Santa Cruz Sprinting and Look out, Ironman Texas!

Posted on September 2, 2010 by sean

Yep, that title means what you think it means. More on that in a few.

It feels good to know I’m actually making some progress on my speed and overall feeling when doing all these events. I got to race in the Santa Cruz Sprint Triathlon earlier this month and came in a few minutes earlier than my first sprint, the Stanford Treeathlon. The big differences being the swim was actually 750 meters and in the Pacific Ocean at Cowell Beach at Santa Cruz, California. The bike course was a bit slower due to some headwinds coming off from the ocean but nothing extremely drastic.

The best thing about it? It was my wife’s very first triathlon. In hindsight I should have passed and played the spectator role but it was hard not finishing a 4th triathlon to get my money’s worth from my USAT year license. I was on call to work the previous day so I couldn’t have done the Olympic distance instead. I also would have been a worried mess if I had to wait on the sidelines though, so participating helped keep me sane!


Kel’s CAAD9 all ready to get it’s tri on.

The ocean water was extremely cold but the wetsuit made it less painful. Kelly, unfortunately, has a sleeveless xterra wetsuit so it was quite a bit colder for her. I talked her into diving in the ocean for a warm up to test the waters. As soon as she got in I thought she was going to seize up due to the coldness. I kept trying to console her and tell her she was going to be fine but I was really worried.

I was in the very first wave so I couldn’t send her off. The fun started and off I was into the water. Ocean swimming wasn’t really too bad. The waves weren’t too difficult to maneuver around in and the water I accidentally (always) swallowed didn’t make me cringe too much. Probably because I train in a saltwater pool! During my entire swim I kept thinking how the hell is Kelly going to do this… my god … and I was right. She died in the water that day.

Er, no she didn’t. She did great! She said she altered her swimming stroke quite a bit and didn’t do a very good time for her, but who the hell cares since it was the very first triathlon and in the hardest water I’ve seen so far. I was on the run portion when she was cycling by on the road and I was so happy to hear her voice yelling at me. I didn’t even have time to yell back to cheer her on!

The bike leg, my favorite, went really well. I ended up with the 9th best split out of 28. I could have probably squeezed another spot or two if I was more familiar with the course, but that’s my fault. It feels good to have better splits on my road bike with clipons and stock wheels than some of those beautiful triathlon machines with deep dished carbon rims. Of course I’m sure they smoked by me on the run! :)


The run course wasn’t too bad, flat on the sidewalk path near the ocean. It was definitely beautiful but I certainly didn’t set any 5k records on that. Kelly makes it look easy but I swear I wasn’t suffering as much as how silly I look!

As soon as I was done I got my medal, got some of the awesome free pizza, and headed back to transition to get my camera. I was able to see Kelly coming in off the bike and going out on the run! I got myself in a great spot to see her coming back in from the run and was so happy to see her cross. I know once she’s more comfortable in open water swimming I’m going to get chicked by her. :(

We celebrated the great day by going to the Seabright Brewery for some delicious burgers!

(om nom nomnom omom.)

It was such a great day and just like San Francisco, somewhere we should go to much more often. It’s only 45 minute south of us – and SF is 45 minutes north of us! Argggh!

Yep, that news from earlier is true. Within minutes of the registration opening I have signed up for the inagural Memorial Herman Ironman Texas Triathlon. In May of next year I will be traveling to The Woodlands, Texas and swimming 2.4 miles in Lake Woodlands, followed by a nice 112 mile tour of the Texas farmlands on a bicycle and cooling down with a 26.2 mile run (walk) through The Woodlands. I’m already nervous and scared but I know it’s going to be a hell of an experience and it just so happens to be on a very special day – our wedding anniversary! I will update on my training routines and results through the blog and over especially over on The DailyMile. If any one else uses it please add me, I need friends there!

I promise now that I’m up to date I will update this puppy much more often. I just can’t promise that the photos are going to look much better than these.

