Xterra Miami 2012

I still didn't get any pizza but I did get a first place.

The venue for Xterra Miami

The race was the last event of this trip which was originally planned to attend my niece's wedding on Grand Cayman Island. The race moved its date to the second weekend in March and happily coincided with our return from the wedding cruise in the northern Carribean. So, with the airfare already paid for in a sense I decided to do the race and get an early start on my triathlon season.

Something tells me that spending a week drinking lots of beer and relaxing on a cruise ship is not the best way to prepare for a triathlon. Combine that with spending the previous three weeks having work travel and other commitments wreaking havoc with one's training schedule resulting in very little actual training getting done and you're definitely not standing on the beach in top form. But there I was, well rested but definitely not well prepared.

I did feel like I was in better shape, both in terms of my fitness and my mountain biking skills, than the last time I did this race three years ago.  My first thought when my brother first brought up the idea of doing Xterra Miami three years ago was, "It's Miami, the course has to be completely flat".  I ended up having a terrible race then because I wasn't prepared for the almost diabolically technical bike course and almost equally difficult run course. This time though, I felt like I was a much better mountain biker.

My brother, Scott,  and his friend, Kevin, accompanied me as we pre-rode the course on Saturday afternoon after debarking the ship in the morning and putting our bikes together in the parking lot at Oleta State Park, on the northern end of Biscayne Bay. The pre-ride went well, giving me much more confidence in my ability to handle the course than the day before the race last time I did this event. I was still a little nervous about my fitness and there's always an element of uncertainty before a race because anything can happen during the mountain bike ride and often does. As it turned out, this race would be quite eventful.  But I went to sleep the night before the race feeling pretty good.

The first thing that went wrong on race day was the time change. I changed the clock and got a wake up call on time but I lost an hour of sleep, getting up at what my body thought was 3:30am but was actually 4:30am on order to get to the race venue in time.

We left the hotel on time at 5am and headed for the race.  I realized a few minutes later that I had left my Garmin in the charger plugged into the wall behind a chair in our hotel room. Thinking I had no time to go back to the hotel since I had to pick up my brother and his wife I drove on, resigned to do without the Garmin. As it turned out, Scott's buddy was picking him up and after finding this out at Scott's hotel I realized that I had time to go back to our hotel and get my Garmin.  That crisis was averted.
Just as we approached the entrance to the park it started raining, hard. After we got into the huge park and drove towards the venue the rain stopped and I realized that the road was dry. I thought it was just a passing, isolated shower.  I parked the car and before we could get out, a torrential rain started to fall. This was going to make for an interesting race.
 
Thanks to the switch to daylight saving time it was pitch dark when I rode my bike to transition after waiting out the storm for about fifteen minutes.  I got a good spot, left my bike and returned to the car. Shortly after returning to the car it started to rain some more. The rain finally stopped for good a few minutes later and I grabbed my gear bag and lugged it to my spot in transition right near the bike in/out. I laid my stuff out in the pre-dawn light, lubed my chain and fixed my misaligned front wheel.

My brother had come down with a nasty case of bronchitis on the ship and had decided not to compete. I had not realized that the swim would be wetsuit legal so I hadn't brought my wetsuit. Since Scott wasn't competing and we're about the same size I tried to get into his wetsuit.  No such luck. He's a bit smaller than I am through the shoulders and even if we could've gotten the zipper up, the suit would've been too restrictive to swim in.  The swim was only 800-meters so I wasn't terribly concerned about having a wetsuit. The small time advantage from wearing the suit would have been largely eaten up by taking the suit off after the swim anyway.

I made my way down to the water and got in an excellent warmup. The water was 72-degrees so, although wetsuit legal, it wasn't uncomfortably cold at all and I got used to the water right away.

After the warmup swim

As is typical of this race we didn't start anywhere near on time. I would find out later that that wasn't the only organizational problem with the race. We finally got started at 8:10 instead of the advertised 7:30.
After waiting around so long for the start I had forgotten to lower my goggles, realizing my mistake after getting a stinging shot of salty Biscayne Bay water in my eyes.

The start

My swim didn't go too badly but it wasn't great. I could swim quite well from the start but eventually my stomach started to get nauseous, as usual, and I had to alternate between freestyle and breast stroke.  I came out of the water last, a position I am quite used to on the swim but I wasn't far back.

Out of the water

I made up some time in transition after having probably my best ever swim/bike transition. I left transition on the bike with a slight lead on last place but that lead wouldn't last too long.

Headed out on the bike.  Notice that I am NOT last out of transition.

I hit the trail head feeling really good and ready to attack the extremely technical course. I do most of my mountain biking in the desert.  We don't have trees in the desert. We have some cactus that gives us lots of incentive to carve our turns carefully and to stay on the trail, but trees on both sides of the trail, often not much more than handlebar width apart, are just about nonexistent. Here, in South Florida, there's trees absolutely everywhere. And what do you get when you have trees?  You have roots.  Roots in abundance, ready to snag a pedal or slide a back wheel out from under you. And they were wet roots that were extremely greasy from all the rain making an already difficult course positively treacherous in spots. All went well for about two miles.  I was rocking the Casbah, dominating the dojo and generally riding pretty well, confident in the MTBing skills that I had been honing over the winter.

Then, just as I stood up on the pedals and started to attack a hill...

Hill? Did I say hill?  Yes.  Hills. Hundreds of them. Oh, nothing too high. Most in the 4-10 foot range but the course was 14 miles of twisty, hilly switchback singletrack with a few short sections of dirt road interspersed about the course to make about 15 miles total. There was almost no place to rest and the course was full of drops, ramps, and a few boardwalks that had us working all the time that we were riding.

