Luray International

16 August, 2008: Luray, Virginia.

The Luray International Triathlon was the first olympic-distance race of the year in the Virginia Triathlon Series. I had slotted it as a mid-priority "B" race with the intention of using it to add an element of intensity to my speed-phase training and preparation for my remaining "A" races of the year: the Patriot's Half Ironman and Ironman Florida. Because of this I didn't take it too seriously, and "trained through it" instead of tapering for a fitness peak in order to arrive fresh and at full capacity. About a week and a half before the race I even decided to add on the challenge of tackling the Luray Sprint Triathlon the day following the olympic, curious to see if I could push my body's durability up a notch. This was a risky gamble, as I intended on holding nothing back at either event. When the dust settled I would either walk (or hobble) away with a harder body and a significant boost in top-end threshold speed, or I would burn out or seriously injure myself, threatening my training and burying my chances of a peak performance at either of my upcoming "A" races. Because of the slightly apathetic attitude I took toward the events, I continued the large volume long distance training I had been doing since June to prepare for Ironman Florida, with only a half-handful of high-intensity speed sessions catered toward short-course racing in the final few days before Luray. My final heavy workout was a whopping two days before the event, which was much too close. I came to Luray underprepared and overtrained, with nagging leg injuries that had plagued me the entire week before. In my ignorance I still held out hope that I could pull something off, perhaps placing on the division podium at one of the most competitive races of the year, if not win it outright.

I arrived in Luray somewhat uneasy about the condition of my legs, but still confident. I had literally redoubled my efforts in swim training, now swimming twice a day, six days a week in an attempt to put to rest the mediocre and sub-par performances I had been frustrated with for most of the year. This approach was working and I was looking forward to a personal best swim split at this race. My reputation on the bike was dominating to say the least, and the fact that high intensity workouts had been absent from my training the past couple months did little to phase me. The run would be an unknown; I had posted some fast times in the speed training I did the week before, but the lack of consistency and the deteriorated condition of my legs meant anything could happen. After checking in at the hotel I drove out to the race site at Lake Arrowhead to check out what we were in for. The lake was relatively small, with only one boat ramp and a small beach play area. Despite the brownish water, the scene was pretty picturesque, with a long levee bordering the south quarter of the lake and tall grass encompassing the remainder of the lake's perimeter. Because of the lake's small size, in order to get the full 1500 meters we would swim around near the edge of the lake clockwise for two loops, keeping the turn-buoys on our right before swimming in to the beach and running to transition. The quarter-mile run to the transition area from the swim exit was a little ridiculous. After coming out of the water we would have to run across the beach, across three gravel pits then up a steep hill using a long wooden staircase with tiny 2 inch step-ups between each stair. Once at the top, we would head left and continue about 100 meters up a gentler hill across the grassy, rooted, branch-strewn park until we finally reached the transition area also situated on a slight hill perched just before the park's main road. I drove the bike course and wasn't really intimidated, although I probably should have been. Driving in a car is very different from riding a bike, as its difficult to tell if the road is actually flat or if its a slight grade, which is crucial information because Newton's law makes it a very big difference on a bike. I would end up getting a significant portion of it wrong and as a result use my disk wheel in the rear when I should have used the lighter deep-dish 808. As I drove out of the park I perused the run course, and it was a bitch. Setup Events classifies it as "rolling," which is accurate I suppose, except the rollers were very steep, and relentless. Hardly a half mile of that 6.2 mile run was flat, and I will be the first to admit that hills are not my strength. Oh well; one problem at a time. After grabbing dinner and getting my race gear ready to go for the next day, I turned in 6 hours before my alarm would awaken me--not bad at all for a race night's sleep.

...

