The Triathlon Squad
I take it I’ve told you about my condition? Plantar fasciitis…in both of my feet. But I’m happy to report that the injury subsided and I made a happy return to racing this past weekend, placing eighth in the San Francisco Pan American Cup!
I was nowhere near race-ready, but I was newly race-able, so I went out and “knocked the rust off,” missing the front pack in the swim and riding a more-or-less solo 40K in between a large front pack and a similarly large third pack (I caught my friend John Dahlz and a Canadian kid named Aaron Thomas in the final 10K on the bike, giving me a bit of rest). I topped it all off with a 35:22 10K. It was a tough day for sure as I was going flat-out pretty much the whole race and didn’t have much to show for it at the end of the day.
Three weeks in St. George, Utah with Paulo Sousa’s Triathlon Squad brought me to the start line in San Francisco. After arriving at the camp Paulo nonchalantly made the claim that “the problem is in your calves and achilles, not your foot,” and then something like “I hope you like water-running (sinister laugh),” and then made me bring my “Stick” to every run session for post-run self-treatment. Two weeks later I logged a 76k run week.
Getting into the car three weeks prior to make the drive to St. George I remember thinking, “Am I really doing this?” Gut check time, Dupree! I was hesitant to leave the comfort of my new home in Boulder, a place I called home for only three weeks before taking off to camp, but also the best place for training I ever encountered – especially for cycling. However, for those three weeks I was just doing my own thing and I know that self-coaching is a recipe for major athlete disaster. And despite being back to a little run training I couldn’t seem to shake the plantar fasciitis completely. So I took off to see what the Triathlon Squad is all about.
Rewind three more weeks – I just arrived in Boulder and fired my coach that I moved to Boulder to work with. Yeah, that makes sense! During my road trip from Orlando to Boulder I saw quite a few Paulo Sousa coached athletes – namely Andrew Hodges and Amanda Felder – and the suspicions I already held about the efficacy of a run-specific coach as a triathlon coach grew until I finally cracked and started the process of change. It was only 18 months ago that a friend of mine made the same decision, changing to a squad-based coach known for hard work and results, and halfway through camp we all sat around the computer and watched Sarah Groff get on the podium in Kitzbuhel! So I’m confident in my decision for sure.
Live From Saint George
My life on the road continues. I stayed in Boulder long enough to adapt to altitude and learn that it’s best to pay with cash at Amante and then it was back in the car and off to Paulo Sousa‘s training camp in St. George, UT. This was certainly not in my plans when I left Florida in May but a cross-country drive does provide lots of time to think things over…
There are no races on my schedule – just getting the work done, carrying water, chopping wood and all that!
The Triathlon Squad at Sand Hollow State Park. The water is 22C so I don’t get a wetsuit (ITU rules)!
Road Trip
I definitely didn’t know what I was in for on my trip out to Boulder for summer training. It all started with a short trip to Gainesville, a group ride, and a new 30″ CP followed by a surprisingly delicious Yuengling. Then I was off to Huntsville, Alabama to stay with the rocket scientist (literally) Andrew Hodges. Some good Italian, an early morning swim and pecan pancakes set me up nicely for a short trip to Memphis for the Memphis in May Triathlon. I originally planned on racing but with my lack of run training I just did the swim/bike as a workout on my road bike…in a lightning storm! Gemmell laughed as he went by…”What were you doing out there, Collington?”
Then things really got interesting. My original plan sent me north to St. Louis but considering the destruction in Joplin and the weather forecast for continued storms I went west towards Tulsa instead. Everything was great until I hit the Oklahoma/Kansas border and BAM! Massive hail. All of a sudden the $25K worth of bikes on the trunk rack of a car worth only $4K went from a funny joke to a serious problem. I pulled under an overpass, waited the storm out, and took off again only to find myself in more hail. So I pulled into a service station, cut a trucker off into a diesel fueling line and waited the storm out again. Lots of trucker horns and some choice words followed. Fortunately that was when the storm subsided for good.
With only one more short day of travel to Boulder the next day I thought I was in the clear, but Colorado was no better than Kansas. I learned my lesson the day before, though, and pulled into a gas station at the first sign of storms (and I parked by the unleaded pumps this time). I spent the next five hours in the diner at the Loaf n’ Jug in Flagler, CO watching as varying degrees of lightning, hail and rain passed over. I also made a few new friends that taught more than I ever wanted to know about Colorado state lottery scratch-off games.