Posted in General Things, Triathlon | Leave a comment

My First Marathon!

Posted on August 27, 2010 by sean

I couldn’t be satisfied by being just a month late posting my very first half ironman performance so I had to go ahead and delay the posting of my first marathon finish! Exactly one week after finishing the Vineman 70.3 I conquered my very first marathon. Sure, I probably should have spent more time resting and moping around with my feet up and choose a much  less hilly course. No way! I couldn’t resist signing up for the 2010 San Francisco Marathon. So here’s a brief little recap of that unforgettable weekend.

Just like how the previous week started I had to drop off my little beagle off for another 3 day weekend stay the vet for boarding. I know I’m a terrible doggie daddy but I think he really likes it. We leave him there and he barks like Michael Jackson but when we pick him up he’s a baritone Barry White. The Barry White bark lasts for about a week before the terrible high pitch screeching bark is back. After working the remainder of the day we head on over to the light rail station and make a connection to CalTrain. It is kind of sad that I live only about a 45 minute drive south of San Francisco but I really hate driving in the city. Parking there is too frustrating and my Irish blood cannot take it. The cool part is though it made for a nice 3 day mini-vacation! Perfect!

Now my friends on the east coast find it hard to believe but San Francisco is terribly cold most of the time. It will be shorts and t-shirt weather in Sunnyvale but a mere 45 minute drive away it is jeans and a jacket weather. This time was no exception at all, but it made for very good marathon weather.  It was very foggy and you couldn’t even see the top of the Transamerica Pyramid!

We hustled to check into our hotel and wanted to go to the weekend street food festive, Off The Grid so we headed out quickly on foot. It’s a collection of some pretty awesome unique food trucks from the area that congregate in Fort Mason every Friday night. If you’re in San Francisco I highly recommend checking it out but get there early because trucks will run out of food and lines are long. I had some pretty good Filipino
style hot wings from Senor Sisig.  Unfortunatley in my hunger rage I forgot to take a photo.

However, I did have to get an amusing photo of this on the way back:

Saturday, expo day, was a nice fun adventure all around the city. We rode the muni quite a bit to avoid walking too much the day before the marathon. I ate breakfast at the awesome farmer’s market at the ferry building and had to have an awesome ice cream sandwich from Miette Patisserie inside the fairy building. yum.

From there Kelly and I hit up the race expo to pick up our goodie bags and bibs. The expo was in an auditorium way too small for the massive size of vendors but it was still pretty cool. I wish I got there earlier to get my photo taken with Dean Karnazes, but the line was huge and he was leaving shortly. I did manage to kind of get a photo of him but I don’t know what the hell that dude was doing in my way. haha.

Sports Basement was running a shuttle to their store in the Presidio that we decided to hop on. There is a location in Sunnyvale that we spend huge chunks of money at so we figured we’d see what one of the two SF locations looked like. Yeah it was very similar but arranged into 5 pretty awesome floors. Check out this awesome mural on their wall on the way to the bike shop floor.

After picking up all our goodies and some ‘essentials’ from Sports Basement we wandered around a bit looking for somewhere interesting to eat. We stumbled upon Dos Piñas and their yelp reviews looked pretty solid.  The food was pretty good but the amazing part was the walls were lined with hot sauces. I drenched my enchilada plate in Dave’s Hurtin Habanero… I didn’t even get time to snap a photo because I inhaled my food too quickly but I did manage to get some sort of shot of the hot sauce collection!

We woke up Sunday, downed a couple of bagels smothered in almond butter and headed out to the start line. Both of us were nervous although I think I was hiding it much better than Kelly was since my nerves were worn out from the Vineman the previous week.

The starting line was insane. Flat out insane. There was two half marathons, a 5k and the marathon all going on at the same time. I don’t know the exact amount of people combined but I think reading somewhere it was around 24,000 people.  We were supposed to be in the 6th wave but we couldn’t get to the front due to the mass of people so we ended up going during the 7th. It worked out fine but we were quite worried about cut off times.