…my pedals locked up and I thought, "What the hell is going on?"  After dismounting and dragging my bike to the side of the trail I discovered that when I unweighted the back of the bike by standing up, my back wheel, which had come loose somehow, dropped out of its mounts and bent the hell out my derailleur mount and twisted my chain.  I thought my race was over. Then I calmed down a little, caught my breath and started to figure out how to fix this thing. After 10 or 15 minutes I was able to stuff the rear wheel back into its mount, straighten the derailleur mount and get the chain re-aligned so it didn't hit the spokes on the back wheel. Amazingly, everything worked but the chain was a little noisy for the rest of the race. A few minutes later I encountered a guy who had broken his chain. I stopped to help him for a few minutes, continuing on when it looked like he had it almost fixed.

I proceeded on and rode the course technically pretty well but not very fast. I had a few close calls like when I rode over a pile of logs at an angle and almost lost my rear wheel out from under me. I was running brand new tires that I had chosen for their ability to handle soft terrain and they performed very well. I didn't have any trouble with sliding out on the hundreds of switchbacks and hairpin turns.

The roots were the biggest challenge. I was constantly pedaling to maintain forward motion up and over all the hills. It was very easy to snag a root and get my foot knocked out of a pedal which happened quite often. The only really nasty crash happened about 4 miles into the race.

I was climbing a root covered hill and just as I crested the hill the back wheel slid across the roots and went right out from underneath me. I went down, hard, on my left (why is it always the bad side that you land on?) shoulder.  I was stunned but not really hurt that I could tell. I had a little bit of flesh pain but thought nothing of it until a woman behind me asked me if my shoulder was ok since it was pretty bloody. I figured it was just a flesh wound and I soldiered on.  After the first loop of the bike course which took about an hour and a half I stopped to take a gel.

I had been steadily slowing as my lack of fitness for a long, hot and humid effort began to show.  That combined with having to stop for faster riders who were lapping me on the two loop bike course made for a long bike ride.

I did much better on the second loop. I had to walk a couple of obstacles that I could have ridden but I was too tired to attack them.  That was partially offset by being able ride a few obstacles that I had trouble with on the first loop because I knew they were coming and I set myself up better to negotiate them.

Toward the end of the second loop, as my arms were getting pretty tired, I took a turn too wide, ping-ponged off a tree, bounced across the trail, ricocheted off a tree on the other side and fell down pretty hard.  Clearly I have a lot of work to do on my arm fitness (and my overall fitness) before my next race. I was definitely ready to be done with the bike.

I rode back to transition just as my derailleur started to act up. I'll be doing reconstruction when I get the bike home.  Second loop of the bike course took about an hour, aided by the fact that, out there all alone, I didn't have to let faster riders pass and I wasn’t slowed down by anyone in front of me.

Back from the bike.

I had an excellent bike/run transition, heading out on the run feeling good but with some pretty heavy legs.  The first water crossing came about a quarter mile into the run. It was a good 30-40-yards across and the water was well over my head.  I put my Garmin in my hat and “swam” across in an upright position.  I got out on the other side and started to run with waterlogged shoes.  

Headed out on the run.

The first 5 miles of the run course was marked pretty well as all the Xterra races I have done but that would soon change.  I negotiated another water crossing about a half mile from the first one.  This one was twice as wide as the first one and featured a rope with which to pull ourselves across.  A while after the second water crossing I came upon the first run aid station manned by two young boys.  As I drank some water and took my second gel one of the boys asked about my bloody right arm which I had cut when I slammed into a tree while impersonating a pinball.  I told him I had injured myself when I fell off the bike.  With a completely straight face and a bit of an incredulous look he said, “And you kept going?”  I just smiled and said, “Hey, this is Xterra.”

I felt pretty good as the spring in my legs had returned and I ran most of the next three miles which included another aid station where I stopped briefly to get some Gatorade having lost my Gatorade bottle on the second water crossing when it floated out of my water bottle belt.  After negotiating about a mile and a half of twisty, rocky but mostly flat trail I exited the woods expecting to cross a road and be directed by signs and volunteers to the next aid station.  Instead the open field where the aid station was supposed to be had a van where they were loading up said aid station.  I yelled “Where do I go?” but got no response so I ran across the field, got some more Gatorade and the guy said, “Go that way.” as he pointed to the other side of the field.  “You’ll see the signs as you go through the trees.”  Well, I went that way but there were no signs.  I looked around a bit but there were no markers anywhere.  Xterra courses are clearly marked with blue “XTERRA” arrows for the bike course and red “XTERRA” arrows for the run course.  The first four miles of the run had been well marked.  I wandered around generally following the route I remembered from the last mile of the course when I did it three years ago.  I kept looking for a red arrow but there were  none to be seen.  I managed to find my way back to the finish but I know I didn’t go the right way although, according to my Garmin, I covered more than a mile and a half instead of the mile that I should have gone from the last “aid station”.

The finish.  Notice that there is no chip mat.  This race doesn't wait for all the competitors to finish.

Clearly, I have a lot of work to do on my overall fitness.  I think I performed better on this edition of Xterra Miami though with a better swim, a better bike (minus the mechanical) and a better run if you factor out getting lost on the last mile of the course because of the missing markers.  Still, it was a sucky performance that I’m not happy with.

The shoulder doesn't hurt as much as I thought it would.

This race was intended to be a gauge of my fitness level going into the triathlon season.  It looks like the arrow is pointing closer to empty than I thought.

Oh, and the first place award for 60-64?  I was dead last in the race and I found out later that some other people got lost on the run too because of the lack of trail markers..  My only competition on the sign up list was my brother and he decided not to race because he was sick.  So I was the only competitor in my age group.

