June 30th, 2009 Scott
I’m sitting in the San Francisco Airport waiting for my flight to Seattle to start the next leg of our brief two week visit to the USA this summer. We flew into San Francisco Thursday morning around 11:00 AM and after visiting Gina’s grandma we spent the rest of the day recovering from 22 hours of travel from Okinawa. Our flight left Okinawa at 11:00 AM Thursday and we arrived in S.F. at 11:00 AM on Thursday. Too bad it didn’t really happen that fast.
We jammed a full day of sightseeing in on Friday for San Francisco and had a genuinely good time. We don’t normally go for the typical tourist fare much, but it was done so well here that we really enjoyed it. Here’s the schedule we hit for the day:
8:00 AM
We departed our hotel in the theater district and grabbed a cable car over to fisherman’s wharf. If you’ve never ridden a cable car, it’s an amazing adventure to watch 1880′s technology at work. The job of operating such a car is manual and primitive. Using three levers and a pedal, he had to manipulate two different types of brakes as well as grip or release the cable to operate the car through the city. Very cool adventure. I’ll post video later.
9:00 AM
Breakfast at O’Sheas where they are famous for their Irish Coffee (for good reason…it rocked) and Crab Cake Benedict. Very good breakfast indeed. We shared a table with folks from Pennsylvania and had a great visit.
10:00 AM
Ghiradelli Square; lot’s of little shops and lots of food with chocolate.
11:00 AM
Fisherman’s Wharf culminating with Pier 39. There all types of shops in this area enough that any interest could be covered. I even found a landscape photographer’s gallery there that feature huge prints from his 8 x 10 view camera. Excellent stuff.
12:15 PM
Tour of the bay on the Blue & Gold boat; we had 60 minutes and went under the Golden Gate Bridge as well as around Alcatraz while getting narration from a cheesy Captain Nemo voice. Very nice views and good stories from the narration.
1:15 PM
Lunch at Boudin’s Bakery which was clam chowder in a sour dough bowl. It seemed like at least 100 restaruants featured this menu item but our guide book recommended Boudins. Good stuff.
1:45 PM
Walked to Lombard Street, then hiked UP Lombard Street and then back down Hyde street to catch the F Train street car. Lot’s of HILLS!
3:00 PM
Street Car ride around the Embarcadero to the theater district and back to our hotel.
5:30 PM
Dinner at a great Yucatan restaurant near our hotel.
8:00 PM
Spamalot! at the Golden Gate Theater. It was pure silliness, but it was done so professionally you didn’t even consider how goofy the material was.
11:00 PM
Taxi back to the hotel and bed!
Overall, it was an amazing day. Staying right downtown and utilizing all the different forms of mass transit was great. We also had a Bart station close by so getting in and out from the airport was a snap. We didn’t even have any transfers on Bart.
I’ll post links and video later when I have time. I’ve got University of Phoenix homework to work on right now.
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June 16th, 2009 Scott
…or “How to mess up your hydration so bad that you can’t run and you lose your balance”.
This is a very detailed, lengthy blog entry about my experience at the Gamagori Triathlon last weekend. Make sure you have some time to read before starting.
Several years ago while taking band students on yet another bus trip I realized that something was always going to go wrong during the trip. It was usually one thing and once that one thing went wrong I could relax because I knew the rest of the trip would be without incident. I developed this theory after many years of teaching and dozens of trips. Sometime the thing that went wrong would be huge (a student disappearing from the hotel in the middle of the night) and sometimes it would be fairly insignificant (forgetting to bring my tuner). To this day on a band trip I still wait nervously to discover what will go wrong so I can get past it.
I now know that this theorem applies to triathlon racing as well. One bit of wise information I received from a very successful triathlete friend of mine was that “Something will go wrong. Deal with it and do what you can with the rest of the race.”
Yesterday was the culmination of five months of training under the direction of my coach with my first JTU (Japan Triathlon Union) Olympic Distance race. I booked a flight and set up hotel reservations in April for the Gamagori Orange Triathlon. This venue has been the site of the ITU World Championships in past years so I figured it would be a classy event. Translation issues notwithstanding, I did manage to make in time for event registration day before yesterday and was comfortably set up in the transition zone well before start of the race.
It wasn’t clear until sometime after the race what went wrong. It’s stunning what a simple single mistake can do to months of preparation. Here’s the mistake:
My time trial bicycle water bottle is smaller than I thought it was.
