See Ryan Run

Rebooting....

2012-01-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I ran across the link to my own blog, this lovely page, the other day and I was saddened to see that I'd allowed a year to go by without posting. After the immense cluster that was 2010, I had fully intended to make 2011 better, and I did.

If you've followed Dana's blog at all, you've seen that we got engaged and are now in the throes of planning a wedding. Talk about something I never thought I would have to do. Maybe I'll write more about the proposal process, maybe I won't. I haven't decided whether that's self indulgent or not. In any event, let it be known that the moment she said "yes" made my year.

So what does 2012 hold? Who the hell knows?

I'm planning to be more active on this blog, so maybe if you keep reading you'll get to keep tabs on me. I think there will be two major topics of conversation: fitness and wedding planning. I assume that my take on the adventure will be, well, uniquely my own. It's a strange enterprise, full of insanity and silliness, and we've just begun.

As for the fitness, I think this is the more important topic in the near term. As Dana mentioned on her post, we've each got about 50 pounds to drop. In my case that will get me back to the weight I was holding when I was at the top of my tri career. Though that career may well be over, for a variety of reasons, I still need to get back to the weight. That only makes sense. Lighter is healthier, right?

So, now that we've chosen a wedding date, I've got a little over a year to lose that 50 pounds. I also have a big split to take in the middle. I turn 35 this year. In just about exactly 6 months.

So here's my goal: Lose 30 of the 50 pounds by June 9, 2012.

5 pounds per month. You think I can do it? If I do, then maybe I'll be in even better shape by the time the wedding rolls around. Wouldn't that be crazy?

More on the methods and the progress as they develop. Hope you stay tuned and, if you see me out in the real world, call me out if I look like I'm slacking off.

Don't worry, babe, you'll be stuck with me for a good long time.

2010: You Forgot Your Phony Dog Poo

2010-12-31T13:44:00.000-08:00

Okay, yes, it's been what, 10 months since I last posted on here? It's been a busy year. A busy year and not really one I'll care to remember, though definitely one that will never fade completely from my memory.

Anyway, I was looking at Dana's blog earlier and I realized how long it had been since I wrote anything for the masses, both of you. I decided that it was probably time to either delete this thing or start using it again.

So why have I been away? Frankly, I've been at a loss for words this year.
This has been a year marred by the removal of two people from my life. The first was my grandmother, who we called Me-maw. Me-maw departed in January and, although it was undoubtedly her time to go, it opened 2010 onto a rough road.

The second has kept me silent and hunkered down for the last few months. Right before Halloween, we lost my dad. It was sudden, totally unexpected, and all the other small descriptions you can apply. That day I saw and felt things I hope no one I know ever has to. I’m going to leave out the details, because they aren’t necessary, and because they are mine.

When I find the words, I will probably write something about him, because he was far more than just my father. He was, in point of fact, one of my best friends, my compass for most things professional and personal. In the time since he passed, I keep finding myself in situations where he’s the only person I can conceive of having an answer for me, or even some kind of guidance, which is perhaps the greatest irony of it all. How do you make sense of the world when the person who usually explained it is gone?

I’ve spent the last few months not so much handling as coping, looking for the center so I can keep standing on my two feet.

There are a few components to that center. The first being my family and friends. Even the ones I didn’t know or expect.

But in all honesty, the one who’s kept me standing is the woman in my life. I am lucky beyond words to have her. She has shown me time and again that she can keep me up and running when for all intents and purposes I should have collapsed in a bloody, broken heap on the side of the road. Thanks to her I’ve started sleeping nights. I've learned to drink wine. There's paint on my walls. We had our first anniversary and our fist shared Christmas.

So no, 2010 can’t come to an end fast enough. Although I know that 2011 will have its share of challenges, I am looking forward to meeting and surmounting them. I am looking forward to all the things, small and large, that will dim the memory of 2010. Powder days, good beer, good workouts and good friends. I hope to see more of you out there in the world than I have this past year. It’s time to make new memories and see what the world can offer after you’ve shaken off the punches and got up off the canvas.

Vegas, from the Boot Heel

2010-02-18T17:11:00.001-08:00

If you've ever been to a party at my house, or been told about one, you've probably heard someone say "Das boot!"

No, we are not talking about an old WWII submarine movie starring Jurgen Prochnow. Though I hear that's awesome in its own right.

No, what you're hearing about is a much more "useful" iteration of Das Boot. It's a boot-shaped shot glass that once prompted a victim to exclaim "It goes all the way to the toe!"

For the record, it doesn't. But if it makes you feel better....

Anyway, the reason I'm telling you all this is that "Das Boot," as seen below, has been trumped.

Its big German cousin has come to stay for a while.

So why am I telling you this? Good question. I had to tell you that to tell you this:

It's strange to fly with only a 2L glass boot, a copy of Wicked (the book) and the contents of your pockets as carry-ons.

Wicked, you may rightly ask... Yes. Ask Dana. She's been after me to read it. It wasn't nearly as gay as I thought it would be either. No singing at all. Mercifully.

Anyway, after the usual fun in the security line, I put my plastic tray of stuff (wallet, keys, phone, ipod, etc.), flip flops and shopping bag on the x-ray belt. Now the boot is packed in a brown box and this is inside a clear plastic Hofbrauhaus shopping bag, along with the book. The stuff goes into the machine and I step through the metal detector.

My bin comes out. My flip flops follow. All is well. The bag starts to emerge from the baleen curtain, and wait! It goes back in. The girl watching the monitor leans in for a better view. She's about my age and she's squinting at the monitor like she's got glaucoma, or is very drunk.

She ponders the view for a minute and calls over her supervisor. A middle-aged civil service type with a government issue mustache and glasses. She asks, "Is that really an empty box?"

The supervisor looks at the screen for half a second and says "I know what it is. It's a big glass boot."

This confuses the girl on the stool, so he says, "Run it out. It'll be in a Hofbrauhaus bag."

She looks at him, perplexed. He says, "It's a drinking thing." This does not help. She is still confused. He thinks for a moment and asks "Haven't you seen Beerfest?" and turns to me for confirmation, to which I can only say "Great movie."

She's still drawing a blank and the line is getting longer. She runs out the belt and the supervisor shows her the Hofbrauhaus bag. She nods as though she has learned something. He hands me the bag and I go on my way.

That's it. No moral or anything, only a question. If you work airport security in Vegas, how many odd drinking vessels do you see in carry on luggage in a given day? How many plastic Eiffel Towers and yard long margarita glasses? Have you never really seen an invisible glass boot on an x-ray?

Yes, I am alive....

2010-01-05T22:56:00.000-08:00

In case you were wondering. If, like me you use the blog roll tool to keep track of things, you probably haven't seen me above the fold for quite some time. Well I'm here. I'm alive. I still have fingers to type with. I also have lots of stories I can tell.

But I'm not going to.

Those of you in my regular orbit have lived them with me or heard them already, and most of you are the people who read this thing.

So I'm also seeing a rash of "Year in Review" posts. So here's mine.

2009: Oof. I'm glad it's over. I'm even more glad it happened.

Time to move on into 2010 and figure out what the hell is coming up next. I've got a series of goals and objectives, which I won't write about until they become necessary to the story I'm telling.

What I will say is that I am looking forward to the adventure. I learned a lot in 2009 and I plan to apply the lessons well. I've got a solid circle of friends who continue to surprise me (no mean feat, that!), a family that stands behind me, and an incredible girl by my side. This is gonna be one hell of a ride.

See you on the roads, kids.

Another Music Post

2009-09-02T23:33:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. I know. Don't get your hopes up. I'm not going to say anything definite or provide any kind of factual update to anything that's been going on. Someone asked me recently how things were going and my response was "Things continue and the dude abides." The reference got missed but the sentiment was dead on.

That said, these two songs have been on the playlist a lot lately, along with the rest if these guys' catalog. The band is called Thrice and I think they're my favorite band of the moment. The songs seem a bit contradictory in terms of lyrical content, but they go together for me. They're both from the album "The Artist in the Ambulance."

The Melting Point of Wax
I've waited for this moment
All my life and more
And now I see so clearly
What I could not see before.
The time is now or never
This chance won't come again
Throw caution and myself into the wind.

There's no promise of safety with these secondhand wings
But I'm willing to find out what impossible means.
A leap of faith.

Parody of an angel
Miles above the sea
I hear the voice of reason
Screaming after me
"You've flown far too high boy now you're too close to the sun,
Soon your makeshift wings will come undone"

But how will I know limits from lies if I never try?

There's no promise of safety with these secondhand wings
But I'm willing to find out what impossible means.
I'll climb through the heavens on feathers and dreams
'Cause the melting point of wax means nothing to me.
Nothing to me
Nothing to me

I will touch the sun or I will die trying.
Die Trying.

Fly on these secondhand wings
Willing to find out what impossible means
I'll climb through the heavens on feathers and dreams
'Cause the melting point of wax means nothing to me
Nothing to me
Means nothing to me
Miles above the sea.

The Artist in the Ambulance
Late night, brakes lock, hear the tires squeal
Red light, can't stop so I spin the wheel
My world goes black before I feel an angel lift me up
And I open bloodshot eyes into fluorescent white
They flip the siren, hit the lights, close the doors and I am gone

Now I lay here owing my life to a stranger
And I realize that empty words are not enough
I'm left here with the question of just
What have I to show except the promises I never kept?
I lie here shaking on this bed, under the weight of my regrets

[Chorus:]
I hope that I will never let you down
I know that this can be more than just flashing lights and sound

Look around and you'll see that at times it feels like no one really cares
It gets me down but I'm still gonna try to do what's right, I know that there's
A difference between sleight of hand, and giving everything you have
There's a line drawn in the sand, I'm working up the will to cross it and

[Chorus]

Rhetoric can't raise the dead
I'm sick of always talking when there's no change
Rhetoric can't raise the dead
I'm sick of empty words, let's lead and not follow

Late night, brakes lock, hear the tires squeal
Red light, can't stop so I spin the wheel
My world goes black before I feel an angel steal me from the
Greedy jaws of death and chance, and pull me in with steady hands
They've given me a second chance, the artist in the ambulance

[Chorus]

Can we pick you off the ground, more than flashing lights and sound

Road Tunes

2009-08-05T21:18:00.001-07:00

This past weekend, I had to make a solo run from Oakland to San Diego in a pickup truck with no air conditioning. If anyone needs a 2000-something Chevy Silverado extended cab, drop a line.

Now, if you know me at all, you know that I have an uncanny ability to turn the events of my life, significant and trivial, into massive piles of stress using only the power of my mind. Boredom is, and always has been, one of the greatest catalysts of this process. As you may imagine, I was a little leery of 6-8 hours in a car with only my iPod, the San Joaquin Valley and the inner recesses of my head for company.

Thankfully, the iPod and the valley delivered. It was a beautiful day without too much traffic and the tunes worked like magic. I was totally in the zone and made the run in 7.5 hours. I had so much fun with the tunes that I started keeping track of the playlist. One thing you may find interesting, if you've spent any time in a car with me, is that there's no metal in it.

For the first hour, I ran the iPod on library shuffle. Hey, it was 7:30 in the morning and I was feeling indecisive. After the gas stop, this is what spun out of the stereo.

Panic! At The Disco: A Fever You Can't Sweat Out
Drive-By Truckers: Southern Rock Opera
Kenny Chesney: Live Those Songs Again
Cross-Canadian Ragweed: Back To Tulsa, disc 1
Arctic Monkeys: Favorite Worst Nightmare
Dierks Bentley: Feel That Fire
Our Lady Peace: Burn Burn

So if you've got a long drive ahead, that's my suggestion.

Vineman. When You Start to Sizzle, You Move Your Ass.

2009-07-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

As usual, for the math geeks and the short attention spanners, here are the numbers:

Swim (Watch split): 0:35:28
T1 (approx): 0:04:10
Bike: 3:02:50
T2: 0:07:01
Run: 3:06:03
Total Time: 6:55:34

Race day dawned before I got up, which was pretty cool. I was lucky enough to have an early start, at 7:02 AM in wave 5. Riding down to the start I had my first thought about how different this race was going to be, since all I had on my back was my mesh Zoot bag. That's right, no transition bag for this race. The Zoot bag contained a pretty minimal kit, too. Wetsuit, flip flops, body glide, goggles, swim cap and sunblock. Everything else I would need before T2 was attached to the bike.

I was strangely calm as we got into transition. I didn't even use my ipod or go through any of my pre-race jitters. Seems like before I knew it, it was 10 minutes to start and I said good luck to a few friends and headed down to the water.

Swim:
The horn sounded and I took off. I had a little crowd control problem in the first hundred yards or so, but I got clear and found a rhythm pretty fast. I made my along the line of buoys and the only thing that worried me was that every time I hit the one I'd been sighting on, there was another pair. I really wished I had counted them ahead of time so I would have known where the turn was. I'd been warned ahead of time about how shallow the river got in places, but I wasn't ready to grab muck before the halfway point, or to swim into the legs of someone who had stood up to walk at the turn. I don't think he was ready to fall on his ass either, so we'll call it even. Around the turn and into the back stretch I ran into problems. Navigational problems that is. I realized how far off I was when I got close to the bridge and realized I was headed to the wrong side of the leg. I made a hard jag back toward center, only to get stuck behind a frog-kicking girls from a wave or two ahead of me. She wound up getting her ankle grabbed as I jerked past her. Sorry. And then it was out of the water. Final watch split: 00:35:28, my slowest half iron swim so far, but still nothing to sneeze at.

T1:
Pretty clean, considering I had to get my swim gear off, bike gear on and the whole shebang repacked into the Zoot bag so it could get moved to T2. I was really looking forward to those flip-flops. 4 minutes or so and I was on the bike.

Bike:
This bike course rocks. Apart from some rough, narrow roads, it's not technical. It's mostly flat/rolling and a lot of it even has shade. As I came up on the first turn, I felt like I was on a course to make my first goal of the race, which was to finish the bike under 3 hours. I know, it was way too early to feel like that, but I did. A couple miles in, I was approaching a hard right turn into a short, steep climb and there's a volunteer yelling STOP!. Right about then I hear the siren and jam on the brakes. My back wheel starts to slide, but I get my foot out and keep from falling, stopping about a foot shy of the side of a moving ambulance. Not a good sign.

The ambulance passes and I start riding again, from a cold stop up the steep hill. I start talking to the guy next to me about how that just totally messed up our rhythm. Strangely, he agrees with me. We crest the hill and there's another volunteer saying there's been an accident and we'll have to get off our bikes. Also not good. A few hundred yards later, we see the ambulance and a giant tree across the road. There's a cluster of bikers standing there waiting to walk under the tree. There's a fire truck and a cop car on the other side. Going under, I realize that there's a guy under the tree. The paramedics are trying to get him onto a backboard. I shudder.

Clear of the tree, we take off. The guy next to me asks whether I think having a tree fall on you is more or less likely than getting hit by lightning. I have no idea, but I know he's drafting, so I accelerate away. Within the next mile I heard one crash behind me, and then heard another one and turned just in time to see the guy slide into the embankment.

The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful. I felt strong pretty much the whole time. I remembered my lesson from Wildflower and had 6 scoops of CarboPro and 3.5 Nuun tabs spread across 2 water bottles. My other two were plain water. I exchanged two bottles at the first aid station and rode away with more water and a bottle of Gatorade. I never touched my Gus, but I never felt hungry. It must have worked too, because I also never cramped up on the bike.

My only moment of trouble came on the way up Chalk Hill when I suddenly found myself unable to shift into my easiest gears. WTF? At least it wasn't Wildflower. Chalk hill isn't particularly rough, except that it's at mile 42 or so and you're past the last aid station. I stood up, powered up it and dropped back into aero on the other side.

Not too long later, I was in T2, feeling good but a little disappointed that my dead reckoning split was 3:05. Turns out it was 3:02, but I think that without the attack tree I would have made it under.

T2:

This is just sort of embarrassing. I got to my spot pretty quick, but I had trouble getting my ice jug open. Then the guy next to me on the rack showed up and wanted to chat about the tree. Finally, I had to wrestle out of my jersey and into my Barney Butter jersey, which required a fresh application of Body Glide to my sides and chest. The jersey tore me up at Longhorn and I didn't want to have that experience again. I finally got out on the run 7 minutes later. Need to work on that.

Run:

This was an unstated, though internal goal of mine. Run at least half of the course. I'm pretty sure I did it too, though my time doesn't bear it out. It took about 3 miles for my legs to loosen up from the ride. What has two thumbs and needs to work his bike to run transition? That's right, this guy.

Anyway, once my legs loosened up, I found a pretty good rhythm and was able to run more than walk for most of the way out to the turnaround at La Crema Winery. I didn't see many friends on the way out, except for Chris and Joanna, my fellow Barney Butter-ites. I got a confused look from Chris when I called his name, but had a quick chat with Jo as she passed me. Somewhere past the big hill, I heard the following, which threw me for a second: "The sexy thing is that you're running."

And then Brian Melekian ran past me, looking like he wasn't working at all. We had a quick shouted chat and I was on my own again.

Around this point, I still wasn't hungry, but I had a Gu and a salt tab, just to be safe. I still felt good, although the temperature was climbing. When I got to La Crema, I grabbed a couple of fig newtons at the aid station, along with water and Gatorade. Bad idea on the newtons. I couldn't chew them. I choked one down like prison penance and threw the other two away. On the dirt path through the winery, I felt okay, but the heat and dust started to get to me, so I decided to walk around the first pond and run the second. Oops. The second one is way longer. As I crossed onto the trail, I ran into Derek from TNT and we made snarky comments before I ran on.

Derek caught me at the aid station where I made my second mistake and grabbed some flat cola. What kind of cola? What's a pirate's favorite cola? That's right ARRRRR-C cola! (You're welcome Ben and Mike.) This is supposed to be good on the run for some reason but all it was good for was making me burp.

I ran/walked with Derek for the next few miles, wondering why I hadn't seen more friends. Of course, as soon as I said something, we started seeing all sorts of San Diego TNT-ers. I also saw Dana and Paul about this point. At about mile 8, I had a second wind and Derek dropped off. I ran on through about mile 9.5 before I melted down. My calves started to cramp. And I don't mean "oh, that kind of hurts." I'm talking about mucles rippling up and down on the tendons twanging nerves like like badly tuned banjo strings. It got so bad that from mile 10 on, I couldn't run more than a hundred yards or so without the cramps coming back.

This is of course when I saw Gunn, Jason, Penny, Jodi, Robin and pretty much everyone I knew. Awesome.

I gritted my teeth and ran/stumbled my way out into the neighborhood where Betsy caught me at a walk and told me to run the last mile with her. I tried, but the calves rebelled and she pulled away. As I turned into Windsor High for the finish, I saw Iris heading out. I gave her a big high five and dug deep to find something to run through the finish.

I crossed the finish at a run, grabbed my medal and water and headed out to...realize I hadn't turned in my chip. I went back.

So what did I learn? A lot. I learned that it's okay to hold back and leave something in the tank for the run. I spent all last year burning down to the cinders on the bike because I knew that with my feet I wouldn't be able to run. I learned that 6 scoops of CarboPro is hard to choke down, but the 675 calories it give you is really useful. Especially on top of the bagel w/ peanut butter, glass of apple juice and clif bar I had for breakfast. That and 1 Gu (100 calories) was enough to put me through the race with more than enough fuel.

I learned that 3.5 Nuun tabs and 5 salt tabs isn't enough on a hot day. Given that I never felt tired or hungry, I have to chalk the muscle problems up to salt and lack of bricks.

Finally, I learned that my style of racing, which is definitely more relaxed than that of most of my friends, works for me. It's not for everyone, but I'm really digging racing on feel. I'm still happy with not having a computer on my bike, and with not using my heart rate to make speed decisions. I'm happy having my watch and taking splits but not really looking at them. I'm enjoying the races, even when they hurt, and that is progress.

So yeah, my swim was my slowest 1.2 miler and my run was longer than my bike again, but I had a lot of fun. I enjoyed my race and I wasn't destroyed afterward. In the final analysis, despite the issues I ran my fastest 70.3 to date and accomplished my only major goal, which was to break 7 hours. I call that a success.

I've got a lot to do to get ready for Pumpkinman and for the challenges to come, but this race showed me that I'm on the right track.

Holy Mother of God...

2009-07-15T22:54:00.001-07:00

It's finally here. Tomorrow morning we hit the road for Guerneville and the long awaited running of Vineman. It feels a little bit weird, to be honest. We all signed up for this thing back in December which, for those of you playing along at home, was in 2008. Two thousand friggin' eight! This is by far the longest lead time I've ever had for a race and it's messing with my head, man.

I mean, I'm not worried about the race itself. The horn will go off at seven o-freakin' early on Sunday and I'll run into the water with the rest of the numbskulls who paid money for this and sometime later I'll finish and they'll hang a shiny thing on my neck. Hopefully, shortly thereafter, there will be beer.

It's just strange in that unlike any of the other races I've done, this one doesn't feel real. I'm not nervous. I'm not excited. I'm just ready to go do it already, but there's still 3 more days to get through. Sheesh!

Are we there yet? No, wait, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Don't turn the car around...oh, damn it all...

So that's it 'til after the race, kids. See ya at the finish.

On Repeat

2009-06-19T13:52:00.001-07:00

I think I've listened to this song about 50 times today. I love the lyrics. It's a Drive-By Truckers song, from the Southern Rock Opera album.

ZIP CITY
(Cooley / DBT)

Your Daddy was mad as hell
He was mad at me and you
As he tied that chain to the front of my car and pulled me out of that ditch that we slid into
Don't know what his problem is
Why he keeps dragging you away
Don't know why I put up with this shit
When you don't put out and Zip City's so far away

Your Daddy is a deacon down at the Salem Church of Christ
And He makes good money as long as Reynolds Wrap keeps everything wrapped up tight
Your Mama's as good a wife and Mama as she can be
And your Sister's puttin' that sweet stuff on everybody in town but me
Your Brother was the first-born, got ten fingers and ten toes
And it's a damn good thing cause He needs all twenty to keep the closet door closed

Maybe it's the twenty-six mile drive from Zip City to Colbert Heights
Keeps my mind clean
Gets me through the night
Maybe you're just a destination, a place for me to go
A way to keep from having to deal with my seventeen-year-old mind all alone
Keep your drawers on, girl, it ain't worth the fight
By the time you drop them I'll be gone
And you'll be right where they fall the rest of your life

You say you're tired of me taking you for granted
Waiting' up till the last minute to call you up and see what you want to do
Well you're only fifteen, girl, you ain't got no secretary
And "for granted" is a mighty big word for a country girl like you
You know it's just your Daddy talking
Cause He knows that blood red carpet at the Salem Church of Christ
Ain't gonna ever see no wedding between me and you

Zip City it's a good thing that they built a wall around you
Zip up to Tennessee then zip back down to Alabama
I got 350 heads on a 305 engine
I get ten miles to the gallon
I ain't got no good intentions

Does this make me a bad triathlete?

2009-06-17T20:46:00.000-07:00

Today's Stats:

Sleep: 6 hours (pretty good for me)
Workout: 2850 yd master's swim. 57 minutes.
Nutrition:
Breakfast: 2 Pop Tarts, 20 oz Diet Dr. Pepper
Snack: Powerbar Harvest Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip bar
--workout--
Lunch: 6" Subway Club on wheat w/ swiss, all the veggies. Cheddar Sun Chips. 32oz Diet Coke
Snack 2: Vending Machine Crackers
Dinner: Rubio's bean and cheese burrito, chips, 22 oz Diet Coke.

I'm listing this for a reason, not to boast about my crappy eating habits. I've been going to these noon master's workouts every Wednesday for a month. Yes, today was my fourth time. I typically get to split the lane, though I did have to circle my first time.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may remember me posting about pool work earlier in the year, before things started going squirrelly. I was zeroing in on 3500 yards in an hour. At a minimum, I was hitting 3000. Today is the first time I've come anywhere close to that in a good long while, and I feel pretty good about it. I mean, the coach's workouts are tough, and I'm still learning all this base pacing stuff, but that's where the point of this post comes into play.

Since I started into this whole triathlon adventure, I've done a lot of things I never thought I would ever try. A half marathon. Two, soon to be three half Iron tris. 9 other triathlons. Several layers of goofball workout that I don't even want to think about. Along the way, I've learned a lot about myself, both what makes me tick physically and mentally, and how I relate to this bizarre world I inhabit. I've met loads of people, many of whom I'm lucky enough to call friends and some even good friends. I wouldn't trade any of this for the world, believe me.

So what am I on about?

During this time, I've also gone through my periods of obsession, where all I think and talk about is practically triathlon. Where I count calories and schedule my training sessions to the minute. I've had periods where I swing the pendulum all the way across and drink too much and stop sleeping and eat like a jackass. What I've learned so far is that none of this really affects my ability to race. I can swim and bike as hard as I want. I may gain a minute or lose two, but I never move the needle too far. My runs are getting better as my foot heals and I see good things in the future.

But now I'm weeks away from Vineman, my second half of the year, and while I originally wanted it to be my "A" race, the one I just killed, I find that now I don't care so much. I know I can finish it. I know how I'd like to do, but I also know that if I don't do it I won't be heartbroken. Frankly, I'm getting in touch with my motivations in the sport and they aren't what I thought they were.

I had a talk with Mark a week or so ago and I was telling him about some workouts I'd been doing with people who weren't as fast as me or didn't have the same endurance. Usually, I just hang anyway. He got a little concerned that I was sacrificing my training. I probably am, but the thing is, I know that if I set my mind to it, I'll finish the damn race. I learned that at Wildflower this year. I'll just get it done on race day. I might not do it as fast as maybe I can but I'm a pretty simple machine. Point me in a direction, turn me loose and I'll find the end of the path.

What I'm learning is that I don't care so much about my times. I don't care about my position in the field. I care about what I do on the way to the race. Who I train with and get to know. Who I can help to meet whatever goals they have. Mostly, I find that what I care about is that I enjoy the time I put into it and the people I spend that time with. As long as that's going on, the racing seems to take care of itself.

So you tell me, does that make me a bad triathlete? Should I be more gung-ho about the numbers? Should I be charging for a podium that I'll never reach, or am I onto something? Maybe my mind will change after Vineman and I start gearing up for 2010. Maybe not. I sure as hell don't know, but I'm having a lot of fun with the puzzle.

Oooohhh....shiny....

2009-05-20T23:19:00.000-07:00

The day after I got back from Wildflower I bought new bike shoes. They're awesome. They fit great, have cool carbon-fiber soles and don't make my toes go numb. They're also very, very white. Tooth commercial white. Albino in the sun white.

Today I bought new running shoes. Asics Kayanos, just like I had. Again, great fit, nice and light. Very shiny. Very, very shiny.

I look like a newbie.

I gotta train more.

Let the Experiments Begin

2009-05-10T23:35:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about Wildflower since we got back, especially during the long sessions on my living room floor working over my legs with "the stick." It's interesting, but more than anything I've done since I got into triathlon, this race really brought a lot into focus. I talked about the nutrition problems and T2 issues in my race report, so I won't go into them again, but I've started trying to put the puzzle together to make sure that Vineman goes better than WF.

This isn't to say that I got off to a clean start.

I really meant to do some light recovery workouts this past week to help clean Wildflower out of my system, I really did. It just didn't work out. I was only home one night last week, and that night I was working, so it was Friday before I managed to get in any actual exercise, and that was only about 3/4 mile at the Cove. A decent swim, but not much for the workout value.