The course was just stunning. It started near the Bay Bridge on the Embarcadero and ran all the way through Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39 all the way up to the Golden Gate Bridge. We got to run on the roadbed of the bridge because they closed down a few lanes for us on the Northbound side. What a memorable experience. From there it headed down through Golden Gate Park before heading back toward the Embarcadero via Haight street. We even got to go around AT&T park before crossing the finishing line! I wish I had more photos to share but I was kind of busy running.

The first half of the marathon had some pretty intense hill climbs that challenged me quite a bit. I decided to walk most of them to save my legs. My longest run before this was a 22 miler and I certainly suffered a lot on that and didn’t feel like I got in enough running because of the Half Ironman Training. The second half of the course was much more elevation friendly and pleasant. My favorite part of the marathon though, oddly enough, was the motorcycle club that was volunteering out there. They were assisting in stopping traffic and cheering us on and they really made the SF Marathon a great experience. I hope they’re there next year, whomever they are!

Here are a couple photos, and you can see the gallery on a new section I’ve been working on here.


Wish the orange shirt guy wasn’t there :(

Thank god my wife ran the entire way with me. It was her words that kept me going. (She would have smoked my ass in a heart beat if she ran it her own pace!)


I wish someone told me my hat looked stupid in my face like that before the photos!

Whew, that was longer than expected. All in all I had a great experience during my first marathon. In fact it didn’t scare me off at all and I’m signed up for 2 more – Steamtown and the Rock ‘N Roll Vegas marathon!

Keep checking back for more updates and drop a comment if you wish. Although the spammer’s have been going nuts on here, I do appreciate ‘real’ comments! :)

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I’m half an Ironman!

Posted on August 20, 2010 by sean

I got the pleasure of racing in the Vineman Ironman 70.3 on July 18th. It was one of my huge long term goals and here is a brief recap of what I went through.

This really should have been posted last month and I also have a couple more posts that I’m working on that I need to get up as soon as possible. I should be in detention.

Early Friday morning, all the way back on July 16th, I packed up all my tri gear into our Prius, took my lovely beagle Coleco to the vet to be boarded, and headed off to work for the day. After the longest day of work ever, Kelly and I then headed off to Santa Rosa, California for the eventful weekend! My triathlon club, SVTC, was awesome enough to reserve some rooms at a decent hotel located only about a 10 or so minute drive from the T2/finish at Windsor High School. Of course the very first thing we did Friday night after checking into our hotel was head on over to the Trader Joe’s to stock up on food!

Saturday morning was the race expo and packet pickup day. This was my first Ironman branded event so I didn’t know what to expect. It was very well organized though and my nerves were calming down quite a bit after being around all the other triathletes. I got into the merchandise booth as soon as it opened and picked up quite a bit of stuff. A jersey, tech shirt, tea mug, a tech hat, and a pretty awesome long sleeve tech hoodie. Also worth mentioning was the ‘finishers shirt‘ that was in the packet pickup. Can’t complain about expanding my (pathetic) wardrobe this way!

I think M-Dot have jumped a few sharks now – an Ironman branded bed!? haha!

We spent the rest of Saturday afternoon roaming a bit around Santa Rosa. We went to the Life Is Good store where I picked up this awesome water bottle. (I totally saw it on EatingRD‘s blog and I *needed* to own one)  I also picked up a few running and cycling related shirts for Kelly and I. It’s a bit on the expensive side but it’s good quality.


Yeah!

