having great difficulty with their course.  I learned that you can't really hear directions under water so it was mostly lost to me any instructions.

I made it into the canal, which was a narrow entrance that was pretty non descript on the shore line.  By luck it seems I had managed to keep a good course.  I was excited for the canal thinking that this would make for an easy swim, since it had a slight current and being narrow which made me feel much more secure than swimming in the middle of a big lake.  The canal though ended up being very difficult.  I was with my pack and it was so small that there was not that much room.  I was banging into people left and right and I swum down the canal.  When you swim behind someone you draft off of them.  This means that I was faster than the person in front of me but there was little room to pass and when I did I lost that extra speed and just fed the congestion of the canal.  The canal was not fun and I was glad to finally get to the end.
The Canal

From the canal to the transition area was a good distance.  It probably was a half kilometre.  I ran along getting half out of my wetsuit, stuffing my googles in my sleeve.  At some point they must have fallen out because that was the last I saw of them.  I was really hungry at the end of the swim and devoured a Powerbar while changing.  I quickly changed an headed toward my bike.  I had the brilliant plan of wrapping 4 Powerbars around my bike handle bars.  This had worked before, but the heat of the dy had melted them and at the foot of my bike were about half of the bars and the rest was dripping off the bars.  I smashed them on and off I went.
Looks familiar

I had ridden the bike course a few days before the race so I was prepared.  The bike was pretty mellow.  My coach had really been emphasising the importance of eating, especially on the bike.  The day I will burn around 7000 calories and since you can't eat on the swim and the run with the constant movement up and down makes eating challenging, therefore eating on the bike becomes critical.  I was already hungry so after the first 20 km I had a nice Powerbar picnic as I rode.  I sat up and ate two of the remnants of the bars off my handle bars and drank a bottle of water.  Then after every feed zone I would grab some more bars, stuff them up my short legs (a new cool trick I learned) and have mid race picnics.  I really wanted to get a lot of food in me.
Having a drink while biking.

This plan worked well until the end of the bike leg.  It is a real challenge to eat and soon my body didn't feel like it.  I was tired of Powerbars and riding.  My picnics turned into force feedings where I would make myself choke down a bar in order to get the much needed calories.  It rained twice on the second leg of the bike, but I wasn't too bothered.  I get into this mode where I am just going and not much is going to make a difference to me.  The course was nice and had a few big hills which is definitely my strength.  It felt good to pound uphills every now and then.  The ride seemed to end quickly and before I knew it I was back at the transition area.
Pretty course.

I dropped my bike off, grabbed my running gear, which is only running shoes and a visor.  I remembered to take off my bike shorts.  After my first Ironman I discovered that the skimpy tri shorts don't have enough padding and the bike saddle becomes very uncomfortable.  At the Los Cabos Ironman I experimented with putting on bike shorts and it worked great.  The extra padding really helped and it takes hardly any time to put on in transition.  The one drawback was that I forgot to take them off in Mexico and a few kilometres into the run noticed I still had them.  While great for biking they are miserable to run in.  Luckily I saw my dad and was able to take them off mid race and give them to him.
There I am running in m biking shorts.  Notice all the trash from the wrappers stuffed in my  short's leg.

Learning from mistakes I made sure to take off my bike shorts and then I was off to the run.  I started the run just as the leader of the race was running by.  So there I was with an official on a mountain bike with the sign of the number 1 man next to me.  Feeling good and energised by this commotion I started my run at a ver fast pace.  The number one man still passed me, of course, and he was just a few kilometres from finishing whereas I still had the whole marathon ahead of me.  The pro athletes do get a 15 minute head start so that is probably why he had this lead.
There I am in first place.

My goal was to run a marathon in under 4 hours.  It seems easy considering how slow it is compared to my normal marathon pace.  I was definitely flying the first 10km and had visions of a record performance.  But the lack of food and the effect of biking 112 miles caught up with me.  It is like a switch is flicked and my blistering pace went to a slow plod.  The trick is trying to keep a consistent pace.  I definitely had gone out too fast and exhausted my supplies.  Also my will to eat had vanished.  Even bananas which usually are my staple tasted inedible.  I had to spit one out it so revolted me.  I could only drink water and sports drink and that would have to sustain me.  Even though I had hit a snag I did manage to settle into a new pace.  It was still a run and I could sustain it so I just accepted the slow pace and made sure I sustained it.
Running along.

You run from a town on the lake to the centre of Klagenfurt and repeat this lap for the marathon.  Much more than the bike or the swim the marathon seems the most forbidding and the longest.  Coming at the end of the event is part of it but the pounding of running so long is really hard on the body.  It is also the hottest part of the day and compared to the bike where there is always a breeze from the speed you are traveling.  It seemed to take forever and the worst part is that you pass the finish line on the second lap when you still have half a marathon left.  It is mentally tough not to drop out.  I wasn't in that much pain compared to my last Ironmans, so I just committed to keep on going.  My parents were on the run course and seeing them always boosted my spirits.
Mom with her cowbell.

Finally after what seems an eternity I rounded the statue of the dragon in the centre of Klagenfurt and headed towards the finish line 5km away.  I added what speed I could and cruised back.  There at the edge of the Wörthersee 11 hours 27 minutes and 59 seconds after the start of the race I finished.  At the end two volunteers held out a Ironman Austria tape that the finishers break.  This was done as a treat for the finishers at all times but it so confused me that I just approached it and grabbed it and looked at it for a minute trying to figure out what was going on.  Maybe I had won?
Fighting through the tape and confusion 

The post race is all about surviving your body's revenge for doing something so ridiculous.  During the run I dream of just sitting and not doing anything.  But after I am finished siting hurts, walking hurts, standing hurts, everything hurts.  I have learned that I just need to get some warm clothes on and lie down.  I found my parents, got on my after race clothes, took the mylar blanket they give you and laid in the grass of the park.  My body freaked out as always and I went through my traditional bout of post race shivering and seizing but after an hour of recovery I was feeling okay.  I reclaimed my bike, my parents drove me back to the hotel, and I went directly to a warm bath and then to bed.
Picnic on the drive home

In the end it was a personal best for me.  This was the third Ironman that I had done and my previous best time was 13 hours 4 minutes.  Everything was faster and overall I felt better than previous ones.  I am trying to move from surviving them to racing them and I feel like this race was a good step in the right direction.  The course was easier too but I am getting better.  So now I have spent the month of July preparing for a rematch against the Zurich Ironman, which happens 27 July.
Mom and Ken and the Austrian mountains

This post is dedicated to my step dad Ken Kellermann.  He was the inspiration for the Slovenia tour which was a great cultural event and at 76 ran his first race last November, a 5 km in Charlottesville, Virginia.  I want to still be competing when I am in my 70's too.
It was Ken's 77th birthday on the way home.