EPILOGUE

After replacing my seriously bent derailleur hanger my bike still wouldn't shift right.  I adjusted the derailleur but it still wouldn't shift properly so I took it into the shop today.  It turns out that I have a severely cracked rear triangle.  

You can see the crack just to the right of the weld.  Had I ridden much more it probably would have broken clean off.  No wonder that it started riding poorly toward the end of the bike ride.

2011

Not what I had planned.

Above is the final standings for my age group in the Xterra South Central Region.  Note that I am not last, although I had a pretty dismal season.  The highs and lows of this past season are what follows.

The season started out inauspiciously.  I was going to do a new race in Moab in early May.  I decided not to do the race when I realized that I probably wasn't trained enough to be competitive.  As it turned out I was right too.  I heard through the grapevine that the Moab bike course was incredibly long and difficult and the water was extremely cold (like in the upper 40's) for the swim.  Glad I didn't attempt it.  I just didn't want to slog through a race that I wasn't ready for.

The next race in the schedule was Xterra Four Corners.  This is the only Xterra in New Mexico.  The race is held in Farmington which is up in the NW corner of the state about a 3 1/2 drive away.

I've done the race twice before.  The first time I was the last one out of the water after suffering horribly with some horrific calf cramps in the swim.  I finished dead last in the race.  I later traced the cramping problem to Lipitor which I discontinued as soon as I figured it out.  My cardiologist decided that I could do without a statin after all since they didn't affect my blood chemistry all that much and I was living a very healthy lifestyle anyway.

The second time I did the Farmington race I raced quite well for me, improving my time significantly.  I was looking for a good result this year too since I knew the course and I'd been training pretty well.

Then a couple of things happened.  They got new race management for Xterra Four Corners and they changed the course.  I wasn't able to get to Farmington to pre-ride the new course either which didn't make me real happy.

Race weekend didn't go well.  I got to the race a little later than I wanted.  I wasn't able to warm up like I wanted and when the gun went off I just wasn't mentally into it. 

Four hundred meters into the race disaster struck.  The severe, debilitating nausea that has plagued me on most of my cold water swims came back again.  I thought I had licked it by changing up my swim warm-up and altering my pre-race breakfast routine.  My first lap on the swim was horribly slow.  I was really sick in the water and just couldn't face another lap of feeling so nauseated that I felt like I would throw up any minute.  Besides they had instituted a swim cut-off of 50 minutes and with the way I was feeling I didn't think I'd make the cutoff anyway.  So I DNF'd.

I figured I do another race in Texas and one in Arkansas that was fairly short and one in Virginia that I'd done before to get three races in for the season.

It didn't happen.  The Arkansas race got canceled.  By the time I booked airfare for the Virginia race the airline wanted $1100.00 (plus $100.00 to carry the bike) for my wife and I to fly.  I just wasn't ready to spend that kind of money just for airfare.

The only race I got to do this year was Magnolia Hill outside of Houston which is the subject of the previous entry in this blog.

As I look at the standings, it looks like I could have gone to Nationals this year had I done three races and finished no worse than third.  Oh well.  I'm finally healthy again and I have the bug to do more Xterra triathlons.

Next year will be a better year.

Xterra Magnolia Hill

XTERRA MAGNOLIA HILL

I was introduced to a new level of athletic suffering this past weekend. How do those people in South Texas handle the heat and humidity?

I thought training in the mid to upper 90's heat of Albuquerque would adequately prepare me for this event. I need to think again. Training in a sauna might be better.

We flew in Friday night to Houston Hobby airport and drove to Navasota, about 90 miles NW of Houston. We checked into a brand new Comfort Inn and Suites hotel that was about 20 minutes from the race venue.

The hotel experience was among the best I have ever had. They gave me exactly what I asked for, a room on the side of the hotel away from the highway and on the top floor. I think we had the top floor all to ourselves on Friday night and there were only two or three more rooms occupied on Saturday night.
Saturday started out with a three hour round trip to The Woodlands to pick up my packet. I would have skipped the trip if I had known that I didn't need my packet to pre-ride the course as the race website had indicated. I would have just picked up my packet on race day. It was an interesting drive but I could have pre-ridden the course much earlier in the day without it.

Finally found the race venue after driving for an eternity on the back roads of Texas. By the time we got to the venue it was noon and almost 100 degrees.



Took a quick swim in the lake after gabbing with some of the other race participants. The water was extremely warm, so warm that it was not refreshing. There was enough humidity in the air that getting out of the water didn't cool me off at all. There simply was no evaporation from the skin. There was no way to get cool. The shade helped a bit but not much.

Then it was off to ride the course. I reasoned that it would be OK to pre-ride the bike section since the 13.5 mile course actually consisted of two 6.75 mile loops. So I could see the whole course by only riding 6.75 miles. I've never done much riding the day before a race and I suspected it might not be a good idea to work that hard in the heat but I didn't think the course was that hard and I didn't think it would be that hot on the mostly wooded course. I was wrong on both counts.



The course was not technically difficult but it was very twisty and 99% of the surface was sand, some of it deep in spots. So that made for some hard work. The other thing that made the course more difficult than I thought was that the trail, even though it was "in the woods", was wide enough on 80% of the course to be in full sun. The sections that were on narrow, heavily wooded trail were comfortable in comparison to the sections that were jeep roads or along the lake where there was no tree cover at all.
Long story short: I was tired, overheated and a little dehydrated when I finished one lap of the bike. The temperature, in the shade, according to the car thermometer was something like 104. We headed into town to get some lunch and went back to the hotel.

