La Paz
If I had an Argentine Peso for every time someone said to me, “You have to race in La Paz sometime in your life. It’s an awesome experience,” I would be able to afford my weight in empanadas de carne from the rotiseria on the corner of Chacabuco and San Martin, right next to my homestay’s house in La Paz. However, I don’t think I could stomach another empanada considering the way I reacted to the last one I ate before boarding my flight from Buenos Aires to Washington-Dulles. Many thanks to the crew aboard United flight 846 for being lightening fast with the airsick bags and for the spare pair of socks. I’m sorry about the carpet in the aft galley. I’m sure that will come right out.
Anyway, I finally got to race in La Paz this past weekend being that it served as the 2012 Pan American Championship and thus was very important for the Olympic qualifying process. The race lived up to the hype. Triathlon is HUGE in La Paz. During my training in the days leading up to the race I got tons of cheers from bystanders or cars driving by. “¡Dale dale!” they yelled. I got into countless conversations with various La Paz citizens about my Cervelo S3. “¿Es de ruta or contrareloj?” (road or time trial?). “Tu Castellano es muy bárbaro,” one man said. I’m still not sure exactly what this means but he looked like Jack Sparrow so it was an amusing conversation nonetheless.
The race itself was just like any other ITU race but with a few eccentricities. Like the violent, ear-shattering fireworks that the locals kept shooting off. Or the swim start where we all dove in and immediately turned left (because that’s fair, right?). I was number 17 on the pontoon and as logic would have it I ended up 17th in a long line of swimmers down the Río Paraná. I survived the downsteam-upstream-downstream swim and ended up in the first chase pack. We caught the front pack within five kilometers and I rode the rest of the time at or near the front – so much easier up there! My incredible good luck in avoiding crashes that happen right in front of me continued in La Paz when a Guatemalan went down and sent one of the orange gas cans (used to divide the out-and-back portion of the bike course) into my front wheel. It bounced off harmlessly. “Nice save, Kev!” I heard Barrett Brandon yell behind me. As I ran down the final straightaway it was like a Tour de France mountain stage as the burgeoning crowd left only enough room for one runner. I politely pushed a Brazilian athlete to the side so I could pass him in the last few meters. I closed the last three kilometers of the run strong but it didn’t matter as my first seven took nearly 30 minutes. I suffered from the same side stitch/breathing cramps that plagued me in Kelowna, Buffalo and Huatulco. This is incredibly frustrating to say the least and I need to find a solution if I am to race effectively.
Due to similar lackluster performances from other American men in La Paz I remain eighth American in terms of the selection process for Olympic Trials in San Diego in May. The door is not closed completely. Ice cream and hip hop dancers in la plaza concluded the La Paz Triathlon weekend – definitely an experience!
About to enjoy a desayuno completo with LJ.
Discussing tactics with Barrett. “Let’s make the front pack.” “Yeah, OK.”
Boats took us to the swim start.
Suffering on the run.
Where’s the Penalty Tent?
After 1.5K of ocean swimming, 40K of cycling and 9.7K of running with 74 of my best amigos, the title of this post is what I yelled at the six ITU delegates standing on the side of the road in Mooloolaba. You see, I take things very literally, and if you call something the “penalty tent” I will generally look for a tent-like structure. No such thing existed and after I ran a few meters past what I am now calling the “general vicinity of penalty enforcement” one ITU official ran up to me and began to count down my 15 seconds. It sucks to sit there and watch so many guys run by, but I got a good rest and sprinted past a few of them again, only to realize that 300 meters is a long way to hold a full-on sprint, so a few passed me back again and I ended in 45th place. NOT what I was looking for in Mooloolaba. I got bumped up to 44th because Gavin Noble didn’t serve his penalty and got a DQ. So it could be worse.
So what was my penalty? “You didn’t put your cap and goggles in the box and we have a picture to prove it!” she said. I took a picture, too:
Wearing my timing chip on my left leg just to be different. Photo credit: Wayne Nevrilk
Oh Yeah I Raced This Past Weekend
The race this past weekend blended so well into my normal routine that I almost forgot to post about it! Other than acting as a homestay for Barrett Brandon and his wife Lauren, as well as Greg “the Future of Triathlon” Billington, I didn’t stray too far from the norm.
Anyways, the race took place in Lake Louisa State Park. It was a sprint distance Pan American Cup with ITU ranking points on the line so it attracted quite a talented field from all over the world. I do almost all of my cycling workouts inside the park so I definitely knew the course quite well. Lake Louisa itself is so shallow that the swim was a non-factor – I probably only swam 300 meters total, spending the rest of the time either running or dolphin diving. A huge front pack formed up halfway through the first of four laps on the bike and this was how we entered T2. I came out of T2 right in the middle of the field and immediately ran straight to the front of the race. My run fitness seemed to be quite good entering the race so my confidence was high but after about four minutes of running right behind the leaders I blew up fantastically. I faded hard to 16th. This was not at all the result I thought myself capable of. Hopefully I can make up for it in Mooloolaba!
