2009 Nautica Malibu Triathlon

You remember what I was saying before about being tired? Turns out sleep fixes that. Much to my surprise when I backed off training, caught up on sleep, and then ramped up again quickly I was able to have a great race. More importantly, I was able to enjoy a full weekend of racing, support my teammates and friends for their Olympic distance race on Saturday, and then set a PR on Sunday for my own race. To cap off the victory the event raised over a million dollars for Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Personally, my friends, clients, and cohorts donated over $11,000 to my fundraising efforts making me the second highest fundraiser for the CHLA team and fifth highest overall fundraiser for the entire event!

On devaluing

A funny thing happened on the way to Arizona. At some point doing a forty five minute workout stopped feeling like a workout. This isn’t bragging, this is a psychological problem. After a workout there are steps one must take to properly recover – rehydration and lean protein being two key needs. As I stretch myself out on this Ironman timeline 45 minutes or an hour doesn’t feel like a full workout. And so, dangerously, I don’t properly refuel or rehydrate afterwards. This has caught up with me at the wrong time – my taper week leading up to the Malibu sprint triathlon. I am exhausted, having a hard time catching up on sleep, and when I do work out the legs are sapped of strength. This isn’t how I want to feel in the days leading up to a race so for the first time I am disobeying my planned workouts and taking it easy. Honestly, I did do this to myself. I worked out three times last week at Core Performance and while it was a great experience to be back there, it was also laid over my existing higher volume training schedule. The bow on this gift box of explosives is that I’m deliriously happy to be hovering under 180lbs and so of course, I’m lowering my caloric intake to try and lose more weight while also increasing my workload. This is just plain stupid.

Born to Run, Native Wisdom, and why I hate Michael Pollan

For some months everyone I knew in sport was reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and then chucking their sneakers to run barefoot. “Dude”, my cousin Chris told me, “my legs are like steel cables!” Coach Brian was giddily sprinting barefoot up and down San Vicente navigating tree trunks and slippery discarded Gu wrappers, then went and signed up for a 50K ultra marathon in the hills of Malibu. The more people evangelized the book the more it sounded like the moronic “Native Wisdom” arguments that Michael Pollan makes in The Omnivores Dilemma. In Pollan’s Berkeley-colored, Whole Foods isn’t liberal enough, left of Caesar Chavez world, returning to our ancestor’s way of life is the route to ridding ourselves of disease, stress, and strife. What Pollan conveniently forgets is that Native Wisdom means dead by age 35, and the moment western medicine and modern agriculture have been introduced to stone-age peoples their life expectancy shoots through the roof. My rage was coloring my view going in to McDougall’s book, and yet being in this sport was forcing me to figure out what the whooping was all about.

Famous Last Words

In Los Angeles many, if not most people refer to “back east” when referring to the east coast. Even people who were born and reared in L.A. have adopted this nomenclature as if we are, in some way, from back east. As we’re all from Africa at some point this does hold an amount of truth, though I doubt Scandinavians refer to going home as “dropping south”. I was on Alaska Airlines flight 6 flying back east to visit my parents for my father’s 65^th birthday, see my sick grandmother in hospital, see my sister and her new boyfriend, and most importantly see my wife after two weeks of her in residency at grad school. An hour after we took off the pilot came over the intercom and announced that the vibration we felt upon takeoff appeared to be the rubber coming off our front tire and they were going to figure out their next steps. It occurred to me that I may not survive the flight.

Going the distance.

Two years ago my wife started a master’s degree program. She recognized that my endurance training wasn’t showing signs of abating and that left her by herself for many hours on the weekends. She’s excellent at relaxing, but months went by and there were only so many hobbies and crafts that could be done before she realized she could get a graduate degree with her free time. Her semester classes are done via telepresence and they meet for two weeks in summer for an intense session of in-person learning, collaborating, and collegiate debauchery. (Grad students eschew beer and instead stay up late drinking fine wine and top shelf spirits.) The first time she left for two weeks I let my clients book me 24/7 and worked myself into back to back nasty migraines. The second year she was gone I figured out how to protect my time better, but still used it as an opportunity to work nonstop. This year she admonished me not to let my clients run roughshod over my schedule and to keep my normal business hours. I promised her that I wouldn’t have a choice as Coach Brian picked that first week of flying solo to lay down one of my Ironman training goals: the 300 mile bike week.

Broken heart.

I recently reconnected with a friend from college. Actually, this friend is a woman I was madly in love with for several years, a lesson I had to learn about what it meant to be in love with the idea of someone rather than the person. For two years I held out hope that she would move to California and we would be together. I was 19, a deranged romantic, incapable of enjoying the freewheeling sex and abandon that comes with being a precocious teenager. I had worked for a psychiatrist for a summer transcribing couples therapy sessions – imagine Neo in the Matrix learning not martial arts, but marital arts. I could not shut off the need for an emotional connection to be intimate with someone, so when I did find someone I desired who was a mix of renegade, wicked wit, and beauty I was crippled like Superman in the Kryptonite aisle of the Villain Superstore.

112

Testees on the testes.

I miss my boys. On any ride more than an hour, there ceases to be a there there. It has become necessary to replace the stock saddle that came with my Cervelo, and I have been putting off the decision because I’m getting stingy and am quite tired of buying Stuff. The Stuff never seems to end, especially after the horror that was my return from Boise. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that in my race report: when I brought the bike box back to Tri Zombies on Tuesday Scott informed me that a hole had been punched into his disk wheel. Ironman bikes didn’t see any damage when they packed it, the box was undamaged, so obviously someone opened it, broke the wheel, and closed it up hoping not to get caught.

20:49 at the Culver City 5K!

How the hell did I PR that race? Yesterday was crazy long: up at 5:30am, then all morning with the CHLA team meeting and helping with the ocean 101 clinic, then a two hour workout and two birthday parties. Didn’t get to bed until 1am, then up again at 6:30am for today’s race. Let’s just say I was pretty tired.

2009 Boise Ironman 70.3, HTFU

On the phone with coach Brian the morning of the race he asked if I could figure out how to do this race just for fun to let him know. He’s doing Vineman soon, “just for fun” and has serious doubts that he can get his head away from the numbers to focus on the joy of the journey. Here’s a way: do your swim in a lake that slaps you around the way Jack Nicholson treated Faye Dunaway at the end of Chinatown, do your bike inside a car wash during a tornado for 56 miles, and then do your run in a kiddie pool. After a while you’ll stop caring about the numbers, your watch, the race clock, and you’ll just think one thing: HTFU. Harden The Fuck Up.