Anyway, on to race morning! If it weren’t triathlon evening in a block of rooms for triathletes there would probably be quite a few pissed off people this morning. At 4:45am the alarm went off and Kelly started up the blender we brought to make race morning green smoothies! I downed a bagel smothered in Justin’s almond butter and started packing up the car. The swim started at Johnsons Beach in Guerneville which is about a 20-30 minute drive from our hotel. I wish I got there earlier because the racks for my age group were packed to the brim! I’m sure the guy with the Cervelo P3 next to me wasn’t happy about me moving his stuff over, but too bad – I somehow beat him out of the water anyway! I also lost Kelly in the crowd after getting my transition setup — and the kicker is she was holding my wetsuit. By the time I found her, utilized the porta facilities, and got the wet suit on, my wave was already getting in the water. I was nervous, anxious and angry but she made me stop for a photo – I don’t know how I was forcing this face. haha.


I’m one of the heads in the back.

The 1.2 mile swim was a lot easier than I was expecting. The water was actually very nice and my only complaint was that it was too shallow at some points. I had to stand up and walk during some sections because I was hitting the bottom of the river during my front crawl stroke! That would be fine if the rocks weren’t so freaking painful to walk on.  I finished the swim in 45:42. Not an impressive swim by any means but I certainly wasn’t the last yellow cap out of the water so I was happy. I have a lot of room to work on improving and the fact it wasn’t that long ago that I couldn’t even swim 2 laps in a pool without stopping to rest.

I was allowed to hand off my wetsuit, cap and goggles to Kelly during transition since T1 is quite far from T2.  After a slow T1 (I’d like to have a few words and a steel cage match with whoever thought it was a good idea to put this on rocks) I headed out on my favorite part – 56 miles on the bike! This is where I get my confidence booster because I start catching up with some people from the waves before me and a few rare passes by people on buzzing triathlon machines. About 10 miles in I was making a pass and felt a surge of pain in my lower lip. I thought the guy a bit in front of me kicked up a rock or something. I reached down to feel my lip and felt something moving — a BEE was stuck in my lip. I yanked him out and chucked him away and tried to make sure there wasn’t a stinger left in there. I had a nice numb lip for the remainder of the day though.  The bike course was beyond beautiful. Passing wineries left and right was very motivating to keep pushing on. Unfortunately there weren’t many photos of me on the bike but I did get this one. Funny timing since I was half way on the aero bars so must have been shifting when they took it.

I finished the bike course in 3:09:29. I could have done a bit better but was worried about Chalk Hill. (For wine drinkers, yes this is where the Chalk Hill Winery is located at!) There was quite a bit of talk on how hard of a climb it was and coming at mile 40ish was a killer. I was saving some juice for that and I wasn’t even sure when it arrived until I saw some people near the top saying only 400 feet left to go… doh. I did try to make up for it by hammering a little bit more during the remaining miles but I was relieved once I saw T2 in the distance but was thinking about how in the hell I was going to run a half marathon after this.

T2 was a few minutes longer than it should have been but I had to reapply sunscreen which apparently I’m not very good at – more on that in a second. The run course was pretty nice, shaded in some parts, and baking hot in other parts. I was getting tired but wanted to keep on trucking but I could feel my skin baking in the sun. There were aid stations at every mile of the run course and I took advantage of the water at each. I ate some Chips Ahoy at the turn around aid station which tasted sooooo good at the time. I wanted to kiss the girl giving “showers” out there too which consists of just pouring a pitcher of water over my head.

During the second half of the run course I ended up run / walking it until the last mile. I was certainly in pain by then and I could feel my neck and shoulders burning up. I saw the 12 mile marker and my emotions hit me that I was going to complete my first half Ironman so I started running and told myself no walking breaks.


(That time isn’t correct since I started in the 2nd to last wave.)

Boy that last mile hurt but I did it all  7:04:36. I have a *lot* to improve on and I learned a lot from the experience. My nutrition went very well for me which was one of my biggest fears.  And I hate bees.

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Muddy Century Buddy Triathlon

Posted on June 18, 2010 by sean

I’m pretty bad at updating, ‘eh? I did quite a few events since the last post! Let me recap some of it.