Looking out over the lake as we were stretching out and mentally preparing for the race, the director got on the loudspeakers and instructed us to fall silent and prepare for the singing of the national anthem. That's kind of cool, I thought--they don't do that at every race. Two overweight local women stepped up to the microphone, and what ensued was the most atrocious mutilation of the national anthem I'm sure I have ever heard. Seriously, these women should have been shot as traitors for what they did to the Star Spangled Banner. Francis Scott Key was undoubtedly turning in his grave. Their horrible melody and grating high notes had more than a few people visibly grimacing. Talk about nails on a chalkboard, I thought it would never end. Having endured the real challenge of the day, we applauded more the conclusion than their performance as we turned to face the lake and shake it off, focusing on getting pumped back up for the swim start. Having completed one of the most thorough swim warmups I've ever done immediately before a race, my mindset was aggressive and confident, exactly where it needed to be. I was looking forward to tearing up this 1500 meters. Because of the two-loop nature of the swim, the race organizers wanted to reduce congestion in the water by combining waves and decreasing the amount of time spaced between them in order to get everyone in the water as quickly as possible. This meant that my age group, normally seeded in the second wave, would join the professionals in the first. We waded into the water until we were all treading water, then spread out and seeded ourselves according to how fast we thought we'd be swimming. I positioned myself perfectly with my rivals, in what would develop into the lead amateur group once the race got under way. Unlike the bike leg, drafting is allowed during the swim, and it can prove to be extremely effective if done correctly; the reduced drag resistance is worth up to 10% of your overall speed and effort. A key aspect to the swim is finding a swimmer early on who is a little bit faster than you are, and provided they can swim in a straight line, swim close behind them for as long as possible. I've had trouble executing this well in the past, seemingly waiting too long before looking for a pair of feet to follow and getting stuck behind slower athletes as a result. This time I was determined to nail it.

The horn sounded and we all took off, sprinting furiously the first couple hundred meters. As the professionals began to swim away, I maneuvered through the pack and placed myself in the perfect drafting position. We began to settle into our pace and I was looking forward to the advantage I would gain from coming out of the water early. Before I could finish the thought, a strange sensation ran quickly up my back, culminating in a release of tension and downward collapse of my shoulders. "BULLSHIT" ...The zipper had separated and the back of my wetsuit spread open only 200 meters into the race. My extremely expensive, super high-tech, drag reducing triathlon wetsuit had become nothing more than a parachute, catching and filling with water every swim stroke. I stopped and tread water with my legs for several seconds, getting bumped and slapped as other athletes swam by. I began feeling behind me, tracing the zipper up and down with my hands to see if there were any immediate solutions to this problem. I found none. "GODDAMNIT!!!" I would later learn upon inspection that the random athlete I had help me zip my wetsuit prior to the race failed to properly align the two zipper halves, resulting in an off-set, incomplete zip with a small hole at the bottom which gave way under stress. The competitive fire in me all but extinguished, I spent the rest of the swim adjusting and modifying my stroke in an attempt to find the most efficient way to swim with an open wetsuit and increasing my tempo to try and make up for the increase in drag. I rapidly fell back from the pack I was attempting to hang with, and managed to find myself leading a slower one. As I rounded the second turn buoy and headed north things went from annoying to downright frustrating when another swimmer proceeded to beat the living crap out of my legs. I had fucking had it by this point, and when he didn't show signs of letting up after another 20 meters, I was getting ready to turn around and fight back. Alright asshole, I have enough problems as it is--find a new pair of feet to fail at drafting off of or I will see to it that you never emerge from this lake again... The thought must have transferred to him, because he fell back and never tried to draft or pass again. The remainder of the swim improved from there, but only marginally. I came out of the water well behind, and began the tedious work of playing catch-up. After sprinting across the beach and over the gravel pits my progress was halted by a slow moving traffic jam going up the wooden staircase. Once at the top I ran past the rest and up into transition, practically screeching to a halt once I reached my bike. I again had problems stripping my wetsuit off my ankles, although I managed not to fall on my ass this time. Wetsuits are supposed to save you time in a race, but today it was most definitely doing the opposite. As I was wrestling with the neoprene and uttering things that should never be repeated, I resolved to practice the hell out of wetsuit ditching before my upcoming "A" race in Williamsburg. Finally rid of the accursed thing, I threw on my shades and helmet, tearing my bike off the rack and sprinting toward the mount line. As I did this my world almost instantly turned white. More of a light gray, actually. Your sunglasses, which are waiting in the cool morning air with your bike while you swim, almost always fog up some when you put them on your warm face, but never this bad. I was straight blind as I ran toward the mount line, fortunate other athletes were getting on their bikes at the same time because I couldn't see the chalk line on the ground to save my life.

