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This past Saturday I did the first in the Tri for Fun series in Pleasanton. This was my first race since Wildflower, and my first race since getting injured. The race went well, and I felt pretty comfortable the whole time, though my legs were quite tired. Which is to be expected after not running for over 6 weeks.

In addition, this was the first triathlon for my friends Joe and Rachel. They absolutely killed it and did very well. After they came and watched me do Wildflower, they got motivated to try a triathlon themselves. I suggested the Tri for Fun series as those races are nearby, quite fun and an easy course that is great for beginners. Both of them finished strong and are planning on doing more triathlons in the future. Here’s to the Wildflower Olympic race next year!

As this race doesn’t collect splits, I collected them myself and posted them below.

Despite the year of experience since doing the exact same course, exercising more and, in general, being more prepared, I was slower in all three events. I wasn’t too much slower in the run or bike, which is good considering that I was injured. But it is still disappointing. As usual, I passed a lot of people on the run, and got passed on the bike. However, I’ve been starting to look into improving my cycling legs. I’ve got another Tri for Fun in 2 months, so I’ll see how well that training works out.

Wildflower: “The Woodstock of Triathlons”. I can now say this seems like a very accurate description.  This past weekend was the twenty-something-th running of the Wildflower Triathlon event at Lake San Antonio on the Central Coast.

Starting the Bike

I had first heard of Wildflower a few years back when my sister told me about an event she was going to where there was a giant party and, almost as an afterthought, a triathlon was held. As my interest in tri’s increased, I of course heard more about Wildflower. I came to find out that there are 3 events: the long course (a half Ironman), an Olympic distance course and a mountain bike sprint.

Then, sometime in the last couple months, I decided to start my 2009 Olympic distance tri season with Wildflower. The first thing I did after signing up was to begin to round up a posse to join me at the event. I managed to convince my friends Dean, Joe and Rachel to come. My sister and her friend also decided to volunteer, so I’d be seeing them on the course somewhere. The plan was coming along beautifully. Until I realized the Olympic event was on Sunday, and the other two were on Saturday. This was a major bummer as I was hoping to totally enjoy the festival and relax and camp after my race. Instead, I had to go through another full day of anxiety as I watched the other races. I just hoped to find a camping spot that wasn’t going to be too loud Saturday night.

So in the months leading up to the event my training consisted mostly of frequent CrossFitting, biking on some weekends, and when the event got closer, swimming a couple times a week.  I really should have done more cycling and running, but a combination of laziness and busyness led to more nights not running, and more excuses to no cycle places. Plus it was cold out lots of times! I did feel a bit underprepared for the event, and plan to change that feeling in the future, but I knew I could finish. Based on my previous Olympic distance tri, I set a goal of 3 hours and 30 minutes. Yes, this is 40 minutes slower, but I liked that it was a round number. I decided to shoot for around a 30 minute swim, 2 hour bike and an hour run. I knew the bike and run had more hills than other tris, and I suck at biking, so I added more time to them than my previous tri.

Originally, our posse was set to leave Friday night from the Bay Area, and drive down to Lake San Antonio where we would get to hang out all day Saturday before my race Sunday. But then a storm came in and dumped rain on us and we got scared. So we postponed our departure until Saturday morning, attempting to get down and witness part of the end of the long course bike and run. The drive down was (mostly) uneventful and got to drive next to athletes tackling Nasty Grade and Heart Rate Hill. I was not jealous of them. We finally arrived at the entrance to the lake, but had to wait for most of the bikers to make it back before we could drive down. So we hung out, ate lunch and eventually took a drive down the Olympic distance bike course before we were able to enter and setup camp. Saturday evening I setup my gear and prepared my transition bag before taking an Ambien to get the best sleep I could.

I woke up at 6:30am to prepare for the event. We had a nice breakfast before I began to change into my tri shorts. As I was getting them out of my bag, I noticed what seemed to be a hole in the butt. Upon closer examination, it was indeed a hole, a big hole at that. I have no idea when or how it got there, but I’m just hoping that I hadn’t been mooning the people of the Stanfurd pool for too long. The only option was to get a new pair, and quick. I found a good pair at the festival, changed, and proceeded to set up transition. Crisis averted.