No worries, though, because by the time we got to the Brewhouse, I had a ride scheduled for Saturday morning. I had originally planned to hit the coast with the tri club, but I wound up riding the Del Dios/Elfin Forest route with Greg, which was cool. A little harder perhaps than I had originally intended for my "recovery" workout, but it felt good to push and to keep up with someone who I know is faster than me.

Nonetheless, I was plagued by some equipment issues. At Wildflower and throughout the last few months of training, my aero bottle had been driving me nuts. Turns out that I really can't use one. My shoulders are too big. The bracket that holds the bottle in place is stretched too wide and it rattles and flops around. On the last two rides, the race included, it has actually fallen off. I caught it both times, but jeez. In order to keep it from falling off a second time, I had to dump my cage bottle and fill it from the aero to lighten the load. So I did the rest of the ride on two bottles of watered down carbo-pro. Yay.

On the way home, I stopped and bought new bottle cages for the tri bike and, although two bottles don't fit comfortably inside the frame, I'm gonna try my mext ride with them anyway. I had a new mixture of carbo-pro all set to go, but it got screwed up. I'll take another whack at it next time.

I was also shaking down new bike shoes. They rock. The stiffer soles and wider toe boxes in the Northwaves make a world of difference, but I don't have the left cleat lined up right, so by the halfway point my knee was killing me. A simple enough thing to fix with a trainer session and a screwdriver, but I have to find the time, absolutely have to before next Saturday.

As soon as I get them dialed, I start on bricks.

Wildflower, or My Day Climbing the Cliffs on the Surface of the Sun

2009-05-06T01:22:00.000-07:00

It’s official, Wildflower 2009 has come and gone. It’s in the books. For those of you with short attention spans (or gratuitous number fetishes) here are the splits so you can get back to your graphing calculators.

675 – Ryan Mashburn
Age 32
Hometown San Diego, CA
Time 07:23:08 at Finish Line
Ranking:
1533rd overall
1214th overall men
255th 30-34 men

Splits:
Swim: 00:34:43.710 28:56 min/mi
T1: 00:05:22.680
Bike: 03:26:59.420 16.23 avg MPH
T2: 00:03:03.470
Run: 03:12:58.720 14:44 min/mi

One of many things I love about triathlon is the fact that I can have my lame ass splits down to the millisecond. As if the .720 on my run split was all that separates me and Chris Lieto. Eh, whatever. On with the race report.

Driving up to Lake San Antonio, I wasn’t sure I was going to race. My cage was still rattling from the three serious bike crashes friends have had in the last month, my foot was still bothering me (though it was improving) and, to top it all off, I have no health insurance. Those factors, coming off the general turmoil of the last few months had me seriously considering forgoing the long course in favor of the longneck. On arrival at the campground, parking next to the RV, however, I started to feel something that has been missing for a while now. What is it, you ask? Did I suddenly regain mobility in my left index finger? Did I have a great spiritual epiphany of some kind? Nope. I just felt focused. As I pitched my tent I started feeling more like, well, me than I have in months.

Thursday night was just like last year, beer, BBQ and chucking stuff in the fire. Laughing and goofing off. Catching up with old friends. General good stuff, really. Which made it a little unnerving when rain on the tent fly woke me up that night. I was a little freaked out for a second. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to wait out rain in a tent. It took me back to my old Boy Scout days. Yes, I was a Boy Scout. Is that a shock? Really?

Friday dawned okay and we killed time until noon, when packet pickup started. A bunch of us cruised down to the lake to do a swim preview. I left my wetsuit in camp, figuring I’d rather brave the lake than put on a clammy wetsuit on race morning. This was both wise and foolish. Foolish because there was a serious algae bloom going on and swimming through it was a bit like something that Mike Rowe should be doing at the safe remove of “on TV,” and wise because it meant that I didn’t have to worry about the algae evolving and running off with my wetsuit overnight. Those things are expensive.

The rain started as we toweled off on the boat ramp. It continued through packet pickup and stopped long enough for us to grab some lunch and shop the expo. By the time we got to camp, it had started again, though it was light and intermittent enough for us to ride our bikes out to the camp entrance and snag free Avia visors and gelato. Mmmm… It was a wet ride back to camp, though. The rain continued on and off into the night and I was nervous about the race the next morning, since I knew there would be some serious downhills and I was riding the Kuota for the first time in a race, though not for the first time in the rain. I calmed the nerves by wandering down to the Fargos’ campsite and hanging out over some pasta and snacks. That, and a couple of Tecates got me calmed down. I even got some sleep, which I didn’t manage to do before Longhorn.

Race morning dawned cool but dry. I had a crisis of confidence when the alarm went off and considered hiding in the sleeping bag, but I ultimately decided that someone would probably figure out where I was. I got up, ate my standard pre-race energy bar and prepped my water bottles. BG and I rode down to transition together and this time I remembered to make sure my brakes were closed when we dropped Lynch Hill. When I got to my spot, number 676 was racked wrong and his bike was where mine needed to go. The official I grabbed wasn’t overly helpful, though he was very polite and wrote down the number to come back and check on it. I wedged my bike and bag into what little space I had and went to body marking.

Now, I don’t want to criticize the race volunteers, but I’m going to. The kid that marked me was cool enough. He got the numbers on my arms and hands, the age on my calf and the number on my left leg right. When he got to my right leg, he did something that makes no sense to me. He lifted the cuff of my tri shorts wrote the number, then put my shorts back. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with tri shorts, they’re spandex and have a strip in the cuff that keeps them from moving. This kid wrote my number underneath the leg of my shorts. He knew he was doing it too, because he had to move them out of the way. WTF, I ask you, WTF?

So I go back to transition and number 676 has returned. The four of us who have been screwed up by his mistake politely stare at him until he realizes what he’s done and sheepishly turns his bike around. At this point, the official returns to ask me, number 675, whether racer number 675 has come back fix his bike. I briefly consider slapping him upside the head with my helmet, but realize that that would disqualify me. I explain that it was 676 who had misracked, but that it was okay now. He wandered befuddledly away and I put on my wetsuit while chatting with the guy on my right, who explained that he was worried about his transition times and therefore had already saved drafts of his T1 and T2 twitter posts in his phone. I wandered befuddledly away.

The swim was uneventful. Apart from the muck, it went well. I held a much tighter line than last year and overall swam a cleaner course. I came in a bit slower than I wanted, but all told, I blame that on the dude who kept stopping in front of me to frog kick while sighting and then sprinting ahead to keep me from passing him. I very nearly gave him the butterfly dunk, but I got past him in the end. I felt a little funky running up the boat ramp, but the cheers I got from some friends up on the hill spurred me on into T1. I took some extra time there to settle my stomach and get my heart rate down. Remembering last year’s race, I just calmly walked my bike out to the mount line. Ben, thanks for the cheer at the gate.

Now, the bike was the interesting part. When you sign up for the Wildflower long course, everyone tells you about Nasty Grade. Seriously, everyone. Your doctor, your dog, your dental hygienist, everyone. Nasty Grade is at mile 40. Nobody tells you about Beech Hill at mile 2, or wherever it is. Bastards. I thought it would never end. Frankly, I’m not sure how I stayed vertical heading up it. At the top, we took off on the roads through the park and out to the county road. This is where Marty passed me. I briefly tried to catch him before I realized that I was making a HUGE mistake if I planned to get past mile 5 and so let him go. I dropped back into my aero bars and felt something was wrong. It took a minute of listening to rattling parts before I realized that my aero bottle had come loose and was about to crash down into my front wheel. I got a hand on it and stopped, wasting some time while I fixed it.

Over the course of the next 30 miles or so, I had a lot of time to think, but I didn’t. Apart from the new bike and the aero bottle, there are two other changes I’ve made to my training and racing. I’ve replaced Gu with a Carbo-Pro/Nuun mixture as my primary source of electrolytes and calories. I’ll talk more about this in a minute. The second change is that I’ve thus far eschewed the bike computer on the tri bike. This means that when I ride I have no idea how fast I’m going, what my elapsed mileage, average speed or cadence are. The only things I can use to gauge my progress are mile markers and how I feel. This keeps me intensely dialed into my own legs, heart and lungs and I constantly have to adjust my riding to match the way I feel. Does this help? I don’t know, with only one race under me this way, but I beat my projected bike time by five and a half minutes, so maybe.

At mile 41, I realized I had been going up for a while and that it was really hard. This is about the time I realized I was on Nasty Grade. Who knew? I got about a third of the way up the main stretch and my legs just wouldn’t turn. I don’t know what happened, I just knew that if I didn’t stop I would fall over, so I unclipped and pulled over. I stood on the side of the road for about a minute and then I felt fine, so I started back up the hill and passed the two guys who had just asked if I was okay. That felt good.

This is where the quote of the race happened for me. A guy from the UCSD tri team caught up to me and chatted in between heaving gasps for air as we climbed. We talked about training and the hill, and when I said I didn’t think it was as bad as it had been sold, he said this: “I don’t want to piss on your Cheerios, but up there where it looks like the top, it turns right and goes up again.” I laughed and he left me in the dust.

The coolest thing about the bike course is this: for every ugly climb, you get an awesome descent. The back side of Nasty Grade is worth the whole dang race. I’m actually glad I didn’t have a speedometer. I would probably have slowed down.

Then came mile 48. That sonic boom you heard around noon if you were there…that was the sound of me blowing my wad. My legs just stopped. I was hungry, despite the Carbo-Pro and two Gu Roctanes I had consumed. I was out of energy. I knew I could dig in and just muscle through the last few miles, but I was seriously considering bailing in T2 and calling it a day. I have never thought about that during a race before.

I’m not sure where, but somewhere in here, I realized that race day was the exact opposite of Friday. Instead of rainy and cold, it was crystal clear and roughly a thousand degrees. Oh, and did I mention the head winds? Just like Beech Hill, nobody ever mentioned those.

I got into T2 and I was seriously wobbly. I had to sit down to put my shoes on and that’s when Trent found me. I felt like crap and was convinced I’d just had the worst bike ride since Sleeping Indian. When he said “Nice bike. You killed it.” I thought he was joking. Then I looked at my watch. It had only been 4 hours since the start. I was on schedule. Holy shit. I talked to him for a minute or so and Heather asked how my foot felt, then they shooed me out of T2, where I threw a cup of water on Brian Horne at the gate for ca-cawing at me. Long story.

I mustered enough juice to run past the crowds and out onto the fire roads before it all went to hell. My legs just quit. My calves and quads felt like they wanted to jump off my body and go searching for a less abusive relationship. I started walking. Sometime in mile 2, I think, Gunn caught up. Now usually he catches up, slaps me on the back and keeps on running. This time, he walked with me. That’s when I knew just how hard this thing was. As we walked, we talked about the race and we both came to the conclusion that our nutrition strategies were severely lacking. We kept up a run/walk, though mostly walk, pace for the first 7 miles or so, before we mustered the will to run through camp and past the TCSD station and the TNT camp. I have to say here that team San Diego ROCKED that turn. The roar as we passed carried us through another mile or so. Brian finally pulled ahead at mile 10 and I ran with a really cool guy for another mile and a half or so who had done the race several times and talked me through “the pit of despair” as he called it. This is a 2 mile exposed stretch of road. 1 mile down and 1 back up. When you come out of it, you’ve got about 2 miles to go and Andy dropped me there.

I finally crested Lynch Hill and began the descent to the finish. I managed to run most of the last mile and yes, I crossed the line at a run. I saw Gurujan and Heather in the finish and the hugs I got were a big help. But I have to say that when I saw Rick Fargo and he told me Ben missed the finish because he was in the pisser, I nearly collapsed laughing.

The beer they gave me after I stopped wobbling was one of the best I’ve ever had.

So all in all, I didn’t hit the time I wanted, but who cares? I needed a win, after everything that’s been going on lately, and finishing the 70.3 course at Wildflower certainly qualifies.

Don't Worry, Be Happy...Or Not...Whatever....

2009-04-14T18:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a little while since I've updated this blog and I've been wondering whether I ever would again. I don't say that facetiously. I've been thinking about scrapping this thing.

I've been told several times lately that my posts are too negative, or too raw, or don't make sense, or just generally make people worry about me. Let me tell you this now, once and for all, I am not sitting at home alone in a dark room with a bottle of whiskey playing with knives or out pounding nails into walls my forehead or whatever else those of you who are scared for me may think is going on. Yes, things have been...we'll say strained...lately, both personally and professionally and there is still a lot of shit to shovel, but I've moved from the backhoe down to the bobcat and am in the process of shifting once again to a regular hand shovel. I'm a little ways out from moving down to the garden trowel, but I'll get there.

My road has been redefined rather brutally in the last couple of months, but I know where it points now and I'm actually looking forward to getting moving. I don't know how everything will shake out, of course, but I'm no longer concerned about that. I've set what wheels in motion that I can control and I've accepted the fact that others will just have to be watched and not interfered with.

So that's it for now, and while I know that this post has not exactly been a ray of sunshine, I do hope it explains a few things so you can all stop worrying that the next blog post will be ghost written, pun intended.

I'll check in again after Wildflower, though there's a decent chance that my race report will read "Drove to Lake San Antonio. Didn't race, but still limped home." Such is the way these things go. Until next time, and there will be a next time.

So I Can't Sleep. Again...

2009-04-06T03:28:00.000-07:00

I tried to do some real writing to kill time, or hopefully make me tired, but it didn't work, so I went back to reading. Killed The Gate House, by Nelson DeMille. Okay if you're already a fan, but not his best work. So I moved on to Fates Worse Than Death, by Kurt Vonnegut. In the interest of full disclosure. Vonnegut has been one of my favorite writers since high school, so it may not be a shock that at the beginning of chapter two he wrote something that I found to be brilliant. Here goes:

"If a maiden sits on the ground in a clearing in a forest where a unicorn lives, they say, the unicorn will come up to her and put its head in her lap. That is the best way to catch a unicorn. This procedure must have been discovered by a maiden who sat down in a clearing with no intention of catching a unicorn. The unicorn with its head in her lap must have been an embarrassment."

Now we know the best way to catch a unicorn, but to catch it doing what?

That's all. Now I need to find something to knock me unconscious. Perhaps a hammer...

News of the Weird

2009-03-31T21:19:00.001-07:00

Apparently, running hurts less than walking these days. Fucked up, right? Talk amongst yourselves.

By Way of Explanation, or Maybe Just Thinking Out Loud

2009-03-09T22:21:00.000-07:00

It’s been an odd couple of weeks, or maybe months. In some ways momentous, in others like a hard right hook to the kidney with a fist wrapped around a roll of dimes. As I blink away the tears and try to find a few hours to sleep I’m stuck wondering what exactly has happened. Sorry to be so oblique, but there are names that can’t be used and trains still coming behind the ones that I’ve managed to take as glancing blows. Those could still be direct hits and I’m trying not to tempt fate here.

What I’m getting at, I guess, is that I feel like I’ve been missing things lately. Mostly little things. I’m good with the big stuff. The stuff that casts a long shadow and makes a big boom when it lands, that stuff’s easy to see coming. The little things, the ones that slide in like razor blades thrown in the dark, those I’m not so good at. There have been a lot of those lately.

My last post? The one about sleeping only 50 minutes in one night? There’s a reason those things happen to me. It’s pretty much always because I’m sorting through something that I don’t understand, or because I’m beating myself up about something that I’m fairly certain I’ve screwed up. It was a healthy combination of both this time.

I walk on wounds
That seldom prove to slow me down
I laugh this constant pain away
So you can't tell
But there it lies under the smiles
It drains me mile after mile
But seldom proves to slow me down
Here I go

I find that this is a pretty good encapsulation of the way I feel most days. Despite the fact that I actually enjoy most of what’s happening in my world most of the time, there are those moments where I’m talking to someone, or leaving them, and I realize that I’ve missed something, that there was one more thing I should have said or done. That feeling that if I’d just been more alert I could have made something different happen. I’ve reached a point where I am well and truly sick of this feeling.

There are conversations that need to happen. Actions that need to be taken. Most are small things, little movements that can tie off loose threads and simplify things, but it’s also the smallest things that shake the biggest foundations.

As I lie awake at night, my brain churning through all my mistakes, both real and perceived, trying to make sense of what I know I should already understand, I can’t help but wonder where the ride ends. When do we pull into the station and let the safety bars pop up off our shoulders so we can move freely?

How do we know when to pull the trigger as opposed to the ripcord?

Don’t fall, I see lights in the distance
They’re not far away
Stand up because the sky is turning gray

There’s hope in these footsteps of persistence
So don’t go astray
These lights get closer everyday

If the lights in the distance are really getting closer, then the next question I suppose, is whether or not the destination on the horizon is the one we’re supposed to be aiming at. When the road runs out and we finally reach the lights will we find the answer we’re looking for, or just another turn toward a farther off horizon? When we’ve walked the soles off our shoes and talked ourselves right out of our voices; when all that remains is action, will we know what to do? Will we pull the trigger, or the ripcord?

These are the things I wonder about when I can’t sleep, and sometimes when I can. They’re the things that hit me in the shower in the morning and that only recede when I’m kicking the hell out of myself physically.

So if you’ve noticed that something’s not right, that I’m not reacting the way I should. If you think my actions don’t connect with my words. If you’ve seen me staring randomly off into the middle distance, then you’ve caught me square in the act of being out of my depth. I know I owe more than one explanation, and probably a couple of apologies for the last couple of weeks. I think I even know who’s supposed to get which. Now all I have to do is figure out how to deliver. I can say this, though:

A destination, a fading smile.
Another station, another mile.
Another day gone, I swore that I will.
Be there before dawn.
So be there, I will.

Sometimes I'm Amazed That I Can Even Dress Myself

2009-03-08T21:13:00.000-07:00

Since I haven't used this particular storytelling device in a while, we are going to revisit The Big Book of Stuipd Things Ryan Does.

Today's reading comes from chapter 972 (It really is a BIG book.), entitled "Insomnia, or How to Put Yourself in Physical Legal and Moral Jeopardy."

I agreed to go to Mt. Baldy on Saturday to get in one last day for the season. All I had to do was get myself to Dieu's at 6:30AM, load the truck and head for snow. Sounds simple, right? Well, I had dinner plans Friday, and we were well behaved. Then I had to run down to South Park and meet some people at Hamilton's. And you CAN'T go to Hamilton's without trying at least one of the beers. Look it up, it's a law. And once you have your beer, it would just be rude to say hi to your friends, pick up what you came to get and leave, right? Exactly.

So I get home at about 1:00 AM. Five and a half hours to go. My phone rings. I answer. At 1:30 AM, I lose signal and the call ends. Five hours to go. The phone beeps. I have a text message. I answer. An exchange ensues. It is now 2:30 AM. Four hours to go. I have stuff on my mind and can't get to sleep so I lie there in bed and watch the ceiling fan until 3:00 AM. Three and a half hours to go. at 3:50 I sit bolt upright in bed, waking up shaking and sweating from one of the most vivid nightmares I've ever had. I don't get back to sleep. At 5:50 AM I shut off the alarm before it goes off and grab a shower.

To read about the nightmare itself, go to the Creative Blog.

Total sleep: 50 minutes.

Between my house in Kearny Mesa and Dieu's in PB, I knock down 40 ounces of soda and two pop tarts. At our breakfast stop, I drink yet more soda. I am now on something less than an even keel.

I drive like a demon to Mt. Baldy and we beat the other car by almost an hour. Finally, they arrive and we can all suit up, cash in our $5 ticket vouchers and hit the slopes.

On my first run, I manage to bury my nose in a slush pile and flip multiple cartwheels down about 50 yards of wide open groomer. I take a second and laugh it off, after making sure that all the parts move properly, and bomb down the rest of the run. My riding never really recovers. I'm jittery and gun-shy the rest of the day, and manage a couple more hard falls that I'm lucky didn't hurt much more than my pride.

We had agreed to meet at the cars at 3:00 to head down and find food on the way back home. By 2:00 my foot hurt so bad and my control was so shot I had to stop. I made my way back to the lodge where I grabbed a Gatorade, a soda and some cookies to get my energy levels back up.

We get back to the cars and head out, stopping for lunch/dinner in lovely Rancho Cucamonga before making our way back to I-15. At this point, everyone in the car is asleep except for me and Dieu. He's in the back seat, playing with my digital camera. I am trying to stay awake while driving by calculating just how long I've managed to be awake, assuming that the 50 minutes of sleep don't count.

This is when my phone beeps. I've got a text message. Now, I know just how stupid this sounds, but I answer the message. An exchange begins. I'm driving down the freeway with a bum foot, exhausted by 36 hours awake (interrupted by 50 minutes, of course) with a carload of sleeping friends who have entrusted me with their safety. And I'm texting. This is because I am a good friend. Hear me out.

I drive a Ford. It has the sync system, so the phone is connected to the car stereo via bluetooth. If I take a call, it goes onto speaker phone. This would wake up all my tired passengers and make them cranky. No, far better to let them sleep and risk their lives without their knowing, not to mention the ticket I'm up for by now. So I'm texting and driving, like a champion, I might add. Thank you for keeping me awake in 160 character chunks my friend on the other end of the phone.

I get home at about 7:30 and shower, planning to have a beer and fall blissfully asleep watching a DVD. Fantastic plan, right?

My phone rings.

I'm back in the car, driving off to watch movies somewhere else, drinking yet more soda to stay awake. As these things go, I manage to be up and in hang out mode (with a few interruptions for unconsciousness and station identification) until 5AM. Well, 4 AM, but daylight savings started so take your 4 AM and stick it. It was 5AM. At that point, I pass out.

So the upshot of all this: I am an idiot. Yes, I can still go for two and a half days on no sleep. Woohoo! It's like college all over again, but without the Jack Daniel's and Jack in the Box. And Mark, thank you for not taunting me into working out this morning. I think I would have died. Those aero bars would have made too tempting a spot for a nap.

Running: The Bane Of My Existence

2009-02-22T15:44:00.001-08:00

Actually, the title of this post is a bit misleading. When I'm healthy enough to run without random bits of my legs and feet feeling like they're made of broken glass, I enjoy running. Strapping on (yes, I know, I said strap on) the ipod and hitting the pavement for an hour or three is a great way to burn tension, unplug and work through stacks of the crap and assorted detritus that accumulates in your brain during your day to day life. Believe me, this is a good thing, especially if, like me, you currently have huge swaths of your world being torn apart by heavy equipment and the scraps left to rot in the sun on your front lawn.

So why am I writing like this? Because I went running twice this weekend. The first time, yesterday, was at the tail end of a brick workout. For you non-triathletes, this is a workout comprised of two sports. In this case a 40 mile bike ride followed by a 30 minute run. Now, if you follow this blog, you know that I have had assorted issues with my feet and ankles over the last year and that I haven't done much running beyond racing.

I've been working on it, though, and the foot has been doing a lot better. I've been running again for a couple of weeks and was up to four miles. So I thought the brick would work out okay. Not so much. Seven minutes into the run, Mark was out of sight and my foot was thunking down on the road like a cinder block. A cinder block wrapped in nerve endings. I tried to tough it out. Pros play hurt right? Fuck the pros. I decided to walk until minute 10 and try again.

No dice. I walked to minute 12. 13. 15... Are you seeing the pattern? 24 minutes after the run began, I limped my way back to the car.

Which brings me to today. Just to make sure I'm not broken, I decided to try a run only workout. I went down to the boardwalk and banged out 5.75 miles pain-free. What the fuck? Seriously...

Training and Racing Update

2009-02-03T22:10:00.001-08:00

So I haven't blogged about anything like the triathlons that're supposed to be the focus of this blog, so it's time to talk about 'em a bit. First up,

MY 2009 RACES

March: Solvang Century
May: Wildflower Long Course
June: San Diego International
July: Vineman 70.3
September: Big Kahuna

Maybe something else, if it catches my attention. I've gotta sign up for Kahuna and Solvang pretty soon, just to get them out of the way. For those of you playing along at home, that's 3 half-iron distance tris, all in preparation for the big adventure of 2010. More on that another time.

As for training, I've been doing okay with it, considering that my approach to training is about as scattered as a crack addict in a house of mirrors. I've been doing workouts based on what's gonna hurt most since that's about the only way I can find lately to kill the tension and anxiety of the professional world. Fucking economy, right?

In order of occurrence:

In the pool, I'm up to 3000 yards in 60 minutes. 3250 in 64 minutes. I'm shooting to hit 3500 in 60 minutes. Got some work to do.

I've been biking a lot and doing well. I keep getting stronger and I hope to make a big improvement on my 3:03 bike split at last year's Longhorn 70.3. I'm hoping to go under 3 hours at Vineman.

As for running, I've been in physical therapy to have my foot worked on; part of the continuing quest to clear up last year's plantar fasciitis. It's been going well. Two weeks ago, I started running again for the first time since October. I started at 3 miles and I'm up to 4. I actually ran 4 straight miles pain free last Sunday in 38 minutes. Things look okay, but I'm taking it slow. My goal is to be able to run 10k, or half the run, at Wildflower, and to be back to full speed by Vineman. No risks, no foolish chances with the leg, that's my new motto.

Here's hoping 2009 lets me race as strong as I plan.

Of course, this is all contingent on whether this intense, white hot poker of pain I've developed in the ball of my foot goes away. It's never easy is it?

For God's Sake, Don't Make Eye Contact!

2009-01-28T23:46:00.000-08:00

I was on the road for work today, which is to say that I went to Phoenix for a meeting. As usually happens on days like this, I spent the bulk of the day in airports, Lindbergh Field and Sky Harbor International, to be exact.

Today, I had to fly to Phoenix, got to the client's office, have a meeting and do a walkthrough of their new office to plan an installation. Along the way, we fleshed out the project requirements and roughed in the equipment list. My kit for this little adventure: a notepad, pen and pencil, digital camera, ipod and book for the plane. That's it. No laptop. No portable printers, projectors or any of the other crap I see people carrying around in the security line. What I like about traveling this way is that I can get through security without using the plastic bins, my briefcase is nice and light and, when I get to my gate, I get to be one of the few people who isn't buried in a screen.

I confess, I do carry a Blackberry, and it's a handy little fucker, but most days I'd just as soon hammer a ten penny spike right through its vampiric little silicon heart.

The fact is, as I watch people freaking out that they have to remove their bluetooth headsets to go through the metal detectors, or even better, spend an entire flight with the thing deactivated but still in place; as I watch them sitting in crappy airport gate chairs for hours at a time hammering away on emails and chatting into their little headsets, I wonder what's wrong with me.

I hate being connected. In fact, the harder I am to find, the happier I tend to be. I can go a whole day without my phone. I can go several without checking email. I've set things up at work so that they can run without me checking in constantly. When I do check in, it's usually because I'm bored, and not because they need me to do anything back at the ranch. It's this way because I made it this way. I am replaceable. We should all be replaceable. We should all be able to unplug, to be able to sit down and read a book without a bluetooth headset on, to look around a room or out a window and not at a computer screen.

I get productivity, I do. I get that we all have a thousand little things at one time that require our attention. What I don't get is why we think all of it is so urgent.

Maybe I spent too much time in the wilderness as a kid. Maybe I'm just a bad employee. Maybe I'm missing something and it really is cool to be that connected. I just don't get it. Text me a comment. If I turn my phone back on any time soon, I promise I'll read it.

Another Lesson Learned

2009-01-13T21:23:00.001-08:00

So last Friday morning the physical therapist watched me jog around his parking lot, and he figured out that I stomp my right leg down and push it off as hard as I can while my left leg runs. Even after he clears me, I have to relearn how to run or I'll end up back on the table. That was 9AM.