Kelly and I drove up to Napa for a little mini-vacation for the summer. It was for our 5th anniversary. I don’t know where time goes but it certainly goes somewhere fast. It has been five years since we got married and drove across the United States in a Penske truck and stopped in Sunnyvale, California. That was fun but I don’t think I ever want to drive 2,000 miles on I80 ever again! Sadly Napa is only an hour and a half away but it was my first time there besides running through it during The Relay the previous week.

We celebrated our anniversary in style… by riding in our first century, Echelon Gran Fondo. Or in normal terms, 100 miles on a bicycle. It was a beautiful ride with about 5500 feet of climbing around the Napa Valley. It started in downtown Napa and headed toward Lake Berryessa with a loop back to St. Helena before returning to Napa.

We met up with some great bloggers:  CaitlinHTP, EatLiveRun, EatingRD, LiquidJill. (Linked to their recaps!) I stole photos from Jill’s  gallery … hope she doesn’t mind – I’m terrible at taking pictures and she took some great ones!


Kelly wearing her Velo Girls jersey in style!


Cute pic of Kelly and I before I blew up on the climb!

I thought I had my nutrition worked out pretty well with some HEED in my bottle, clif bloks and some gels. I tried to eat some salty things at the two aid stations before the big climb. Unfortunately I didn’t react well to all the sugary stuff and felt really nauseous in the middle of the climb. I had to stop for a few minutes because I thought I was going to hurl. After HTFUing up a bit I hopped back on and made it to the top. I never had tums before but they certainly work. I downed one of those along with a can of coke. (First time willingly taking in HFCS in a couple years!) I felt much better after that. So my nutrition needs some adjusting. The climb is almost a carbon copy of one of our local climbs that we train on, except that usually comes at mile 22 of the ride … this hill came above mile 60 somewhere! Doh.

Overall it was a great experience. I had some gripes with the organization but they vowed to fix a lot of the issues for next year’s ride. 100 miles on the bike in Napa with a bunch of pretty ladies? How can I complain about that!?

Shoot to a couple weeks later, we got really muddy. We participated in the Columbia Muddy Buddy. It is a hybrid mountain biking and running event you do with a partner. Basically there are five legs to the race and one starts on the bike while the other runs. After a mile or so you have to do an obstacle and switch places. Kelly’s bike doesn’t have a quick release seat post so we used my Cannondale F5. It’s a bit big for her but she managed very well.


I rode the mountain bike first.


Kelly ran. You’re required to wear a helmet at all times, not that Kelly shouldn’t since she falls a lot even on good surfaces.

I did 3 legs on the bike and 2 runs and Kelly did the opposite. The obstacles were pretty easy. A wall climb, a cargo net climb and slide, balance beam, and crawling under some net. Those weren’t much of a challenge, but the first leg of the bike certainly was. Almost right from the start line was a pretty intensive climb in dirt and it wasn’t very wide to handle our starting wave. Combining that with not being able to wear my SPD shoes/pedals since we had to run made it very hard. I had to walk up a patch since there was people still walking from the wave before us and I lost traction. ugh! After that it was pretty smooth sailing. Until…….


Mud!

At the very end of the race you have to hook up with your partner and crawl through a  pit of mud. We weren’t nearly as muddy as a lot of other people but we were still covered pretty bad. Kelly thought it would be cute to splash me with mud… which I ate some of obviously. ugh. We ended up finishing in about 1 hour and 6 minutes. I know we could’ve done much better but didn’t know what to expect. I think if we were 10 minutes faster we could have placed in our age group. Next year! ;)

Sorry this is getting long already. The latest event I did was the Silicon Valley International Triathlon. It was my first try at the Olympic distance – 1500 Meter Swim (.93 miles) – 24.9 Mile Bike – 6.2 Mile Run. It was my second open water swim after the Stanford Treeathlon and I felt a million times more comfortable. I do have to work on my sighting a lot more but my form was much better.

I have quite a few photos of this so here I go. (Click on them for huge photos if you’re insane)


Transition setup!


