i'm officially a triathlete.  my first "unoffical" olympic distance event is done and as such here is the obligatory race report.  now i've read some super detailed race reports from fellow teammates who can remember ever detail of ever second.  and i've be relayed race report stories of a guy who may have raced for 30 minutes and made the report about an hour long...but here's mine.

i swam & survived.  i crushed it on the bike.  and then i ran and ran some more and felt pretty good.  what? not enough details?  okay.  fine.  here goes.

this was the 10th annual memorial louie tri.  it's dedicated to a teammate from LLS' Team in Training Ironteam who passed away 10 years ago this month from leukemia.  Louie's story is inspirational and his mantra of "live life to the fullest" has inspired many people in their efforts to train for Ironman.  This year the event took place in Pleasant Hill, CA. I had packed up everything the night before and had my bike waiting to get loaded onto the car in the morning.  I got up at 4:45a.m. to eat breakfast, get dressed, put the bike on the car, then drive over to Colin's to pick him up and get to the event for the athlete check in at 7am.  We arrived before the sun was even up.  yawn!  The silicon valley team and the san fran team were to do the event together so that meant somewhere between 75 and 100 of us on the course.  we wanted to get there at the start of check in so we could get our stuff set up and then have some time to mentally get ready.  looked like that was everyone else's idea since the parking lot was full of folks waiting to get into the pool area.  Once we got into the pool area we headed straight to check-in.  I think we were one of the first folks since Colin was #25 & I was #30.  There was a gal there doing body marking (which means writing your race number on your arms, legs, and also your age on one of your legs).  i laughed and told the girl "lots of luck" with the arm numbers and when i took off my sweatshirt she laughed and said she's just write it on there even though no one could really read it.

i found a spot to park my bike in the racks and tried to eavesdrop on what other folks where doing.  i laid down a little towel, put my helmet and sunglasses on my handlebars like the guy next to me, put my bag of running clothes at the back of the towel.  in front of the running bag, i laid out my running shoes, watch, and water belt.  my water belt was already packed with gels and my asthma inhaler in case i needed it.  in front of the running shoes were my cycling shoes with my cycling socks stuffed in side.  in the front i had my bag of cycling clothes and my race belt attached to it.  that way i could pick it all up and run inside the locker room to get changed.  inside my cycling bag i had already stuffed my jersey pocket with a spare tube, my tire iron since i doesn't fit in my tool bag, and some sports beans.  i think the layout worked pretty well for me especially since it's the winter and i wanted to have layers.  i think once it gets to spring and summer i'll wear a trisuit and will just have that laid out in front to remove one of the steps.  this time i swam in a bathing suit but when we get to the open water swim i'm going to play around with some options i've heard other gals say they do including wearing a sports bra and jog shorts under the wetsuit and then just putting your one-sy, i mean skin suit, on over top of that.

The transition area

the swim was in a pool.  it's january in california and even though our air temp isn't too bad an open water swim may not be so pleasant this early in the year...plus we haven't even tried that yet so throwing it on race day wouldn't have been very nice.  instead of having us swim in lanes we had 4 buoys set up in the pool that we had to swim 16 laps around to make the distance around 0.9 miles.  it was meant to simulate the chaos of the mass start swim we'll experience at Ironman Canada.  Since I'm not a good swimmer yet I asked what I should do and the advice was get in the water last.  Well given the pool lap isn't too big that worked somewhat okay until the speedy swimmers were lapping me.  so we jump in and i'm nervous.  it's a lot of people and i've never swam anything like this before and i'm seriously still learning how to do the stroke correctly. the whistle went off and we started swimming.  just a few things i remember.

• that many swimmers in a small pool makes a big whirlpool.  i've heard about getting pulled into the draft of other swimmers, but i think this effect was magnified by the situation.  the result was the pull helped me to calm down a little bit
• i'm really bad at sighting.  i had no idea where i was.  i ended up swimming pretty much hugging the wall most of the time which made my swim a bit longer than folks who swam in about 10 feet along the buoys.
• somewhere around lap 9 i thought, oh wow i'm
• just keep swimming.  even if it's that froggy type move to keep your head above water and get your barrings...just keep swimming
• getting stuck in the armpit area of someone is really unnerving.  there was this one guy i kept getting trapped by and i couldn't get around him.
• hearing your coaches and captains cheer you on is super encouraging!

me & swim captain sam during set up

it was a good experience because in a real event the start will be chaos.  except at the event  i hear it will spread out and that the duration of this chaos will be a lot less than the event we just did.  i was somewhere between the second half of the pack and 2/3 of the way back getting out of the pool.  my transition was a bit slow as i wasn't exactly sure what i wanted to wear.  i opted to go with the base layer, the jersey, the wind jacket, the bib shorts, skullcap, and arm warmers.  somewhere in my scramble i totally forgot to put on my knee warmers.  soon into the ride i regretted not having realized that sooner.  my old cycling coach used to say never ride with your knees uncovered if it was below 70 (and i've heard 65 from others).  it was definitely below 65 that early in the morning so my legs were a bit cold.

John G riding in memory of his daughter Marie

the ride was seriously tough.  it was very hilly and never seemed to let up except for say the first mile near the school where we had our transitions.  i decided the ride is my strength so i would work on moving my way up through the group.  it was a fun game to play with myself because i'd try to guess how long it would take me to catch the next person ahead of me.  i also realized i'm pretty good at being motivated to keep pushing even when my legs are hurting from the effort.  i also realized that i'm not so bad at climbing hills.  it's been a long time since i spent some serious time on the uphills and it's one of the things i'm looking forward to doing this year more of.  i was pretty smart with not pushing too hard although i was pushing.  i haven't done my lactic threshold in a long while but when i had done it previously i was around 168.  i figured i'd dial it back a little bit and try to stick around 165 bpm for the hills.  this seemed to suit me well.  on the way back there was one area where the hill was super steep and it seemed like the headwind was whipping up over the top of the hill directly in my face.  colin has got this crazy triple with a 30 tooth cog so he was just pedaling his way up the hill.  i had to get up and stand.  now, since i haven't been climbing in forever i was afraid my legs would revolt pretty quickly while standing but luckily they didn't.  i used to love doing mt. eden repeats standing the whole way.  maybe i'll have to go back to doing those now that i've got a little confidence boost from being able to prance up that tough spot by standing up.  i was pretty pleased with my stats when i downloaded the garmin data.  average speed was around 15mph which isn't too bad since the hills were tough.  my average heart rate was 160 which meant i did a good job saving something for the run. and my average cadence was 83 which i was excited about because i've been trying to spin faster up the hills and this wasn't too bad.

honoree board listing out a bunch of the
people we ride in honor and in memory of

the run was a nice out and back pretty much flat course.  i decided to just keep my cycling outfit on as i didn't want to hassle with the change.  i wasn't really sure how my legs were going to feel after the challenging ride but surprisingly they were good.  i'm a bit slow to warm up on the run so i opted to do a 5 minute run/1 minute walk interval.  after two intervals i started to feel pretty good and tried to pick up my running pace (i started out somewhere around 10.5 minutes per mile when i got off the bike but i knew i wanted to go faster if i could manage it).  after about 2 miles the swim coach started to run with me and we talked about the swim.  i was really starting to feel good and realized we were picking up the pace very nicely.  when we got to the return water stop coach karen stopped to wait for some other folks.  i was feeling good and kept with the same 8.5 or 9 minute pace for awhile.  that felt awesome.  as i was getting close to the school i started sprinting and crossed the finish line smiling.  all in all a good day and a great opportunity to learn some helpful tips.