At 10AM I find out that a device I installed a month ago has failed in the field, at about the worst possible time for relations with that client. Then I find out that our mail server went down Thursday night and no one noticed. I'm standing there, trying to figure out which fire to put out first, and still bummed about the PT results, when one of the guys walks in with another problem, and that's when this happened:

Yup, I threw a straight right into the anodized aluminum side of our server rack. Let me tell you something that I already knew. Metal is stronger than flesh and bone. I got off light with the skinned knuckles. I've cracked bones doing that in the past. I know just how stupid it is, believe me.

Which brings me to Dieu's annual birthday trip to Big Bear, which began Friday night. I considered bailing, since I was in no mental shape to be social. As it turns out, it's a good thing I didn't. Without going into detail about the weekend (if you're a facebook friend you can piece it together), I spent a day and a half teaching and coaching, which I actually like to do, though I forget how much harder it is than riding like myself. Seriously, if I'm teaching you or just hanging out on the green runs while you practice, it's because I want to. I know full well that I can take off, so don't apologize for holding me back.

Come Sunday I've got a choice: watch the Chargers game in the bar, or go back up the mountain alone and hammer the slopes. I guess I should digress a little here and mention that snowboarding is what I do when I really need to reset my head. It's time I use to take all the damaged and broken and off kilter bits and pieces of my life and put them back in order. This happens without me actually doing anything. The harder I go, the clearer it gets. I ditched everyone in the bar.

I charge a couple of runs and decide to drop onto Olympic, which is the only double diamond run. I stick my first couple of turns and then I hit the ice. BAM! Flat on my face, supermanning down the hill. This has happened before. I kick around a bit and get my board below me, dig in and stop, then lay there laughing my ass off for a couple of minutes before I get up and take this picture:

I took it to prove that yes, I do fall too. So I get up, stick a couple of turns and fall flat on my ass again. In the lift line, the lifty says "Making friends with the snow?" which I find inordinately funny.

I'm riding the chairlift up, pretty much alone, listening to the classic rock they're playing on the PA and right up in front of me, a hawk shoots out of the trees, spraying snow all around it in this cool falling cloud. I watch it flap and gain altitude and then it starts gliding in circles, ever bigger circles, in and out of the patches of sunlight coming through the clouds. Finally, I lose it over the ridge and settle back into my seat. Somehow, there's no more clutter in my head. All the shit, the noise and aggravation and apprehension, everything that scares me and makes me nervous, all of it was gone. Right there, somehow, everything was okay.

I rode through the rest of the game, thanks to a text from my brother letting me know how badly it was going, and met up with everyone after to drive home. So now I'm back in the world, and my calm has already been tested several ways from Sunday, but I still can't shake the feeling that there is in fact a way through it all, that all I have to do is find it. I'm hoping I can hang tough enough to prove myself right.

Stress Reliever, Had To Be Done

2009-01-09T14:07:00.000-08:00

So I'm having one of the worst days on record in a very long time, despite the fact that in a few short hours I'll be on my way to the slopes. Anyway, this made me laugh a bit, so I thought I'd share:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Blog Division

2009-01-06T22:09:00.000-08:00

What a shitty name for a band, huh? Sounds like a bunch of nerds with woodwind instruments. Anyway, in an effort to separate my fictional ramblings from the tri and life stuff that are supposed to be on this blog, I've started another one.

If you're interested, the URL is ryansnotepad.blogspot.com. It's also in the blog roll on the right hand side of the page.

Now, I promise I'll try to keep this one on topic, or at least rooted in stuff that's actually happening.

'Til next time, kids.

Sometimes I Scare Myself

2009-01-05T23:31:00.000-08:00

I was going through some old files on my hard drive tonight and...no, that isn't code for looking at porn. Anyway, i ran across something that made me laugh, so I decided to post it here. By way of context, a couple of years ago, I took a class in how to write horror fiction. One of the assignments was to write 10 opening lines/paragraphs for short stories. These were mine:

Ryan Mashburn
Horror Writing
Assignment 1: 10 Opening Lines
1. It’s not exactly like flipping a switch, you know, ending the world, but it is pretty easy.

2. “God damn it,” Claire mumbled, kicking the bloody carcass away from her, “Why do they always have to look so human?”

3. Have you ever seen the inside of your own body, without the help of an x-ray?

4. My eyes hurt, the way old scars do when it gets humid.

5. It’s raining outside, the kind of rain that makes you want to put on a straw cowboy hat, steal a Camaro and cross the border at sundown, looking for a beach where you can drink cheap tequila and pretend that nothing’s wrong.

6. The room smells like old blood and rotten leather.

7. You’re feeling it aren’t you? That little pang of excitement, the subtle aftertaste of fear. You think you can handle it. Take the chains off and find out.

8. I can honestly say I never believed him, never thought he was anything but a daffy old coot, until I saw him there, splayed out on the floor like a frontiersman’s bearskin rug.

9. When I was young, I would look up at the stars in wonder, dreaming about flying between them, about weightlessness and light speed; now I just wish the sun would never set.

10. I never would’ve pegged Bobby Smiles for a prophet, but the little fucker was right, he didn’t live through the day.

So What Do Insomniacs Dream About?

2008-12-30T03:33:00.000-08:00

In Fight Club, the movie, not the book, because I didn't feel like leafing through my copy to find a quote, the narrator says "With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." This isn't exactly true.

I've had insomnia since I was in high school. As you might imagine, at this point I'm reasonably adept at living with it which, if you look at the time stamp on this entry, is pretty much what I'm doing now. It's 3:39AM and I had planned to get up and go swim at 5:30. Pretty sure that's not happening. Instead, I've decided to write a blog entry rather than get too far into the second book of the evening. I'm rereading West of Jesus, by Steven Kotler. Even if you don't surf, take a look at it. It's a pretty cool story and raises lots of interesting questions.

The reason I'm writing this is that I'm hoping to expend a little mental energy, shut down my brain so that maybe, if I'm really lucky, I'll be able to carve out a 90 minute or 2 hour power nap before I go to work. Sadly, the days are gone when I would have these attacks and just power through the day on caffeine until the sun went down and I added whiskey to the cokes to slow down and hopefully get some sleep. And I used to wonder why I would sometimes go three or four days with only an hour or two of sleep. The equation seems pretty simple now.

My record run is 10 days. That's not 10 days with no sleep, mind you. That would have had me in the padded room strapped to a table freebasing NyQuil and asking the nice orderlies to please get the spiders off me. No, it was 10 days with no more than 2 hours a night. I was a freshman in college, which was a bad time all around for me, but this two week span, ugh. I went to the student health center where they advised me to go to bed earlier and to try not to get stressed out before bed. And they wouldn't give me sleep aids because I might get hooked, but was I by chance depressed? If I was, it might be a cause of my insomnia, and they could probably prescribe something for the depression. If you've ever wondered what it would feel like to have Joseph Heller write your life story, that appointment was it for me.

I can't sleep, so I want pills. I can't get pills unless I'm depressed. I'm not depressed, so I can't have pills, but not being able to sleep is depressing...Sorry, that doesn't count. No pills. Come back when you're wearing all black, listening to Morrissey for hours on end and have developed a fascination with razor blades.

Enough of this rambling. I finally ended that run because my body just shut down. I remember I slept for something like 16 hours straight and then got to be kind of functional, but it took a long time to get back to an even keel.

So what do insomniacs dream about? We dream about sleep. Most of the dreams I can remember involve waking up, only to realize at some unconscious level that I just woke up in a dream, which is usually followed by waking up in real life, which can sometimes trigger more insomnia. Like a snake eating its tail, very slowly...because it's fucking exhausted.

I'm Dreaming of Tomorrow

2008-12-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

Properly compartmentalized, 2008 has been a hell of a year. Improperly compartmentalized, it was kind of, well, hell. Such is the fundamental dichotomy of my world. Of course, the hellish bits are pretty much all professionally rooted and tied to factors beyond my control like the implosion of the global economy and the vagaries of Taiwanese circuit board manufacturing, so I choose not to dwell on them.

2008 was a great year, personally. A year of firsts. My first successful heavy powder day on a snowboard. My first trip to Hawaii. My first half marathon and half ironman.

Along the way I've been privileged to get to know some pretty incredible people, and to count several of them as friends. I've managed to reach back into the mostly walled up and ignored reaches of my past and make contact, however tenuous, with people I haven't spoken to in years but think of often and well. I've lost touch with, and had to make the harder decision to forcibly cut away from others, but that's what happens. Roads diverge and sometimes you just can't build a strong enough or long enough bridge. Things come together, evolve and fall apart at the edges while the center strengthens.

This being the holidays, and reading all the other posts about reflecting, I guess I should say that, like Ben and Annie, I don't put the religion of the season in the front of my head. Frankly, I'm more of a New Year's guy than a Christmas one. I don't know, as I've gotten older, I just don't feel like it's everything it's supposed to be. I get burned out on the retail pressure and the personal pressure to get something right, to find some kind of insight that makes the previous year worth it.

It always seems to me that the small victories, finishing the longest race yet, catching a great wave or having a flawless run on a waist deep powder day, adding a few new people to your life to keep things interesting; it's these things that make the year worth what it took to get it in the books. The big victories, while they are incredible, are too few and far between to count on.

And that's why I like New Year's. It's a time to plan out your path through the coming year, to choose your battles. To have, as the saying goes, one last drink before the coming war.

All the way around, while parts of this year have been, shall we say, less than awesome, it's been a hell of a ride, and I'm going to chalk it up to a win. Frankly, I can't wait to see what's coming down the pipe in '09, or who's going to be walking the road with me. I hope we can have as much fun as we did this time around, if not more.

So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Give your family and friends a hug and a pat on the back. Thank them for what they've done for you and resolve to return the favor as best you're able. Have a drink and get ready to get back on the ride. The 2009 show is completely different than the 2008 show, and it's gonna be a mind-blower.

Home

2008-12-20T00:36:00.000-08:00

I'm lying on the couch in a house that, until a few hours ago, I had been in front of but never inside. I know the owners in passing, friends of a friend, and yet here I am, on their couch with their dog snoring on the floor a few feet away. They were asleep when I got here, so I haven't even said hello or thanks for the place to sleep.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm here for a reason. I wasn't freebasing drain cleaner around the corner and wandering around looking for unlocked doors and Doritos or anything. Well, okay, mabe Doritos. Mmm....

Anyway, I'm lying here in the dark, with the whole place asleep, trying and failing to space out to the Alison Krauss album playing on my ipod, and thinking about home. Not my home, in the sense of the place where I keep my stuff, but home in the ephemeral sense, what it means to be home. It's December, meaning Christmas, and that means that a lot of the people I know are going home for the holidays. Being one of 8 people in San Diego who actually think of this place as home, I'm hanging here.

So all these friends of mine who are leaving, going home, do they think of this place as home all year, only to switch allegiances come winter? Or do they only consider this a way station on a larger road? Is this truly just a place to keep their stuff?

Maybe I was smoking something. I don't know. Maybe I just have quiet time now and too much thinking going on. Lord knows I've already written enough tonight that I'm not going to post.

Back to the topic at hand, my brother is coming back this weekend for a few days. I am really excited about this, since we don't talk or hang out nearly enough. I have to wonder though. I think of this as my brother coming home, but does he? Our parents don't live in the house where we grew up, and our childhood rooms are long gone. This doesn't seem to matter much when we're all together, so maybe there's something to all those sappy cliches...I don't know.

Think about it, if like me you can't sleep. Where do you keep your stuff? Is it home?

I'm going to try switching albums.

7 Pieces in 7 Days

2008-12-16T22:44:00.000-08:00

So I set myself a couple of challenges last week. The first was to go without soda for a week. Made it 5 days.

The second was to write one original piece per day for a week. I made 7 of 7 days, from Monday through Monday, and I've got a start on Tuesday. Can I go 8 for 8?

I won't post all of them here, because that would be self indulgent and obnoxious, but I picked my two favorites from the period and one that I got busted writing when I should have been being social. See if you can guess which one's which.

By way of context, these are all written in one shot with no editing or revision.

12/8/08
--------
Eyes scratched inside like broken glass
Sunlight through the blinds
The promise of a new day gone stale
The taste of last night's stout
Where exactly did tomorrow go?
Where might you have left it?
Through your dirty window watch
Is that rain? Is it smoke?
Are you thinking about later?
The sound of wheels waiting for you
Just beyond
Just past the place you wanted to stop
Towel dry
Burn your coffee. You like it that way.
You shouldn't drink so much anyway.
Irish it up? Iris it shut?
Fade to black and scene
Curtain call before the overture and then you can just skip the formality
The taste in your throat like a cigarette
You forgot to stop smoking until you hit the filter
Where exactly did you leave tomorrow?
Why can you only find today?
Think back. You remember.
Last week.
Last month.
Last year.
But not last night.
Now where, exactly, did you leave tomorrow?

12/13/08
----------
Lights in the mirror reflect
Questions left unasked
Answers unneeded in the dawn's first flash
Eyes open to yesterday and closed again
Blown glass casting shadows
Like echoes of tomorrow
Bleeding through the seams
Shining past today
I see what was and never what is
Prismatic
Shifting
Where and when no longer matter
What color do I bleed
Cut with a razor I can't see
The day's first light brings sights
I'd rather not see
But I can't close my eyes

12/15/08
----------
If an answer in the negative
Stops conversation in its tracks
What is there to talk about?
What questions left to ask?
If the story that unfolds
Is too much or not enough
Remember silence broken
In the words that passed for love
A thousand ways to ask this question
Only one way to respond
Pick the locks before I turn
To see the damage that we've done
Tunneling to freedom
Seeing light through the dirt
Shovels ground down in our hands
And just ourselves to hurt
So come on and ask your questions
Reach right in and take hold
But if the answer pulls away
Be strong enough to let it go

This Tri Shit Is Getting Ridiculous

2008-12-11T22:48:00.000-08:00

So it's the off season. Why don't I feel like it? Oh yeah, because I'm reading books about training, working out in sport specific ways and still getting up early on Saturdays to put miles on the new bike. That's right, I bought a new bike.

Like I said, this tri shit is getting ridiculous.

If you saw Mark's last post then you know that I'm part of his maniacal plan to train for a full Ironman in 2010. We've also enlisted Dana in our scheme.

The venue is yet to be determined, though we may be joining Goody and several other TNT alums in Taupo. Even if it doesn't end up being our race, I may go on principle. Can I do two in one year? Am I insane? Don't answer that! Who am I talking to? I should really take my meds on time.

So here it is. I don't know what I'm thinking, but in preparation for this nonsense, I am training in my off season to get ready for my season, which in 2009 will consist of at least one century, two half ironmans, an international tri and probably at least one sprint, just for giggles.

How did I get here? I don't know, but I'm kinda glad I did. Shut up, voices in my head.

A Blast From the Past (unmedicated)

2008-12-07T03:44:00.000-08:00

So, Mark, this one's for you. You were wondering what happened if I actually veered full into rantville? I dug into my old writing archives and pulled some of my editorials from my buddy's old mailing list. Despite the fact that the one I've included here makes it sound like, well, like I really earned my theater degree, I think it's pretty close to the full, in person meltdown. This is about 8 years old now, so take it for what it is.
----------------------
On Fashion
----------------------

Okay, so there’s no business like show business, and you live fast, die young and above all, leave a pretty corpse. What do these two cherished American axioms tell us about ourselves? We are one seriously vain culture. No big news, right? Right. Okay, so now that we’re all agreed, what can we say about our vanity?

Turn on any given episode of Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight and you will be bombarded by sickeningly sycophantic, startstruck horseshit about who was wearing what where and which alarmingly gay fashion expert had a near fatal aneurysm over it. One point of clarification here, the word gay in this context refers not specifically to homosexuals but to the community of men sporting lisps, triangular chin beards, turtlenecks and an unhealthy knowledge of fabric types. The kind of people who make you pronounce the word croissant correctly, who order coffee drinks with names more complicated than the scientific names for most venereal diseases and that cost more than the treatments. The kind of people who think Chloe is a nifty, hip name. In short, the kind of people who should be added to my ever expanding list of people who should not be allowed outside without a helmet. But I digress.

My rage in this case is pointed not at celebrities and the celebrity chasing tabloid media.
These people are paid very well to make spectacles of themselves and each other, paid, I might add, with the money we spend on their product. That said, I do occasionally wonder what causes celebrities (typically the women, but occasionally the men) to make personal appearance choices that dramatically reduce their personal attractiveness when they are not being paid to do so. It’s one thing when a beautiful actress gets a strange haircut to play a role for which she will be paid a hefty sum of money, but quite another when she decides that, in between seasons on her hit show, she should roll the dice on the miracle hair salon that is the local Nurseryland. But again, I digress.

I said that the target of my rage on this particular topic is not the celebrity, nor the drooling, borderline retarded schlubs that follow them around and take pictures of them doing useless things that we are then supposed to care about as though it were an offense to the cosmic order for the premiere of the Manimal movie adaptation to go unnoticed. No, the target of my venom this time around is none other than us, the media hungry, frantically unhip public.

In Las Vegas recently I witnessed fashion flubs that could possibly have scared Mr. Blackwell straight and could even have left Joan Rivers speechless. For this, these sartorially challenged individuals (who shall remain nameless since I was too busy laughing to bother to meet them) should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor. Before I go too far, I should note that I am speaking here as a critic of fashion, which of course means that I know nothing about it. But enough about me, on to the dirt, that is the earthen motif.

Complaint #1: Women with colored hair.
While this phenomenon is not an inherently problematic one, there appear to be several areas of this rather delicate operation with which the bulk of our female population is unfamiliar. These issues, when dealt with properly, greatly enhance the appeal of the woman to men surrounding her. Handled improperly, they induce men to ask for an hourly rate. Allow me to provide the following helpful hints.
1. Just because Christina Aguilera saw fit to dye the lower half of her head blue, this does not make it a good idea for you. People like Ms. Aguilera have image consultants and hairstylists with one name on speed dial. People whose hourly rates are higher than most psychiatrists. You however, have ponytail holders and a sharpie. Do the math.
2. Bleach jobs are rarely as good an idea in truth as they seemed to be in the planning, especially if you are not white. This is not a racial statement, but rather an observation about color interaction. Platinum blond is not a color that mixes well with dark skin. You are not fooling anyone. Pale white people can usually pull it off, but rarely do it properly, hence the number of people you see walking around looking like a road pylon took a shit on them.
3. Uncorrected botched dye jobs are particularly bad. If you dye your long hair and find that it looks bad, cut it. You are only doing yourself a disservice by wandering around with well styled, but plastic looking hair.
4. Pastels do not naturally occur in human growth. Lavender, orange, blue, green, and other colors not generated by chromosomal combination should be ignored. You don’t look daring, you look like you slept in a kindergarten tempera set.

Complaint #2: Those shirts with no backs.
Here’s the deal, that thing you have, the one comprised of a sequined dinner napkin and two matching shoelaces? Yes, that one. It’s not clothing, it’s table linen. Wrap it around a fork and go put on some clothes.

Complaint #3: Strap lines.
If you wear a bikini to play, tank tops to shop and spaghetti straps to functions, stop it, at least during the summer. Your back looks like a Sanskrit manuscript. It’s not sexy. It’s geometry.

Complaint #4: Men in leather pants.
Go home and put on some jeans. You’re not a rock star, and if you were, you would probably be responsible for more schlock like With Arms Wide Open and I would be forced to put on a Metallica CD and crush your head with a rock.

Complaint #5: Cowboy Up
If you live in or are visiting a major city center, leave the boots, belt buckle and cowboy hat at home. You stick out like Ron Jeremy in a convent. Stop it. And for God’s sake, take that damn sticker off your Neon. One more thing, Calvin is a city boy, so take that sticker off too. A real cowboy would kick your ass faster than he’d shoot a cow stuck in barbed wire.

The list goes on and on. Sadly, there are more problems involving women than men, but men wrote the rulebook, which means that we get to do things the easy way. Then again, visit a golf course and you will see that many men have obviously never read the book their ancestors clubbed so many women to create.

So what can we do about this? How do we keep from becoming walking fashion travesties? We can’t listen to our European cousins since they’re the ones who started all this insanity in the first place. Fashion designers are no help. Watch an awards show. These people are so whacked out they make me want to watch the Jerry Springer show for a little normalcy. I don’t know, maybe we should all just go back to cheetah skins and loincloths, at least the current cast of Baywatch should, if not permanently then definitely during sweeps.

But seriously, we have to do something, unless of course evolution is showing us that the next stage in our development is Bozo the Clown, in which case we should just set off the nuclear warheads and see if the cockroaches can do better in a few thousand years.

For what it’s worth, my advice is just to do what you do. Stop trying so hard, it’s never as impressive as you think it is. You’ll be much better off .

Song Lyrics That Kick Ass

2008-12-06T00:30:00.000-08:00

Mostly this is random lines from songs that I think are really cool. Why am I writing this down? Because they keep getting stuck in my head.

1. I brought down the sky for you / but all you did was shrug -- Audience of One, Rise Against.

2. When I die I don't want no part of heaven / I would not do heaven's work well -- Youngstown, Bruce Springsteen

3. Now every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world, / Ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl. -- Death or Glory, The Clash

4. Pretty girl keep growin' up, playin' make-up, wearin' guitar -- Left of the Dial, The Replacements

5. She's living in LA / with my best old ex-friend Ray / a guy she said she knew well and sometimes hated -- Operator, Jim Croce

6. All smiles and sunshine / a perfect world on a perfect day / everything always works out / I have never felt so fucking great -- Survive, Rise Against

7. The Gods forgot they've made me / so I forgot them to / I listen to the shadows / I play among their graves -- Seven, David Bowie

8. Big green monkey / everyone's a junky -- Everyone's a Junky, Our Lady Peace

9. Look around and you'll see that at times it feels like no one really cares / It gets me down but I'm still gonna try to do what's right, I know that there's / A difference between sleight of hand, and giving everything you have / There's a line drawn in the sand, I'm working up the will to cross it -- The Artist in the Ambulance, Thrice

File Under: Didn't You Think to Check?

2008-12-03T12:35:00.000-08:00

Seriously, it's like Christmas.

Zoo solves mystery of celibate polar bears

The punchline is in line 1 of the story. It's awesome.

Yeah, but how are the brownies?

2008-12-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

Duuuude.....

This rocks. I got nothing.

World's oldest marijuana stash totally busted
Two pounds of still-green weed found in a 2,700-year-old Gobi Desert grave

Tri-ing to Catch Up

2008-12-01T23:35:00.000-08:00

So there, I think that's my first "tri"-related pun. I'll "tri" not to do it again...damn it...anyway...

I've been quiet a while, at least in blogger-land, so this is a quick catch up on the tri stuff, which is why this blog originally started. I'll "tri" to post the non-tri post tomorrow. Oh, jesus...just shoot me...I can't stop...

I'm back to working out, except that I can't run. My foot still doesn't work. I went my regular doctor, who helpfully explained to me that I weigh more that 200 pounds. not much more, but more. Therefore, I shouldn't run. You see, in his logic, the only people who should run are really skinny people, grown men who weigh 130 pounds or less. The rest of us should find other sports. In his words "Lots of people are perfectly happy working out on the elliptical trainer." Sorry to get crass, but...fuck off, Doc. You spent 8 years in med school to tell me not to exercise? Bite it.

So I went to a different doctor, a sports doctor who has bike jerseys hanging in his office and copies of Triathlete magazine in his waiting room. A good sign. He spent a half hour or so quizzing me about my injury and poking/bending my foot in ways that made me want to give up state secrets. In the end, I'm going back into physical therapy. I start on the 16th, so maybe I'll have more to say then.

Since I'm not running, I'm focusing on cycling and swimming. I've actually started using the pool at the YMCA, which is the reason I joined 6 months ago. It's going well. I still know how and I can still knock out a 2000+ yard workout in under an hour. Now to get faster....

On the cycling front, I learned something this past weekend. Pay attention. This is important. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, DO BACK TO BACK BIKE WORKOUTS!!!!

I was humbled this Sunday by Sleeping Indian Road. For the first time since I started in this sport, I had to get off the bike and walk up a hill. A little piece of me died. But then, wait for it....there were more hills!!!! HOORAY!!!! Finally, Dana and I just bagged it. Neither of us was feeling it, and she was bleeding, but that's her story to tell.

Since I seem to be working backwards, I'll wrap this up with a quick recap of Ironman Arizona (IMAZ). Dana and I drove out to watch the race on Saturday morning, meeting up with Katie and Joanna in Tempe. Since they are all paying a coach, they had to work out. I, being along for the ride, got to join in. Dana's scripted workout was a 50 mile ride comprised of one loop of the IMAZ course (competitors do 3), plus 13 extra miles. We did the loop, which turned out to be the most boring ride in existence. A sample of my interior monologue from the ride...

Wow, it sure is deserty out here. Is that a saguaro cactus? Well, I guess we are in Arizona. We haven't turned in a while. Where was that turn again? That mountain is kind of cool looking. I'm hungry. Almost heaven, west virginia...blue ridge mountains...why am I singing John Denver songs? How long have we been out here? Wait, has that mountain gotten closer? Is that another saguaro cactus? It sure is dry. Hey look, an indian casino...I'm tired of looking at that damn mountain. just sit right back and you'll hear a tale...Did I remember to lock the car?...What would happen if I just zigged into traffic? Why isn't that f$@I@#g mountain getting any closer. Damn it Dana, why did you have to ask me to come on this ride?...I don't ever want to do IMAZ...

And on and on. Despite the soul crushing monotony of the course, it was a really instructive experience to watch the race. Astute readers of this blog might have noticed a phantom post called "Water Boxing" which was an attemot to mobile blog from my blackberry. It was a short description of my impression of the swim start, which was, in distilled form, pretty much this:

At the sound of the cannon, punch your neighbor in the spine.

Now imagine 2500 people all doing this at once in the predawn glow while floating in a pool of motor oil.

Almost like you were there, huh?

From there it was over to the bike course where it went something like this:

Your friend comes out of T1. Cheer. YAY FRIEND!!!!!

Wait 2 hours.

Your friend makes a u-turn. Cheer. YAY FRIEND!!!!

Wait 2 hours.

Your friend makes a u-turn. Cheer. YAY FRIEND!!!!

Wait 2 hours. Get lunch during this interval.

Your friend goes into T2. Cheer. YAY FRIEND!!!!

Go find a spot on the run course. Repeat.

Not to take anything away. Congrats to Jess, Jason, Brian, Chris, John and everyone else out there. You all rock, but when my time to race the distance comes, my family and friends are welcome to hang out at the bar.

I think that'll do for now. Still to come will be recaps of Thanksgiving, drinking stories, Snow Jam, and who the hell knows what else.

Time for bed now. Have to work out in the morning.

Ah, Intoxication...

2008-11-25T17:00:00.000-08:00

So I was reading the BBC News article about whether Obama would keep Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense when I caught this in the sidebar:

Man jailed for Spiderpig insults

Now how do you not read that? Check it out for yourself.

An Interpretive Dance of Imbecility

2008-11-20T23:08:00.000-08:00

We invented a drinking game on the trip to Austin. This was after Longhorn, while we watched football and put off packing the bikes. The game is pretty simple. All you need is a TV and some booze, and someone like me, who tends to say things like "That commercial makes me want to hurt people," or "That guy summons the killing rage." Whenever this person (me) says something like this during a commercial, you take a drink.