The road to Boulder was rife with more storms so I diverted south to Colorado Springs where I arrived with the same loaded down Hyundai Elantra I departed with a little over four months prior. After one night on a couch and some good S/B/R training I finally made it to Boulder. And the weather is nice!
My winter training camp in Orlando ended with a long workout out at FL70.3. I raced the swim/bike and jogged the run. It turns out it’s against the rules to take your racing kit off like this.
Brissie
I spent the interim period between Mooloolaba WC and Sydney WCS in the suburbs of Brisbane. I was specifically in the Carindale/Carina region training with a little triathlon squad coached by Warwick Dalziel, a friend of my coach. Things were pretty nice, especially since my training really just consisted of resting a lot to recover from the beastly Mooloolaba course. Although not everything was going to plan as I sort of might be kind of a little bit…injured. Plantar fasciitis is not fun. The good news is that the problem is currently manageable so I will race Sydney WCS. Hopefully I’m not on crutches after the race. Here are some pictures from the past two weeks in Brisbane:
I had to send this into USAT’s physio team for Sydney to explain my condition. Pretty standard plantar fasciitis symptoms. Warwick has a physio background and the blue marking on the picture is where he generally worked to help alleviate the problem. When he worked on that area it brought pain on the order of 11 or 12 on a scale of 10. So the treatment wasn’t my favorite part of the day but it helped as my foot problems improved markedly during my stay.
Are We There Yet??
Last week I set off from the cold, snowy north in search of a warmer climate to spend the winter months, the destination being central Florida and Jarrod Shoemaker’s training group. My plan was to stop to visit a few friends in Texas on the way and get in some training while also breaking up the long drives. All went to plan except for the training part. Whether it was a bad salad from a Subway in Amarillo (not sure there is such a thing as a good Subway salad actually) or a final parting blow from the Olympic Training Center in the form of a nasty stomach virus (as usual I blame the wrestlers) I don’t know, but I can say I got sicker than I have in a long time. Ugh!
The first leg of the trip was a long drive from Colorado Springs to Fort Worth, TX to visit Barrett Brandon. I left the training center feeling good and in high spirits, but arrived feeling quite the opposite of that. The rest of the week was downhill from there with most training sessions being replaced by naps and my normally scheduled naps being replaced by longer naps. Friday I finally started to feel better, made my way down to Austin, TX, and got in some easy swim/bike/run days to get back into things. On a side note: Austin, TX is awesome. After that a short drive to Houston followed by a long drive the next day to Florida finished things up. Another side note: Houston, TX is not awesome.
I can already tell that coming to Florida for the winter was a good decision. Today is about as cold as it gets here (in the 30s F) and the Coloradoan in me said it was warm out! Training will feature quite a bit of volume and intensity over the next few months and I’m looking forward to all of it!
Christmas in Guatemala
My hour long “run” – averaged 12:33/mile. It was more of a very hard hike.
A Collington Christmas
As you might expect I will be flying out soon to spend Christmas with my family, but unlike most I won’t be going home. No, instead the Collingtons are going to the most dangerous region on earth (not including active war zones of course). It should be a good time! My brother works as a foreign service officer in the country where we are going. Most guess either Mexico or Columbia but neither is correct…close, though!
It won’t be the first adventurous Collington Christmas – we spent Christmas ’05 in the beautiful mountain town of Cuenca, Ecuador. At the time my brother was teaching English there (yes, these third world Christmas adventures are entirely spurred on by my brother’s worldly travels). We flew into Guayaquil, which my brother made sure to point out as the second most dangerous city in South America (behind Lima, Peru apparently). I think he likes to throw these facts out there so that we know what we’re getting ourselves into. I have lots of good memories from Christmas in Ecuador – harrowing 12 hour bus rides through the Andes Mountains, train derailments, using medium size rocks to “launch” our train back onto the tracks…and somehow convincing myself to be OK with all of this by repeating my mantra of “I’m SURE they know what they’re doing” in reference to our savvy Ecuadorian tour guides. Hopefully this Christmas will be equally memorable!