We return to the hotel and as I check the bike to clean and lube the chain I discover that the back tire is flat. I now have to put my only spare tube in the bike and repair the flat tube to use as a spare. After changing the tube I couldn't find a leak in the tube that had gone flat. I wonder if I hadn't closed the valve all the way when I added air. I put some more air in the spare tube and left it out to see if it held air while we went to dinner.

After relaxing for a bit we headed to College Station for a nice Italian dinner. I like my Spaghetti the night before a race. We got back about 9:30PM and the spare tube had held its air so I drained it and folded it into by backpack for the race. I got the rest of my gear laid out and went to bed, getting a fairly good night's sleep.

The plan was to get up at 6:15 and be on the road by 6:45 to the race venue. It should only take us 15 minutes to get there and I wanted to be there by 7, 2-hours before race time. Final preparation went flawlessly as I ate breakfast, filled my fluid containers, one being my Camelbak with Gatorade and ice, the other being my bike bottle with water, electrolytes and ice.

I was trying out a new trick this race. I had acquired a small roller bag that was insulated and so could double as a luggage bag and an ice chest for transition. Just the thing for those hot sunny transitions, I stashed my hydration containers in the insulated roller bag along with a zip-lock bag full of ice and off we went.

I thought we'd get to the venue in about 15 minutes but we had a couple of snafus. The first was having to make a pit stop in the woods by the side of the highway as my nerves overcame my digestive system and the second was missing the turnoff from the highway to the race. We did finally find the race only about twenty minutes later than I'd planned so no big deal.

It was almost 80 degrees at 7:30AM with no wind.

Here's a shot of the lake on race morning:

I got setup in transition and then headed for body marking and chip pickup. I went back to transition and tried to think of what I had forgotten since there's always something. I couldn't come up with anything although it would occur to me later what I forgot. Then it was time to relax until I did my warmup.


Ten minutes later after a half mile run, I headed into the water to warm up. I got a good warm up and left the water for the pre-race briefing. There would be three waves for the 800 meter swim: men under 40, men over 40 and women/relays. OK, I'm in wave 2.

10 minutes later wave one goes off and one minute after that wave 2 is in the water.


I hit my stroke right from the start. Breathing was good, sighting was good. I knew I hadn't warmed up quite enough because my arms felt heavy for the first 200 meters or so but everything was working perfectly. The buoys were a little hard to see since they were somewhat small and hard to make out over the churning mass of swimmers in front of me. I had to stop twice, just briefly, to double check my sighting but I was spot on and started swimming again right away.

Half way through the swim, I'm swimming along smooth and strong when, right out of nowhere, bam!, I get smashed in the head. A third wave swimmer, passing me in open water with no one else around me, managed to swim over me. I know I'm not that fast but this was ridiculous! Shortly after this I remember what I forgot to do in transition. I had not put my Camelbak's bladder inside the Camelbak. The bladder was sitting in the roller bag. It would be nice and cold but it would take me a minute to put it in the Camelbak. Oh well. Nothing to do but get it done as fast as possible in T1.

I rounded the second buoy and headed for home. The last 300 meters went by without incident and I exited the water after twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was a hair slower than I'd planned but I wasn't too disappointed.




After a 5 minute T1 ( I have GOT to get my T1 down under two minutes) I'm off on the bike. I did manage to save some time in T1 by sticking my gloves on my handlebars and putting them on while I was riding. I did however mange to forget my bike bottle with my electrolyte solution. Fortunately, it was a two lap course so I retrieved it after the first lap.



The bike was pretty uneventful. There were 3 or 4 bridges, all of which I managed to negotiate with the rubber side of the bike down. But it was HOT. I made a decision not to push because I knew that in this heat and humidity I wouldn't have anything left for the run if I did. So I just tried to maintain a steady pace and go as fast as I could on the downhills. All the granny gear climbs were in full sun with no wind. I only passed up one of the six aid stations, making sure I got plenty of water. First lap of the bike course was 1:05 and second lap was 1:10. By the time I finished the second lap the temperature was well over 100 degrees. I managed to pass four people on the bike course, all of which I never saw again.

Back from Lap 1 of the bike course

Headed out for lap 2 of the bike course

The run started out in the woods on a very narrow, very twisty trail. Getting any speed up was a challenge but that was OK because I was so overheated at this point that running for more than 30 seconds at a time was out of the question. Again, a steady pace with relentless forward motion was the plan.


The first mile of the two mile run course that we would traverse twice was in the woods in full shade. The second mile was around the lake in full sun with no wind and a temperature over 105 degrees. The lake itself was no help. The water was so warm and it was so humid out that when I dipped my hat in the water and put it back on my head I felt no cooling effect whatsoever.


After the first lap of the run I got some ice at the aid station and stuck it in my hat and inside my shirt. That helped a lot. Somewhere in the first part of the second run lap my Garmin stopped. When I left the woods I was dreading the last mile out in full sun but fortunately there was a light breeze for most of the last mile which not only made the last mile bearable but also enabled me to run quite a bit of the way around the lake.

Aid station just before lap 2 of the run

Headed into the woods for lap 2 of the run

I finally made it to the finish, 3-hours and 50-minutes after starting the race. I was DFL but only because the 8-10 people behind me had dropped out of the race. I took my chip off at the finish only to find out later that they didn't record my finish time. After all that, as of now, I'm listed as a DNF in the results. The race director is working on that.

Finally, the finish

Temperature at the finish? 109.

I couldn't relax though. Since it had taken me so long to do the race we now had to get back to the hotel, shower, pack, checkout of the room, pack the bike, load the car and get to the airport which was 90 miles away. We made our flight with 10-minutes to spare.

Academy Run 11-17-10

Back at the Academy Run. Another flat run.

Not sure what the complete stop around mile one was. This was a run 1 minute/walk 4 minutes run.

OK, pretty flat again I know.