Sometimes, I think I'd like to play this game as I go through my day. Granted, some days I wouldn't even make it to work before I was swaying and barking in French about monkeys in the branches. (If you have to ask, it's best not to.)

The reason I mention this is because I had a strange sort of epiphany today, if you can call it that, and I'm not sure you can. Without going into specifics, I realized that there is a special category of people who are not worthy of respect or equal treatment. This is not a blanket statement. There are no generalities implied here. Members of this unhallowed pantheon of mediocrity work very hard to earn their places in it. You know who they are. You've got your own list. I may be on yours, I don't know.

It's interesting, though, the moment that you notice someone has moved into this category. Sometimes they slip quietly in, moving just outside your peripheral vision and sneaking by, hiding until you just as quietly forget about them. Sometimes, and this is when it's really special, sometimes, they put on a tutu, light up some sparklers, plie, tendu and skip like a nimble little forest sprite right across the line. It's something to see, let me tell you.

Right about the time they take a bow they light their dance tights on fire and you know they're never coming back. You'll never be able to talk to them like adults, or take them seriously again. Of course, they'll be happy to return the favor, just as soon as they find the source of that burning smell.

All I can say is that when the smoke clears, you want a drink, so I'll say it. That guy makes me want to hurt people.

Now say goodnight, Gracie.

What the hell? Seriously...what the hell?

2008-11-11T16:25:00.001-08:00

Ran across this on the web today. I am speechless, but I have to share. This shouldn't be funny, except that it is. Does that make me a bad person?

Man's coffin kills wife on way to cemetery. Read it here.

Swinging the Hammer

2008-11-09T20:51:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and this isn’t good. Left unattended, my mind does not turn to chivalry and dragon-slaying, to rescuing fair maidens or changing the world. I don’t dream up funny limericks to write on bathroom walls or pithy epithets that I can rattle off at parties. Frankly, my wandering mind is usually a pretty dark place.

This is why I try to stay occupied, to keep some kind of puzzle going in my head at all times. But sometimes I slip, and that’s when I start thinking.

I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s “A Man Without A Country” today, and he wrote something that kind of encapsulated what’s been going through my head lately. He starts by saying that he’s been called a luddite, and that it’s not a bad thing. Then he tells the story of Ned Ludd, the namesake of the Luddites, who, according to Vonnegut and Wikipedia, destroyed a bunch of mechanical looms and other equipment in nineteenth century England in protest of being replaced by machines. He wraps up that story with this quote:

“Today we have contraptions like nuclear submarines armed with Poseidon missiles that have H-bombs in their warheads. And we have contraptions like computers that cheat you out of becoming. Bill Gates says, ‘Wait till you can see what your computer can become.’ But it’s you who should be doing the becoming, not the damn fool computer. What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do.”

This is in my mind lately because I’ve been spending a lot of time around people in various contexts and I find that, depending on where I am and who I’m with and what I’m doing, there always seems to be a switch or two in my brain that I know I should flip in response to the situation, but when I do, the circuit that should be connected isn’t finished. The switch gets flipped but the light doesn’t come on. The car doesn’t start.

In the resulting intracranial awkward silence, I’m presented with the puzzle table on which my mind is laid out and I’m always stunned by just how many missing pieces there are. Those missing pieces, those gaps in the mural, are all the things that you can become, provided, I assume, that you don’t smash the machines that can help you get there.

The thing is, I’m pretty good with a hammer. It’s okay, though. If you smash enough machines, periodically you have to scavenge the parts to make new ones and when you do, you sometimes find that the new machine will make you another piece of your puzzle. That, of course, is what this is all about.

So if I’ve learned anything over the last couple of years I think it would be that it’s fine to pick up your hammer and pound away. At the cost of looking like a fool, or a bastard, of straining a friendship here and breaking a bone or two along the way, there’s almost always a reward when the dust settles and the wounds heal and you’ve got a slightly more complete picture of what you can become.

So thanks, KV, for putting a focus to the things that have been keeping me up the last few nights.

You Tell Me...

2008-11-01T15:56:00.000-07:00

I had the first couple of lines of this in my head as I went to sleep last night. Didn't know what else to do with it, so I stuck it here.

If I could take the tape from my eyelids
Blink them wet so I can see
Pull the bandage off my mouth
Part my teeth and breathe

I’d walk. I’d run.
I’d scream and howl
Until the air went cold
And the sun went down

I’d close my coat up tightly
Turn my shoulders to the wind
Take one step into the gale
And do it all again

I’d see lights on the horizon
The silhouette of home
I’d shuffle and stumble and grit my teeth
Until I reached the road

A Moment of Silence

2008-10-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

It isn’t hot or cold. It isn’t black or white. What you notice first is that it’s nothing. Impersonal. Silent. A space without personality or history. Without memory. You’ve been in this exact same room before. White walls. Yellow walls. Pale blue. With posters or unadorned. You’ve been here before.

You lean on the bare wall and watch the closed door as though something momentous lies just on the other side. Ball handle or lever, you wait for the turn, for the grinding/sliding sound as a pocket door disappears into a wall.

When the door opens, there’s nothing you can do. A machine is at work that requires no intervention. No gears to oil or bells to ring. No problems to solve. You watch it work; pay attention as the cycle continues and the motions are stepped through. There’s a procedure for a reason and your part is small. You’re a witness.

So you lean on the wall and you fold your arms across your chest. As the process moves forward you find yourself squeezing your own chest tighter. You can taste blood because you’ve bitten through the inside of your lip. You don’t make a sound. You watch and breathe, trying not to disturb anything. There, in that second, mired in the absolute stillness of the space, you want to disappear into the walls.

You don’t make a sound. You keep your mouth shut, with the sound of your heartbeat in your ears and the taste of your blood on your tongue, because you don’t know what will happen if you try to speak. In the end, your mind can’t supply the words. You don’t trust yourself, but also, in those seconds, there’s really nothing that needs to be said.

Inertia

2008-10-27T23:43:00.000-07:00

I haven’t had a lot to do lately. That’s due largely to the hole in my leg with the surgical tube stuck in it. In the last week and a half or so, I’ve watched a lot of TV, mostly Smallville and CSI reruns. I’ve avoided the news, since all they talk about is politics and frankly, that makes me want to projectile vomit. That’s another rant, or maybe this one. I’ll figure it out as I go.

Most of what I’ve done this past week is read. The list:

The Pure In Heart, by Susan Hill: 370 pages
The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane: 702 pages
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson: 890 pages

All very good books, though if you haven’t read Stephenson, don’t start with Anathem. You may go crazy.

If I haven’t been reading, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About work, next year’s race season, politics (much to my nauseated dismay), the economy, you name it. I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.

I’m not entirely sure what this post is supposed to be about. I certainly didn’t start it with any objective in mind. Do I want to talk about something serious? Do I want to rant about politics and the upcoming election? Do I want to air some personal baggage?

Not really.

Is this what happens when nothing is happening?

Uselessness and Crippledom

2008-10-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

For the last 6 days I have been to five places: the hospital, my parents' house, the doctor's office, In-n-Out and Baja Fresh. Most of this time has been spent lying down or pacing aimlessly. Only the Vicodin keeps it interesting, and even that's only because for the first hour or so after I take it, it makes me loopy.

Honestly, this is making me nuts. I can't go anywhere on my own, and I only have enough energy to move around for half an hour here and there. And this is from minor surgery. God, I don't remember it being this irritating when they rebuilt my hand. Of course, then, I had to take finals on painkillers. I got good grades that time, but it was all sympathy. After the fact, most of my professors told me I needn't really have shown up for the tests. Cool huh? Not to be ungrateful, but a little advanced warning would have been nice.

This time around, it's simpler. I scheduled this one. I planned my absence from work, did the pre-op visits and read up on the procedure and recovery. The doctor braced me to be mostly immobile and in agony for two weeks. Fine, I'm a highly trained athlete, I can take it.

Thing is, it didn't start to hurt until yesterday, day-friggin'-five. And even now, it's only a dull roar. So yeah, I'm climbing the walls, or I would be if my leg worked. Oh well, at least I paid for the privilege, right?

Longhorn...heh...That's What She Said...

2008-10-07T22:20:00.000-07:00

Oh, where to even start with this? This past weekend was the culmination of a journey that started a couple of months back with an e-mail from Gunn. That e-mail was a copy of his race registration, topped with an all caps message: "SO THERE!" or some such nonsense. So there it is, BG, as I sit here with my foot wrapped in ice, this is all your fault.

It was a great weekend, all in all, good friends, good food, good beer and even a race.

That's right, October 5, 2008 was race day. Ironman Longhorn 70.3 in Austin, TX. I, along with the rest of Team Barney Butter, am now a half-Ironman. I don't know which half, though, probably the gimpy one.

Here are the stats:

Chip Time 7:07:50
Overall Place 1614 / 1929
Gender Place 1180 / 1313
Division Place 197 / 219
Swim 1 2Mi Rank 1212
Swim 1 2Mi Time 33:21
Swim 1 2Mi Pace 1:44/M
T1 Time 03:49
Bike 56Mi Rank 1036
Bike 56Mi Time 3:03:29
Bike 56Mi Pace 18.3mph
T2 Time 02:56
Run 13 1Mi Rank 1802
Run 13 1Mi Time 3:24:12
Run 13 1Mi Pace 15:35/M

Blow up much? Guess I need to learn how to run. Know how I know that? Apart from the pathetic run split, I mean. Check this out...

Yes, that's a cramp.

So anyway, back to the story...

We flew into Austin Thursday night and we got in kinda late, around 9 or so local and by the time we had gear off the carousels and were underway, it was working on 10. None of us had eaten, so we talked Katie B. and her mom into stopping for food. Of course, they had Clara with them and when we pulled into the Taco Bell ('cuz we don't have those in California) they lagged behind at the car while we went inside. We had ordered and were waiting for the food when we realized that they hadn't come inside.

Apparently, it wasn't the kind of neighborhood where you left luggage unattended. And we didn't. We left Katie (all 9 pounds of her), her mom and a 2 year old to stand guard. We rule! And we got Volcano Tacos, well Brian and Paul did.

mmmm...Triathlon food....

With bellies full of cheez and other preservatives, we regrouped and headed to Belton, and the Brunners' place. We were all pretty wiped, so a quick beer and it was off to unconsciousness, well, almost. Walking back from the house to the camper, where BG, Paul and I were crashing, I started getting chills. My allergies were up and I couldn't breathe. I went to bed feeling like I had ebola or something. I was freaked out, thinking that I had caught something at one of our football parties the week before.

I passed out easily enough but woke up at about 2AM. Here's the triathlete part of the conversation. I couldn't figure out how to get into the bathroom without turning on the lights and waking up the other guys, so I had to go outside and use the neighbor's lawn. So sorry, neighbors. If it's any consolation, I was out there in the middle of the night, in a vulnerable position, wondering if the Brunners had been kidding about there being a cougar in the neighborhood. If the weren't kidding, then somehow, I don't think they meant the Del Mar kind of cougar, if you know where I'm heading with this.

Anyway, Friday was all about meat and Wal Mart. In that order, with a brief stop in creepy Willy Wonka-ville. Lots of good Texas bar-b-cue and the first of many Shiner Bocks. Tim caught up with us that afternoon for a fish fry at the Brunner house and we had fun communing with nature.

Here, bambi, bambi...

Then we had more Shiner Bock.

mmmmm....carbs.....

Saturday was down to Austin to get bikes from Tim's new pad and head back to the race, by way of the LBJ library and the Adult Video Megaplexxx. I also broke my camera, so no more pics in this post. Maybe more later, once I see the rest.

We got to the race site and ran the budget truck into a tree, which was awesome.

Then we headed over to check in. I now have lots of cool Longhorn schwag. At check in we learned that the race director's previous e-mail about the lake being 90 degrees was a bit exaggerated and that the race would be wetsuit legal for age groupers. Of course, only BG brought his suit. What a princess. The expo was kind of lame, but I did some grill rub and a beer coozie from the Texas Beef Council and traded some Barney Butter for a Livestrong bracelet. So that was cool.

From the expo we had lunch at Chuy's, and honestly, how could you possibly go wrong ordering the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom the day before a race. Boom Boom sauce has to be good for you right? Right. I'm going with that.

The last thing to mention from Saturday was our bike preview. We racked the bikes as instructed and piled into the jeep for a cruise through some lovely Texas back roads, complete with sharp turns onto steep hills, crevasses that could swallow mountaineering parties and potholes that were, frankly, Texas-sized. We also learned that we had no idea where we were going and that the comprehensive directions provided by the race directors were useless because there were no actual street signs at the intersections.

Finally we flagged down a lady who was out jogging and asked her how to get to Blake-manor Road, which would lead us to civilization, and most importantly, to dinner.

US: Excuse us, how do we get to Blake-manor Road?
Lady: Blake Manor road?
Us: Yes, please.
Lady: Well, you're on Ann Showers. Just keep going a couple miles and turn left on Damita Jo (ed. note: I am not making these street names up. the directions really did sound like a bad porn script.) So you turn left on Damita Jo, keep your doors locked, and (ed. note: the transcript ends here, because the SoCal city kids all pooped themselves.)

A long and banjo filled ride later, we got to the hotel and then headed to dinner and finally to bed, where I utterly failed to sleep.

RACE DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ugh. 4AM and my wave didn't go until 8:02. And Katie was hepped up like a howler monkey on cracky-o's. Sorry KB, we love ya, but yikes, way too early to have that much energy. Thankfully, I had an ipod full of Rise Against and 36 Crazyfists to preserve my mood.

The race ended up getting backed up and I didn't hit the water until about 8:30. the swim felt really good. I found clear water pretty early, and the course was shaped so we only swam into the sun for the first leg. Since I breathe to the left, I didn't get blinded every time I took oxygen. Even in fresh water without a wetsuit, I felt strong and controlled. The swim was really a no brainer. If I hadn't stopped to pee after the second turn, I think I would have been in the 32 minute range instead of the 33s.

By the time I got to my bike in transition, I didn't need to worry about putting socks on for the ride, since I had boots made of mud by then. I lost a good minute or so trying to scrape enough sludge off to get into my bike shoes and out onto the course.

And oh, what a course it was. From the first couple of miles I knew this was going to be a trick. People were all over the damn road. riding on the center line. Riding with no hands. Riding horses. Okay, not that last one, but seriously, it was like no one had any idea what the bike rules were. I swear I saw a couple of pelotons form.

The ride was actually, apart from big groups of other riders, well handled. the roads were in rough shape, but the worst spots were marked with paint and/or cones, so the were pretty easy to avoid. The scariest moment was when we were coming up to the right hand turn that slammed immediately into a full bore, out of the saddle climb. It was only a hundred yards or so, but ouch.

There were volunteers at the turn saying slow down, sharp turn. Shift up, there's a climb. Watch out, bikes down. Wait, what was that last one? Yes, you heard right. Watch out, bikes down. The guy in front of me pretty much stopped, so I was shifting and trying to decelerate at the same time (not a good idea) as I swung wide around him and into a minefield of people clipped to bikes that were lying flat in the road. these people, most of whom were flanked by one or more riders who had simply stopped to offer encouragement and were still standing, were making no effort to get up at all. They were just laying there in the road, begging to get run over and take someone else down. I got out of there as fast as I could.

The other thing that amazed me on the ride was the number of people with flats who decided to wait for the Mavic people to come by rather than just fix them. I can think of at least 8 or so that I saw who seemed to have the full kit on them but were standing next to bikes, not lifting a finger to put in a tube. Silly bastards. Don't they know there's a clock?

Oh yeah, and people were dropping their crap all over the course. Water bottles, power bars, Gu wrappers, tubes, you name it. I saw several people eat gus and throw the wrappers on the road. Punk asses.

Oh well. What can you do? You can shut up and ride your own dang race and that's what I did. Thanks Denner for the advice in your IMLP post about shifting whenever you feel like you're working too hard. And thanks Dana for reminding me of it. It serve me well. I came off the bike way faster than I thought I would and jammed out of T2 into well, hell. Yeah, that's about right. Hell.

The run was hell. My foot felt like a cement block and my left leg got thrashed pretty early trying to compensate for it. I finally settled into a 5 minute run/5 minute walk rhythm that worked for about three and a half miles, but I had to walk up Quadzilla, the big dirt hill that pretty much closes out the last mile of each loop. The first 10K took an hour and a half. The second was worse, pain wise. My foot was so sore that I couldn't keep up the 5/5s anymore. I caught up to Dana into the second mile of the loop and she and I walk/shuffle/limp/jogged the rest of the way together. Pretty much the worst 3.5 hours of my recent existence right there, but I knew it might go down that way, so I don't mind.

Crossed the finish line and headed to the Team Barney Butter tailgate area for beer and fajitas (thanks again, Brunners) and a champagne shower, courtesy of Paul.

Finally back to the hotel for showers and more beer (theme?) along with pizza and football.

So how was the half? Incredibly painful. Will I do it again? Duh. Yeah. In the words of my dad, now all I need to do is learn how to run.

The Final Countdown (cue synthesizer bridge)

2008-10-02T11:06:00.001-07:00

Longhorn is imminent. We leave today to fly to hot and muggy Austin, Texas. Everything is packed, the bikes are on the road, and we are all peanut-free.

That's right, Team Barney Butter is in effect, yo!

Visit the site for the full blurb.

I'm going to take a crack at mobile blogging from Austin and watch for pics after the fun is done.

Fun. Pain. I can't tell the difference.

2008-09-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

So I did exactly jack in the week after Pac Grove, but here we are spitting distance from Longhorn and I'm alternating between cranked about my first half-iron and scared off my head.

I didn't mean to take a full week off. I really intended to sit out Monday and maybe Tuesday, then get on the horse and hit the gym Wednesday night, maybe a run on Thursday...none of that happened. Come Friday, I had done nothing except pick up my bike from Jason after he tuned it.

So Friday rolled around and I joined the gang out at the Cove with the intention of cranking out a quick mile. Well, by the time we all got there and got going, the sun was sinking inexorably lower on the horizon and the swells were climbing higher and higher above it. I got to the quarter in 0:7:30, the floated there for almost 15 minutes jabbering with folks. Finally, we decided to just bag it and head in. Most of us headed to dinner, though there was a bit of a schism over who was eating Mexican and who was eating with who. It wasn't exactly East and West Germany, but there was a little drama, nothing some clever text messages couldn't cure.

Leaving dinner, I had to jam home and shower off the wetsuit smell to go meet the volleyball kids at the Carriage House for some karaoke and booze in honor of Daniel's birthday. I was the latecomer to the party and they already pretty far gone, which was good since it meant I didn't have to catch up. I didn't emerge totally unscathed though. Drinking beer may be carb-loading, but Alabama Slammers don't qualify I guess. I had the sense to pull the ripcord at about midnight.

5AM Saturday and the phone goes off. It was a text from Mark bailing out of the day's ride. (You're gonna have to explain your later explanation dude, I'm still puzzling over it.) Ultimately not a huge problem, but I got up and started to get ready for the ride, only to realize that wait, it's five in the damn morning. I don't have to be up until 6. I went back to bed.

Dana and I caught the train up to Capistrano at 7:40 after an impromptu sprint through the Solana Beach Amtrak station in bike shoes, toting helmets and bikes. Thankfully someone was running even later than us and they held the train. I can't help but think though, about the helpful lady who sold me my ticket. The conversation, which began at about 7:35, went somthing like this:

Ryan: One for Capistrano.
Lady: I need your ID. Will this be cash or charge?
Ryan: How much is it?
Lady: I hope you make your train. Cash or charge?
Ryan: How much is the ticket? I don't know if I have enough cash.
Lady: Twelve dollars.
Ryan: Cash. (hands over twelve bucks)
Lady: Thank you. (begins typing on the computer, presumably ordering East European porn or something, but very slowly) I hope you make your train. All the way across on track 2. (hands ryan the ticket)
Ryan: Me too. (sprints out the door, clacking in bike shoes)

Once in Capistrano, we had a pretty uneventful time of things, except for the bike shoe shuffle across the slick tile and hardwood floors of the station cafe to find a bathroom, and hit the road.

If you haven't cycled this route, you have to go through Camp Pendleton, which is cool. We had a hard time keeping ourselves from pulling over to climb on the decorative tanks and play on the obstacle courses, some of which looked way fun. Then we rode past a Carnival at Oceanside harbor. Somewhere between oceanside and Carlsbad, we made the decision to bag the transition run portion of the day's program and turned inland at Palomar Airport Road to get in some hill time.

By the end of the 60 miles, I was well and truly sick of my bike chain clicking and we stopped at B&L, where we ran into Jeanie and Rolf. Turns out Jeanie's racing IM Cozumel in 2009, just like our good friend Katie. Oh, and I think I got pulled into being in town for the race. Guess I should make sure my passport's current. Oy.

A little while in B&L and Dana and I realized that we were about to pass out from hunger. We'd been on the road for four hours in the sun. So a quick stop at the cars and we were into Chief's for what might have been the best frings and burgers ever.

Saturday night was Paul's birthday party and I'll gloss over that lest I think too long about BG modeling the bikini.

Today was supposed to be a 13 mile run with Katie, her coach, BG and Rita, but two miles in I knew there was no way I was gonna be able to handle race pace and interval training. I dropped back and let them pull ahead and pulled into my head to just muscle through it. Around mile 5, my foot was partly throbbing and partly numb ans wasn't bending right, so I stopped, stretched and turned back. I ultimately did 10-point-something miles in just over two hours. It could have been faster except that around the Children's pool, my knee and foot stopped working and I had to limp back to the cove.

Not my best performance and it's got me a little rattled about the half-marathon at the end of Longhorn, but I also know that I can just suck it up and muscle through if I have to. I really don't want to, but if I have to, it's there. I'm expecting to hurt for about two weeks after the race, but thankfully I'm going down for post-surgical rehab just about then and I have six weeks to recover from all of it.

How do I get into this stuff?

Pac Grove 2008

2008-09-14T22:58:00.000-07:00

Well, it's Sunday night and another exhausting race weekend has come and gone. That's right, yesterday saw me running the Triathlon at Pacific Grove. If you've been playing along at home, this was my first ever race in 2007.

Since that fateful day last September, I've been racing like crazy. In fact, yesterday was my ninth triathlon in 12 months. Does that make me obsessive? I'm not qualified to answer that question.

I decided to return to PG after a year of racing to see just what I had accomplished. What better benchmark than repetition, right? Again, if you've been playing along, this year has seen lots of races, but also lots of injury. Cracked ribs, plantar fasciitis, blisters and cuts and bruises too numerous to recall.

Anyway, how did I do? I crushed myself.

Pac Grove 2007 Finish: 3:10:22
Pac Grove 2008 Finish: 2:49:42

Apart from the overall, what did I want out of this race?

1. Beat my swim from 07. Check.
2. Beat my run from 07. Check.
3. Finish the run with no walk breaks. Check.

Icing on the cake:

1. Beat my Lavaman bike split. (by about a minute and a half)
2. Ran my fastest triathlon 10K. (by about 5 minutes)
3. Cracked the top half of my age group.

That's 3 PRs in one race (bike, run, overall).

Oh yeah, bring on Longhorn.

It was interesting, racing on my own even though the TNT crew was there and they all knew me. I raced in my age group rather than with them and for the first time since I started this, I stepped into the chute not knowing a soul in my wave. I couldn't feed off the energy of friends and had to really pull into my own head for motivation. As I wandered around on the beach waiting for my turn, I could look up at the road and see the wall of purple jackets. Part of me wished I was up there with them, but I went into the water and just stood there for a while. There's an angle you can find where if you look out to sea, all you can see are rocks and water and grey sky. You can hear the announcer and the crowd, but if you tune it out it's almost like you're out there alone.

The swim was solid. I found a good rhythm pretty quickly, though I had some crowd issues. I came out of the water to go around the rock and braced for the next wave to land on top of me just like last year. It didn't happen, so I snuck a quick look at my watch. 13:36 for the first half of the swim. Not a PR but I had nearly 90 seconds to get out of the way before the horn went off for the next wave.

No problems until the home stretch. I was drafting off of a guy's shoulder and he started pulling to the outside, into me, since I was to his right. I stuttered a stroke and let him pull ahead, then cut inside. No problem, right? Well, he turned back inside and swam underneath me. We got all pretzeled up. As I tried to push off of him, he mule kicked me square in the right shoulder, hard enough to stand me up in the water and stop me cold. I gave him a second and finished my swim.

Up into T1 and I got my bike shoes on before I went completely, totally blank. I was literally standing in front of my gear with no idea what I was doing. The i heard someone yelling my name. I looked up to see Tim and Neil from the TNT squad cheering for me. That snapped me right out of it and I suited up and ran out to the mount line.

It was on the bike that I realized just how cool the AG start was. Last year, the bike course was straight out of Thunderdome, with people all over the road on all manner of bikes and no two of them following the same set of rules. In snowboarding, we call that the human slalom. Since I took off in wave two, the road was a ghost town. I had no traffic until lap four and by then it just didn't matter. After IB, I was really worried about my dismount into T2, so I prepped my shoes and slowed down a little early, but it worked. I stuck it and ran into transition. I could even feel my feet this time.

T2 was smooth and I was out on the run. Looking at my bike on the rack, I saw that I only used one of the four Gus I brought, which had me a little worried, but I had a tough time putting it down, so I didn't try to force a second.

On the run, all I wanted to do was run the whole thing without cramping. I figured that meant all I needed to do was find a pace that I could hold and just be steady, forgetting all about speed. This was a perfect strategy for me, apparently. I had no muscle issues, didn't stop at any of the aid stations and finished smooth. The 1:01 time is a PR for the triathlon 10K, so maybe for Lavaman I can get it under an hour. Who knows?

Congrats to the TNT crew. You guys looked great out there. Some of you actually looked like you were enjoying yourself. And the after party...mother of god, you people know what you're doing. I'm still hurting.

Oh, and you guys at Nation's...nice job all of you.

Congrats to Ben on his first olympic distance race.

Thank you to all the SCU crew who came down and to everyone who texted or emailed or facebooked a good luck message. You guys rock.

Well, I think that's about it for now. I need sleep since it's back to the real world tomorrow.

Signs (of the Apocalypse)

2008-09-04T23:32:00.000-07:00

I was reading a menu tonight and I saw an entry for "Mexican Hot Chocolate." We were in a Mexican restaurant, so nothing unusual there. The thing is, underneath the item name, it said "Made with real Mexican hot chocolate."

I pointed this out to Mark, who mentioned that he had happened to read the back of his chocolate milk container earlier that day and saw the warning that the product inside contained...wait for it...MILK!!!!!

Ah, lawyer shields. I have a bag of trail mix in my pantry that warns me that it was packaged on equipment that processes peanuts.

The list goes on and on. It put me in mind of this fragment I wrote a few years back. Nothing ever came of it, and I think I wrote it after a turn in jury duty.

Signs

There’s a sign on the door that says “Court is in Session. Do not Enter.” If you look in the window, there’s no one inside.

You pass by thousands of these examples of human idiocy every day. What you don’t do, most of the time, is notice.

When the man at Disneyland goes crazy and refuses to believe that you took his family’s picture, you politely tell him that yes, you did. He persists because there’s no film in the camera. You show him the little screen and attempt to explain that it’s digital. You do not, for example, whip out a Browning 9mm and blow off his right kneecap. In a perfect world, maybe, but not here.

What keeps me up at night?