Here is a video of the finish starting with the third place finisher Kaleb Van Ort:
After the race USAT hosted a cycling skills camp. This is exactly what I needed. We Americans are not known for our bike handling skills (with the exception of a few skilled athletes). Let’s just say that it would take more than my fingers and toes to count the number of times American World Championship Series ‘regulars’ hit the pavement last year in races, and I contributed one to that number! Michael Heitz was our instructor and he was awesome!
The highlight of the weekend was a spirited game of three-on-three ‘trashball,’ a game played on a grass field where the objective is to pick up a small foam ball and score it into a trash can, all while riding bikes. Additional rules state that all three members of the team must possess the ball before scoring, and no single rider can possess the ball for more than three seconds. It turns out that Greg Billington is pretty much the Lebron James of trashball (Sidney Crosby for my Canadian readers). I specialized in defense and definitely stacked pretty hard a couple of times to prevent others from scoring. Thankfully I didn’t break my bike (or myself) so it’s all good.
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!
New for ’09
Oh hi. It’s been awhile but I’m back to blogging for 2009. Thanks for reading! So what’s new in the world of Kevin Collington? I know everyone is just dying to know.
First off, I moved! I managed to acquire full-time Olympic Training Center ‘resident’ status for 2009 so I packed up and left Florida on December 27th and took a sweet road trip across the country and moved into Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. This will not be permanent as I will be living at the OTC in Colorado Springs, Colorado for the majority of the year, but for now the perennial summer of Chula beats the Colorado Springs winter any day. Thanks to Andrew, Barrett, and Paulo for letting me stay at your places as I bummed it across the country.
Chula Vista is great. Right now the weather averages a dry 50 degree low and 80 degree high. The winter is considered the ‘rainy season,’ meaning it rains about once or twice a month. A suburb of San Diego, Chula is best known for making the news in border patrol related stories. Also, as Mr. Sexton recently reported, Chula was chosen by Forbes.com as one of America’s “most boring cities.” So that’s where I live!
Chula Vista…endless suburbia and shopping centers.
The Otay Reservoir in Chula (this is right outside the training center).
In other news I am now in the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s (USADA) registered testing pool. This means that I have to tell USADA where I am at all times and also set aside one hour of my day between 6 AM and 11 PM to be in a very specific location of my choosing for that entire hour so they can come and test me. I know it sounds like a bit of a pain in the ass…it is. But what USADA does is very much worthwhile and I’m happy to be a part of it.
I’m also excited to report that I’m working with a few new companies this year, namely Shimano, Kiwami, and Rudy Project.
Oh and lastly, since I receive requests on almost a daily basis of, “Kevin, we want to know what you’re doing RIGHT NOW and AT ALL TIMES!” I got a twitter account and put it over in the right sidebar. Barrett has one, too. We’re so trendy. Too much Kevin Collington? Not possible.
WUC Race Report – Long Version
Here is the long version:
We arrived in Turkey after relatively uneventful travel from the States (I did get upgraded to business class for the Chicago – Frankfurt leg, though, which was awesome). We were greeted by some FISU staff and made preparations to leave for Erdek. We just missed the 12:30 ferry to Erdek and the next one wasn’t until 6:30 so the FISU guys got a bus for everyone who had arrived around the time we did (this included the British, Greek and Chinese teams). We soon learned two important facts about how things operate in Turkey that would become the theme for the week – there will never be enough space on the bus and everything will take at least twice as long as the Turkish race delegations tells you. We were told that the bus would be quicker than waiting for the next ferry since it is only a “five hour drive,” so after barely fitting everyone and their luggage on the bus (bike boxes took up several seats) we set off for Erdek. We arrived in the city nearly eight hours later to find that everyone who had taken the 6:30 ferry was already sitting down to eat dinner. We had basically gone half way around the Sea of Marmara via Izmit.
The days leading up to the race were characterized by odd food served at the hotel (not ideal for pre-race), run-ins with the hotel staff (mostly concerning keeping our bikes in the hotel rooms or acquiring water from the restaurant), and of course the shuttles that ran on Turkish time.
Our hotel – the Agrigento
Several changes were made to the race course and time line the day before the race. First, the bike course was changed from four laps (10k per lap) to eight laps (5k per lap). This eliminated the only flat portion of the course and made athletes climb a somewhat large hill (8% to 10% and around 1k in length) 16 times. The swim was changed to an in-water start due to the large number of athletes in the men’s race (81 starters). Also, the men’s and women’s race times were switched so that the women raced first at 1 pm and the men raced later at 4 pm.
Race day finally came and the weather was almost perfect – sunny and clear (but hot!). I rolled up to the race site about 1.5 hours early along with the rest of the American men’s team and heard the announcer going on about Justine Whipple – she was currently leading the women’s race with 2 laps to go on the run! This was certainly a good start to the day. Justine crossed the finish line to take the gold medal as we were setting up our transitions. I did some swim warm up with Ethan and waited for introductions to take place. I was the last American athlete to choose my start position (numbers were assigned randomly and I was 69). We hopped in the water and held onto the start rope. I braced myself for my least favorite type of triathlon swim start – the in-water start.