Obviously I’m not bringing a bike and I don’t envision myself doing any swimming, but my brother says we will be able to “walk very briskly” to a nicer neighborhood where I should be able to do a run or two. And once we are out of the city I might be able to run up a volcano or something. If I’m still around next week I’ll post some pictures. I’m SURE I’ll be fine…
In other news I got to do a video for TeamUSA.org about my favorite Holiday traditions. “Triathlete” must be a hard word to spell correctly. Sound it out USOC! Oh well, enjoy!
First Coast Kids Triathlon…and on to Seoul!
I grabbed my first win of the season yesterday – at the First Coast Kids Triathlon in Jacksonville! Actually, since I was around in Florida for some sea level training and St. Anthony’s (kind of) before Seoul I made my way up to Jacksonville to help out and be a ‘celebrity big kid’ for the second year in a row. With more than 1000 kids racing the First Coast Kids Triathlon is the largest kids triathlon in the United States, and each age group gets assigned a few ‘big kids’ to help them out. The celebrities, as they call them, range from firefighters, police sergeants, or navel officers to Ironman finishers and myself, the professional triathlete. The kids look like they have a ton of fun and hopefully we make it a little better! Later on after all of the kids age groups finish all of the big kids race each other. As the only triathlete in the field who calls it his profession I was picked by most to take home the title.
I helped out the 11-12 age group this year.
In other news I am on my way to Seoul for the second round of the World Championship Series. Training is going well so I can’t wait to see what I can do!
Jarrod, Alicia and me on the early A.M. Orlando to San Fran flight.
Sydney
Well I’m back from Australia and after a whirlwind of jet lag, taxes, and trying to organize all of the new gear I got from Shimano, Orbea and Rudy Project I finally have some time to blog! If nothing else the races in Mooloolaba and Sydney gave me a big list of things to work on before my next race in Seoul in three weeks – open water swimming, bike handling, and lots of other stuff. So that’s what I’ll be doing for a few more weeks in sunny Florida.
As always here are some pics!
I watched most of the women’s race from my 20th floor hotel room
iPhone pic of Barbara about to win.
The opera house at night.
Noosa
Myself and most of the American team from Mooloolaba spent the past ten days in Noosa, Queensland. It didn’t make sense to come back to the United States before the first race in the 2010 World Championship Series in Sydney so we just stayed over! For those who don’t know, Noosa is a very popular destination for professional triathletes (especially during the northern hemisphere’s winter). It was easy to see why. Noosa is a muggy and tropical area – a lot like Florida in the summer. There are tons of bike lanes and unpaved trails to run on, and the Noosa Aquatic Center featured a 50m pool and a 25m pool which we frequented. Overall it is a great place to train and it might be a great way to escape the Colorado winter next year!
One of the best sessions up there was the open water swim session at main beach in Noosa Heads. All of the triathletes in town and a bunch of local surf life saving athletes get together on Wednesdays to do an open water practice. This must be how these Aussies get so good at surf run-ins and run-outs! There was one kid who couldn’t have been more than 15 years old that could seemingly find secret paths through the tide pools and sand bars. He easily put 25 meters on every run-in and caught waves into the shore on the run-outs to lengthen his lead. I’ll stick to pontoon starts for now but definitely want to work on those ocean skills for races like Mooloolaba.
Here are some pics:
The only track in Noosa is a grass surface track. I loved it but I’m a sucker for soft surfaces. You just have to keep in mind that if you’re running slow then you’re running normal, and if you’re running normal times then you’re running really fast!
Chris Foster doing a transition workout on the grass track.
Australian cities can have some odd names! Also, apparently Nambour = poo.
Moo
Finally – internet in Australia! Despite being a fully modern country getting on the interwebs has been a huge issue.
I am very happy with my ninth place finish, although I would describe my swim, bike and T2 as ‘technically unsound.’ Getting ninth with the sixth fastest run isn’t a great statistic! Felt good on the run – there is nowhere to hide on the run course in Mooloolaba.
Anyways, here are some pics:
I thought this was cool – the Mooloolaba Surf Lifesaving club.
Me on the run – photo courtesy Brandon Bailey.
Waiting for the women to come out of the water.
Sarah Groff (in red) using my sweet 24mm Dura Ace wheels.
The lead women’s run pack on lap one.
Vacation Time
A couple days after my last race in Clearwater I took off for a little vacation in Japan. It was pretty fun – three days in Tokyo, three in Kyoto, and then back to Tokyo before coming back to the US. Japan is an amazing country, especially this time of year – it’s Fall there and the leaves change color.