Lake Almaden. Beautiful little lake right off of Blossom Hill road.


Me before thinking I might die in said beautiful lake.


Getting kicked in the face multiple times!


I survived :)


Bike out, stoppp, hammer time!


Coming back in on the bike.


Starting the suffering run.


I finished! I look like death but I was really happy, I swear.


And my beautiful photographer had to get in there somewhere. Thanks for taking the photos :)
My time was not very good but I learned a lot from the experience and I’m a hundred times more confident for my upcoming Ironman 70.3 in a few weeks. I had a blast doing the race and it was very well organized and put together. Nutrition wise I drank in 2 scoops of heed on the bike and had a gel before the run. I hammered a little too hard on the bike and suffered a bit on the run but I think it was worth it. I’m a terrible runner anyway so it was expected. I now have times to work on and destroy for next year. I’m definitely signing up for this triathlon again next year.

Next up on the schedule is the Vineman Ironman 70.3. It will be the hardest race I’ve tackled so far, so I hope I have a positive blog post about that in the near future. Thanks for reading!

Posted in Cycling, Triathlon | 1 Comment

My training plan

Posted on May 17, 2010 by sean

Quite a few people have asked me what kind of training plan I follow so I figure I would throw together a short post describing my routine. I’m not competitive by any means and it’s usually a battle for me to stay out of the last few spots in my age group. But hey, maybe some day soon that will change! It wasn’t that long ago I would never have considered doing this stuff!

I try to incorporate swimming, cycling and running throughout the week along with two days of full body strength training. So essentially my template “base” schedule looks like this:

Cycling (30-45min) Run (short) Cycling (30-45) Run (short/speed|hills) Rest Long Run Long bike ride
Weightlifting Swim Weightlifting Swim

I definitely stress that this is just my template. I live in the San Francisco Bay area and am lucky enough to have a ton of events going on all year round. Because of that I end up dropping some things and/or moving them around a lot. For instance I dropped a couple of the cycling workouts when The Relay was getting closer. I also dropped a long run since the Echelon Gran Fondo Century is coming up. I have, however, been pretty strict about the swimming since that is my weakest of the three and I don’t want to drown during the Vineman Ironman 70.3 coming up in July!

I try to follow the 10% rule during the runs only by adding a mile or two to the long runs on the weekend. For example, a couple weeks ago was a 10 mile run followed by an 11 mile run the following week. In swimming I’ve been trying to build up to the 86 laps to mimic the half Ironman I will be doing. I’ve been doing a lot of work on my stroke trying to make it much more efficient but I end up doing something like 200 yards, a bit of rest, repeat. As I get stronger I’m trying to make those intervals longer.

I can’t find a good photo of the pool and I’m scared to bring my iPhone near the water but this is what it looks like, but imagine there being lanes! It has a saline system in place so no disgusting chlorine smell! (It’s a digital concept photo but it does look as awesome in person!)

As far as my weight program goes, I follow a pretty simple program:

Monday:
Squat
Bench Press
Straight leg deadlift
Incline dumbell press
Lateral pulldowns
Chin ups + dips

Wednesday:
Incline bench press
Deadlifts
Seated military press
Leg curl
Leg extensions
Seated rows
Chin ups + dips

I try to add 1-3 exercises depending on how much time is available and how I’m feeling that day. The compound exercises (bench press, deadlift, squats, military press)  are the most efficient and what I concentrate on the most in the gym. If I’m really short on time just getting in and doing those lifts are well worth it. I did quite a bit of weightlifting when I was younger and I feel it’s one of the most beneficial things anyone can add to their training programs.

Any questions please post a comment! :)

Things I have coming up soon:

Echelon Gran Fondo Century (May 23rd)
Muddy Buddy (June 6th) !!!
Silicon Valley International Triathlon (June 13th)

Posted in Cycling, General Things, Running | Leave a comment