The path rises as I near the finish so the HR climbs pretty steadily.

This one felt pretty easy. I'll increase the running and decrease the walking for next week I think.

Starting Over

OK. It's time to start over. I struggled with trying to train through the injuries of the past 18 months. I was able to do Xterra Worlds but it's not my goal to just finish these things, I want to get better. In addition to at least three Xterras I also plan to do a 50K MTB race in Ontario in 2011. So here is the first installment of what will, I hope, become my training log for 2011.

The banner photo is the 2 mile out and back run/walk that I did on Wednesday as I try to re-start my training, pretty much from scratch.

Here's the pace chart. I was running with a friend who's faster than I am at the moment so when we were running we were running fairly fast. The workout was run 2 minutes/walk three minutes. I fudged the first run interval so it's a little short.

OK, it was pretty flat. The elevation charts will look more interesting in future posts.

Here's the heart rate chart. You can tell we were running uphill at the end as the HR rises a little for each interval.

OK. That's the first workout. Tomorrow, Saturday, is a planned 30 minutes of more run 2 minutes/walk 3 minutes. I hope to cover a bit more ground. Next week we move up to run 3/walk 3.

2010 Xterra World Championships

It's been about 18 months since I last posted to this blog and the Terrible Triathlete has been busy.

Long story short to catch up, I finished the Xterra Four Corners triathlon in June of 2009 in a personal record time even though I had my usual sucky swim. That's the good news.

The bad news is that I failed to take enough time off after the race to properly recover and wrecked my right hamstring a week after the race. So by early 2010 I'm running a little biking a little and swimming a little. So what's the logical thing to do? Sign up for Xterra Worlds, of course, right? That is exactly what I did. Then, about the time the hamstring had healed, I sprained my right ankle very badly and tweaked my right knee in the spring of 2010. With that, here's the story of the 2010 Xterra World Championships.

This race very nearly didn’t happen for me. I hadn’t done any serious training in 16 months. I wrecked my right hamstring in June of 2009. Then about the time the hamstring healed and I was running fairly well again in the early spring of 2010 I sprained my right ankle pretty badly. The ankle sprain apparently tweaked my knee and inflamed a cyst in my knee that kept me from running until September 2010.

After struggling all summer with knee pain I finally got a good diagnosis about what turned out to be a cyst in my knee. Just when I was ready to bag the race, a doctor took an MRI in early September and told me that I had a cyst in my right knee. About that time the pain abated too. I told the Dr. I was doing this race so we tentatively scheduled surgery to remove the cyst for mid November. Once I knew I wasn’t aggravating some soft tissue injury by running I started training in earnest for the race in the first week of September.

Yeah, I know, 6 weeks is a *little* short of adequate time to train for a major triathlon but I may only get one shot at Xterra Worlds (plus I paid a non-refundable 375.00 entry fee) and I didn’t want to give up. Besides, I had been doing some MTBing and a lot of swimming so I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch.

I cobbled together a 6 or 7 week training plan and decided to go for it.

We had been planning this trip to Maui for over a year. My brother, who was also doing the race, and his wife offered to share their two bedroom time share condo on Maui with us so we had a great place to stay. We planned to stay at the host hotel for two nights, the night before and the night after the race, so the logistics would be easy on race morning.

We arrived on Maui the Monday before the race, which would be held the following Sunday. We played, gently so as not to injure ourselves, in the sun and surf for a couple of days and then it was time to go to work. We were planning to hit packet pickup as soon as it started at 9AM on Wednesday and we wanted to do our practice ride as soon as possible so our legs would have time to recover.

Wednesday morning dawned with a huge storm cloud over Haleakala, the volcano that dominated the southern end of Maui and loomed over the race start. We left our condo in Kaanapali, well north of Makena where the race would be held, under clear skies. By the time we got to the Makena Beach and Golf Resort it was cloudy and threatening rain. We got our bikes out of the car and rolled into the host hotel and down to the ballroom where Xterra Central was set up to welcome athletes from all over the world.

My number was 512. After shopping at the expo and spending way too much money on Xterra stuff, I put my number on my bike and got ready to do my practice ride. Just about this time, Haleakala decided to let loose with some moisture. A steady rain started to fall as we were getting ready to ride.

We changed our plan. We figured we’d do a practice swim first, since it didn’t matter if we got wet after the swim. So off to the beach we go. There were a couple of athletes finishing up their swim as we get in the ocean and swim into some 1-2 foot waves. I had a pretty good swim of about 800 meters. We basically swam out for 8-10 minutes, swam parallel to the beach for a few minutes and swam back. I had some trouble sighting as we headed back to the beach and ended up zig-zagging a bit. I hoped I’d do better on race day.

It was still raining steadily as we slogged out of the water and headed back up to the Expo. My bike was resting comfortably, sporting its 512 number plate and the brand new Kenda Small Block Eight tires that I had installed for the race.

There was quite a bit of discussion about tire choice for this race and I saw all kinds of tires on the bikes that had come from all over the world. I noticed a small knot of competitors gathered around my bike discussing my tire choice. I was too far away to hear what they were saying but I did notice that most of the athletes had more conventional MTB tires on their bikes. I noticed that some of the competitors were planning on racing on some pretty worn out tires.

I’ve always believed in running new or very nearly new tires for a major race. I wasn’t going to let $100.00 worth of tires come between me and a good race so I put brand new tires on my bike. The tread pattern was chosen because I knew that the bike course surface had a lot of loose dirt and gravel on it and the Kenda Small Block Eight had performed very well when I rode on it over the mostly gravel covered trails that I train on in Albuquerque. My tire choice would prove to be a good one on race day.