This was me for a week: backpack + tour book. Now that I’m home I’m taking a few days rest before getting back into training – I must have walked 60+ miles last week with that backpack!
Nijo Castle in Kyoto. The maple leaves are beginning to change colors.
A kaiten-zushi restaurant (sushi train) in Tokyo. You might think the fish in that aquarium are for decoration. They’re not.
Wrapping up 2009
The 2009 racing season is finally over and I definitely ended it on a high note. Things went better than I ever expected during my October altitude training block – I definitely learned a lot about training and how to get myself ready to race. Here are some pics.
My primary November race was the Huatulco World Cup in Mexico. The course has a 16% grade hill on it so I often went out to Cave of the Winds (pictured here) to do some hill repeats in preparation for some tough climbing.
However, October in Colorado Springs isn’t always great for outdoor training.
I didn’t feel very comfortable on my TT bike at the Augusta 70.3 so I drove up to Denver to get fit by Todd Carver in his Retul bike fit studio.
I was lucky enough to be able to attend the International Altitude Training Symposium at the end of October. It was pretty cool to learn about how to train at altitude – it turns out I could be doing a lot of things better.
Alicia Kaye (Jarrod’s wife) and Jarrod in Phoenix. We did a little sprint triathlon as a tune up for Huatulco (and for me, Clearwater).
The Huatulco World Cup is easily the most difficult ITU course I have ever raced on. With temperatures averaging around 100 degrees F, high humidity, and a ~16% grade hill on the eight lap bike course, there’s really nowhere to hide. This year the front bike pack started with around 35 men in it and by lap eight there were only 12 left.
My Colorado Springs room mate Matt Chrabot won it with a daring bike breakaway. I finished eighth – my highest World Cup finish ever! I DNF’d on this course last year so it was nice to redeem myself.
Next up was the Clearwater 70.3 World Champs. As my third race in as many weeks and being that it was only my second 70.3 distance race ever, I wasn’t really expecting much from myself.
Michael Raelert won it! I met him at the Hy-Vee triathlon in June and he’s a great guy. I was happy to see him take the victory. He also gave the funniest awards speech I have heard in awhile!
I started the run in 21st place but ended up in a fight with Luke Bell for sixth! I’m still in disbelief at this result. What a way to end the season!
70.3s are kind of painful.
I’m not gonna lie – it was pretty sweet to stand up on stage at this awards ceremony. I never expected to even be close to the top ten!
2010 World Champs Series
In case you haven’t already seen it, check out the 2010 World Championship Series schedule. With Sydney, Seoul and Budapest being added for 2010 it should be pretty awesome. Not awesome, though, is the complete lack of races in North America. Looks like I’ll be spending a lot of time in Europe next summer!
In Gold Coast
I arrived here in Gold Coast on Saturday after some pretty exhausting travel – 14 hours from L.A. to Sydney is rough! I can’t complain, though, because I have plenty of time to recover since my race is seven days after my arrival!
Life is pretty nice on the Gold Coast. My first four days here consisted of waking up early (don’t have much of a choice in that since my body is still on Mountain time) and go run on the Coombabah trails, stop by the grocery on the way home for the day’s food, cook breakfast (usually an omelette with avocado and passion fruit yogurt), go bike around town, eat lunch (ham sandwich), go swim at the Southport pool, cook dinner (chicken stir fry on night one, spaghetti on night two, and kangaroo steaks on night three), then attempt to stay up past eight PM (my record for staying up is currently 9:10 PM local time). I’m slowly adjusting to the time zone.
Here are some pics from the first few days:
Coombabah park. Lots of trails to run on.
Kangaroos are everywhere. Or maybe this is a wallaby. I don’t know.
Jarrod taking a pic of a roo.
The view out my window. Gold Coast reminds me of a mix of Daytona Beach and Miami.
Headed to Gold Coast
I’m currently en route to Gold Coast, Australia for the World Championship Series Finale. The last time I was in Australia was for the Mooloolaba World Cup in March. As you can see that was a poor performance – I need to redeem myself in Australia!
Yes, I was #17. Oof…
London Sightseeing
Mark Fretta, Jill Petersen and I went out sightseeing in London the day after the races a few weeks ago. It was a lot of fun – It’s not often we get to stay a day later and actually do touristy stuff!