In preparation for the race, Saturday was spent hydrating as much as possible. I know I succeeded because I woke up 3 times to pee Saturday night. For the race, I had 2 Gu packs on my bike, and one on my shorts for the run. I planned to have one at the top of Lynch Hill (the first bike hill out of transition), and then one after the 12 mile turn around. And then I had plenty of Gatorade. The race started at 9:20am and I finished a few hours later:

[Official Results Here - Bib 5634]

So as you can see, I did better than my goal. My swim was almost dead on with my last race, and my run was only slightly slower, despite the fact that Wildflower has about a 1200 ft elevation gain in the run alone, and the SF tri was completely flat. As usual for me, the bike killed me. My super slow pace seriously hurt me. The top guys had paces of 23 MPH, with one guy at 27 MPH! I did pass 5 people on the bike. And only 2 of them had flat tires. There was no point in trying to count the number of guys who passed me. Though I’m sure I passed quite a few of them on the run. Obviously, I need to work on this area. I really think I just don’t know how to cycle, plus I’m just not used to it. So if you know how to cycle and want to give me tips, and/or have an indoor trainer for me to use, please let me know!

Race Finish

I felt really good at the finish, save for some initial feelings of wanting to puke. But that was cause I was sprinting the last couple hundred meters. I even had some gelato shortly after the race (thanks Dean, Joe and Rachel!). Also, I really do want to thank those guys for coming. I really, really liked having them at the various transition areas during the race. I also want to thank my sister Amy and her friend Margo for bailing on their volunteer duties to cheer and study. Having someone you know at the race cheering you on really boosts your spirit and gives you that much more energy and motivation to do your best and fight on, which is really important in endurance events. And having an entire posse, that is truly awesome :).

So what did I gain from this? I had an amazing weekend and really enjoyed the race. I’ve also decided that 2010 is the year of the half Ironman for me. Right now, I’m planning on doing the Wildflower long course. I’m going to do several more Olympic distance tris, and really work on that cycling (!) in preparation. Also, Joe and Rachel have been inspired to do the Wildflower Olympic distance course next year. I look forward to being at many of their races cheering them on!

As I write this today, the day after the race, I do so without being sore. I can feel that my muscles did something, but I have no trouble moving and would have hit up CrossFit today except for one thing: I am terribly sunburned. I put on sunscreen, but that much exercise and swimming just stripped it from my body. I can attribute this lack of soreness to two things: CrossFit is awesome, and that I should have given more yesterday during the race. It seems weird to have done 3 hours 15 minutes of exercise and feel the way I do today. Granted, I was a bit stiff for a bit yesterday, even after post event stretching, but not today.

A great race, with some great weather. Wildflower, til next year.

Well, it sure has been a while since my last post on here. So I thought I’d kick it off with a discussion of how I went about getting my email backed up.

First, a description of my situation. I run all my email through GMail. I enjoy the interface and the fact that it is a cloud service; I can access my email seamlessly on my phone, my home computer, my work computer, some other computer, etc. However, I don’t want to lose all that information. Google is great, but who is to say that something terrible won’t happen and some (or all) of my mail is lost? So I wanted to setup some sort of backup. And then once I got that setup, make it automated.

At home, I run an Ubuntu box, that I just upgraded to 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. This machine primarily serves as a media box, hosting video that streams to my Tivo off the 1.5TB RAID 5 array. I also use it as a network mounted TimeMachine box as well. Since I have extra storage on it, I figured I’d get something to sync my mail over IMAP periodically, and then I have a nice little backup.

After some searching, I came across two sites that had instructions using the utility mbsync (formerly isync). I found that following the instructions worked pretty well, though I had to customize the patch provided to get it to work with the version provided by Ubuntu.  And then I thought I’d detail my steps here for others to see.
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Over the weekend, I participated in a trail running 10k. I did the 10k distance, which turned out to be more difficult than my previous trail run. This course wasn’t as aggressive as the Dip Sea trail, with a sloping 1000 foot elevation gain, followed by a steep downhill back to the start, where we also finished.

I opted to do the 10k distance, and convinced my sister to also do the race, which was her first race. And I was informed about the race by some CrossFit friends who all did the 50k distance. Saul, Samantha and Dustin are pretty crazy for doing it, but accomplished the monstrous achievement. Saul wrote up the summary from their race over at the Peninsula CrossFit site. He also has some great endurance training ideas there too. So congrats to them and to my sister.