Once on my bike and rolling down the road, the airflow helped clear the fog from my shades. 25 miles is too short for me to hold back anything early on, so I started hammering right away. After a couple steep hills, the course descended down into the loop that we would ride twice before returning to transition for the run. The first 3 to 4 miles of this loop twisted back and forth downhill at a pretty steep grade. I wasn't feeling great, but I wasn't feeling horrible either, so I took advantage of the downhill to try and make up some time I lost in the swim. At 175 pounds, I'm closer to the heavy end of the spectrum as far as triathletes go. When you combine that momentum with my power and wind-slicing aerodynamics, you get an unstoppable force on the downhills. I have yet to find a single athlete who can keep up with me on the descents, professionals included. A very popular thing to do on steep descents is to stop pedaling and let gravity do the work for you, tucking in to make yourself as aerodynamic as possible. This strategy lets you reserve energy for later on the course, because pedaling hard on a downhill doesn't have as much an effect on your top speed like it does on the flats and uphills. All well and good, but when you train to race competitively at 112 miles for Ironman, 25 miles is a warm up. I knew I could go all out and time trial the 25 miles and still have plenty left for the run, so I used the descents to exaggerate my strengths, pedaling furiously and ripping past all my competitors at break-neck speed. Once at the bottom of this long descent, we were greeted by a sharp 90 degree left-hand turn opening up into flat ground. I went as wide as possible and dove into the turn, my bike and body practically sideways. I feathered my brakes as needed, trying to bleed as little speed as possible before erupting into a sprint once I straightened out. I held the sprint until my legs began burning badly, then sat back down and settled in to my aerobars, shifting up and focusing on good form, pedaling in smooth circles.

Progress was definitely being made, but not as fast as I wanted it to. After a couple miles the course transformed into winding, steep rollers for a similar distance, then finally straightened out on the last third of the loop. This was a part of the course I got horribly wrong when I drove it the day before. I was convinced this leg was flat, and it wasn't. It turned out to be several miles of a slight uphill grade. Much of my immediate energy was sapped from trying to maintain speed over the preceding rollers, and it was here that I began to realize my legs were not operating at 100%. It seemed like I just couldn't recover from that relatively brief effort, and the false flat did an excellent job at grinding me down to an average pace. Not what I needed to be doing if I intended on making up for that clusterfuck of a swim. I took in an energy gel and some fluids, focusing on trying to be as efficient as possible. I still hadn't seen anyone I recognized, and was concerned I was just too far behind. After what seemed like an eternity, I hung a left at the top of the road to start the second loop. Determined to make this one better than the last, I again opened up on the first long descent, this time not passing people quite as easily as last time. Finally, I've caught up to some fast people. Once at the bottom of the downhill I was blocked in from the outside and couldn't execute a fast turn like I did before. I had to work to catch back up to the guy who got the outside line and slingshot around him at a respectable pace. The same problem I had before reoccurred, however, and soon thereafter my power and pace dropped as my legs sort of petered out. You can't be serious...I've only gone 15 miles! I thought I had used up all my bad luck at my last race, but apparently it wasn't so. Around this time my disk wheel started making unhappy noises as I began playing tag with a group of about 5 other athletes. I would pass them, then a few minutes later they would pass me. A few minutes later we'd repeat the process. I've never been stuck in a group before, and riding almost the entire remainder of the bike leg with them did wonders with my frustration. They were good, but they weren't that good, and I should have been leaving them in the dust. I couldn't figure out what was going on with my wheel either. Something was rubbing, but it wasn't my brakes. I was getting extremely pissed at my misfortune. I even had someone come up from behind me and ask "Hey man, is your wheel ok?" to which I replied "Hell if I know!?" It didn't seem life-threatening, so I wasn't about to stop and examine it, giving up the precious time I had worked so hard to regain. Upon looking over my wheel after the race, I would discover that the wheel itself was rubbing against the frame--a result of hastily adjusting and spacing it upon installation. The last few miles consisted of several unnecessarily huge, steep and painful uphills that made me dearly regret my wheel choice for this race. The rubbing was at its worst here, and as if the nasty grade wasn't enough, it felt like I was biking in sand, even as I was standing out of the saddle with my gearing maxed out as light as it would go. Spectators offered words of encouragement from the side of the road that fell on deaf ears. "Come on, you can do it! You're almost at the top, good job!" God do I hate it when people do that. After cresting the last huge hill, the terrain eased up the last mile or so into the park, just enough time to recover and get ready for the run. I removed my feet from my shoes and rolled up to the dismount line standing on one side of my bike, hitting the ground running as soon as I crossed the line. I ran in to T2 too pissed to be discouraged. I angrily racked my bike, ditched my helmet, then had a hell of a time wrestling into my running shoes, which even have elastic laces so you don't have to tie them. Once my racing flats were attached to my feet I hauled ass out of transition, buckling my run belt with my race number attached as I ran.