We waited a bit for the rain to stop and then decided to just go for it and ride in the rain. We were already wet from our swim. The bike practice course wasn’t actually on the bike course. The Xterra World Championships Bike Course is on private land and the landowner doesn’t open up the course until race day. So we were strictly forbidden to be on the bike course before race day. Instead, Xterra made a portion of the run course with similar terrain available for practice riding. The practice course was only about three miles and much of that was on some semi paved asphalt but it did give newcomers a sense of what to expect on the bike course.

The rain stopped and the sun came out briefly while we were riding then it started again in earnest after we got back to the host hotel. We hung out, tried to dry out which was impossible in the jungle-like heat and humidity and then decided to head back to Kaanapali. There was just one problem…

Since we were planning on going for a ride first, I had put the electronic key for our rental mini-van in the back pocket of my tri-top. Then we changed our minds and decided to swim first…with the key still in my tri-top and since I was going to race in my tri-top I was doing my practice swim in my tri-top too.

Long story short, I had to get the car towed back to the rental car place on the other side of the island and pick up another car since the electronic key was fried. At least they didn’t charge me for frying the key. Waiting for the tow truck killed two hours though, but overall, no harm, no foul.

We made a trip back to the host hotel on Thursday and Friday too. I did another short ride on the roads around the hotel just to keep the legs loose. I didn’t want to risk an injury by riding on the practice course up on the mountain.

By Friday I was little more nervous but not terrified. My plan was to make sure I was well rested on race day so I just took it easy and relaxed, soaking in the atmosphere of all the triathletes from 35 different countries some swimming, some running, a lot of them biking as we all prepared for the big day.

Saturday was a busy day. Brigitte was doing the trail 11k race that Xterra holds on the day before the World Championship race. The 11k race is done on the run course for the triathlon so Brigitte could give me a preview. I had run the same trail race three years earlier when we had come to Maui to watch my brother compete at Worlds so I was a little bit familiar with the course. But a fresh look at the course, especially with all the rain over the last few days couldn’t hurt

We also checked into the host hotel. I was really looking forward to staying at the Makena Beach and Golf Resort. The swim would start on the beach in front of the hotel and the transition would be on the hotel grounds. It would be nice to roll out of bed, walk my bike downstairs and be at the race.

After Brigitte’s race, where she got a 2^nd in her age group, we just hung out at the hotel and relaxed. I spent the day drinking nothing but water and laying around by the pool. I was determined to be well rested for the race.

At 7PM the night before the World Championships Xterra celebrates its past champions with a gala dinner. We attended the dinner but like the rest of the athletes we drifted back to our hotel rooms as soon as the dinner was over. I double checked my gear for the next day and got a great night’s sleep, confident in my plan for the race the next day.

Transition opened at 7AM on Sunday. The race started at 9AM. I was up at 6:30 feeling well rested and only a little nervous.

I had decided to completely revamp my pre-race routine. All my years of running had left me ambivalent about getting a good warmup. Most of the running races I had done were long distance affairs and I had gotten into the habit of mostly saving my strength and doing little to no warmup. My previous six triathlons, with one exception, had not gone well, mostly due to nerves about the swim. But an experience on a training swim across Cochiti lake this past summer had convinced me that a big part of my problem on the swim was a lack of an adequate warmup. So today would be different.

I had been practicing with breakfasting on a banana smoothie for a month or two before the race. I bought some bananas before race day, got the deli at the hotel to sell me a cup of milk the day before which I stored in our room fridge and I brought a hand blender from home to mix it up with. It went down without a hitch as I got dressed and ready to leave.

On the way to the elevator with my bike I topped off my Gatorade-filled Camelbak and my Gatorade-filled insulated running bottle with ice then I headed for transition right at 7AM.

Met my brother downstairs and together we were among the first competitors into transition. The bike racks were numbered, five bikes to a section, well over 500 bikes in all. We racked our bikes and setup our transitions. Then it was off to body marking. Good thing we got there early. There was no line for body marking when I went to get 512 stamped on my shoulders and 55, my age group, on my calf. An hour later there were thirty or more guys lined up to get body marked. I got slathered in sunscreen by the Planet Sun sunscreen guy. Then I started my warmup.

I decided at the last minute that I would buy another tube so I would have two tubes with me on the bike ride. It may be overkill but I had heard too many stories about the kiawe thorns, nail-like dried out thorns that littered the mountainside of Haleakala volcano and were reputed to go right through one side of a tire and tube and out the other side. So my run warmup was back to my room for the 10 bucks that the guy from the local bike shop wanted for a 29 inch, pre-Slimed tube. I was hoping it would fit neatly into my saddle bag and it did. That was the last of my equipment worries.

Then I was off to the second part of my new pre-race ritual. I grabbed my bike and went for a ride. Good thing too. Somehow I had managed to screw up my chain as I was walking it down to transition. I fixed it and then rode for just a couple of minutes, making sure that when I returned the bike to the rack, that I left it in the gear I would need leaving transition during the race.

Finally it was time to head down to the beach and warm up for the swim. I got to the beach and started to get a little nervous. Plunging into the 80 degree ocean was more of a shock than I expected but it didn’t last too long. I got in a really good warmup swim, much more than I had ever done before, probably swimming a good 400 meters before getting out of the water. The race officially wanted all of the competitors out of the water by 8:30 so I was standing on the beach, out of the water in plenty of time.

One of the things I had decided to do, for a gag, was to wear an inflatable animal ring on the beach before the start. This turned out to be a great idea. A lot of the other competitors came up to me and laughed at the prop. It really helped to take the edge off the start.

The start was preceded by an elaborate Hawaiian traditional blessing. I think the blessing idea is great but this thing went on for almost half an hour. I made sure that I stayed loose while we waited for the cannon to go off, swinging my arms as much as possible. Just before the race started I took off the inflatable toy and got ready to swim.