2008-09-01T22:45:00.000-07:00

The Lee Majors Bionic Rechargeable Hearing Aid. You heard that right. I just saw the commercial for it on the History Channel. And guess what!!!!!

It won't cost you six million dollars!!!!!!!! Hooray!!!!!!

I'm going to go vomit.

New Friends and Places Best Left Behind

2008-08-29T01:03:00.000-07:00

It's Thursday night, well, technically Friday morning, but I don't count the new day until the sun actually rises. I've been home about an hour and once again, I don't feel like sleeping.

I've been thinking a lot lately about life and friends and the world in general. In the last two years or so my life has turned completely on its head and frankly, I love it. I don't understand it, and I think I manage to make a pretty good hash out of about 90% of what I do on the personal front, but for the most part I'm enjoying the ride.

If you'd told me two years ago that I'd make a bunch of friends by blindly joining a beach volleyball league, I would have probably laughed at you, that is, if I had managed to work up the nerve to talk to you in the first place. If you'd gone on to tell me that I would run a triathlon, let alone get hooked on the sport, I would probably have said something really snotty and walked away.

The reason I'm thinking about all this I guess is that today sucked. It really, really sucked. There was almost nothing about work that went right, I nearly had a high speed accident on the freeway, one thing after another. None of that matters, though. I had a birthday party to go to tonight. I got there late, but I got there. I didn't talk much, but I almost never do in big groups. I don't do well in them. I'm the guy who says things that no one hears, even when no one else is talking. Even this doesn't really matter though, because for me, just going means that I'm not quite the guy I used to be. There was a time, not all that long ago when I would never have gone. I probably wouldn't have responded to the invite, and if I had, it would have been even money that I'd get to the door of the restaurant and not be able to go in. I can't tell you how many times I've done that.

My dad asked me today at lunch what I was doing tonight. I think he meant, what workout was I going to do. I'm always going off to swim or run or hit the weight room during the week, but I said no, I have this birthday party to go to. he kind of laughed and said "remember when you never had anywhere to go?" I do. Believe me. It was a period that had to be worked through to find the other side, but now, with some distance, I can say that I stand in awe of the people who stuck by me during those times. My family, the SCU crew, all of 'em. It's humbling to know that no matter how invisible you feel, there's usually someone looking; that people have your back when you don't have any clue how to ask for their help. That you didn't have to is staggering.

I was told tonight that this blog is a bit negative. I know it is, but most of the time, I'm trying to be funny. I'm cursed/blessed with a dark, offbeat sense of humor. In conversation, I can usually make it work, but not always in print. With the exception of a few posts, I am being as snarky as you probably think I am.

But what does all this have to do with anything? Not much really, at least in the longer view. Nothing I say here is going to make me or you a faster racer, or make the next president any more likely to solve the world's problems than the last several.

What I can say, as I look back at the last couple of years, is that I've blundered my way onto a path that makes some sort of sense to me, in a really oblique sort of way. I've made new friends, lost track of a few, and covered a lot of ground with a dizzying array of steady and one-time traveling companions. I don't know where this road goes, or who will be standing there with me a little further on, but I am looking forward to finding out. I know where I've been, and there are lot of places I never want to see again, a lot of holes I'd like to see filled in and paved over, but there's not a lesson learned that I'd give up.

I'm bad at keeping in touch, at making the little gestures that keep friendships and relationships on track. I'm just not that detail oriented, though I wish I could be. I know I should work harder to keep up on the people in my life, however tangential, but I usually just can't do it. There's still a little bit of the maladjusted, dark as hell loner I used to be stashed away in corners I haven't found, but I'm looking. I'd like to be a better friend, brother, son than I am and I am working toward the goal, but it's tiring work, building something without a blueprint, so the days when you make a positive step without having to work at it are pretty special, especially when the odds were stacked against you.

I'm getting long winded now, so I'm going to stop before I repeat myself. I'm going to sign off with this poem, I guess it is, that I wrote right around the time I knew things had to change. Maybe one day there will be a sequel, but I think it will involve some running. Until next time, this is called Walk Again.

Standing. Toes over the edge. Staring
Rocks on the valley floor
A lost soul willing
A sick heart beating
Giving anything just to be good

Falling into sunrise
Bloody light burning my eyes
A vertigo I can no longer feel

If I could grow wings I'd fly away from all of this
But on my broken legs all I can do is crawl
The distance between where I need to be and where I am
Is greater than the strength of this boy to become a man

So with bleeding hands I pull myself into the sun
Over the rocks and across the glass horizon
With every drop of blood I leave my sins here in this dirt

Free fall. Through clouds and fire
Strip away the armor. Shed the fear
And show my scars to the world

If I could grow wings I'd fly away from all of this
But on my broken legs all I can do is crawl
The one I need to be waits for me
A shadow behind the sun
Waiting for me to heal. For the day that I stand tall
So that I might walk again for now I'll crawl

Sometimes I'm so smart I scare myself.

2008-08-25T21:52:00.001-07:00

Okay, I'm finally coming out of the coma. I'm only beginning, I think, to understand exactly what I put myself through this weekend. By way of initial context, I'll say this: It was all tri, all the time.

Friday night was the TNT swim at La Jolla Shores. 1 mile, no big deal, right? Right. Except...when I swim slow, I get bored. Actually, I don't have time to get bored. In the water, if there's no clock running, I'm about six years old. I spent my forty five minutes in the water diving into the giant school of bait fish just offshore, trying to touch the bottom and sprinting around after seal barks, all in between bouts of making sure newbies didn't drown. I don't know how far I actually swam, but it was probably well over a mile. My arms and shoulders were sore the next day and they never really are after Shores swims.

I actually stayed in and slept on Friday night, knowing that Saturday was Iron Mountain. Now, if you've read this blog for a while, you know that I have a history with this workout. It was my fourth time on the course, and my first going in without an injury. I was supposed to be helping TNT again, but frankly there isn't much to be done for them at this point.

Prophecy moment: Iris gave me a bumper sticker that reads "Warning! Training with hangover." This is awesome on many levels. Mainly, it's damn funny, but I wonder if it signifies that I've been sending the wrong message to the TNT folks. It seems that every time they've called me to help out with a Saturday workout, and I've done several this season, I show up hung over, on no sleep, or both. Of course, I still manage to grind out the workouts and I'm usually pretty quick about it, but still, definitely something belongs in the "Don't Try This At home" category.

I think the alumni volunteers matched or outnumbered the participants who showed up. We got going and the lead out volunteer, Greg, and I dropped the teamies pretty quick, so I topped to let several catch and pass me to try and bookend the faster team group. The thing is, they were only holding about 15 MPH in that part of the pack and the top half of the IM route is way too fun to ride that slow. I wound up waiting at the turnaround. I let most of the team pass me there while I goofed off and talked to Robbie. We finally started riding after giving the middle of the pack a goof four or five minute head start. That's when Robbie said "Let's catch Dana." I said, "Okay" and tore off. A long hard sprint later, I caught and passed Dana. At that point I realized that Robbie hadn't followed me. Bastard.

No turning back now, though, I was committed to seeing how far up in the line I could get. I eventually caught Katie and passed her, which I think made her angry, because she wound up chasing me all the way back up the hill. More on that in a bit.

If you haven't ridden or driven highway 67 southbound, the stretch from where it connects to Scripps-Poway Parkway to Willow Road in Lakeside, which is our second turnaround, is an insane downhill section. I hit 40 MPH this time, though I've gone as high as 45. Iris told me she hit 49, which is AWESOME!!!!

At the bottom, we have an aid station at the Circle K. This is where everyone regroups and I got to heckle Robbie for not keeping up with me. He patiently explained that yes, he caught Dana too, he just waitied for a big downhill, rather than waste a bunch of energy sprinting through Ramona. I felt stupid, because it was at that point that I remembered I was racing on Sunday morning.

So we set out for the last leg of the ride, which a multi-mile climb back to Poway Road. This where it got weird for me. I was tired anyway, so when my energy started flagging, I sang songs in my head to keep going. I went through some Springsteen (Thunder Road), Social Distortion (Highway 101) and then I settled on, of all things, John Denver. That's right, JOHN FREAKIN' DENVER!!! Wanna fight about it? Apparently, Take Me Home, Country Roads works like afterburners. Who knew?

This is also where I realized I think I made Katie mad passing her earlier. See, she wiped the road with me climbing Torrey last week, but this time I stayed ahead of her, though she wasn't far back. I don't know, but I think she was holding back, letting me win, but knowing all the while that I would pay for it. I know this because back at the trail head, when I changed into run gear and took off up the hill, she and Dana and Tim went and did the ride again.

I had thought about going with them, but seeing as I was racing on Sunday morning, I decided to limit myself to the official workout, which was the 30 mile ride with 2274 feet of climbing, followed by a 3 mile trail run up the side of the mountain. You can actually go 6 miles if you go to the top, but I was being smart remember? I was saving something for the race, so I only went to the T junction. About halfway up, I realized that I hadn't done a trail run since I hurt my foot back in February. That's right, I picked pretty much the hardest one you can do to test the waters. That's me, Ryan Mashburn, Super Genius.

I felt a little better when Brian, who was also doing the race on Sunday, showed up at the T. At least I wasn't being dumb alone.

We grabbed lunch after the workout and it was at about 2:30 in the hamburger factory, in Poway, that Brian and I remembered we had to be in Imperial Beach, which is basically Mexico, by 4 to get our packets. We made it as they were packing up the expo.

Saturday night was a fundraiser where I was supposed to go for an hour or so, have a beer or two and then get some sleep. Four and half hours later I'm shooting pool with Iris and Melinda, several more than two beers into the night, thanks to Trent and Alan, and I have a stake in Brian, who I helped Iris buy at the singles auction. If you've got any suggestions on what we should do with him, hit the comment board.

So at 12:45 as I'm walking four blocks in the wrong direction from my car to get Melinda back to hers, I'm beginning to think I should revise my race goals for IB.

At 1:30AM, as I set the alarm for 4:30, I thought I may have made a, shall we say, tactical misstep, in my handlling of Saturday, which is when someone started backing heavy trucks around in one of the construction sites around my neighborhood. Beep beep beep rev. Repeat. Until 2AM, when I finally nodded off.

5AM Sunday. My text to Brian: "We are stupid. I've decided this." He agreed.

As I was setting up my transition area, someone asked me if the swim was still going to happen. Given that this was a triathlon, I said "I think so, why?" Apparently, the beach had been closed for a few days leading up to the race due to high bacteria levels. Wow, good thing I had all that beer in my system. Alcohol kills germs, right?

Not much to report on the swim, except that the water was disgusting and the visibility was worse.

Running out of T1, I heard someone yell my name and looked over to see Denner shouting at me from his seat atop a bike trainer. I spent the first mile or so of the bike ride wondering why the hell he was on a trainer in the transition area. My morning was definitely starting to rule.

I powered through the ride as best I could, though my legs felt like, I don't know, similes fail me. They felt like crap. I felt like crap. Thank god it was only 9 miles. I know 'cuz I read my t-shirt this time. I was so zonked though that even though I had my feet on top of my shoes coming into the home stretch, I nearly powered through the dismount line. Hopping off the bike as it was moving way too fast, I hit the brake to slow down, only I hit the front brake, causing the bike to endo with me in midair and slapping down onto the pavement in my bare feet. Somehow, I didn't break an ankle or drop my bike, though I got a great agonized "oohhh!" out of the crowd. And I made the dismount line. Yay! So into T2 I went.

That run sucked. How much did it suck? There are not yet computers powerful enough to calculate the magnitude of the suck. And I ran the whole 5K in under 30, but I didn't enjoy it damn you!

When I passed Greg on the course he asked how I was feeling and I said, "This sucks!" He laughed at me and we ran on. He was heading into the turnaround and I had already gone through it. I found out after the race, however, that after he laughed at me, he barfed. So see, that run sucked! It even sucked for the guy who wasn't hung over and running on 3 hours sleep the day after Iron Mountain.

Thankfully, after the race we got to go to Jim's house and eat heaping piles of awesome food. Thank you Denner for showing me that you don't need a fork to eat mac and cheese. You are correct that it's just more efficient, not to mention visceral to just shovel it in by hand.

By the time I got home Sunday night, I was so tired I don't think I knew my name anymore. I fell asleep in the shower. I finally plonked my worn out carcass into bed around 10:30, and I barely made it past turning off the light. Score! Sleep. Finally, sweet holy blessed sleep. And I have no idea whether the jackass in the truck was working last night.

My First Aquathlon...ah, Crap...

2008-08-21T21:21:00.000-07:00

So I haven't blogged much about the cool stuff I do with the tri club since I became an official member. That's because, since I became an official member, I have managed to attend exactly ONE function. That was last Saturday's Bog Moon swim. My attendance at that was due more to stubbornness and an unwillingness to fall into a coma (see Randomfest).

Tonight was the monthly aquathlon, and I was registered. The new tri bag was packed and next to my desk. I was psyched.

What's an aquathlon, you ask? It's a triathlon, but without the bike part. This is as opposed to a duathlon, which is a triathlon minus the swim. Still with me? Anyway, I was all set to race.

This brings me back to the fact that I have done next to nothing with the tri club. Every time I get all set to do a club race, or go to a club function, something gets in the way. Today it was computers. Yes, computers. Specifically, the computers we make at work.

Without going into technical detail, I've been on this for two weeks and I'm seriously starting to wonder what the Amish know that I don't. Churning butter and tilting up barns is starting to sound way cooler than figuring out why a CPU driver and a dual core optimization utility won't play nice together. Do you ever have a moment where you're holding a bottle of water, looking at it and focusing all your energy, thinking, "Please be vodka. Please be vodka."? Yeah, that's been my two weeks.

No aquathlon for Ryan, just quality time with a series of hardware drivers and brain drain. Yippee! Now where do I get a coat with wooden peg fasteners and a horse drawn buggy?

RANDOMFEST!!!!!!

2008-08-17T22:52:00.000-07:00

So, I don't know about you, but my weekend involved 3 tribute bands, 2.75 miles of swimming (.25 of which were in my underwear with a glow stick tied around my neck), about that much running, climbing Torrey Pines and getting bit by a dog. How'd you do?

Starting with Friday night and my Cove swim. I only did a half mile, since I was totally phoning it in. The first quarter was a PR though, at 5:59. Then it was 20 minutes at the buoy talking to Marty and back in. Working hard, I tell ya.

After a shower, it was off to Cane's for a night of cover band awesomeness. That's right, a triple bill, for only $12 bucks, we got to see fake Springsteen, the fake Stones and fake Journey, wait, check that, we got to see Lights, the premier Journey tribute band, as they introduced themselves. Actually, they were almost as good as the real Journey, who I have seen in concert, to my eternal shame. About halfway through their set, the singer for Lights announced that they will be opening for Styx in Newport Beach in September. Here's a question, how far have you fallen as a headliner when your contempraries' tribute bands are opening for you? Serves them right for inflicting Lady on the world. And for not playing Mr. Roboto when I saw them this summer. Damn it, that still makes me mad.

All in all, apart from the fake Stones, who sucked like brand new vacuum cleaners, it was totally worth the cash. And our waitress was attentive, and hot, so that was good, though it lead to more beer consumption than I'd planned. Home at 2AM to pack for:

Saturday, and Katie's insanity workout. Essentially, this was supposed to be an olympic tri. We did a mile swim from the Shores. I saw a 4 foot leopard shark and my first jellyfish of the year. Cool. Switched to the bike and rode up to UCSD (sucked) and then down Torrey to Coast Highway and up to Moonlight Beach, where who did we find? The Pac Grove team, that's who. They were one round into their full transition practice, and this was at 10AM. They started at 7. We hung out, bummed some SAG supplies and took off back to climb Torrey (sucked). Katie dusted me up the hill, of course, she's half my size. Apparently tiny women can climb hills on bikes faster than 200 pound guys. Who'd a thunk?

At the top of the hill, I caught every red light between the crest and the turn back to the Shores descent (way effin' fun).

Switch to the run and away we go. Started smooth, but I got a leg cramp and stopped to stretch. Katie kept going. I ran on once I loosened up. Running through the neighborhood past the tennis club, I saw a guy talking to a contractor. The guy had a dog on a leash. It was a wheaten terrier, just like the one we had when I was a kid. Mean little....but I digress. As I ran by, I said hi. The dog leaned in for a sniff and BAM! sunk his little shaggy demon teeth into my leg. Took a big chunk out of my tri shorts and left a nice meaty bite mark on my quad. I think it was because it had been shaved and didn't like me looking at it. Either that or its little terrier brain was so compressed from gernerations of inbreeding that...aw screw it. Anyway, Cujo kinda took the wind out of my sails. I ran a little more, but I was bleeding and my leg was throbbing, so I pulled the ripcord and bailed out.

Had some personal business to take care of after the session, so I got back to the Shores for Cassi's birthday about four hours late. Unfortunately, none of my personal business involved a nap, so I got there with all my swim gear, wetsuit, clear goggles (it's night time), swim cap, body glide...all of it...except trunks. Have you ever tried pulling a triathlon wetsuit on over a pair of cotton boxer briefs? Not pleasant, I tell you. Not freakin' pleasant. Stupid tri club intiation rituals...damn it...wasn't supposed to...first rule of tri club is...well, no drafting, but the second rule of tri club...forget it. I'm in enough trouble.

On with the glow stick and into the Pacific for a quick 800M (or so they said). Fun time, swimming with a fishing lure tied to your ass. But it was really cool to look up and see this line of glow sticks cruising through the water.

Home by 10:30. What a lame-o, right? Well yeah. But I stayed up 'til midnight, so there.

Today was a wetsuit-free mile at the Cove, which was cool, except for the freakish windswell that kept putting the ocean in the wrong place. My right arm was useless for a quarter mile. Either the wave broke on top of my stroke, or it went out from under me and I fell onto my side in the trough. I've still got boat legs.

Can't wait to see what the week brings.

Untitled.

2008-08-14T23:14:00.000-07:00

Cut to the Jazz Man, standing alone on a street corner under an orange sodium light. Fedora slung low, his pinstripe suit glistening with a vaguely incandescent rain. His muted trumpet lost to the city traffic.

Cars slide by, the wet pavement trying in vain to shush the unmuffled exhaust and the blaring thump of hip-hop and techno. The trumpet fills the void between the beats, like the past reaching out and brushing its cold fingers along the bottoms of your bare feet. The drivers don't even know it, but they're driving over someone's grave.

The oily slick on the street reflects scattershot glimpses of undercarriage neon. The Jazz Man's eyes stay closed. He doesn't need to see it anyway. He knows how far he's come, as his wrinkled but not yet arthritic fingers work the valves and his creaky wrist pulls at the mute.

Occasionally, someone walks by, but there's no case for spare change. This is a solo for the night, for whoever happens by. For the Jazz Man and by the Jazz Man, though if you asked him, he'd only say it was jazz, as though it wrote itself out of the ether and just took hold, focusing through the bell of a horn that has seen more years than most.

More cars, more bass. More voices. One sided conversations rattle and bounce by as the bars close and he adjusts his song, adding little flourishes, increasing the tempo. Lively and yet still somehow mournful. A song that knows something you don't.

People walk by. Some stop to listen, then drift away. Fading back into the night carrying little pieces of the song with them and dreaming, for reasons they don't understand, of private eyes smoking in dim hotel bars and flashbulbs popping and glamorous women smoking cigarettes from slim silver cases. Maybe they hum a few notes before they drift off, wondering where they heard that song.

The Jazz Man's tune slows as the city heads toward sleep. There are fewer cars on the road, fewer voices, lonelier footsteps. The song slows down, then finally whispers to a stop. The Jazz Man opens his eyes and walks, his suit still shiny with rain, into the night.

It's midnight, why am I blogging?

2008-08-14T00:14:00.000-07:00

Frankly it's because I don't think I'll be sleeping any time soon. This despite the fact that I spent the latter half of today feeling a lot like I spent the first half drinking cheap corn whiskey out of mason jar filled with old cigarette butts. I barely made it through dinner.

I've been working out a lot lately but balancing that with eating badly and drinking too much. Welcome to my half-iron training plan. Half-assed is a viable description, maybe even half-witted. Certainly haphazard. Okay, enough of that.

It's been a while since we visited the Big Book of Stupid Things Ryan Does. For tonight's reading, we're going to start with last Friday night, at the wine, cheese and chocolate party. I actually got through it unscathed, without even reaching for an emergency beer, though I did get into a rather elliptical (and drunkenly stationary) political argument. Thankfully, other, more intoxicated people were there to break things up by trying far harder than I was to be coherent. I beat it before they figured out how to turn on the karaoke machine.

Made it home around 1AM, tried unsuccessfully to sleep. Valuable lesson learned: When drinking wine and eating chocolate and carb-laden crakers, your body gets a bit jacked up. When you do sleep, your dreams are jittery and Tarantino-like. Lots of jump cuts and marginal acting. Surreal montages of dancing costumed characters like the ones at Disneyland only creepier. But I digress.

I finally entered this, let's call it a fugue state, at about 3AM. Just in time to have the alarm go off at 6 so I could head down to Coronado and help the TNT squad learn to grab water bottles while cycling. Valuable lesson learned: When newbies unload their used bottles, check their hand position and be ready to duck.

After the TNTers wrapped up, it was time to do my training for the day, which consisted of crashing Katie's far gnarlier than anticipated workout. Stay off the Strand at 1PM. And definitely at 3. Trust me. Even without sweating out red wine, it sucks when you get blown out of your aero bars. And the running is best left undiscussed.

Needless to say, when I made it home around 7PM I was largely non-functional.

Sleep helped, though I crashed right through my planned Sunday surf session. What's one more week's worth of dust on the board? Did manage a cove swim, though not the planned 2-miler. (There's always this week, right?) And then it was off to meet Mark for a beer...er, Mark and Tauni for four pitchers...

Monday sucked. And the visit to UCLA didn't help matters. Have I ever mentioned my irrational loathing of the City of Angels? Another post entirely.

Skip forward to last night and the 80's cover band at the House of Blues. How do you go wrong with a fat bassist in a Devo costume, a singer dressed like Spiccoli (complete with white zinc on the nose) and a wannabe Slash on lead guitar? You just can't, I tell ya. You just can't. Especially when they know Don't Stop Believin' AND Come On Eileen. Oh, and we got free tickets to see Dramarama. Even though the cover guys played Anything, Anything, so I get to be all blase about it and compare the originals to their imitators. Hope they bring their A game.

Again, too much beer and a sketchy salad led to weird dreams and not enough sleep, so of course I got up and joined Brian and the gang for a swim this morning. I missed the bat rays, but I did see a seal. And I swam like I was still drunk. Brian, you couldn't stay in my slipstream because it was a moving target. I blame the currents. Yeah. Currents. Not the Red Trolley. What would a trolley be doing in the Cove anyway?

I'll close with this: I got a call today from a client telling me that the audio on their main display had gone out. I tried everything I could think of to fix it remotely. I rebooted their computers. I had the guy on site check the TV volume and make sure no one had turned it down. I read PC log files looking for weird cryptic error codes. Finally, I gave up and drove down to El Cajon to see for myself. Guess what? They had unplugged the #$%#!@ speaker.

And curtain.

Following Up

2008-08-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

After the last post, I ran across this article...

Sen. Chambers Hopes Lawsuit Against God Carries Real Lesson

Enjoy.

What I'm Frightened Of...

2008-08-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: This is dark. It's angry. If you're having a good day, you probably don't want to read it. I'm posting it anyway.

I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a few years now, though to be honest I usually try and stamp out this train of thought when it starts up. I tend to find it useless. The thing is, it’s all boiled over lately and I need to write this down, if for no other reason than because I need it out of my head.

It’s been a while since I’ve believed in God. Not the “is there or isn’t there” kind of belief. Frankly, I don’t think about that all that much because even if there is a God, I don’t believe in him. I say that in the sense that I wouldn’t follow God into battle. I wouldn’t take an order. I wouldn’t put my trust in God any more than I would in a hungry grizzly bear.

People have a tendency to ascribe their victories to God’s preference, to bury their disappointments in God’s will. As the song says, “what I’m frightened of / is that they call it God’s love.” When I achieve something I’ve worked for, when I see a blind man skiing or a one legged man racing a triathlon or a teenager giving up summer break to build houses for flood victims, I don’t see God. I see the power and spirit of the individual. Indomitable will and altruism are human traits that developed over the eons along with consciousness and opposable thumbs and to give credit for them to anything other than the individuals wielding them is to dilute them.

At the same time, any of the thousand minor tragedies that befall us over the course of our lives don’t fare any better under the guise of the divine plan. What possible utility could the failure of a business, the dissolution of a marriage, the death of a hamster, or the outcome of a boxing match have to God’s overarching vision of Creation? I guess you could write this off as one of those crazy butterfly wing flap causes hurricane things, but that’s reaching really far. The idea that God designed these events as tests to help us better ourselves and to lead lives that better conform to his rules makes me a little sick. This is God as costumed super-villain, the master manipulator pulling strings to make sure you dance to his tune. And what good is that?

Looking around the world, I think that God, at best, is asleep at the wheel. Whether the heavens are presided over by a bearded man in a robe, or by a pantheon of incestuous sociopaths, to acknowledge the existence of either is to acknowledge just how spectacularly they fail to fill the job description. When the rapture comes, who exactly is getting picked up? The zealots who shoot abortion doctors? Or will it be the hand of Allah that purges the earth of infidels in a wave of righteous fire? And who gets the asbestos underwear, the guys recruiting suicide bombers? Frankly, if either is right, then the higher powers might as well get on with it. Pick up their jacks and go home so the rest of us can learn the new rules and start living.

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe God does have a plan, but it can only be seen at some far removed, macro level. But then again, they say the devil is in the details. So there you go. That’s exactly the problem. The details are what affect us all. It’s the little things that get under your skin, that keep you up at night, and that help you sleep easier. It isn’t the macro stuff. That’s all too big, too far removed. You can write a check or volunteer and feel better about the big stuff, but you can only work your way through the money problems, the family dramas and the broken bones. There’s no higher power help there. It’s all time and sweat. So if the devil’s in the details, then only your hard work can get you past him.

I’ve lived through my stretches of darkness, the times when even if the light at the end of the tunnel is a train, you don’t mind, because at least it’ll be bright for a while. I’ve split my knuckles open on solid core doors and left holes in my share of walls. I’ve had the meltdown days when I can’t do anything but sit shaking on the floor of my garage with the lights off. In every case, I’ve managed to find the thread, however small, however translucent, that leads to the exit door.

The problem is, it’s only every so often that you get through that door with all your fingers and toes. And even when you’re back in the sun, there’s always another trap door there waiting to pull you under again. You can step over and around, but it’s the ones that get the people closest to you that leave you feeling powerless, like you want to dive in after them with a climbing rope on your shoulder but you’ve got nothing to tie off to. There’s nothing you can do. So is that part of the plan? Be your brother’s keeper, expect when it suits the overseer to make it impossible? I’m sorry, but if that’s what God wants, God can go to Hell.

Holy Crap, What Day Is It Agian?

2008-08-03T22:49:00.000-07:00

So it's August now, and holy hell, where has the summer gone? I have had absolutely zero free time lately thanks to work and the impending buyout/merger that has me learning the systems and, let's call them idiosyncrasies, of another company. Hopefully it'll all go through, but that's another bottle of bourbon entirely.