The run took us out of the park and in the opposite direction from the bike course. It was a two-lap run, meaning we would run 1.55 miles out, turn around, come back in, turn around and repeat before detouring to the finish chute. While runs of multiple laps irritate me (I like to actually get somewhere for all this work), they give you ample opportunity to see where you stand with your competitors as you pass each other several times. You may remember that I mentioned this run course is a bitch. That's good, because I had forgotten and I was the one running it. I almost always go out fast on the run, sprinting out of transition with a red-lined heart rate. It is not unusual for my opening mile to be 30 seconds faster than my overall pace. Most people will tell you that this is a bad strategy, then proceed to advocate negative splitting (running the second half faster than the first). Thing is, no one ever told me about negative splitting three years ago when I began run training in earnest, so going hard at the start is ingrained in my body's muscle memory. I have tried both in training and in races, and quite simply my body is so used to blitzing the start before settling into its pace that alternate strategies almost always result in lower performance, except for long distance. It also helped that while the course was rolling, the run out to the first turn around had a net loss in altitude, meaning it was predominantly downhill. As predicted, I ran the first mile and a half blazing fast for the course, and when the extreme stress and white hot pain of pushing that hard began to subside, my pace would gradually grind down until the run back up to the park was painstakingly slow. At several points, when running up the steepest of the hills, I could feel series of individual fibers on the outside of my quadricep muscles popping and tearing. This was a sensation I have felt only once before, during the run at Buffalo Springs Lake Ironman 70.3. Not fun. My overtrained condition was making itself evident, but I pushed through anyway. I made sure to get fluids at every aid station, even though it wasn't very hot. On the way back out from the second turn around at the start of the second lap, I saw my main competitor running in like the devil was chasing him. In my last race report I commented on how fast at running my friend and rival Jordan Chang is. Well this guy is faster. And that's just fucking scary. My hopes for gold were extinguished, but I saw that coming long before this point. I was determined to make it onto the podium, and thought I had a shot at it, so I ignored my loudly complaining legs and continued to push hard. The second lap went much like the first, only a little slower. I caught sight of another competitor in my age group well ahead of me, and knew I would have to settle for third place at best. A bummer for sure, but still the podium at a very competitive race I wasn't prepared for. After a final series of leg-burning hills and lung-burning descents, I crossed the finish line with no one around me, just glad to get the disgusting feeling of mediocre performance over and done with. I grabbed a banana and a bottle of water, then found a bench in the shade and sat down, waiting for my body to calm itself and reverse the low-grade heart attack I had given it.

When they finally put up the preliminary results I discovered I had earned fourth place, missing the podium by three minutes, which is about what I estimated I lost in the swim due to my wetsuit malfunction, not to mention the wheel mishap on the bike. I placed 53rd overall, way off from what I was aiming for and ensuring that the ranking points I earned there would be too low to be used to calculate my ranking score in the Series. I left with nothing to show for my effort, feeling angry and disgusted like I had wasted my time. I'd had enough of short course for the year, it was time to focus on bigger fish to fry. I returned to my hotel room and immediately started the recovery process, taking in a ton of protein, carbs and hydration while elevating my legs when I wasn't stretching or massaging them. I took a nap for a couple hours, then woke up and evaluated my situation. I was fortunately able to fix the zipper on my wetsuit which saved me a serious amount of money. My legs didn't feel good at all, but that was to be expected. I opted to get sleep, setting my alarm as if I were going to do the sprint race the next day, postponing that decision to see if I could warm up and stretch out my legs in the morning well enough to race a second time. The next morning wasn't much better, and I couldn't get my legs raceable again. I decided against competing in the sprint at the last minute, not happy about not being able to do it, but I wasn't about to jeopardize the training for my upcoming "A" race, Patriot's Half Ironman in three weeks just to do a stupid sprint. If I could pull off the win there, it would without question erase the bitter taste from the horrible luck I've had in these past few races. I resolved to look ahead and forget about the immaterial past, immediately planning my training for the upcoming weeks and continuing my recovery. When the time came, I was more than happy to leave Luray behind and head home to begin work on my redemption. 'Chance favors the prepared mind,' along with 'fortune favors the bold' rang deafeningly loud in my head as I began to devote massive amounts of time and energy into planning my aggressive training and race strategy designed around decimating the field in three weeks time. Sick of misfortune, sick of failed preparation, sick of mediocre performance and sick of losing, I am consumed by my goal. Mark my words now, before the fact: I will annihilate Patriot's Half with every cell in my body and every ounce of my soul. That is all.