One Weekend, Two Races
I’m currently sitting in West Des Moines, Iowa, awaiting a weekend full of big races. The first is the Hy-vee Elite Cup on Saturday. It is actually a World Cup in terms of ranking points but it gets the special designation of “Elite Cup” because it has such a huge prize purse ($1,000,000). With $200,000 to the winner and a 75 deep payout the field is pretty stacked. Then, on Sunday, the ITU is putting on the ITU Triathlon Team World Championship – a mixed triathlon relay that the ITU hopes will make it into the 2012 Olympics in London. As for me, I’m coming off a big four week altitude training block and fully five weeks of not racing. I’m definitely in racing withdrawal so I can’t wait to toe the line twice in one weekend!
The Hy-vee Triathlon race committee really went all out for this weekend’s races. It’s so easy to focus on my race when things are taken care of as professionally as they are at this race! Every athlete racing in the World Cup has free accommodation for the weekend at hotels near the race site in West Des Moines. I arrived at my hotel and was immediately given some ‘arrival gifts’ from the Hy-Vee Triathlon – a race bag full of everything I could possibly need for the weekend from cereal to sun screen, as well as a few other items (see picture below). A few minutes later a knock at the door signaled the arrival of two full crates of bottled water (48 16oz bottles) and an equal amount of grape Gatorade Propel. That’s enough water/Propel to hydrate a small army. Although it was almost 100 degrees F today, maybe I will drink it.
Free stuff!
As for the race, I think I can do quite well. Training at altitude in Colorado Springs over the past month went fairly well. OK, it went really well. But good training doesn’t always carry over to great race results so I’m just going to head out there on race day and line up in the most competitive field since the Olympics and see where I end up. Hopefully it goes well!
The second race of the weekend, the ITU Triathlon Team World Championship, consists of teams of two men and two women racing in a relay format. Each person on the team has to complete a 250 meter swim, 7K bike, and a 1.8K run before handing off to the next relay team member. Obviously the team who gets their last athlete across the line first is World Champion! There is currently a lot of speculation as to who is going to be fielded from each country. Well, as the self-elected team captain (running unopposed since nobody else is aware of the position) of USA Team III I’m going to release our roster. I know, everyone is on the edge of their seats waiting for this! Here it is:
Mary Beth Ellis (2009 Pan American Champion, 2009 Escape from Alcatraz Champion)
Kevin Collington (kind of a big deal/ridiculously fit/Olympic Training Center napping champion)
Kate Ross (2008 USA Junior National Champion)
Greg Billington (12th 2007 Junior Worlds)
So there it is. We should do pretty well. We definitely won’t get last (I hope).
Mexico – Next Right… and Pan Am Champs
It was about a week ago today that I finally piled all of my earthly belongings into my car and departed the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center. It was definitely a bittersweet departure – I will miss training in Chula for sure. On the other hand it was starting to get ridiculously hot there (I think it capped out at 103 one day before I left, causing some serious bonking to occur on a training run). Also, I was headed out to two weekends of racing in the midwest so I was pretty excited about that. I left Chula at 8:45 AM last Monday and arrived in my final destination of Ft. Worth, TX at 7:00 PM on Tuesday. That’s 22 hours of driving with a one night rest stop in Las Cruces, NM. In sharp contrast to my two days of travel, Ethan left Chula Vista three hours after me and arrived in Ft. Worth that same night (flying). I definitely don’t suggest driving long distances to races if you don’t have to – it’s just too much sitting.
Anyways, after 1200 miles of driving along I-8, I-10, and I-20 and countless signs saying “Mexico – next right” (and one confused sign that said “Mexico – next left”), I finally arrived in Ft. Worth at my friend Barrett’s house and it wasn’t long before we departed for the Pan American Championship in Oklahoma City. The entire Chula crew was racing here and we were excited to see how we would fare in what would be the biggest race of the season thus far for most of us. For me the race didn’t pan out exactly as I hoped but I did manage a top ten finish. I haven’t done a real race report in a long time so I figure I will do one now. Read on!