I’ve done the 10k distance a number of times before, though this was my first 10k trail race (though the Stintson 12k pretty much counts). I really think that I wasn’t as prepared physically as I should have been. My legs were still sore from my CrossFit workout the Wednesday before, where I did Barbara. So I ended up walking up the hill quite a bit more than I wanted to. But I’m pretty sure I made up some time on the downhill. The official results got posted, and my time was 55:53.7 minutes, for an average pace of 9:12 minutes /mile. This was good enough for 35th overall out of 255, 17th of 46 in my age division (ages 21-29), and 31st of 119 of all men in the 10k race. So I’m not fully happy with my result since I know I could have done better a day later and with more rest. However, Amy killed the race where she completed the course with a time of 1:03:25.6 minutes for 10:26 pace. I need to start training more to make sure I stay ahead of her pace.

Update: My split for the course was 36:39 to the aid station, which was at the top of the hill, 3.45 miles in, and then 19:13 from there to the finish (the final 2.75 miles).  This gave me a 10:37 pace up the hill and a 6:59 pace down the hill to the finish.  I really should have walked less going up the hill.

Over the weekend, I participated in my first Pacific Coast Trail Runs event.  I did the Stinson Beach 12k which turned out to be a more difficult event than I expected.  The trail has a pretty aggressive elevation gain with just about all of the gain at the start of the trail.  Starting from Stinson State Beach, we ran 4.9 km uphill, going about 1600 feet before running along the side of the mountain for a short distance before turning pretty much straight downhill to go back to the beach.  The total elevation gain on the course was 1850 feet.

This was the second time I’d run a 12k distance race, with this one being decidedly harder than the bridge to bridge run in San Francisco I did last time.  In the 12k overall, I got 13th place, and got second place in the age group results. My time of 1:18:14 got me an average of a 10:43 minutes / mile pace. Seeing as how challenging the course was, I’m not disappointed in my results, but am confident that on my next run in December, I can turn it up a notch to 11.

A couple months ago I heard about the San Francisco Triathlon on Treasure Island.  At the time, I knew there was a sprint and an Olympic distance, but relegated myself to the sprint distance. However, after the last triathlon I did, I just decided to try for the Olympic distance.  Last year, in 2007, I made a personal goal to do an Olympic distance tri in 2008, and the SF Triathlon seemed to be my last chance.

Well, I signed up for the event, which occurred yesterday morning.  The race took place on Treasure Island in the San Francisco bay. Treasure Island is part of the island the Bay Bridge passes through.  I woke up at the super early hour of 5am to make it to the island by 6am so I could check in and prepare my transition area before the early race start at 7:15am.

Since the island isn’t very big, the course was a series of loops.  The first event, swimming was 1.5km, where I swam twice around a triangle with 250m sides.  From there I jumped on my bike for a 40km bike course.  The 40km course consisted of 6 laps of a ~6.66km circuit.  After biking was the run, 3 laps at ~3.33km each, for a total of 10k.  The distance are the same as the ones used in the Olympics, making this an Olympic triathlon, and thus, much harder than the previous sprint triathlons I’ve done.

My initial estimate for the course was to complete it all in about 3 1/2 hours, broken down as follows: 30min for the swim, 2 hours for the bike, and 1 hour for the run. The estimate for the bike was taken from a recent 25.4 mile ride that I completed in just under 2 hours. This ended up being the estimate that was very exaggerated because the triathlon course was so flat.  With that being said, here is a breakdown of my results:

So as has been the case with all the past tri’s I have done, biking is my weakest link.  I really need to do more bike training next time.  I’m pretty sure that the only people I passed on my bike yesterday were the people with flat tires (and there were a lot of them!).  The first place guy finished with a time of 2:04:49, which means I’ve got quite a bit of improvement to make. I’m not sure when my next tri is going to be, but now that I know what the Olympic distance is like, I know I can do many more of them.