3-2-1 Boom!!! And the race was on. My plan was to start in the back on the outside to avoid the scrum and just swim MY race. The new pre-race routine worked like a charm. I started swimming smoothly and strongly right from the first stroke. I caught a good draft from someone in front of me and just kept going.

Xterra swims are generally two lap triangular courses. They put two buoys out in the water and a third one near the beach where we exit the water. We swim to the first buoy, turn left, swim to the second buoy, turn left, then swim to shore. After the first lap we run the beach for 50 yards or so and dive into the water for lap two.

I actually had full confidence in my ability to do the swim. I had done a swim across Cochiti Lake and back, a distance of about 1.5 miles, twice over the summer. Twelve days before the race I’d swum 2000 yards in the pool in a decent time with no problems. The only question marks were how fast I’d be able to swim and how well I would handle the crowd.

I divided the swim up into six parts. Part one, get a good start and get to the first buoy. I felt great as I sighted perfectly and rounded the first buoy in a pack of other swimmers. I was nowhere near last this time. I sighted on the second buoy and just kept a good rhythm. Part two was getting around the second buoy. No problem. I felt like I was swimming slowly but I was determined to pace myself and just have a smooth swim. Part three was getting to the beach. I got a little bit inside of the approach buoy and had to make a slight course correction but I hit the beach feeling strong and started running for the flag where lap two would start. Brigitte told me that I had only taken 15 minutes for lap one. Yikes! I felt really good about that. I should note that the first swimmer was out of the water, after TWO laps, in 19:29, so as good as I felt about the swim I have a long way to go.

Thumbs up after the first swim lap!

I had debated getting a speed suit for the swim. There’s a bit of a tradeoff between saving time on the swim and taking time in transition to take the speed suit off. Had I been able to find one that was reasonably priced before we left for Hawaii I would have bought one, but all the reasonably priced ones were out of my size. They had one in my size at the expo for only 120.00 but I reasoned that I didn’t want to wear it for the first time at this race even if it had been cheaper.

My brother, Scott, with whom I have a friendly rivalry, has been doing Xterra triathlons for 6 or 7 years and is a much better MTBer than I am so I had no illusions of beating him in the race. I thought though that I might just have a chance against him in the swim although he was wearing a speed suit.

Just as I started to dive in the water for lap two I saw Scott diving in just ahead of me. Soon after that we were swimming side by side and I was holding my own stroke for stroke. Part four of the swim was to get to the first buoy on the second lap. I didn’t feel tired at all, but shortly after entering the water on lap two I got a cramp in my right foot. “This is a new one”, I said to myself as I tried to relax the foot without slowing down. The cramp subsided within a minute or two and I sighted back on the first buoy.

I went around the first buoy on lap two stroke for stroke with Scott and sighted on the second buoy. I was now confident that I was almost done with the swim and it would be my best swim ever. Part five of the swim ended as I rounded the second buoy, still stroke for stroke with my brother. Somewhere between the second buoy and the shore another swimmer got between us and I, unwilling to alter my game plan of pacing myself on the swim, let Scott get a bit ahead. Right about the same time I saw a sea turtle swimming below us, completely oblivious to the mayhem going on at the surface.

Scott and I left the water 17 seconds apart. Brigitte told me I had done the swim in 37 minutes. I was ecstatic. Officially it was 38:02 but that was still better than the 40 minutes that I had thought would be about my best.

I was disappointed when we got to transition. I felt like I had had a good swim and I didn’t expect to see so few bikes left in transition. It looked like only a handful of bikes on the racks. Oh well. It made finding my bike pretty easy. In hind sight, I was racing against the best Xterra triathletes in the world so I was probably expecting too much. I just looked at the results. As good as I thought my swim was, I only beat 16 people out of the water.

My transition went OK. It could have been a bit faster but I hadn’t organized my gear properly and consequently I left my Garmin in transition. Other than having difficulty getting my gloves on over my wet hands, that was my only problem with transition. The gloves probably cost me a minute which I would regret dearly at the end of the race.

My legs were dead as I started to ride. I told myself to just pace yourself and keep moving. I needed at least a 3:15 on the bike to make the run cutoff that had been established at 4 hours if I was going to finish. I knew it might be close.

The bike course starts out on the road in front of the hotel for about a half mile before it starts up the mountain. Then it’s pretty much a relentless climb of varying steepness for about 7 miles. I was able to ride the first three or four miles of the uphill but then it got too steep and I was, again, committed to conserve my energy so I just pushed the bike up hill. Every time we rounded a turn there was another bloody hill that was still too steep to ride. Occasionally there’d be a stretch where we could ride but those stretches were short. The top of the bike course was almost 1600 feet above the ocean where we started.

Finally after reaching the top of this section of the course we were able to ride a mile or two of rollers. I hammered the course as hard as I could on the downhills and tried to conserve my energy on the uphills. At the first aid station I was in front of a woman from Brazil who looked at her watch and said we had 1:40 to make the run cutoff. That spooked me. I knew the first aid station was only about a third of the way through the bike course and we had a long way to go.

After the rollers we came to the steepest part of the course. This was really brutal. The temperature was 87 degrees in full sun with no wind and no shade. The race takes place on the leeward side of the volcano. All the rain falls on the other side. The course was hot, dry and dusty and all I could do was keep trying to push my bike up each seemingly successively steeper hill after another. At one point I just stopped. There was no air and no shade and I just had to take a break before I could go on. The good news was all the bike pushing gave me an opportunity to drink plenty of Gatorade from my Camelbak.