I ran two tris in July, Carlsbad Sprint and Solana Beach Sprint. Both were solid races for me, except for the swims, which were surf entry. It's been too long since the races to bother with a full recap, but let me say this: if you're going to do a sprint, make sure you know what the distances are. Sure, the run is always 5K, but but you know, when the swim and bike turn out to be twice as long as you thought, it kinda takes the wind out of your sails. And all you had to do was read the stupid t-shirt they gave you. Oh yeah, and don't ride Del Dios the day before a race. If you do, you might as well go out drinking and cap it all off. Even a 9-mile ride hurts at that point.

So what's next?

Well, Pac Grove is coming up. I just booked the hotel room.

And oh yeah, I signed up for Longhorn Half. So now I have 60 days to get my half marathon run back. Oh joy, oh rapture. Running. Yay.

Grrrr......

2008-07-22T22:42:00.000-07:00

I've been quiet for a while. Things have been rough. Work, mostly, but life in general have been just about all I can handle for a while. I haven't been sleeping. Now, I've been an insomniac since I was in junior high, so running on three hours' sleep a night is nothing new. There was even a period in college, about two weeks, where I went sleepless or maybe an hour a night. That was a scary time, real Fight Club territory, except I couldn't afford an apartment full of Ikea crap to blow up.

Lately it isn't insomnia, precisely. I could very easily go to sleep. I tend to be exhausted by the time midnight rolls around, but I keep the lights on. The thing is, I don't want to sleep. It's not that I'm that angst filled, or that I can't slow my mind down. It's just that sleeping means morning will get here that much sooner and frankly, I want to put it off.

You know that cliche about an iron fist inside a velvet glove? Well lately it's more like a hand grenade in a tube sock. And someone just hits you with it until it goes off. Mornings tend to feel like something from a video clip show where a small child hits you in the nuts with a comical object, except that the clip you're in, as much as everyone laughs, doesn't win the prize money. That goes to the cat falling into the dryer.

One of the guys at work built a database of history trivia to use on our signage displays and the other day it ran a nifty factoid: The guy who figured out grapeshot cartridges for cannons was named Sir Henry Shrapnel. I haven't hit up Wikipedia to see if this true or not, but it feels just absurd enough to be right.

That's enough for now. I leave you with the lyrics to the song I use to get myself psyched up to go once more into the breach. The band is Rise Against.

Behind Closed Doors

Chairs thrown and tables toppled,
Hands armed with broken bottles,
Standing no chance to win but,
We're not running, we're not running.

There's a point I think we're missing,
It's in the air we raise our fists in,
In the smiles we cast each other,
My sister, my brother.

About the time we gave up hoping
We'd ever find these locks still open,
Stumbling on stones unturned,
The hurt we feel, we all have earned.

The lines we cross in search of change,
but all they see is treason.

Although we have no obligation to stay alive
On broken backs we beg for mercy, we will survive
(Break out) I won't be left here
Behind closed doors.

Bonfires burn like beacons,
Guiding the lost and weakened.
Flames dance on crashing waves,
Guiding ships who've gone astray

Time out, let's stop and think this through,
We've all got better things to do,
Than talk in circles, run in place,
Answers {are} inches from our face.

Although we have no obligation to stay alive
On broken backs we beg for mercy, we will survive
(Break out) I won't be left here
Behind closed doors.

Black eyes, broken fingers,
Blood drips and I let it run
down my lips into my swollen gums.
When hope is non-existent,
Our instincts all scream "Run",
We never turn our backs or even bite our tongues.

Although we have no obligation to stay alive
On broken backs we beg for mercy, we will survive
(Break out) I won't be left here
Behind closed doors.

Best Book About The Apocalypse Ever...

2008-07-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

It's a couple of years old, so this isn't news, but if you haven't, go out and get a copy of The Brief History of the Dead, by Kevin Brockmeier. It's scary good. Totally hypnotic and you can't stop reading it.

Ice and snow and mysterious shrinking cities, all tied to the radio on the far side of the penguin rookery. I don't want to say too much more, in case any of you take my advice, because to describe it would be to give it away.

If you've ever wondered what happens after you die, I think I like his idea.

Oh yeah, and Carlsbad tri was this weekend. I'll write about it later on. Gotta go to bed now.

A time to...whatever...

2008-07-09T23:06:00.000-07:00

Going up, the speed at which you can escape the pull of Earth’s gravity is called escape velocity. In the other direction, terminal velocity. At that point, pulling the ripcord will only mean that you were polite enough to cover your stain.

Up. Down. Direction the difference between cruise missile and crater. The velocity stays the same. Constant. Driving. Exhausting.

Relentless.

And that’s me. Coffeed. Coked. Rock Starred. Cranked and dumb-smiling. Switched on and waiting for the tank to run dry.

Night falls and I hang up the phone. Grab another. Switch from email to text. Shift gears but never, ever slow down.

To slow down is to invite thought. To think is to perceive and that’s just a way to poke a hole in the carefully constructed haze of advertising and artifice behind which I hide from the things that annoy me.

My pain threshold, explored....

2008-07-02T22:59:00.000-07:00

I'm going to count this as my San Diego International recap. And I'll get to it after I switch the stereo from the DVD feed. Who would have thought that the end credits of Ghost Rider would have such annoying music? Seriously, it's like nails on a blackboard remixed by Jay-Z. From the techno/industrial cover of Ghost Riders in the Sky (Get it?) to..oh, never mind. This doesn't mean anything.

Sidebar: Fun drinking game: Watch Ghost Rider and take a shot every time Eva Mendes delivers a line like she's made of plastic.

So, back to the race.

I can't believe I know this many people who are willing to get up at 4 in the morning on a Sunday and put on spandex.

Interesting experience, this one. I realized that I've come a long way because I wasn't nervous. I didn't fuss with my bag all night and I wasn't worried about forgetting anything.

I had two goals going into the race:

1. Run the entire course. No walk breaks.
2. Finish without feeling like I could have done more.

I managed both. Yes, you heard that right, I ran the whole 10K. My pace was close to 10:30 per mile, but screw it, man. I haven't managed to run the entire course since Mission Bay last October. I wasn't even limping when I got done.

I think I'm capable of going faster, but that's for another race. For this one, I'll take the lessons, and the proof that I might actually get my run back.

I hit the swim feeling good. It was a floating start, only my second time doing that, but I reaffirmed my belief that it is the coolest way to start a tri. Straight, u-shaped course, and only 1,000 meters. I was out of the water in 14.47, which was a little slower than I wanted, but still not too bad.

My first indication that I was going to have a good race was when I ran into T1. Yes, I ran into T1. I didn't limp. My foot didn't hurt. I ran. I hit the bike with a big boost, feeling good.

The bike went well, though I wish I had been able to preview the whole course. I only rode from the transition area to the Navy gate before the race. That's the big hill, but I wasn't quite ready for the tail end past the cemetary and down to Cabrillo Monument, twice. I also enjoyed passing people who were dressed for more serious racing than I will ever contemplate. Seriously, Team Skyfuel, lighten up and work on your drafting/passing rules. That, or stop selling your jerseys to newbies at the expo.

I got a little more tired than I expected on the ride and had to take some of the hills a little slower than I wanted to, but I was able to keep my speed up above single digits pretty much the whole way. I think I dropped into the 9s once or twice. I definitely need to fix my dang cadence sensor though. I miss that. I didn't realize how dependent I am on it.

I was ready for T2, with my feet out of the shoes and coasting down the hill to the dismount line when I saw the guy in my line go down. I got scared for a second because he was disoriented and having trouble picking up his bike. Someone was next to me, so I wasn't going around, but he got it together and I was able to dismount smoothly.

Through T2 and out onto the run, where I had my first moment of doubt. About a quarter mile onto the course, my calves were spasming and making me shuffle. Someone ran by me, slapped my shoulder and told me I was looking strong. How bad did I really look, I wonder? I kept running, gritting my teeth until Jay caught me. We ran most of the course together, except that he got a burst at the finish and left me behind just before the chute. I tried to keep up, but I wasn't going any faster. Nice work, man, and thanks for the pacing help.

It took until the middle of mile two for the cramps to work out, but they did pass, which means I need to do some bricks, but my nutrition and hydration held up. I only used two water bottles on the bike. One with water and one with 2 tabs of Nuun and 2 scoops of Carbo-pro. I was a little worried that it wouldn't be enough. I usually have a couple of Gus, but I left them behind to try this method. It worked. I love it, too. No trash, no choking down weird pasty stuff.

My foot was sore as hell all through the run, but it stayed loose and the pain hasn't stuck. I guess now I just need to get off my lazy butt and train my run.

The run at this race is great. Flat and fast (if you're into that sort of thing) and there's lots of spectator participation. The older lady on the bike who kept riding 100 yards ahead of us and saying "Damn, you caught me." was awesome. Seriously, she kept it up for at least two miles. It never got old. Then there was the, let's say special, homeless guy who yelled at every runner going by, calling us by race number. "Go 307!" He was loud. He had an appreciative audience. He had a balance problem. I was a little worried that he would fall into the harbor, but he hung in there.

I had a fun moment at the last aid station, when the volunteers asked if we wanted to be splashed. I said yes, and they promptly threw two cups of water into my eyes. It sheeted all over my glasses and I had to take them off. Then there was the lovely combo of harbor water slime, sweat and coppertone sport that surprisingly, doesn't feel very good underneath your contacts. I couldn't see a damn thing, and I gave serious thought to scratching out my eyes.

The finish line was great, except that I totally spaced on the beer garden. Oh well, put that in the race notes for next year.

I feel so much better now.

2008-06-24T14:15:00.001-07:00

Turns out that the Earth is not in danger of being swallowed up by a precision engineered, man-made black hole that stinks of exotic cheese and Gauloise cigarettes.

That's right, the BBC says that the Large Hadron Collider opening soon on the Swiss-French border won't kill us all.

"Critics have previously raised concerns that the production of weird hypothetical particles called strangelets in the LHC could trigger the mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter - transforming the Earth into a hot, dead lump."

At least it'll probably be a dry heat, right? But it's okay, because the reality is that there's no conceivable danger that it'll happen. In the words of the report:

"Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments - and the planet still exists."

So there.

I love this stuff.

If you want to, read the full article.

What doesn't kill the planet...probably still kills the planet.

2008-06-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

Bio-diesel burners beware. Ethanol producers, stop what you're doing. Step away from the corn...

You are killing the Gulf of Mexico.

You bastards.

Okay, in all fairness, it's really just the flooding speeding things up, but hey, why not sensationailze?

Vignettes...

2008-06-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

This post is really just an excuse to log into Blogger and write something, since I haven't in a while. I'm not going to explain it.
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If you're on the Atkins diet, can you use Carbo-Pro as race fuel?
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A week or two ago, someone told me that I don't listen to music that she'd listen to in public. I spent a while wondering what exactly this meant. I mean sure, my "Variations on Mmmbop" CD might be a bit embarrassing, but trust me, you've got to hear the Wu Tang version.
-----------------
Tonight we were swimming at the cove and I went without a wetsuit for the second time this year, if you count Lavaman. I haven't done the Cove without the benefit of neoprene in a while and I have to say, I had completely forgotten about the scratchy, gloopy awesomeness that is stroking barechested through a stand of kelp. Don't believe me? Try this: grab some 80 grit sandpaper, slide it through a can of Crisco and rub it across your nipples. Trust me, it'll be fun.
-----------------
Went to the doctor today to follow up on the foot, which has been backsliding lately into the painful side of things, but the other side of the foot hurts now, so that's something. Anyway, it's been hurting and I thought that I had maybe reinjured it. So I went to see the doc and he grabbed my foot and squeezed it. It went something like this:

"Does this hurt?"

"No."

"Then it's probably not fractured."

"So what do I do about running?"

"You'll have to just work through it."

Yes, that's right, my doctor's advice was to man up.
----------------
Back to the Cove tonight, I swam right over a school (pod, squadron, buttload of?) bat rays. There had to have been 15 or 20 of them. I thought they were awesome, four or six feet below me. The one that was a foot away...it scared the crap out of me. I think I screamed in the water.
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If someone asks you to play Sharks and Minnows, it's a fun pool game. If they ask you to play Sharks and Seals, you'll need a spoon...or a running start.
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luxurious repl1ca bl0g p0st

2008-05-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

Is there any word in the English language that needs to be stripped from the lexicon more than luxurious? And luxury? I mean, seriously, I've been updating the company spam filter for the last eight years and it keeps showing up tied to fake watches, knockoff purses and penis pills. Yeah, luxury penis pills. Apparently they're coated in gold-leaf velour or something.

I can't even see a luxury car ad on TV without wanting to sit up and shout "SPAM!" as I dive for the remote.

So there. We should all get together and ban the word luxury and all its spinoffs. It has outlived its utility.

And by the way, if the medical industry ever does try and go online, those cats are screwed. Nothing they can do will get them into the world's inboxes.

That's my random observation for the day.

So there is justice in the world...

2008-05-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

Just as I was beginning to lose all hope in a just and ordered universe presided over by a benevolent superbeing, this happened:

** Pop mogul gets 25 years for fraud **
Lou Pearlman, who created Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, is sentenced to 25 years in prison for a $300m fraud.

Sadly, the indictment fails to cover the actual creation of said boy bands, but hey, they had to get Al Capone on tax evasion, so we'll take what we can get.

Going Off Topic

2008-05-17T01:26:00.000-07:00

Frankly, I'm posting this because I'm bored. I've had a lot on my mind lately and I'm using my keyboard to work through it all. I finished the first draft of the story below a couple of months back. I've been tinkering with it ever since, and I've got a draft that I like now. That's about all I'm gonna say. The first page is posted here. If you want to, you can get the whole thing here.

In From The Cold

It’s a strange feeling, like being rudderless in a windy harbor. You watch people moving by you, going about their lives like there’s nothing wrong with the world and you know that you can never be like them. You’re on the outside, a part of something, but not anything that the ones on the inside would recognize.

You’re too far gone. Too far into the wilderness. So you stand there, hands in your coat pockets, breathing out contrails they slide by, laughing, arm in arm on their way to brightly lit homes and restaurants with high-end atmosphere and tiny food. You tell yourself it’s all in the name of King and Country, that you’re fighting the good fight, but in the end you know it’s a lie.

You want a brightly lit home. A meal in an atmospheric restaurant. A hand to hold. Something to tell you that in the end it’s all worth it. That there’s more than a gold watch or a black star on a white marble wall waiting for you.

So what do you do? You head to a safe place. A smoky bar where no one will know your face. Bourbon. Neat.

Wildflower: How the worst swim of my life turned into the best one, or dammit, why did I forget the safe word?

2008-05-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

I wrote this whole huge report and realized I forgot my times, so here they are, for the short attention span theater crowd:

Overall: 1333 of 2390 ranked
Division Rank, M30-34: 170 of 241 ranked
Finish Time: 03:17:11
Swim: 00:26:11
Division/Overall: 67/589
T1 00:03:49
Bike: 01:32:22
Division/Overall: 126/875
T2 00:02:37
Run: 01:12:09
Division/Overall: 227/2007

And now for the story.

Unlike Denner, who broke his WF post into the race report and the overall weekend impressions, I'm just gonna lump it all together, since for me the experience and the race are all one and the same.

It all started at Costco...Man if I had a nickel for every time...no, not gonna do that.

Anyway, Brian picked up the RV and we met on Wednesday night to load up and make the communal food run. Turns out that running thorugh a warehouse full of food with no menu plan and 8 triathletes who haven't had dinner leads to madness. $450 bucks later we made it out (without the giant can of Bueno! cheez sauce, which still pisses me off.).

Thursday morning, it was into the RV and off to Wildflower we go, but a couple of hours into the ride, this is pretty much how it looked:

It was all uneventful, until Brian clipped the crippled guy. Well, his truck. It was too funny, watching this guy pull a wheelchair from his extended cab and thinking "Christ, what a drama queen," only to find that he only had one leg and one the foot he had was a bootie like they put on you when you break your foot.

Long story short, he had paint transfer on the bumper. Paul got a good shot of Jason doing some ad hoc car repair.

Then there were the three highway patrol cruisers. Most memorable moment: Brian's field sobriety test, which he passed once they explained the rules, followed by the following exchange:

Cop: Sir, I don't think you're under the influence. So, did you hit him intentionally?

Brian: Um, no.

Cop: You mean you didn't try to hit him and only manage to scrape the back corner of his bumper.

Brian: Um, no.

Cop: Okay.

It was a long hour and a half in Valencia, but then we were back on the road. We finally made it to Lake San Antonio around 6PM and immediately, Scott broke out the tequila. The night went from there.

Yes, Allison, we see you.

Friday:

Preview day. We rode down to transition, which was fascinating. Acres and acres of empty racks.

From there it was off and up Lynch Hill, which Coach Gurujan had told us was way harder and longer than Torrey Pines. After the first time up, it didn't seem so bad, and we took off out along the course, which was beautiful.

You belong, among the wildflowers...

And then it was packet pickup and back to camp to hang out and watch the long coursers get ready.

Saturday:

The long course and the mountain bike sprint. Same course, not quite the same time, but still a bit of NASCAR wreck thrill when the fast guys on mountain bikes were sharing the chute with the slow long coursers. I had to wonder for a few minutes whose blood I'd be running through on Sunday. I only saw a couple of guys bump shoulders and hit sandbags, but incredibly, no one went down. The crew went back to camp to wait for our long course buds to run by, but I had to wait for Ben to finish the MB race. Which was cool because I got to see this:

Yes, that's a fox.

Shortly thereafter, Ben:

Sorry buddy, you got beat by the furry.

I'm gonna skip over the expo and the swim preview and get right to:

Sunday: Race Day

So first of all, the TriCal folks are all Christians, and the race starts after church, so my wave didn't go off until 9:25AM. Jeez, but even so, it was hte usual race morning jitters. I honestly wasn't feeling it at all, especially when I got to transition and found someone racked in my spot. And, this was the view of the bike out from my rack:

After milling about for an hour or so, it was time to go and get in line. I seeded myself well and got off to a clean start on the swim, but that was about all that went right. A couple of hundred yards in, my goggles fogged to full opaque and I had to stop to clear them. A minute or two later, again. I cleared them again and took off swimming, but I just didn't feel it. My rhythm sucked, my arms felt like wood and about every other breath I got a mouth full of diesel, I mean lake water. I got lost twice and had to stop to figure out if I was anywhere near the course. I just knew I was going to finish the swim with a 40 minute time or something otherwise ridiculously out of character for me. When I took a split on the Timex as I hit the ramp, I was convinced it was broken. It read 26:58, which is about the fastest I've ever gone. My official time was 26:11, so I did something right, but I'm damned if I know what it was.

Up the ramp and into T1. On the way, I heard my name and there were Pat, Erin and maybe Damien (I was the rocket, so I don't know who exactly, sorry.). It was awesome to see them so early in the race. It reminded that, damn it all, I was racing.

I intentionally took some extra time in T1, so that I'd have my heart rate under control before I launched up Lynch Hill, which is about 100 yards from the mount line. It worked. I trucked up solidly, veering around the rattlesnake coiled in the middle of the road. At the top, I saw Coach Gurujan in his official's jacket and he gave me another big cheer, just as I was putting the hammer down to go for the real ride.

Out on the highway, I was feeling good, holding my speed up and not hurting. At the bottom of a roller, there was a guy changing a tire off to the side. I swung out to give him some room just as I heard the official's bike coming up behind me. As he passed, I heard "Move over!" and got flashed two fingers. I figured I'd just got my first penalty. 2 minutes. It pissed me off, but there was nothing to do but keep going. So I kept riding.

One of the biggest moments of my race happened about 2 miles past the turnaround, so around mile 14 or 15, when Greg passed me. This is big for me because, even though he passed me, it took him that long. Considering he beat me in the race by 37 minutes, it was cool.

I wasn't quite prepared for the big climb on the was back in, so my average speed fell off a bit, but I still felt good and as I headed back into the park to drop Lynch into T2 I saw Ben cheering me on. He pumped me up a bit and I totally channeled Damien on the way down. I don't think I touched my brakes. I barely made the dismount line.

T2 was a lot faster than T1 and I was out onto the run, where I saw Paul and got another boost.

The run sucked, like I knew it would. My foot is almost healed, but not quite, and though I was able to run on the roads, the trails nearly killed me. Plus, since I was running funny on my right leg, my left overcompensated and kept going numb. From miles 2-4 I couldn't feel it at all. Plus, my base is shot from not training my run for three months. At any rate, I pulled through it, ran as much as I could and walked when I had to. Ben was waiting at the top of Lynch Hill again and I picked it up, deciding to run all the way down, even if it killed me. I kept it up too, hearing bikers whizzing by me like angry dragonflies (that yell things like "On your left, god damnit! as they try not to crash into bikers and runners in their direction and still somehow not cross the centerline).

Finally, the finish chute was in sight. I figured I didn't have far to go so I dug in, found whatever was left and powered through. I got a yell from Paul J. in the chute and powered in. Across the line and out into the crowd. I totally spaced on the free athlete food and water. Good thing Ben was there to buy me a beer. Thanks buddy. Best beer ever.

And then we waited for everyone else to finish. This where I come back to the penalty. Gurujan found me and Brian and asked how the race went. When I told him about the official, he grinned and said "That was me." So I asked what he penalized me for and he said "I was waving to you. The asshole wagging his butt into the road while changing a tire got a penalty for not moving all the way over." I think I laughed for five minutes.

The it was a couple more beers, a quick race review with Coach Trent ("Dude, you should warm up next time. You won't feel so crappy in the water.") and finally, it was time for the long, long climb back to camp.

And then we drank. Jason, you don't get to pick chasers anymore.

So glad it's over.

And that, as they say, was that. Monday, we packed up, parked our hung over asses in the RV and headed home.

Bye bye Wildflower, see you next year...FOR THE LONG COURSE!!!!

Week in Review, or, Tommy Shaw is an A-hole...

2008-04-27T23:16:00.000-07:00

I'll explain my Styx reference in a bit, but I wanted to address a couple of things first. This was a pretty eventful week. Work is nuts, as always, so I won't bother chatting about that.

I guess the big thing to mention here, pretty much because I've had a few too many conversations about it in the last 48 hours, is the shark attack. While I'm tempted to assume my usual tone and make snarky comments, it's really nothing to joke about. I was in a breakfast meeting on Friday when my phone started lighting up. I was as shocked as anyone to read what happened. It's a fairly intense gut-check moment, when you stop and approach the fact that the night before you were swimming in the Pacific, not all that far from where it happened. And you have to admit to yourself that despite the new specter lurking in the shadowy part of your mind, you'll be back at it before too much longer. Sure, you might take an extra beat when you zip up your suit, but you'll get in and go.

I don't know, I've been puzzling over what to say about this for a while, and there's nothing overly eloquent that comes to mind. So I guess the main thing is that we keep the man in our thoughts as we pursue the sport. And that we be careful, on the bike, in the water, that we keep an eye on each other and help out as best we can.

Okay, that's it with the serious stuff. I'm going to gloss over the details of most of the weekend since they aren't really pertinent. Except to say that after you have a night of insomnia and are running on, say, 2 hours' sleep, you should think twice about going out until 3AM. A good night, in the final analysis, despite a few rough patches, but I learned a lot of useful lessons like the one I just pointed out. For the rest, well, maybe another time. I am bummed that I missed the two gay guys and their butter knife fight in the Denny's. How often do you get a chance to witness something like that? But thanks for letting me know it happened.

Saturday was the main event. REO Speedwagon, Styx, Def Leppard. One night only. Oh, yes. While Speedwagon was surprisingly good (I had to go buy their greatest hits CD today, since I couldn't get that damn "Take It On The Run" out of my head.), Styx made me mad. I mean, I sat through their set, they were even pretty good. They played songs I didn't know were theirs. I made it through "Come Sail Away." I sat through a Styx show and they didn't even have the common decency to play "Mr. Roboto." Sure, they held out and mercifully failed to play "Lady," a fact for which I remain grateful, but no Roboto just makes me mad. That's like Leppard not playing "Pour Some Sugar On Me." What the hell? Seriously....Tommy Shaw, I want my money back.

Ben the Bible Thumper

2008-04-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

Had to point this out. In the other triathelete links on the right, there's a link labeled "Ben." This is my buddy Ben's blog about his first triathlon experience. Yes, that's right, he's fresh meat. But that's not why I'm pointing this out. I discovered last night that I had a typo in the link to his blog: benfargo.blogspot.com.

I had it down as benfargo.blogpot.com, which goes to the Mega Bible and Information Site. So, sorry Ben, for outing your repressed Christian zealotry and first grade web-design skills. (kidding...)

What does it say that the bible site is on blogpot.com? Just curious?

Lessons Learned (Again)

2008-04-22T00:06:00.000-07:00

I'll start with an obvious one: MARGARITAS ARE NOT CARBO-LOADING!!!! And damn you Tim for making me think they were. Seriously, if I had just gone home after the first bar, I would have been fine on Saturday morning for Iron Mountain. That said, I had a nifty new adventure trying to clip into a moving road bike with tequila shakes and trucks roaring by on highway 67.I was seriously debating canning the bottom half of the ride until...whoops...I was halfway down the hill into Lakeside. God, I'm an idiot. Of course, by the top of the climb back, all I wanted was another beer, so I had gone full circle. Which brings me to lesson number two.

ALWAYS BRING SHOES TO IRON MOUNTAIN. Even if you can't run because your physical therapist has explained to you that running is, for you, something akin to Eve's Apple, or a new Ferrari behind a showroom window. That is to say pretty and shiny and you want it but you know that if you grab it there will alarms and sirens and suffering, possibly at the hands of uniformed men with nightsticks and aviator sunglasses. But I digress. The reason I learned this lesson is that I was silly enough to volunteer to walk up the hill (rather than run of course, that would have been stupid) in my flip-flops. Yes, you read that right, but I'll repeat it anyway, in my flip-flops. Plantar fasciitis, I spit on you, right up until the moment you cripple me.

Which brings me to the TNT finale party. Hours and hours of silliness in the sun with food and loads of perfectly street-legal "juice." How could you go wrong? Oh, did I mention plantar fasciitis, and walking in the sand for 6 hours? At least I bought those high end flip-flops. And by the way, Allison, the picture is already framed. You'll have to take my word for that of course, but it is. Now to begin counting the days until Lavaman '09 when I'll get to see all these people again...oh, wait, I don't think it'll take that long because now I'm at lesson number 3.

HERE WE GO SPINNING ROUND AND ROUND AND ROUND. Yes, my bizarre quest to play outside that began a couple of years ago with Vavi volleyball and veered (perfectly rationally) into triathlon, has returned to Vavi volleyball. I'll have more to say about that after Wildflower is over and we start playing, but it'll be fun to add another even to the four we all already practice. That's right. Four. Swim. Bike. Run. Drink, er, recover. And now Volleyball. Fifth event. Fantastic.

Jane, get me off this crazy thing. What? Where's my popsicle stick? I have to go around again? Damn it all! (A little Lavaman humor. If you're confused, do the race.)

Hasta luego, kiddies.

All Hail Tri-Dork-dom!

2008-04-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

I joined San Diego Tri Club and USAT today. I think I'm hopeless now. There's no coming back.
On the other hand, after PT this morning, I went all day without my foot hurting. It didn't get tough until after I worked out tonight. I'm on 3 days a week fr the next two weeks, which is going to cost a pretty penny, but it seems like it might actually help. Hmmm...we'll see.

G'night.

Two books you must read.

2008-04-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

This isn't tri related in any way, but I wanted to put this up there. Check these out. You'll be glad you did.

Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales.

It's an examination of survival in wilderness situations and why some people live and others die. He goes into the difference between emotion as a primal, physical force and our intellectual understanding of it. "You don't run because you are afraid of the bear, you are afraid of the bear because you run," and how our consciousness and ability to create and live by mental maps of the world govern our reactions when the world differs from those mental maps, sometimes with disastrous consequences. For those of you in training, he also covers stories about striving through pain, despair and hopelessness to survive. Really worth the read. If you don't believe me, check out the "Words To Live By" at the right.

The Raw Shark Texts, by Stephen Hall

The cover lists a review calling it "Herman Melville meets Michael Crichton, or Thomas Pynchon meets Douglas Adams." I've never read Pynchon, but it's certainly better than anything Melville or Crichton has turned out. I think I'd go with "Chuck Palahniuk meets William Gibson, or maybe William S. Burroughs." There's definitely something Naked Lunch meets Neuromancer about it. I can't think of a good way to describe the plot, but it involves an amnesiac, past lives, quasi-imaginary fish and a red cat named Ian. If that doesn't get your attention, I can't help ya.

That's it for now. If you've got some time, check out the other tri kids I've linked to off to the right. Some good reading out there.

Lavaman Recap. It's Done, Now What?

2008-04-09T23:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, so Lavaman has come and gone. What an awesome experience. I’ll get to the details in a sec, but for you short attention span folks, here are the numbers:

Overall: 2:58:38
Swim: 0:28:52
T1: 0:02:40
Bike: 1:17:28
T2: 0:1:17
Run: 1:08:23

I went into the Lavaman season with one main goal, break 3 hours. I friggin’ did it, even with the bum foot. Of course, whack job that I am, I find myself dampening my excitement with the thought that, had I been healthy, I would have gone faster. How sick is that?

So there it is, under 3 hours and I’m barely sore today, except to say that my foot feels like it’s made of concrete and two of my toes have been numb since I crossed the finish line. The physical therapist I saw this morning says that’s normal, that my altered gait inflamed the tissue around the nerve bundle under my middle toe. Fixing this right leg of mine is going to be all kinds of fun, but that’s for another post.

Now to talk about race weekend. Settle into a comfortable chair, grab some hydration, maybe a gu…this could take a while.

On the flight to Maui, Laurie (our coordinator) gave the flight attendants the script to read about how TNT was on the plane and what we were doing and how much money we’d raised. It was really cool to hear, as it was on the flight to Pac Grove, except that by the time the crew got around to reading it, every purple jacket I could see was wrapped around a sleeping teammate.

The practicing triathlete's carry-on.

Four hours later I got my first taste of Hawaii, stepping off the plane into sunny rain and humidity. We flew to Kona and there was no rain, only a 60 mile per hour wind along the Queen K highway, also known as our bike course. A little unnerving, to say the least. Following hot on the heels of this beginning was our first run/swim preview. We did the last mile and a half or so of the run, which is the off-road, lava rock, coral and deep sand portion. I could barely walk it, my foot hurt so bad, let alone imagine running it.

The mythical A-bay was no better. The wind had the water stirred up into a chop that just slapped you in the face every time you breathed and the visibility was about four feet. Not exactly what we’d been sold all season. I got nervous.

On Friday, I got an early start, thanks to the three hours we gained. I couldn’t run, so I skipped the mile 4 preview and rode with Laurie to unload tri bags. We were scheduled to pick up our bikes at 10:30 and they were waiting for us in the parking lot, but coach made everyone run and swim first. The wind was still up and the water was still seriously choppy, but the visibility was way better. An encouraging sign.

Coach finally let us get our bikes and there was much rejoicing. I did get a flat right after I reinflated my tires, but it turned out to be a blown valve on the tube. We took some time to get the team’s bikes situated and headed out on our bike course preview, which was interesting, because we didn’t have our CO2 cartridges yet and just had to hope no one blew a tire.

The Queen K. From a sensible vehicle.

We only rode about half the course, since the turnaround tunnel was closed to us until race morning. We got back to transition, packed up our bags and headed out to ride the run course, at least the part on the road. This doesn’t sound like much, but then you probably haven’t been through a Gurujan course preview. We previewed just under a third of the course but it took about an hour longer than the slowest competitor ran the race.

Friday night was a trip to the infamous LuLu’s. I won’t record anything that happened there here, but if you ever stop by, look for our dollars stapled to the ceiling.

Saturday, another time zone induced early start, but this time with a hangover. We did mentor-led previews since the coaches and coordinators had meetings. I went on the bike ride, which was sparsely attended. This turned out to be for the best, I think, since the wind was actually moving our bikes laterally across the bike lane while we were riding. The headwind on the way back scared the crap out of me.

A couple of hours in line and I got my race number, goodie bag, lunch ticket and souvenirs.

The pasta party that night kind of tripped me out. It was the first time on the trip that I think being a mentor hit me. It was also where I destroyed my pants. I’ll get to that in a minute.

We started at the mandatory pre-race meeting where they were going to explain all the new course changes. Of course, we had to do red carpet and so we only got to watch the first 30 minutes of the meeting. This means we got to watch the race directors thank each other. Then we left to form up and do the red carpet for the participants.

For those of you who don’t know, the pasta party is for all the TNT chapters in the race. All the mentors for all the chapters form a corridor and whoop and holler and make noise as the participants go into the party. After about thirty minutes of banging bam bam sticks and shouting, I started to realize I was burning valuable calories that I would need for the swim. I had to slow down or risk a 35 minute mile. The last people finally piled in and it was time to go eat, except that it turned out we were missing a couple. Which brings me to destroying my pants.

Team San Diego’s mentors reformed in the hallway to ring in the stragglers and in the process, I crouched down. I don’t know why, but when I did, the leg of my shorts just split. Our stragglers got there, after walking through a different door, so they missed us and my shorts gave their lives in vain. I had to hand out my mentee gifts with a gaping hole in the ass of my shorts and then I took the car and went to change. By the time I got back, I had missed the food and the speeches had started so I had a powerbar and watched from the back. It was at this point that I realized, watching the coach from the Silicon Valley team talk about riding his bike home from his mom’s funeral in Colorado, that I was torn between wanting my race to go well and seeing all my mentees finish. I was more interested in how they were going to do and whether they’d enjoy it than I was with my race.

Sunday, 4/6 – RACE DAY!!!!!!

5:00AM, meet at hotel, get mentee bikes set up. Take pictures. Ride to transition.
6:00AM, get into transition, rack bikes, get body marked and pick up timing chip. Get team photo, last team meeting. Get psyched.
7:30AM, men’s wave start. Take off on extremely confusing swim. The course was M-shaped, with three 180 degree turns and serious crowd issues.

Seriously, who switches to breast stroke on the inside lane of a course and starts frog-kicking? After one or two of those in the face, I wound up grabbing some guy’s foot and yanking him out of my way. I still got stuck behind a lot of tangled up bodies, which slowed me down. I was encouraged, however, by the fact that I started passing women after the second 180. It took me a minute to realize the import of this, since I at first thought I was being passed the women’s wave that started five minutes after me. And I had been passed by some, but most of them were relay swimmers from the wave that was five minutes ahead of me. Very cool. Also cool was the fact that, in the middle of the race, I was watching sea turtles mack on coral heads. Trippy. I don’t know if I saw three turtles, or one turtle three times, but who cares?

Out of the water and into T1. The longest barefoot jog of my life. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get into transition and I was limping pretty badly by the time I got there. Good thing the bike is before the run.

I thought I was out of T1 pretty fast, but then, I screwed up my splits since I had no idea where the timing mats were. I just slapped the button on my watch arbitrarily and hoped I was close.

The bike, even though it’s a PR, started pretty shakily. The road from T1 to the Queen K was designated no passing. I got stuck behind a girl on a bike that looked familiar, but who was going slower than I wanted to. Some guy behind me kept pulling up next to me (illegal) and then deciding not to break the rule, grumbling in frustration, and dropping back (also illegal). Finally, we got to the highway entrance and I was able to pass. It turned out that the biker in front was a teammate, who is way faster than she was riding. Anyway, I hit the gas at that point and took off. There was no wind that I could feel and I spent most of the ride in my aero bars, chasing this 28-year old girl. Actually, we kept leapfrogging, until we got to the one long, gradual climb and I started to get tired, so I throttled back and she passed me, for the last time.

It was then that some guy from another chapter rode up next to me and taunted me for letting a hot 28 year old spandex-clad tri chick get away. For lack of a witty response, I let him pass. I had some electrolytes and a gu, and put the hammer back down. I passed the guy and never saw him again.

At the turnaround, I got screwed on the bottle exchange because the last guy in line, who I was going to take a second bottle from, was about 8 feet tall and was holding the bottle above his head. Lacking a vert ramp, there was no way for me to grab it, so I did the last half with one water bottle.

The second half of the ride actually went better than the first. I was stronger and more consistent with my cadence and speed. The highlight of the ride was toward the end when I slowed down a bit to take my last gu. As I did that, some guy rode by me and said “I’ve been trying to catch you for the last few miles. You’re really strong.” Then he took off while I was putting away the wrapper. I didn’t catch him again, but I was definitely charged up going into T2.

It didn’t take more than 300 yards or so on the run to realize I was going to have a tough time. Running out of the transition area, we immediately went off road and my foot immediately started to throb and stiffen. I decided to walk to the road and start running there. That was when the first teammate passed me. Once I got to the street, I was able to run, albeit slowly, until the end of mile 2, when I had to start the second hill repeat. I got my popsicle stick (don’t ask), ran down, put ice my hat (sweet, heavenly ice in the hat) and started back up the hill, which was when my foot went completely numb. I walked halfway up the hill and then ran past the volunteer collecting popsicle sticks.

I ran again until the course went off-road during mile 5. I had to walk-limp-run-hop-walk-limp until I hit sand. On the sand, with the finish in sight, adrenaline took over. I ran into the line, only to be passed in the chute by another teammate. He beat me by 3 seconds. He apologized, but I don’t know why. The whole point of a race is to finish ahead of as many people as possible.

And that was that. For the rest of the afternoon, it was free food, free beer and hanging with wiped out, grinning teammates, hearing stories and discussing results. Overall, just enjoying the day. The capper was that Captain Emily placed. She took fourth in her age group and got the biggest cheer of everyone who got called. I have pictures.

Eventually, we had to pack our bikes (and take a moment of silence) and go home to clean up for the victory party. For some stupid reason, I didn’t nap. So team, this is why most of you didn’t see me at the party. I bonked. I’ll do better at the finale, I promise.

I think that’s it for now. I’ll probably talk more about the PT process as it continues, and I’ll definitely report on Wildflower. Until then, alo…no, I can’t do it.

I see a tiny little light. It's getting bigger and going choo-choo...

2008-03-31T22:57:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are. Lavaman is a week away. I'm on a plane for Hawaii Thursday morning.

My foot is okay, most days, though I expect to be limping for a while when I get back. Fundraising is done, we made it through final prep and we've been assured that our bikes are being fed and cared for properly on their journey to Kona.

Obviously, I'll be writing up a full race report after the trip, but I thought I should catch up a little first.

So the training wrap-up:

I ran the practice tri and pulled a decent time, 1:17:04. I finished 4th on the team, even with it being my first run in 6 weeks or so. Sure, I could barely walk for the week afterward, but that's okay. Final prep was last Saturday. We did the traditional 2 miler, from the Shores to the Cove and back. It took about an hour, so we could maybe have pushed a little harder, but it wasn't a race. The water was cold and the kelp was up. All in all, very Pac Grovey. At one point, as I was trying to untangle myself from the weeds, I looked over and realized that a sea lion was watching me from about 8 feet away. We saw dolphins the week before. The sea lion followed me briefly and I had a little silly moment where I had to wonder if I could still race through plantar fasciitis and a sea lion bite.

So there it is, I'm not going to run at all until race day and I'm taking my time handling everything else.

Race weekend impressions (forecasting):

I'm really looking forward to this weekend, and not just for the race. It'll be my first time in Hawaii as well, so everything will be in some way new. How often does that happen? On top of that, I get to see race weekend from the experienced perspective instead of the wide-eyed newbie and that means not only having some idea what to expect from race morning, but how to handle the TNT functions like the course previews and the pasta party and all that. Maybe I'll even make it to the victory party this time. Old friends and Jack Daniel's kept me away from it at Pac Grove. I'll even get to see my bike again. God, I'm such a geek.

Last thing to say at this point is that I will try not to hold the Aloha Airlines goat rodeo against the state of Hawaii, though that will be far easier if Capital One decides to refund my ticket price. Turns out that it's hard to get to Hawaii on four days' notice. Who would'a thunk it?

That's it for now. I'll tell you all about it when I get back.

2008-03-17T23:19:00.000-07:00

So I'm sitting here, in between sessions with my rehab tennis ball, watching TV and doing the inactive equivalent of pacing the cage. It's a weird day. I've been kind of out of sorts. nothing is sticking. I was going to write a long and witty week in review post over the weekend but I never got around to it. Maybe this week. We've got our practice tri coming up on Saturday and we're 3 weeks from race day. I'm ready for it to get here already, but I also want to put it off. I want my foot to heal so I'll be able to predict my run split. I don't know. I'm rambling. I've got to stretch my legs again and put in a few more minutes with the tissue mobility drills.

I only managed about 2500 yards today in the pool, which is a lot and I did it in a little under an hour, but I'm capable of more. I've done better and there's no reason for pulling the punch tonight. I just didn't feel it. Eh, whatever. There's always tomorrow.

It's Official

2008-03-05T22:57:00.001-08:00

I've got plantar fasciitis. The doctor said so. Apparently my calf muscles don't get loose enough to release the strain on my foot, so I've got problems. Since Lavaman is only a month away, the good doctor said that the best thing I could do is get a cortisone injection and stretch the bejesus out of it for the next couple of weeks.

I'll spare you the gory details of how far into my foot he shoved the needle, but it was not fun to watch. It hurts like the devil now too. I've barely been able to walk all day.

Apparently, I can try for a short run this weekend and if it doesn't feel right, I'm supposed to start physical therapy ASAP. Nifty, huh? All this so I can run six miles. Where are my priorities? Eh, if I hit my time goal it'll all be worth it, right?

And by the way, don't spin two days in a row. It kinda strains the legs.

Another Week Down

2008-03-02T23:30:00.000-08:00

I finally did Iron Mountain. Well, most of it. I still can't run, so my plan was to go bike only. Ride with the team and sit out the run. The weather scotched that. Thanks to cloud cover and a persistent need for people to be able to see while riding really fast downhill, we did the run first. I got nominated to help with SAG at the run turnaround, about 1.5 miles up the mountain.

I carried the water (several gallons) up and went back down to a break in the trail to make sure everyone went the right way. Walked the last person up to the turnaround and then walked out carrying the remaining water.

Thankfully, I was allowed to ride off on my own when we got back, since we'd missed the last rider to leave by at least 20 minutes. I did the whole route, and pretty fast, if I do say so myself. I won't set any records, but it was a solid performance for a 30 miler. Did I mention that the last 8-10 miles (Coach wasn't sure.) are uphill?

Strangely enough, the only part of me that was sore today was my shoulders from lugging the water, though in the interest of full disclosure, I did spend about a half hour with my foot firmly planted on a bag of frozen corn when I got home.

I did the ocean swim, but only the beginner part, since a couple of participants asked me for help with their swim. It was really choppy today, hard to navigate and the currents were up, so a lot of the beginners had some trouble. After we got them back to shore, a few of us mentors went back and did a second short lap. It felt really good to let loose a bit and charge.

On the rehab front, I'm seeing a doctor on Wednesday about my foot. Hopefully, he'll set me right. He did last time. Oh, and since I can't run, I broke down and bought a bike trainer. I did my own little spin class in my living room tonight. I'm such a geek. Bedtime now. Until the next post.

I just might pull this off...

2008-02-25T23:04:00.001-08:00

Day one of the attitude readjustment seems to have gone well, despite work being intensely lame today. Seriously, it shouldn't take 5 hours to repair a mail server...but this isn't an IT blog, so enough about that.

I made it through day one without soda, which taxed me a bit. It really hurt at about 3:00 when I finally got sore from last night's reconditioning exercise. I was 50/50 about going to the pool tonight, given last week's abysmal performance (not to mention the four days it took for it to stop hurting when I breathed), but I wound up there. I took the night's workout and figured I'd do some, see how I felt maybe pull back at race distance, or 1500 yards. For reference, tonight's workout was 3450 yards. We have one hour to do it.

Anyway, I got in the pool and immediately just felt good. I started swimming and I knew a couple of lengths in that I was going to go for it. I wound up finishing 3200 yards. I didn't lose feeling in my left side. It doesn't hurt to breathe. My core is a bit sore, between last night and this session, but that's to be expected.

The road to recovery begins. Next up, apart from some hotel ab work, is Iron Mountain. I'll talk more about that later on.

Inactivity, Insanity, Irritability

2008-02-24T22:34:00.000-08:00

This past week, I hit the wall. Hard. How hard? Hard enough to leave a Ryan-shaped, splayed out impression cracked into the mortar. I could say "you should see the other guy," but frankly the wall, despite my mass and near-terminal velocity, steadfastly withstood my assault. I didn't take it very well, either, and while I've picked myself up and begun the process of cleaning away the rubble, I have to say sorry to Veva, who got stuck at the aid station with me on Saturday. It was a bad morning.

That covers irritability, on to inactivity and insanity.

As you know, I've been hurt. Still am, actually. Starting with the bruised ribs that I keep trying to train through and graduating into a case of plantar fasciitis. For the last couple of weeks all I've really been able to do is modified duty, holding back on swims and not running. It makes me crazy, having to watch the team training while I stand still. Add to that a severely sub-stellar week at the office and off the reservation I go, down into a deep dark hole. It doesn't take much brain power to see that this is an untenable situation.

So I stopped, took a good long look at my season and realized that I am in serious danger of wasting my trip to Kona. This simply will not do. I'm still hurt, only time and rest can fix that, but with only about 6 weeks to race day, time is in short supply. If I can't follow the program, I have to make my own. So tonight I started my own rehab program. Two hours of spinning, balance, and body work, to be followed by Aleve and sleep. On top of that, I'm going to try and cut booze and soda until race day, which is going to hurt, probably more than my ribs and foot together, but I've got to hit a race weight and be in the best shape possible, given the deadlines and physical constraints.

I need to get my head in the game, and the only thing I can do is to attack the problem straight on and push through it, maybe around it, but definitely, unequivocally, past it.

Today's Sermon

2008-02-21T22:55:00.000-08:00

Tonight, another reading from "The Book of Stupid Things Ryan Has Done," 2008 edition. Chapters 45-49.

It's official, I am a moron. I was trying to get better, to let my bruised ribs heal and the heels stop throbbing every time I run. I went to the doctor and got myself checked out, got my pills. When the doctor told me not to work out for a couple of weeks, I told him that wasn't going to happen. He warned me. He did. None of this comes back on you, doc. You warned me.

He told me that every time I moved the bad spot, I was basically re-injuring it.

To be fair to myself, I tried to take it easy. I did. I took a few days off from training and when I came back, I held back. I ran flat pacing at track instead of doing the interval workouts. I got into lanes away from other swimmers and took it easy.

Then this week happened. I figured I was feeling better and hopped into the pool. i managed 2200 yards or so, but when the session ended, I couldn't pull myself out of the pool. I had to dig my right arm into the ladder handle holes in the concrete and haul myself out one handed like a rock climber. It took until Tuesday morning before I could move my left arm without seeing stars.

I don't know why, but I decided that running would be easier, so Tuesday I tried to set up a run with the team. I was the only one who showed, so I bagged it and went to the gym. I did a mini-brick, alternating between stationary bike and treadmill for about 90 minutes. It felt okay, but I was still really sore on Wednesday.

I took Wednesday off to go to a fundraiser. Beer, pizza and no exercise. Good for the body, good for the mind.

Tonight, we had track at the boardwalk. We were supposed to do sand intervals, but out of deference to my ribs, I figured I'd run on the boardwalk only. I did 2 miles easy, no big deal, so for mile three, I decided to try and hit my time trial pace. I ran flat out for a mile and made it in 7:35, missed by 20 seconds. It really hurt. I had to hold myself up against the seawall with my good arm for a minute or two.

No fool, me, I figured I'd done something stupid, so I started walking back. I covered half a mile, feeling every step and for some reason decided to try again at the half mile point. Now, my time trial was 7:20 and that means a half mile should be about 3:40. I made it in 3:21. And nearly passed out.

This concludes the reading. I think that maybe Coach G should institute a new mentor job: What Not To Do Mentor. I'd be good at that.

So it's Valentine's Day...

2008-02-14T20:48:00.001-08:00

...and I went to track practice. Like the song says, this single life, it sure is fun.

Booth Babes, Cracked Ribs, Sleep Deprivation and Climbing the Walls

2008-02-12T22:22:00.000-08:00

So you can tell by the title that this is going to cover some varied terrain. First things where they belong, this is my training blog, so I guess I should catch you up on that a bit.

I mentioned it in my last post, but I have messed up ribs. I bruised/cracked/broke one or two of them in Tahoe a couple of weeks ago. Not hucking myself around in thigh deep powder, no, but screwing around at slow speed on a cat track. I'm not going to say more, it's too painful, too embarrassing, too bloody stupid. So, the doctor said it isn't broken. He poked me and I didn't scream. He gave me a big Motrins. Works for me, when I take them.

So I had to skip training this past weekend to go to NADA in San Francisco. That's the National Auto Dealer Association trade show, for those of you who don't know. We spent days in end in the west hall of the Moscone Center, which was, as it turned out, the red headed stepchild of the show. I don't know, we got a good reception for our stuff, both from the company we were showing with, and the people we brought by to see it. Now we'll see what we can do with it.

This brings me back to the title. One of my favorite aspects of the convention was booth babes. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not because they're hot and wearing skimpy clothes. If that's all I need, then I can go down to PB or the Gaslamp on any given evening. What I love about booth babes is that they are both the most obvious manifestation of fluff marketing and the most effective traffic generation tool I've seen. I saw more pudgy, middle-aged and old white guys standing in line to have their pictures taken with scantily clad blondes than I had expected at a show where you can buy oil additives, frame aligners, websites and dealerships. I'm not sure any of them knew what the girls were selling, but hey, they were in the booth.

I just have to wonder at what point the girls start to wonder why they signed on for "stand still, look pretty, hand out brochures and get groped."

So we finally got back late last night, and here we come full circle. I couldn't work the show without the Motrin, so I was looped half the time and hurting the rest. Even so, I had run gear with me to try and get in a few miles in place of the team workout. I never made it, between beer and long days and pain, but I was climbing the walls not being able to train.

So tonight I went for a short, relatively easy run. I made it three miles without too much nastiness and I'm not in screaming agony now, so that's good. Maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought. Gonna try swimming tomorrow. That didn't go so well last time, but hey, maybe I'll get lucky.

More later.

Lessons Learned

2008-02-04T23:07:00.000-08:00

Tonight, a reading from "The Book of Stupid Things Ryan Has Done," 2008 edition. Chapter 37, "Swimming on Screwed Up Ribs."

Don't do it. It's a bad idea. I woke up this morning with a little twinge in my side where I took a snowboard binding under my lower left rib. I had full range of motion, no visible bruising. Two Aleve and a Power Bar, on with the day.

So tonight I figure I can go to swim. I knocked out a little over 2000 yards. Sounds like a lot, but there was a lot more to go. Thing is, I lost all power on my left side and now deep breaths hurt.

So basically, I'm an idiot. Oh, well, at least Tahoe was epic this last weekend. Three feet of fresh powder and my first ever successful deep-pow tree runs. Thank you triathlon for making my legs strong.

I may have more to say later, but I won't get many workouts in this week. I have to go out of town again, but for work. More reasons not to train. I'll have to find ways to get something in. I hear there's good running in San Francisco.

So I've got a little catching up to do...

2008-01-23T22:29:00.000-08:00

So, it's been an eventful couple of weeks. So much so, that my blogging has been more internal than recorded, but I'm here now, so I might as well write something down.

We had a party to watch the Chargers/Colts game at my buddy's house and I picked up the Martian Death Flu, which sucked. It knocked me on my butt for three solid days. So what did I do, besides mainline dayquil and robitussin? I blew off a weekend of training and went snowboarding, which was awesome. The only drawback was that I stayed sick for the rest of the following week.

I couldn't train to save my life. Every little bit of exertion brought on a coughing fit that could've snapped my spine. I took it as easy as I could but I was going stir crazy doing less than I knew I could. Saturday rolled around and I felt good enough to ride my bike.

I took off on the team ride and knocked out the thirty miles coach assigned, including the three times up Torrey Pines hill. It took more out of me than it should have, but hey, I'd been sick and hadn't trained for two weeks. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

But here's where it all catches up to me. After the ride, a few of us ran up to Carlsbad to get our race bibs for the Carlsbad Half Marathon, right before we hauled ass back to La Jolla to make the team's first ocean swim.

The team looked a little shaky, but enthusiastic, as they waded into the 50-something degree water (hooray wetsuits!) but the spirit took hold after a while. Despite the shivering, everybody tagged the kayaks and actually looked pretty happy. We just had to keep reminding them that the water in Hawaii will be way warmer than this, more like the pool we train in.

Anyway, after the swim a few of us Carlsbad runners grabbed a carbo-load dinner and went home. Early to bed and out to the starting line for a 7:30 gun.

Now for the race report, dissecting my first half-marathon.

My overall time was 2:24:25, with my 6.6 mile (halfway) split happening at 1:08:29.

My mile splits for the first half of the race came in at 10:23, but my overall average mile pace was 11:01. What does this tell me, apart from that I ran out of gas part way through? Don't run sick, or shortly after being sick. My body rebelled at mile 7. I had to stop and walk away the nausea a couple times, but I finished, and I ran probably 12 of the 13 miles overall. I'll take it for my first one.

Now, if only the stupid Chargers had won. Or at least the Packers...

Now I have to dig deep into the well of self-denial and root for the Patriots come Super Bowl Sunday. I pledge here and now to hate myself while I do it.

Said the Dolphin Girl to the Man in the Seal Costume

2008-01-02T22:46:00.000-08:00

It seems a bit self indulgent, but I wanted to post this because, well, I can. I haven't written much fiction in the last year or two, so this was a fun exercise for me. I hope that you take the time to read it and let me know what you think in the comment section.

This is an early draft of a story I wrote one night after a pool session. It stems from an offhand comment, a leg cramp and an unconfirmed news report about a twenty foot shark in La Jolla. I hope you like it. -- Ryan

I was a half mile out, my tinted goggles turning an already leaden sky into a drunkard’s charcoal Rorschach blot, when I lost the use of my leg. The spasm hit hard, starting in the base of my foot and curling my toes, then moved upward, constricting my calf muscle and pulling the right half of my lower body into a fetal position. This is an exceedingly inconvenient situation in which to find yourself while swimming.

I rolled over on my back and willed my leg to loosen up. When that didn’t work, I alternated massaging it and stroking to keep my head above the surface. In the distance, sea lions barked along the cliffs, their yelping rolling across the water like a badly damaged car alarm.

The day started out simple. It was easier than normal to park at the beach, probably something to do with the late November cold. It was breezy and grey, but otherwise unremarkable. The Pacific was way too calm to surf, which was why I chose to swim.