On Saturday, my local CrossFit affiliate had our Fight Gone Bad day. This was my first official FGB, and having only done it one other time, I decided to forgo the official men’s weight, and do the intermediate weight (which also happened to be the women’s weight). I did the exercises in the following order with the modified weight in parentheses:

• Push Press (65lbs)
• Row
• Wall Ball (14lbs)
• Sumo Dead Lift High Pull (55lbs)
• Box Jump

I ended up doing the following reps for each exercise:

For a total score of 259. I tried to be as consistent as I could between subsequent rounds, and I think I accomplished that goal pretty well.  I also set the bar pretty high for the next time I do a FGB with men’s weight.  Especially considering that I felt like I had energy left over at the end of the workout.  I was tired, but not lie down on the ground for 5 minutes tired.

Over the weekend, I did my second 10k in 3 weeks. A running club in San Jose holds an annual trail running event with different distances. I chose to do the 10k distance as that is right now the longest distance I’m comfortable running.

The course was located in the hills south west of San Jose and the start was in a little valley at the edge of the Quicksilver park. The course description mentioned that there were going to be hills along the route, but I was not prepared for what the course actually consisted of.  At the start was a topo of the route, and, being the map lover I am, I spent time reading the course layout.  The starting line was somewhere around 600 feet.  From there, the course would wind up a road to a single track trail, where it would continue to ascend.  The ascent continued until about the 10k half-way point, where it then began the descent.  In all, I read that there was about 1000 feet of elevation gain. Most of which was continuous.  So it was quite difficult.

I didn’t feel particularly confident in my run up the mountain, and went slightly slower down the second half since I didn’t want to injure my knees.  Somewhere in the last kilometer, a guy passed me, and actually scared me when he came up.  I didn’t think about it, but it turned out I had been in the lead, and this guy just overtook me for the lead.  I followed him closely to the finish, finishing 7 seconds behind him.  This put me in second place overall for the 10k!  I could have won! Despite that stupid mistake, I did get second place and finished in 56 minutes, 58 seconds.  So it wasn’t a fast 10k, but the hill slowed everyone way down.

In the end, the race was difficult, and made me realize that I need to do more hill running.  My current run routes are all in flat areas.  I think that I’m going to start trying to do the dish path more often and work on my interval times there as a good way to train.

This morning I did my second triathlon of 2008. It was the 15th Annual Tri For Real.  This is the triathlon which the Tri for Fun series is supposed to prepare you for.  The race was good, and I felt decently comfortable for the swim and bike.  As usual, the bike seemed to be a weak spot, as a lot of people gained and passed me, after I did really well on the swim. For the run, my legs were really tired, and my right leg started getting almost tight.  It wasn’t a cramp, more that the area below the calf was just tight and sore.

I kept track of my splits and posted them here as a record for myself.

Comparing these results to my results from the last Pleasanton tri, I can see that I swam only slightly slower, biked faster, and ran a bit slower.  I am stoked about the results, as it shows I’m making progress.  The run should have been faster, and by next time, I’ll have worked out the tightness / cramp issue.  Again, without any practice, my swim is pretty good.  Unfortunately, this race didn’t have a timing chip, so I won’t be able to compare my split with those of others; I’d be interested to see how my splits match up with others. My transition times also got a lot better.  Some of the things I tried this time definitely helped out it seems.

The next tri coming up that I’m thinking of is one in November that is on Treasure Island.  They’ve got an Olympic length and a sprint length tri.  I’ve got a couple weeks to decide which one to do before I sign up.  Right now, I’m leaning towards the sprint tri as I’m not sure that I’ll be able to do enough to prepare for a full length tri.  So I’ll have to see how it goes until I register.

Update: I got second in my age division. Of course, there were ony 8 people in that division.  I did manage to get 72nd overall in the Men’s division though.

Update 2: Pictures for the event are posted.

Tonight I completed my first competitive 10k.  Two weeks ago, I did the Nike+ Human Race, though I don’t really consider that in the same level, since it was by my self and there weren’t others to get the same competitive drive.

So I did the Palo Alto Online Moonlight run in 46 minutes, 29 seconds.  That is about a 7 minute 28 second average mile.  Not the greatest, and I was hoping for better. But, on the plus side, I got a sweet shirt.

Update: The results got posted online and it looks like I got 99th overall.  I was off on my time as well. I updated my time and pace above to reflect the official race results.