The swim was a one lap swim in the Oklahoma River and I’m just going to spare the niceties right now: that was the dirtiest place I have ever swam in a triathlon. I can’t even think of anywhere that comes close. In the end it didn’t matter because it is a race and I race where I’m told to race and that’s that. Maybe it was the rain from the night before that made the river exceptionally dirty on race day, but dang! Dirty. Anyways, the swim started and I got out relatively clean for the first 300 meters only to see a ten meter gap open up around the first two turn buoys. I spent the next 1000 meters death flogging myself to close this gap and I eventually succeeded. Knowing my track record of making front packs after exiting the water on the very back of a swim pack, I made a serious attempt to move up a bit which I was also successful in doing. In the end I exited the water near the tail end of the front swim pack but with five or six guys behind me.
Onto the bike a series of unfortunate events happened right in front of me. First, Brian Fleischmann had a bit of trouble mounting his bike and lost control, crashing into Steve Sexton. Steve didn’t go down, but he did lose his shoe in the middle of the road, and as I passed he was going back to fetch it. I roomed with Steve for the past four months in Chula Vista so I have seen Steve get stressed out on almost a daily basis. However, the look on Steve’s face as I passed was a completely different level of panic and stress that I have never seen before, and rightfully so! He didn’t finish the race. Back to my race, though. After I passed Steve I looked up and saw a pretty big gap had opened up between myself and the next guy – about 20 seconds.
So a second pack formed that included myself, Ethan, Barrett, Brian Fleischmann, Matt Seymour, two Brasilians, an Argentinian rider, Andrew Russell from Canada, and Javier Cuevas from the Dominican Republic. Dispensing with the niceties again, this pack was completely useless. In retrospect it was probably Ethan and my responsibility to organize this pack in to a pace line, but honestly we were both looking to Brian Fleischmann to take some initiative. Brian wasn’t doing anything, though – he was either demoralized because he should have been in the front pack or he was saving his legs for the run. Either way, our pack held a 20 to 30 second gap for 15 kilometers and then started to hemorrhage massive amounts time to the front pack. The gap ballooned up to three minutes by the end of the bike and we were caught by a HUGE third pack of 30+ guys 3 kilometers from the bike finish. So that made T2 a huge mess.
Out onto the run our pack was effectively running for at best a seventh place finish (the front pack that was three minutes up had six guys in it). I never really found a rhythm on the run and at one point I faded as far back as 13th place. I had a strong second half and managed to finish up in ninth. It was definitely not the breakout performance that I know I’m capable of at this point, but I did manage to pick up some ITU points and a little bit of money.
Anyways, I’m racing again this weekend at the CapTexTri so maybe I can redeem myself there! If I happen to find any pictures from this past weekend I’ll post those later.
Florida Fun
After St. Anthony’s I decided to spend a little bit of time in my home state visiting friends and family and generally having a ton of fun in Florida! Here is a little bit of what I did:
I stayed with my coach Jen Hutchison in St. Pete for a few days. She made me a pancake breakfast the day after the race – apparently I was on a diet.
I borrowed Jen’s sweet Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove to Orlando to visit my Mom and Dad. This is my Mom’s dog Cosmo – ferocious!
After a short stop in Gainesville to visit friends (and get some of my favorite pizza at Satchel’s) I made my way up to Jacksonville to help out at the YMCA First Coast Kid’s Triathlon. This is me hanging out with some future triathlon stars the day before the race.
Here are some of the “celebrity big kids” as we were known for the weekend. There were about 10 of us big kids and we were celebrities for various reasons. From left to right: Sophia Every from the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, Jacksonville area fireman Raleigh Zike, Don Redman (completed 650+ triathlons in his lifetime), me (token professional triathlete!), Ty Dickenson (Jacksonville area policeman), Don Davey (ex-NFL football player), and Dustin Crawford, a Navy ensign.
I got to be the big kid for the 8 and under age group.
Here they are parading on over to the start.
We big kid’s had our own race and guess what, I won! Unofficially I completed the 100 yd swim, 3 mile bike and 1/2 mile run in 12 minutes and 45 seconds. Here I am with another of the big kids – Mark Woods, a journalist from the Florida Times-Union. He got third. Don Davey (the ex-NFL football player) got second. Pretty fast for the biggest guy in the field! He’s training for Ironman Austria.
Australia
The Mooloolaba World Cup was last weekend. I crashed out. I had a decent swim, a so-so first transition, and then crashed out on the first lap of the bike. It’s tough traveling halfway across the world and coming back with nothing, but overall I’m pretty happy about the way things turned out after crashing: I’m not hurt (x-rays on my right wrist came back as negative for fractures which is awesome!), my bike is mostly functional (I need a new derailleur hanger), and other than a little road rash that’s about all the crash did to me. I’m very lucky – considering the speed I was going when I crashed and the amount of people who subsequently ran over me, I would think I wouldn’t be so well-off.