Once in a while there’d be a short stretch that I could ride. It felt so good to be able to ride the bike and get a breeze even if only for a few seconds. As the bike course stretched on and on I began to have serious doubts about my ability to make the run cutoff. Surely it had already taken me longer than 1:40 since the first aid station? I reasoned that there was nothing to do but keep going as hard as I could and hope for the best.

After finally cresting the last of the interminable uphills I reached the highest point on the course and made the right turn at aid station number two. I paused briefly to get a good shot of gel and wash it down with some water. Then I passed 3 or 4 competitors and started down the section of the bike course known as “The Plunge” to the sound of one of the aid station volunteers yelling, “Check your brakes!”.

I touched my brakes for a second just to make sure they were OK and proceeded to ride this completely rock covered, steep and twisty section of the course just as fast as I could go. The only time I used the brakes other than lightly to maintain some semblance of control was when I couldn’t see around the next turn. I blasted by several slower riders trying to pick their way through the rocks with reckless abandon. I was determined to make the run cutoff if it was at all possible. After a mile and a quarter of hammering down the mountain I had lost 900 feet of elevation riding over a roughly rutted, rocky jeep road. After a sharp right turn I was riding a section of net downhill rollers and I cruised through enjoying the cooling breeze created by my speed and had a chance, albeit brief, to enjoy the view of the ocean far below me. Then I came around a turn and I couldn’t believe I was going to have to push up another ¼ mile long hill. “When is it going to end?” I wondered. I got up as much speed as I could and tried to ride up the hill as fast as possible. This was my only unplanned dismount of the ride as I stalled riding through a rocky rut and laid the bike down as I jumped off but stayed on my feet. After this long uphill it was almost all downhill to the transition and I rode just as hard as I could go. I skipped the third aid station because I still wasn’t sure I would make the run cutoff. The last few miles of the bike course share the mostly dirt road with the start of the run course and there was a steady stream of runners coming up the hill so I figured I might just have time to make the run.

After entering the road to the hotel I shifted into the big ring and motored over the last ½ mile of the bike course. As I entered transition Brigitte told me I had 15 minutes left to make the run. I had done it! I was just elated because I knew that no matter what happened on the run course I would finish the race. I wasn’t expecting a lot of trouble on the run but the race still had a couple of surprises for me.

Back from the bike.

I had a little trouble finding my rack spot when I got back since all the bikes were there but it only cost me a few seconds. I put my Garmin on, got into my running shoes, tossed off my helmet and my gloves, grabbed my water bottle belt and my race number and headed out on the run.

I was pretty much toast by now after riding the bike course as hard as I did. My legs were even deader than I’d thought they’d be. The plan was to walk the uphills and shuffle through the downhills as best I could. I was a little nervous here. My run “training” consisted almost entirely of three runs done as brick workouts after 20 mile plus bike rides in late September and early October. The first of those “runs” had been 30 minutes of run 1 minute/walk 4 minutes. The next one was an attempt to do the same run 1 minute/walk 4 minutes routine but go for an hour. I made it to 51 minutes before my right knee complained too loudly and I walked the rest of the way back to the car. The third run, the following week, lasted for an hour during which I covered just shy of 4 miles.

Headed out on the run.

After about two miles of mostly uphill, mostly walking I was running on a downhill and just starting to feel good that I might have a decent run when my right hamstring locked up on me. No warning. One step was fine, next step, no go. Crap! At first I thought I’d re-injured the hamstring and wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep going. I stopped, stretched and when it still wouldn’t relax I just started limping along the course. Eventually, the cramp, as it turned out to be, let up and I started my run downhill, walk uphill routine again. Shortly after that I got another cramp and limped along while drinking as much of the Gatorade that I had with me as I could. By three miles I was getting hamstring cramps with increasing frequency, first one leg than the other. I refilled my 20 oz bottle of Gatorade at the next aid station and emptied it before the one following that, about a mile later. I took a gel packet every mile, ate some potato chips at one aid station and took three salt tablets that another runner gave me. It didn’t help. The cramps kept on coming. By 5 miles I had taken in 4 gel packets and 80oz of Gatorade just on the run and the cramps were still coming. Clearly I had underestimated how much salt I would lose in the heat and humidity of Hawaii when my usual training and racing venue was the dry air of New Mexico.

The final blow came with about a mile to go. I was trying to run a section of beach when both hamstrings seized up at the same time. I was dead in my tracks. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t straighten my legs. All I could do was plop down in the sand on my butt and massage my hamstrings. Then a wave came along, hit my legs and they felt better. That was the last cramp I would have. I walked most of the rest of the course stopping at the last aid station and one more time to get an annoying rock out of my shoe. I would really regret that last stop.

I finally picked my way over the lava field at the end of the final stretch of beach and climbed the hill up to the hotel grounds and started to run the last quarter mile to the finish. When I first saw the clock it read 6:00:40. Rats. I would not break six hours! Final time was 6:00:53. If I’d skipped any one of the aid station stops I would have broken 6 hours. When I started on the run I thought 5:30 was doable and without the cramps I still might have made it. But, the cramps happened and we deal with what we’re given in the race. I should have anticipated the effect of the humidity on my electrolyte balance and taken steps to avoid an electrolyte imbalance.

The good news was I was done. I had finished the race. Within a few minutes of finishing I felt great and had plenty of energy as the 4 or 5 gels and 80-100 oz of Gatorade that I’d consumed over the last hour kicked in.

Unbelievably, I had no problems with the cyst in my knee during the race and haven’t had any since then. I think I’m going to hold off on the surgery and see what happens as I begin to train again.

Final stats for the race were:

1500 meter swim – 38:02

19.9 mile MTB ride – 3:13:54

6.9 mile run – 2:08:57