That seems innocent enough of a mistake, doesn’t it? It’s better than your bike getting broken by the luggage handlers or forgetting your shoes or breaking the strap on your swim goggles (and the backup goggles). All those kind of mistakes are deadly because you know your done before you even start. My mistake still allowed me to race, but was ultimately very costly. Here’s what happened:
As per the advice of my coach and other sources, I wanted to carry a dilute solution of sports drink with me on the bike. Using straight water is good too, but having some calories and some salt replenishment is a good idea. Diluting the solution is critical because too high of a concentration of carbohydrates will cause your stomach to cramp because it can’t digest it properly. I don’t remember the details, but it has something to do with osmosis and strength of a solution dissolving into another solution. It also makes you feel more thirsty and you have to drink even more water than you would normally need in a race in order to dilute the solution in your stomach to a level where it can digest it. I practiced during training (never ever try something new in a race…a basic axiom of endurance racing) with different solutions of sports drink and found a level that worked very well for me. When I packed for this trip, I measured that precise level of sports drink powder into a ziplock baggie and mixed it up right before the race and put it on my bike. I didn’t think anything of it again.
The swim was in nasty brackish (half salt, half normal) water in a lagoon that was literally swamp water. It was nasty green and you couldn’t see more than about two feet around you in the water. Also, it reeked of sulfur. This alone might prevent from ever coming back to this venue. Beyond that though, I had a very good swim. I focused on good long strokes and stayed away from people. I stayed strong throughout and passed several fading folks on the last of the second lap. Unfortunately I breathe to the left and tend to swim toward the left while the race course turned to the right. I kept finding myself outside the mainline of swimmers a bit more than I would’ve liked and probably added 50 meters or so to my swim.
The transition zone was one great big long alley way lined with about 500 bikes on both sides. Just running from the entrance to the exit without stopping to get the bike probably took about two minutes. I didn’t run very fast, but I had a fairly clean transition at the bike and took off for my four laps around the technical 10k course. There wasn’t a race clock so I don’t know how long my swim was (I don’t use a stopwatch in the water, just my Garmin 705 on the bike and the run) and the results weren’t posted yet when I left.
Now I worked hard on relaxing on the bike. I have a habit of going far too hard on the bike and I really wanted to achieve a negative split for the bike leg. A negative split means you go faster on the second half than on the first half. This requires a great degree of patience on the first half because you don’t feel like you are going as hard as you should be. About 1000 meters into the bike ride I took a sip of my sports drink and knew right there I had a problem. I didn’t know how serious of a problem until later, but I knew that the mix was WAY too strong. This meant that with every drink I would get thirstier. That was my only thought about it at the time. I’ve never had issues with stomach cramps so it didn’t occur to me that I would be paying for the mistake with cramps on the run later. I did look for a water station. If they had one at any point on the route, I would’ve stopped and filled my bottle with water. So I was at least looking for a solution. Despite that problem, the bike leg went well. I held 23.3 mph average speed for the entire leg and never deviated lower than 23.2 or higher than 23.4 for any of the four laps. Interestingly, my heart rate descended from 165 to 158 over the course of the four laps as well. I was relaxing more and more (by design because it had started too high) and yet maintaining speed. Toward the end I actually wanted to bring it back up for the negative split effect, but I was unable to do so. This was likely symptom number one of dehydration.
I ran out of sports drink before the end of the leg. So, not only was it too strong and it made me thirsty, but I also ran out. It was warm in the race, but not overly hot. I knew I was sweating though. Other than being thirsty, I actually felt good and was excited to see such good speeds overall with such a relaxed heart rate. The course had 19 right angle turns and 4 hairpin turns per lap. It was highly technical and I could tell that many, many riders weren’t comfortable with the turns. I made up a lot of time in those turns going around other riders as they slowed down more than they needed to.
So, I felt good, had a good swim and now a good bike leg. My goal time of 2:15 seemed within reason as I approached the transition zone for the run. Then something horrible happened: I thought my bike was disintegrating underneath me because suddenly (very suddenly) I had no control of the bike. It was weaving all over the road seemingly independent of my control inputs. I immediately had my feet out of the clips and was looking down to find the source of the issue as the bike meandered out of control to the side of the race course. After coming to a stop, I could see that I had no flat tires and the frame and wheels were intact. I figured that perhaps a weird wind had hit my tri spoke wheels in a peculiar way and that must’ve been the problem. Winds do create some odd effects to the front wheel of this set so it’s not unheard of for this type of issue to occur. Problem was that there wasn’t any wind. I clipped back in and started to pedal off again only to steer my bike straight left into a wall. It was at this point that I recognized the problem was with me and not the bike. I didn’t feel odd at all other than I obviously had lost all sense of balance, and lost it in a very, very sudden way. It was so sudden that once I realized the problem was with me and not the bike I assumed I was having a stroke. I was scared, very scared.