Anyways, rather than focusing on how I traveled 15,000 miles and came back with nothing but a sprained wrist, I’m going to focus on why Australia was actually a lot of fun:
Mooloolaba is on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. It’s a cool place.
Tim Tams. Amazing. I ate half a box of these after I DNF’d.
Meat pies. It’s a pie but it’s a meal! Delicious.
Matt Chrabot, Ben Collins and I rented an apartment for a week. This means we could cook for ourselves if we wanted. Being that I never get to cook anything anymore (I live at the OTC), I jumped at the chance. I put on my sunglasses because this onion was making my eyes water.
The glasses didn’t work so I busted out the goggles.
On the way back Matt and I got into the Air New Zealand lounge in Sydney. I don’t normally drink champagne at noon on Mondays but it was there so how could I refuse?
Ecuador…So Weird!
“Why are you here? That’s so weird!”
This statement pretty much sums up the whole experience in Playas, Ecuador last weekend. I suppose if you are a middle-aged Ecuadorian visiting your favorite vacation destination with your family, driving around the Playas downtown area in your Ford Pinto-esque vehicle (with a passenger to seat belt ratio easily exceeding 1.0), and you see five Gringos (The American delegation) walking around with ice cream cones in their hands on a Sunday evening, you can’t help but to just roll down your window and yell, “Why are you here? That’s so weird!” I couldn’t have said it better if I tried!
The trip down was easy enough – a red eye from LAX to Panama City and then a short hop down to Guayaquil, Ecuador (well, I should say that the trip down was easy for Chris Foster and me – Steve Sexton, on the other hand, had possibly the worst trip in the history of taking trips, what with being stranded in Panama City due to passport issues for a good 12 hours or the fact that he collapsed 30ft from the finish line in the race due to heat stroke). Anyways, after the flights it was just a short two hour van ride to Playas. In the United States the van that we took would best be described as a “ten passenger van,” but Ecuador was not about to be limited to such a small number (see picture below). Oh, and our driver took us to her house in Guayaquil before we left and we got to meet her purple dog:
Adults and/or kids. Ha!
I’m pretty sure this dog doesn’t know that somebody spray painted it purple.
I visited Ecuador back in 2005 to see my brother who was teaching English in Cuenca at the time and I can vouch for the fact that Ecuador is a beautiful country. In fact, Ecuador is unique in that it is sort of a microcosm of everything South America has to offer with the Pacific coastline to the west, the Andes mountains cutting through the middle of the country, and the rain forest in the east. However, having said that, I’ll just say that Playas did not live up to that hype at all. Run down roads and buildings, creepy uninhabited sky rise hotels – Why did you hold a triathlon here? That’s just weird!
The race was the most normal thing I did all week. It was pretty textbook. I stayed near the front on the swim and the bike (no heroics or attacking). Two Japanese athletes and a Puerto Rican attacked on the bike and got a 50 second lead going into the run. Out of T2 I paced behind two Brazilian athletes, accelerated on them at around 4k, and caught the final Japanese athlete around 5k. At this point it was around 12:30 PM, 95 degrees, and ridiculously humid. I had a pretty big gap so I just tried to survive – no collapsing right before the finish line! I held on pretty easily (it helped that the run course was only 5.3 miles) and crossed the line to win my first race as a professional! Sweet! Oh and for those that are wondering why it took me 50 minutes and 40 seconds to run 5.3 miles (that’s what the results say), that split is actually the last three laps of the bike + T2 + the run. I don’t know why that happened other than to maximize the weirdness.
This is about 2k into the run.
Chris and I got giant oysters after the race. Don’t worry, it’s cooked.
In other news I spent the night in the emergency room last Wednesday. This race in Ecuador was possibly my last trip south of the border to score ranking points and I thought I had made it out of this phase of my career completely unscathed. About 24 hours after I returned I was having stomach issues and 12 hours after that I had lost 11 lbs, couldn’t eat or drink anything without it coming back up, and had to go the the ER for testing and three 1000 mL IVs. I’m fine now and back to training so no worries! I’m 99% sure it wasn’t the oyster…