The horn went off and I got pummeled for about 100 meters before things started to settle down. I lost about 20 meters. I settled into a big pack and started to try to move up. After about 1200 meters I sighted to the lead swimmer going around a buoy and got a time gap of about 25 seconds to me. I exited the water 28 seconds back feeling good about my position especially since I was surrounded by a lot of people.
The start of the bike was where things started to go bad for me. Despite a large lead pack of swimmers, a gap had formed as some talented cyclists at the front were pushing the pace and other less talented cyclists were falling back. I made the first turn and was greeted by a 20 mph headwind and the first hill. I couldn’t close the gap by myself and the second pack formed around me. The good news was that Steve Sexton and Ethan Brown were in the front pack. The gap continued to grow each lap – 30 seconds after lap 1, 50 seconds at lap 2, 70 seconds at lap 3. Finally the bleeding stopped when a contingent of Swiss athletes joined us. The Swiss along with the four Czech athletes in the second pack closed the gap back to 50 seconds at lap 4. I was just along for the ride – I didn’t want to help close a gap to Steve and Ethan. Anyways, the gap was staying steady at around 60 seconds each lap. A few of the Czech athletes got a little heated since they were the only ones steadily doing any work – they yelled something I couldn’t understand but I got the point. They didn’t seem to understand that they were the only team with nobody in the front pack! The bike course was extremely hard anyways so nobody was “sitting in.” We came into T2 down by 70 seconds on the leaders.
The run is pretty easy to explain – I had the best run of my life splitting 32 minutes. I ran down the majority of the front pack and had the 3rd fastest run of the day. It was kind of bittersweet, though, since that run would have put me on the podium had I been in the front pack. However, with my sixth place finish, Steve Sexton in seventh, and Barrett Brandon in 15th, some quick calculations showed that we pulled off a silver medal in the team standings!
After a quick shower and a bit of recovery time we were off to the awards ceremony. We had to wait for a second bus to show up and pick us up (much to the surprise of the race delegation, 200 people still didn’t fit into one bus!). The team awards ceremony started as soon as we arrived and we were very surprised to find out that our men’s team had, in fact, won the gold medal! We got to stand on top of the podium and everything!
However, after checking the math we found that the race delegation had made a mistake and we had actually placed second (as we had originally calculated). The Swiss team had won without a doubt, so we went over to their table and had a slightly impromptu medal ceremony:
Fortunately the Swiss also had a 5 athlete team so everyone got the correct medal – silver for the USA and gold for Switzerland!
European Adventure
It’s time to race again! I’m off to Europe today for three races in as many weeks.
It all starts this weekend at the FISU World University Championship in Erdek, Turkey. Both our men’s and women’s teams are very strong and were recently described as the ”strongest team we have ever taken to the FISU race” by FISU coach Andy Schmitz. Here is the roster:
Men
Greg Billington (Spokane, Wash.) – 2007 USAT Junior Elite Athlete of the Year, 2007 USAT Junior National Champion, 2006, 2007 and 2008 USAT Junior Worlds Team Member, 2006 Junior Aquathlon World Champion
Barrett Brandon (Fort Worth, Texas) – 2004 USAT U23 Worlds Team Member, 2004 USAT Collegiate National Champion, 2004 FISU Worlds Team Member
Ethan Brown (Lowell, Mass.) – 2007 USAT U23 National Champion, 2008 USAT U23 Worlds Team Member, 2006 FISU Worlds Team Member
Kevin Collington (Orlando, Fla.) – Kind of a big deal
Steve Sexton (Davis, Calif.) – 2008 USAT Collegiate National Champion, 2006 FISU Worlds Team Member
Women
Amanda Felder (Houston, Texas) – 2005 and 2008 USAT Collegiate National Champion, 2006 FISU Worlds Team Member
Lauren Goldstein-Kral (Shaker Heights, Ohio) – 2007 USAT Junior Elite Athlete of the Year, 2007-2008 USAT Junior Worlds Team Member
Jennifer Spieldenner (Findlay, Ohio) – 2005 USAT Junior National Champion, 2006 and 2007 USAT U23 Worlds Team Member
Justine Whipple (Duxbury, Mass.) – 2007 USAT U23 National Champion, 2006 and 2007 Collegiate National Champion, 2007 and 2008 U23 Worlds Team Member, 2007 and 2008 U.S. Armed Forces National Champion
Most of us get into Istanbul on Wednesday at which point we get on a ferry to take us across this Sea of Marmara to the city of Erdek, Turkey. Erdek is a popular tourist destination for Turkish citizens and is located on a peninsula in the southern part of the Sea of Marmara.
After the race in Erdek, Steve, Ethan and I are continuing on to Hamburg to race in the Hamburg World Cup the following weekend. The Hamburg World Cup is a pretty big event in Germany as more than 300,000 people usually line the streets on race day. Last year I raced here when it was the U23 World Championship.
Javier Gomez leading the run in last year’s Triathlon World Championship in Hamburg
The following weekend Steve and I are continuing on yet again to race in the Tiszaujvaros World Cup in Hungary. I’m not quite sure what to expect here but I do know that the event is a very big deal in the small town of Tiszaujvaros. Looks like a fun race to me.