I had the beach nearly to myself as I zipped up my wetsuit and licked the insides of my goggle lenses. I waded into the tiny breakers and shivered as the water I pulled into the suit warmed to body temperature. Satisfied that my goggles were staying dry, I stroked for the buoy.

Which brings me back to my leg, locked up and dangling, leaving me unable to swim as the wind and chop picked up. I kept trying to straighten out my leg, but the muscles just wouldn’t release. They stayed tighter than coiled pythons and struggling only made it worse. I looked back toward the shore, at the closed up lifeguard tower, knowing that in the off season, even my hot pink swim cap wouldn’t be enough to bring the cavalry.

Rolling over onto my stomach, I breast stroked the last few yards to the buoy, my leg poking up through the growing swell like Nessie’s neck in that hoax photo. I grabbed hold of the buoy with one hand and went to work on my calf with the other.

The water at the half mile point is deep, but not so deep that on a clear day you can’t see the bottom. Today was not a clear day. Every time my head slipped below the surface, I could watch shadows playing in the depths. Large and irregular, they were probably rocks, or stands of kelp that at lower tide would be lying across the surface. Probably. In the chop, the shadows wavered and swayed, dancing like phantoms shot in night vision. When my head came out of the water, I heard the sea lions, and the theme from Jaws. Which is when I saw the dorsal fin.

If I had to make a list of all the stupid things I do that could get me killed, I have to say that my weekend buoy tag would not be on it. Maybe some of my more harebrained hill descents on a bike with only an inch-thick collection of foam stripping around my head, sure, but not this. I’m normally perfectly at home in the water. Normally.

The fin, a few dozen yards away, disappeared behind a peak and didn’t show up in the trough. Forgetting my leg, I spun in circles, searching. Rising and falling with the ocean. Waiting to feel the brush against my leg. The sharp pain and the tug. The coppery tang atop the salt taste of the Pacific, like licking a battery. The water filling my lungs…

The fin came at me straight on. I grabbed at the buoy, but it was useless to me, a big plastic cue ball bobbing on a chain. I couldn’t climb it. The fin got closer, black and roughly triangular. Closer and closer in the warped out time as I wondered whether the wetsuit really would aid in the return of my body to my loved ones.

Closer and closer until I could just about touch it. I shut my eyes and waited. Nothing. No sharp pain. No tug. I opened my eyes.

The fin angled away and I could see the arched back of a dolphin.

That’s when, a half mile out, I lost control of my entire body. I spent several minutes with my eyes closed, doing a solid jellyfish imitation and listening to the sea lions.

Something brushed my leg. My eyes opened. Something tugged my foot. I looked up.

“Oh good,” she said. “I really didn’t want to have to report a body in the water.”

I gawked, unaware of the million witty responses arcing through my brain. We bobbed there, eyeless behind tinted and mirrored plastic lenses, nondescript beneath day-glow swim caps that advertised past events and companies we’d never actually heard of.

“Hello?” She splashed water across my face. I coughed and sputtered. “Anyone in there?”

I coughed out some more water and promptly took a swell in the face.

“How the hell did you make it this far?” She looked at the beach options in front of and behind us as though she’d just realized that they were on the moon. I could swear I had a solid joke on the tip of my tongue.

“Did you see the dolphin?” It was funny in my mind.

“There are dolphins out here today?”

“Just saw the one.”

“Then there won’t be any sharks.”

“That’d be nice.”

“What were you doing?”

“Impersonating a jellyfish.”

“Why?”

“I thought I saw a shark.”

“Have you ever been out here before, or did you pick up that wetsuit on the way over?”

“It was actually a dolphin.” As I spoke, she cocked her head and looked me square in the lenses. The swell picked her up and for a second she hovered above me, an aquatic angel sitting in judgment of my mental capacity, and clearly unimpressed.

“Lucky you,” she said and turned away, dolphin kicking through a wave. “You should head in before anything else happens.”

And like that, she was gone, under the water and behind the swell. I caught sight of her a dozen yards away before I turned and headed back the way I had come.

I stroked hard in, body surfing the rising swell as often as it would carry me, until my hands finally dug into the sand. Running across the beach, I stripped off my wetsuit and grabbed my gear bag. I blew past the showers and made straight for my car. Sopping wet and salty, I tossed a towel down on my leather seat and climbed in. I headed for the far shore of the cove as fast as I could, parking in a red zone and jogging into the park at the top of the stairs. I went to the rail and looked down onto the sand, hoping to spot a gear bag, which was when I realized that I had no idea why I had come this way, or what I would say if the girl with the mirrored goggles, who had saved me from my encounter with the dolphin, had actually been there.

Christ almighty, man, you don’t even know who she is, what her swimsuit looks like, shouted the voice at the back of my mind that tells me when I’m being an idiot.

Shut up, I fired back, I do too know.

Then what color was it?

And I froze. I was right, or rather my subconscious hall monitor was. Would I even know it if I saw her here? Why did I even care? She was just the girl who came after the dolphin. The Dolphin Girl, now that I had made the connection.

And so, standing there, bare arms freezing to damp metal and staring out to sea, I saw her again. I hadn’t seen her approach me in the water. I hadn’t seen her suit. Still, I knew it was her.

It wasn’t that no one else was in the water. It was the movement. Something in the serpentine grace of her stroke, even at this distance, failed to allow for any other possibility. I’d spotted her. Now what? I walked down to the sludgy sand at the waterline. The cold Pacific sucked at my toes. I curled them under my feet and shivered.

From the water’s edge she was lost and I poked around the cove. If she had any gear she’d left it in her car. I walked into the water. Calf-deep, seriously considering going after her. To what end?

Hey baby, you’ve seen my jellyfish impersonation, wanna see my…what? Shark? Eel? Garibaldi? What was there to gain by going out again? What was there to lose by staying shorebound?

“You’d better head in,” she’d said, “before something else happens.” And like that, I’d headed in, miles before I’d planned to stop. What else was going to happen? The fin had been a dolphin. Flipper. Not Jaws. What else was going to happen? I kicked at some beached kelp but my only answer was slimy toes. I climbed back up to the park.

Sometime later, a wicked swell pounding the cove and spraying the tops of the west-facing cliffs. My toes squishing through damp grass. Wondering where my flip flops went. No sign of her. How long had I been there?

The chalk grey sky bleeding ink black toward rain. Night. Night and rain and no sign of her. I fed quarters into the pay as you go binoculars and scanned the breaking waves. Whitecaps even half a mile out, where my leg stopped working. Where I saw the fin. Felt the brush against my leg. The tug on my foot. Where I jellyfished.

Panning and scanning, time ticking away in my ears as the irises ratcheted closed and I spotted her.

Stroke. Glide.

Stroke. Glide.

Up the face. Down into the trough.

Lake swimming in a late winter swell. Surrounded by whitecaps and black…fins. Shapes like disembodied teeth circling and crossing. Irises shut. Ticking stopped. More coins into the slot. Eyes open. Pan and scan. Before something else happens.

What else could happen? What else could possibly happen?

A flash as mirrored goggles turned shoreward into an unnoticed patch of sunshine.

A smile and a wave as the fins circled and crossed.

A breath and under. Fins across the open water.

The ticking stops. The irises shut. Out of change, out of time.

Squinting into the grey horizon, only black shapes sliding across the water.

“Better head in,” she’d said, “before something else happens.”

If this is Hawaii, you can keep it!

2007-12-20T23:00:00.000-08:00

So the e-mail from Coach started out nice, track was closed tonight. We were running at the Boardwalk, which is a run that I really like. Then the closer, in big bold letters, followed by lots of exclamation points...

Hawaii sand intervals!!!!!!

And those three words made all the difference. 4 miles, 10 sprints in deep sand (give or take) and I can tell that I'm gonna be walking like and arthritic ex-football player tomorrow. Race specific training, yes, since Lavaman ends with a mile of trail and deep sand running. Fun? Not so much. Hawaii's gonna rule.

That's my rant for the day. Scripps Poway Parkway ride on Saturday. Prayers for rain on Friday night? I think so.

On the subject of Saturday, I wanted to post this little bit of verbal scattershot that came to me on the plane yesterday. It's called Saturday Morning.

Standing. Arms folded
Sweating in the glacial sun.
Polarized. Wrapped.
Shielded tense tingling
The sound of waves.
Tremors.
The smell of pavement
of rubber and sweat.
Shivering, sweat becoming steam
Lenses fogged.
Breathing the daylight
Shaking away last night
Taut. Nervous.
Ready.
Not ready at all.
Ready....

A New Season Begins, Well, Began,,,

2007-12-12T22:16:00.000-08:00

So it's week six of the TNT Lavaman '08 season. I've been meaning to say something about that, but haven't quite managed it. This is also the official debut of See Ryan Run, mark II.

For those of you playing along at home, this will be tri number 3 for me. Second Olympic. That's right, I didn't get enough at Pac Grove so I'm doing it again. The cool thing, this race is in Hawaii, on the same course as the Kona Ironman. Cool, huh? I'm also mentoring for this team, which means I get to try and help people along through the program and impart knowledge like I know what I'm doing. Scary huh?

I'm also registered for the Carlsbad Half Marathon and the Wildflower Olympic race. The former is in January, the latter after Lavaman. So we'll have lots to talk about.

Look for more info over the coming weeks, but for now I'm going to close with the e-mail I sent to the team tonight after the combo spin/swim workout:

What a Wednesday...

So the hot tub at Coggan was looking a little like the helicopter just landed outside the 4077th tonight. The number of leg cramps...

I know I'm sitting here, catching up on some Tivo and watching my calf...well, I think it may be trying to evolve. Maybe so it can run away and tell me to take up a sane hobby.

My point? Nice job Ginger and Robbie. And nice work team for hanging in there and pounding out the laps and miles. We're six weeks in and going strong.

See you at track tomorrow and be ready for some fourth event. You'll want to be in shape for that too, come Lavaman.

Keep it up, you're looking good everyone.

Spirit Mentor Ryan, out.

More Fire News

2007-10-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

Well, it's day 5 and the fires are starting to get contained. Pretty much everyone has gone home and they closed the Qualcomm shelter. There's smoke in the air, but the index says it's really only a threat to "sensitive groups." You know, like organisms that require oxygen to live. I know I feel like I've ramped up to a 2-pack a day habit since Monday. On top of that, you really can't go running or biking, which is driving me nuts. I haven't worked out in a week. I know, I'm suffering. I just have to be strong a little longer.

Snarkiness aside, this has blown over and looks to be ending well, at least in my personal sphere. No one I know lost anything (that I've heard about) and my parents were back in their house Wednesday night. We've been back at work since Wednesday morning. (Lucky us.)

All told, as hard as it's been on the city, it could have been far, far worse. The evacuations worked. Reverse 911 apparently did what it was supposed to. The firefighters and police kept things under control, and people came together to help each other out. Pretty impressive, really.

Take care, everyone.

San Diego is On Fire

2007-10-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

Mount Soledad. The fire is in Rancho Bernardo.

So it’s day 3 of “Firestorm 2007” as one local station has branded it. I’ve been meaning to post something about the fires since day 1 when I first figured out how serious it was, but I haven’t been able to keep my mind together to get it done. Between the calls, text messages and e-mails, I’ve been so busy recounting the whole experience that the blog seemed a bit redundant. Now that it’s slowing down and I’ve had some time to think, it’s starting to hit me just what’s happening.

It all started for me on Monday morning when my parents called to say they were going to gas up the truck and get their stuff ready to evacuate. That was a little scary, but still a bit distant, since I was at work dealing with client stuff. Fixing e-mails and updating websites, just going about the day. That afternoon, word came down to evacuate Scripps Ranch, where the office is. This was tough. I couldn’t just pack up and go, since our public facing servers are all run out of this room. We had to decide very quickly what the best way was to preserve as much as possible in the time allowed. Granted, we weren’t watching flames mowing down Eucalyptus trees outside the door, but we knew we had to get out and that we probably wouldn’t be back for a day or two, if at all.

In the end, our graphic designer and I packed the four development machines and the company archive server into the trunk of my car, and as many of people’s personal items as I could grab. I went through the office taking pictures of the equipment and artwork that I couldn’t move. That done, I locked up and went home. Hours of boredom ensued while I fielded phone calls and e-mails, telling everyone that yes, we were all okay and still had houses.

TV was full of images of houses melted down to foundations and chimneys standing like spinal columns that haven’t managed to fall over yet. Listening to the reporters mispronounce street names and give inaccurate directions, I eventually pieced together the fact that they were showing the remains of the neighborhood where several of my best childhood friends grew up. No one lives there anymore, but it’s surreal nonetheless. I found a list of destroyed houses and the house two doors down from one of my parents’ old places is gone, along with most of the houses on the road in. North County was blacked out and burnt, and Chula Vista was lighting up. If you watched enough local news that day (and believe me, I watched more than enough), you got spun up to the point that at any moment you expected to see footage of a guy in a toga playing a fiddle on Mount Soledad while San Diego smoldered in the background.

In spite of all this, I went to my Team in Training info meeting Monday night in Pacific Beach. Driving down, I watched the sun set bloody red behind the smoke and the occasional bits of ash landed on my windshield. Ten or twelve people showed up at the PB library to find out about joining the marathon and triathlon teams. I can’t imagine why they bothered that night, but then again I went because I wasn’t in danger and didn’t know what else to do with myself. In PB, apart from the smoke, you wouldn’t know anything was wrong. People sat out at the bars, drinking and smoking (yeah, I know) and just hanging out. Most of them were probably just happy that school was cancelled.

Even though I wasn’t really in any danger, I went through my house when I got home and took pictures of all the stuff I wouldn’t be able to take if I had to evacuate. I got all my papers and pictures and irreplaceable stuff together. It all fit on my kitchen table. It’s weird to know that if I had to bail out, I could load all that, 8 years of company development and coworker’s personal effects into a 2004 GTO and still jam in my road bike. Don’t know what kind of statement that makes, but it says something.

Tuesday was an exercise in surrealism. The top and bottom of the county are burning and I can still slip into Best Buy to pick up a wifi router. The whole middle section is just open for business, even though Qualcomm stadium is quickly turning into a refugee camp. (Granted, it’s a refugee camp with massages, acupuncture, wireless internet and cell-charging stations, but hey, this it California.)

My parents were finally evacuated Tuesday morning and by early that evening they were at my place with the dogs. We spent a fairly uneventful night.

Now here we are. The evacuation order on Scripps has been lifted so I’m sitting at work, sorting through messages and troubleshooting client issues, just like nothing’s going on. My folks still can’t go home, but at this point their house is fine. Here’s hoping it stays that way.

Thanks everyone for the thoughts and calls and e-mails. We really appreciate it. If you’re here in town, be safe.

Race expos, expert advice and tri #2...

2007-10-01T20:49:00.000-07:00

So this past weekend was the Mission Bay triathlon. Sprint distance which, for those of you playing along at home, is about half the distance of the olympic race at Pac Grove. Since I know you're just craving numbers, that's a 500m swim (.31 miles), 15km bike (9.32 miles) and 5km run (3.1 miles).

I did it in 1:14:01, so now I have a benchmark for future sprints. With any luck, it'll only get faster.

This was a great race for me. I've now got a floating start under my belt, which is cool. Instead of running into the water in a tangle of thrashing humanity like we did a Pac Grove, we all swam out to a buoy and when the horn sounded, just started swimming. The new bike continues to perform well. Once I go back and get the fit adjusted, it should be perfect. Also, I managed to get and keep the computer in the right mode this time, so I could actually track my cadence and speed, so I knew how I was doing. Finally, and this is key, I ran the ENTIRE run course. No cramps, no stretching, no limping, no walking. Fantastic.

In case you're just tuning in, it was a really fun race, more so for being home turf. Makes me want to try all the other races in town. It is odd, though, to drive into Pacific Beach at 5AM on a Sunday morning. The only other cars on the road are going the same place you are.

Even more interesting than the race was the expo the day before. Coach Gurujan gave his course talks and several of us Pac Grovers volunteered to demonstrate transitions and answer questions. We had a fun time and it was kind of surreal to have people coming up and asking us for advice. Most of us had all of one race to draw from. Now we have two. It was a trip to answer those questions and to think that just a few short months ago, we were the ones asking where we'd go to change our shorts between swim and bike (you don't), what you carry your keys and wallet in (your bag, in transition) and how you ride a bike in your aero bars (if you haven't, don't try it on race day). So many other questions. How do you attach your race number to your wetsuit? What does "no drafting" mean? How hard is it to switch from biking to running?

Suddenly, all us rookies are experts?

Still, to see some of those people on race morning, and see the jitters and excitement on their faces. I wonder if that's what we looked like at Pac Grove? Probably.

This just in (sort of)...

2007-09-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

I did my first relay race yesterday. The La Jolla Cove 10 Mile Relay Swim. What a trip.

You take a team of five (or one or two or ten, but we had five) and combined you swim 10 miles. It's weird having an hour and a half between heats. Gives you time to think a little.

The night before the race, I was at a party and someone asked me why I would go do that, swim two miles. The trite old answer is of course "because I can." As we talked a little, we got on to the fact that these races aren't cheap. The relay was $60 or so per person. Yes, some of it goes to charity, but my friend is also right when he says we could just get five people and go swim the ten miles for free. You don't even have to pay to park in La Jolla.

This is where I got stuck. Yes, we could do it for free. We know we aren't going to win or anything. We're not competing, if that's the way you want to look at it. We are competing, we're racing after all, but we're competing against ourselves. the fact of the matter is, once you realize that you can do something like go swim a mile in the open ocean, the thought of not doing it becomes harder to swallow. In other words, you do it because you can do it. The fact that you get to give something back with the charity aspect is just gravy, as is the competitive element. You're not out there to win, but someone is.

Someone is trying to win the race. Someone else is trying to prove that they can, in fact, swim the mile, or get past a crippling fear of kelp. Some of us are just doing it to get together, be outside and get some exercise. Spending time with people who think at least a little like we do.

Why do we do it? It's fun. Simple.

Oh, and by the way, I swam my miles in 27:26 and 28:10, respectively.

So this is it...

2007-09-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

So I know the race was almost a week ago and I'm only just getting to the final report. It's taken me a few days to process exactly what went down in Monterey.

First off, I finished the race. I did it in 3:10:22, which is a little slow, but hey, it's the first one, so I'll take it. Here's how it broke down:

Overall: 3:10:22
Swim: 31:59
T1: 3:01
Bike: 1:25:50
T2: 2:46
Run: 1:06:46

So what does this tell me, now that I am a highly trained triathlete?

1. I swim crooked. I got aggressive. I swam over people, yanked them out of my way, clubbed them with my forearms (Sorry, Pat.) but I guess I still went around one too many. Still, Coach swears the course was longer than 1500 meters. Sounds good to me. I still need to work on my sighting.
2. It was hard to get that damn wetsuit off.
2a. Never trust the people in transition. If you don't know where to go, they sure as hell don't.
3. My new bike is faster than the one I trained on.
4. Work harder to go around, through and over the people who can't seem to get their bikes back into transition. Throw shoulders if you have to.
5. I need to learn to run through leg cramps. Seriously, the ones I had could have brought down a stegosaurus.

All told, I was only 10 minutes slower than my projected time, and most of that could have been made up on the run. Maybe I need more electrolytes on the next one. Maybe I need to even out my pedal cadence while biking. Maybe I just have to drill my bike/run transition more. Probably all of the above. At any rate, I have another race coming up to try some of the fixes.

That's right, I'm doing it again. Mission Bay is coming up in a couple of weeks. It's a sprint, so I can play around a little. I should be past the first race jitters too, if I'm lucky. We'll see how it goes.

Finally, I'd like to say this: the triathlon hangover is interesting. It doesn't hit until the second day after the race and then it lasts a little while. You have crappy motor control, writing and typing tend to look like exercises in drunken hieroglyphics and cryptography, respectively. You space out, you get cramps. Sitting for too long makes you stand up like a drunken, arthritic walrus. It's not pretty, but it's totally worth it.

Thanks to you all. Everyone who reads this, everyone who donated, Coach Gurujan, Coach Robbie, all the mentors, and to the team. We made it. If things work out right, we'll see you at Lavaman. Otherwise, we'll see you in a start chute somewhere along the way.

Stay tuned...

Is it me or is that light getting brighter?

2007-09-05T20:36:00.000-07:00

Well, I know I haven't been overly vocal these last few weeks. Between work and training, I haven't had a whole lot of time or energy left to spin coherent thoughts onto the internet. Why'd I let that stop me?

It's pretty much zero hour now, kids. Strap in, hang on and scream your guts out. When next I post, the race will be over. I'll be posting times and splits and all that cool stuff. Maybe even some more pictures.

Am I ready? Somebody asked me that the other day and I said all that remains is to see what I mess up. I'm ready. I can swim bike and run the distances. I can do it in sequence. I've got my purple lycra top... But seriously, the bike is on the truck, along with the race bag. The voice mail tells people I'm out of touch. The spam filter is cranked up to high and everyone knows that if they call me I can't really help them.

I'm jittery and anxious. I'm ready for it to be over and yet not quite ready to be done. This has been an incredible ride. I never would have thought I could get to this point, let alone actually be entered in the race and ready to compete. I even bought my own bike. And I registered for another race. I'm such an addict. I was warned. I didn't listen.

I'm starting to ramble now. I'm off to pack and set the alarms, then think wistfully about sleeping until I go to the airport in the morning in my purple jacket. I'll write again when it's all over.

My computer is thinking. I'm trying not to...

2007-08-21T23:17:00.001-07:00

So I already mentioned the practice tri on Saturday. I enjoyed it. I did well. There's no reason at all to think I won't cross the finish line at Pac Grove. So why am I nervous?

I think because it's almost zero-hour. This Saturday is the Iron Mountain brick, by all accounts the nastiest, gnarliest (yes, that's the Southern Californian in me coming out, dude) workout we'll do. The rite of passage for all us newbies.

The last donations are goin in; the fundraising is done. (Thank you, everyone. Seriously. I couldn't have made it here without you.) We're wrapping up our coached workouts, and it's getting on time to check our lines one last time and step into the lights.

All I have to do now is heal up the blisters, clean the bike (after the big ride, of course), and not do anything too silly between now and the 8th of September. Sounds simple enough, right?

Ah well, enough of that. This is the problem with the microphone. You tend to say things so people can hear. I think I need to go to bed, I'm starting to ramble.

One last thing before I go. Here's an action shot from this weekend's race. They even got the side where my shoe was on.

Damn it all, I was gonna throw up another one, but I left it on my other computer...

Tomorrow.

Breaking the seal

2007-08-19T09:01:00.001-07:00

This whole race thing is starting to get a little more real. Four months of training, watching a couple of tris, I've learned a lot, but it has all been largely academic. Now, not so much.

Yesterday we ran a "practice tri," which turned out to be a race a little shorter than a sprint, but complete with transitions and rules and a marked course and all that. It broke down into a 300 meter swim, 11 mile bike and 2 mile run. I finished in 1:05:06. I screwed up my splits, but I know that I did the swim in 6:35, and the run in 18:32, which is about a minute slower than I should have. The big hole was on my bike ride.

I felt like I was hammering hard and going fast, but several people from the team flew by me like I was stopped. In replaying the race in my head, I think I need to work on shifting and learning how to stay in the optimal gear, to preempt the lag in cadence that says the road has changed and missed it. I also need to get my shoes on faster. I lost some time working on that. Live and learn. Race again and do it better next time, right?

Pac Grove is now just over three weeks away. Who knows what race day will bring, but I think I'm ready for it.

Random Thoughts, Though They Make Sense In My Head

2007-08-13T22:43:00.000-07:00

Since I've been training for this race, and will soon run it, I suppose it's safe to say that I'm well on my way to becoming an endurance athlete. This is cool for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that when someone tells me they'll pledge some amount per mile, I get to see the look on their face when I say the race is a little over 30 miles.

Another cool thing is that by the time race day rolls around, I'll actually be able to do this. My ankle is just about 100% again, and if I can survive Coach G's last minute attempts to change my stroke, I should be good.

The thing about endurance sports, they're all about slow twitch muscle. This is ironic because I've always been fine with slow twitch sports and for the last few years I've been training my body for fast twitch activities like surfing and sand volleyball. Along comes triathlon and undoes all of that in three months. This is how I choose my hobbies; logically and with an eye to what I've already prepared myself to accomplish.

I played in a teammate's volleyball tournament yesterday. It was for Team In Training, and it was fun, but by the end of five games of doubles with players who were way out of my league...

Let's just say that I wound up feeling like I'd been beaten with rocks and left in a 400 degree oven to bake up a nice golden brown. Seriously, that was WAY HARDER than the 25 mile bike ride or the transition practices, or the ocean swims, or...well, than pretty much any of the tri workouts that preceded it.

Anyway, it was good fun and everyone I played with was very tolerant and cool. They didn't seem to mind me playing albatross to their mariner for the duration of the game. (That's right, a Samuel Taylor Coleridge reference in a triathlon blog. Does that blow your mind?)

I did learn something though, apart from the fact that my v-ball game has departed for parts unknown. What I learned is this: fast twitch or slow twitch muscle, if you fling it at the ground hard enough and often enough, it's gonna hurt the same.

What was it Douglas Adams said about flying? All you have to do is throw yourself at the ground and miss. If I figure that out, maybe I'll take up basketball.

You'll have to forgive me

2007-08-07T21:34:00.000-07:00

I think I'm going to be serious for a minute, but don't worry, it probably won't last.

I had a bit of a scare over the last week or two. I couldn't run. I'd take off running and within a few hundred yards, my Achilles Tendon would seize up. It felt like someone had driven a nail through my ankle. I'd have to stop and stretch, then walk a bit. On our last Lake Hodges brick, we had a four mile run and I couldn't do it. I walked almost the whole thing. The next Tuesday, I fought my way through track practice, but I thought my ankle was just going to tear itself apart.

Anyway, I tried to run on it a couple more times and it just kept getting worse. I finally had to go to the doctor. After a few days on anti-inflammatories and a strict stretching and ice regimen (not to mention a week of no running) I'm almost back to normal. I was beating my pace tonight (one mile in 8:20 or so, which is 15 seconds faster than my race pace), and I only hurt when I lost my concentration and let my stride fall into heel-striking.

The scariest thing about this is not the injury, which turns out to be a minor strain, probably an overuse injury, but rather its proximity to race day. As of tomorrow we are exactly one month from zero-hour. The thought that I might be hindered on race day, or even worse, unable to complete the run, had me anxious and pissed. To have trained this hard and have it slip...

Thankfully, I'm gonna be fine. It does drive home the point that you are only as strong as your weakest link. the smallest crack in the wall can bring you down. This one was my fault. I charged a little too hard and I didn't recover properly between sessions. Add that to the general stress of life lately, with fundraising and all the insanity at work (stupid jobs, getting in the way of training) and you've got a recipe for disaster.

I'm sure my body tried to tell me something was wrong, but I didn't listen. And that's the moral of this story: no matter what you think you are capable of, nothing can run at 100% every hour of every day and not break down.

That's it for now, take care of yourselves, get some rest, eat your vegetables, stay in school, all that stuff. I'm gonna go veg in front of the TV for a while. Maybe I'll be back later to tell you how I spent a few minutes last Saturday on my back, clipped to my pedals, with the bike sticking straight up into the air and my water bottle rolling down the highway.

I think I'm losing it.

2007-07-25T22:38:00.000-07:00

So here it is, Wednesday, and I've already run 9 miles and change and swum close to 3. This is since Monday...

Am I crazy? (Hint: I think I could have been going harder.)