I set the bike down and sat down next to it wondering what was about to happen to me. Two race course officials came toward me and asked me if I was okay (in Japanese). I indicated to them that I was dizzy which wasn’t quite accurate but I don’t think they even understood what it was I tried to say to them. I did start to notice that my arms seemed somewhat disconnected from my brain and I felt a little woozy. At best I figured my race day was done. At worst, I figured that I would start going blind in one eye or lose control over one half my body. Like I said before, I was scared. After a few minutes of rest (I stopped my timer just in case I did race more; I didn’t want the down time to count as part of my high quality bike effort), I started feeling more connected to my body and I tried standing up and succeeded. I wouldn’t have been able to stand when it first happened, I basically fell off my bike when I stopped. I slowly started walking the last 500 meters to the transition and with each step felt better and better. I got back on the bike and carefully peddled in toward the transition and maintained balance throughout. Thank goodness my body and brain started communicating again.
At the transition area, I took my time getting some plain water and getting my race shoes on and started off on the run. It all felt quite normal, just like all my training when I did rides followed by runs. I started easy to get my ‘running legs’ under me and then start stepping the tempo up. My goal was to run the first two laps around 160 – 165 beats per minute (heart rate) and the last two laps around 165 – 170, with the range being dictated by how I felt. However, as soon as I hit 158 my stomach knotted up into a painful ball, cramping that I’ve never experienced before. I had to stop and walk. Throughout the first three laps, my stomach would cramp up painful at anything above 155 or so. That heart rate is a light jog for me and it was incredibly frustrating to not go faster. I felt like I had good strength and good legs, but my stomach pain just wouldn’t allow it. I drank as much water as I could handle at each of the aid stations. Here’s where the problem with sports drink compounds itself. When running, you are limited in the amount of water you can drink because too much will make you uncomfortable from all the sloshing in your stomach. I needed to drink to dilute down the concentration, but not to much or I’d have stomach pains from too much liquid. It was an evil catch 22 that is to be avoided at all cost because the only solution to the problem at this point is slowing down until everything balances out.
For me, it took about seven of the 10 kilometers to get the water/stomach situation resolved and I finally was able to pour on the power for the last 2.5 k of the course. This felt good to finish strong after wrecking the rest of the event because my miscalculation with my bike water bottle.
And then BLAM….down I go onto the street. The same thing that happened to me on the bike hit me again on the run with about 500m to go (just before entering the stadium). Once again, I had no balance and couldn’t stand or really direct my limbs very well. As before though, some rest and slow walking got me out of it and I was able to enter the stadium and finish the race in a light jog.
For the next several hours, I had light nausea. I found someone who spoke good English and he translated my issue to the medical team. They took my pulse and noted that my heart rate was fluctuating up and down but they had no prognosis otherwise. I felt like I likely needed to eat. I had been drinking tons of water on the run, but I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast some six hours and a race earlier. I was worried that I was just bonking while sitting in the chair.
I ate a clif bar and it helped a bit. After going back to the hotel, I improved a bit over the course of the next several hours and finally was able to eat dinner and feel somewhat more normal about 10 hours after the end of the race. After doing some research on line, it appears that I had classic symptoms of dehydration, so I don’t think it was a stroke.
So what happened? Well, it turns out that my time trial bike water bottle is smaller than my regular bottles and I had prepared sports drink mix that would’ve been correct for the larger bottle. Also, even without the drink mix, because the bottle was small I still didn’t have enough to drink and likely would have still had hydration issues separate from the sports drink issues. Kind of a bummer to make one little miscalculation destroy the whole race.
I guess that means I’ll just have to try again to get my 2:15 finish at another race.
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June 13th, 2009 Scott
I leave for Nagoya in two hours to do my first ITU triathlon in Gamagori tomorrow. It should be interesting testing out my Japanese skills. I’m pretty sure English will be in limited supply. I’ll post updates as I work through the weekend.
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