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June 2003
6/2 - 6/8
The week started out relatively normally - Tues/Thurs masters, 30 min run Tuesday (some knee pain, but it was fine after I warmed up), 2.5 hour group ride Wednesday, Friday off. I added a noon masters swim session on Monday, just for the heck of it.

Then came the weekend. I had a long ride planned for Saturday, which was supposed to be about a 4 hour ride with Sharley. We planned to ride the Pacific Crest course, since she's doing that 1/2 IM the same weekend as my IM. We didn't get started until later than we had hoped. We started the ride from Wickiup Reservoir (on the Cascade Lakes Highway) at around 11 AM, right the heat of the day (insert foreboding music here…). There are a couple of significant climbs on this route. On the first one, about 2 hours in, I felt like I was going nowhere. Then I started to get dizzy and cold. Not a good sign. I made it up the hill, where Sharley was waiting for me. Told her what the deal was and we rested for a few minutes. I had Sustained Energy mix in my water bottles, with plenty of extra electrolytes, but I didn't drink much of anything for the first hour of the ride. I started trying to get some of it down, but I think it was just too late. I ended up walking up most of the next major climb (riding as much as I could, until I started feeling dizzy again), then called Jeff to come get me. It would have been a good hour back home, straight down from Mt. Bachelor. 45 MPH was probably not the best speed for my state, so I had to call the SAG wagon.

I recovered enough to do the 1/2 marathon trail race (the Footzone Dirty Half) I had planned for Sunday, but it wasn't pretty. I think I clocked in around 2:51. You know you're slow when your friends finish their race and run back to find you and make sure you're okay :) It was an unbelievably hot day, and the first half of the course was mostly uphill. Pure anger got me through a few miles in the middle section - there were supposed to be 4 aid stations on the course. When I got to about mile 10, where I thought the last aid station would be, all I saw were empty cups on the side of the road, but no aid station. I thought they had packed it up early and I was dying. I had a whole speech for the race director, until I saw the real aid station around mile 12. Aaaah….an oasis in the desert :).

So, this week I learned that I don't do well in the heat, and I really need to be proactive about dealing with training/racing on a hot day. Every training session from here on out will involve Endurolytes or salt tabs. Okay. Lesson learned.

6/9 - 6/14
I took Monday and Friday off (who knows why…it just happened that way), then did my usual T/Th masters. Had an AWESOME 1-hour run on Tuesday and a 4-hour group ride Wednesday (well, 2 hours of it was with the group, anyway - I started early by myself). Saturday/Sunday was the FreshAirSports Swimming for Triathletes camp.

Swim Camp Report: This camp was SO AWESOME. I knew it would be valuable from looking at the coaches' bios and the camp schedule. Chris Hauth (double Olympian for the German swim team, has won his AG in just about every triathlon he's done recently) and Wendy Ingraham. Morning swim and video sessions Saturday and Sunday, open water swim session Saturday afternoon, and two noon sessions of videotape review.

We started out getting to know Chris a little bit (Wendy arrived Sunday), introduced ourselves and talked about what races were coming up (there were about 10 of us in the camp). We did some warmup/stretching exercises, then headed to the pool. We did a quick warmup - 400 swim, 160 kick, 160 pull, 160 swim (we were swimming in a 40-yd pool). Then he had us do several repeats of 40 right-arm, 40 left-arm, 40 catch-up, 40 swim. The last drill set was a head-up drill, where we did a freestyle swim with our heads out of the water. You can really see where your hands are entering and if your form isn't good, it's really difficult to keep your head up.

Takeaways:

• Hands should enter the water at 11:00 and 1:00. NO CROSSOVER at any point in the stroke.
  
• Hands need to enter the water fairly flat, and farther out than I expected. Rather than "spearing" my hand in right above your head, just relax and let it enter farther out, where my arm is just barely bent. For me, the pinky-lead drill helped with this. Depending on how someone is entering the water, it may or may not help. If you enter thumb-first like I was doing, you lose power in that initial part of the stroke because you're not creating enough resistance. This is where the head-out drill helps.
  
• Once my hand enters the water, stretch the stroke A BIT (not a long, sustained glide where you start to sink & lose power), then start the wrist bend and shoulder rotation to catch the water and pull through with a high elbow underwater. Once I begin the catch, commit. I.e., don't lollygag around with my hand resting out in the water. Commit to the catch and start pulling.
  
• Pull STRAIGHT through with a high elbow. Keep it high and powerful throughout the stroke, keeping an even feel for the water.
• When breathing, don't look to the back of the pool, don't look to the sky. Look to the side of the pool and slightly ahead, even. When I look back or up, my left arm swings wide to compensate, which sends my hip and right leg out. I also need to turn my neck more when breathing rather than trying to roll my entire upper body and neck as a unit (a bad Total Immersion habit). Wendy asked if I had neck problems because I wasn't twisting my neck much at all.
• Wendy's first comment to me was that I was over-rotating my shoulders and should try to rotate more through the hips and less through the shoulders.
• Pushing my head down in the water is not necessarily the answer to correcting body position (i.e., popping the hips out). For most people, the water level should hit somewhere between the hairline and eyebrows, with the eyes looking at about a 45 degree angle (not straight down at the pool bottom, not at the far pool wall.
• Be sure to allow for extra shoulder rotation on the non-breathing side.

Sunday, we did a similar warmup, then Wendy had us do several drills, including "doggy-paddling", where you do a freestyle stroke without bringing your hands out of the water, with your head above water. Very attractive looking, I'm sure. We also did the "zipper" drill, where you run your thumb up your side from your hip to your armpit on the recovery. Then the real fun began. We did Wendy's IM-prep swim, that is supposed to help simulate an IM swim. We did it twice through, she does it 4x through about twice a month. It involved a short, fast kick set, then fast 100s, then a 400 at the same pace as the 100s. Ouch. At the end of the 400 on the second set, we were supposed to sprint to the other end of the pool, jump out, run around the pool, and go down the slide (that was T1). We were all torched, but it was a blast.

On both days, we went over the video from earlier in the day. If you really want to improve your swim and have an opportunity to get some underwater video taping done (even above water, if that's the best you can get), DO IT. It is so valuable. It's just so hard to make little adjustments and things when you can't see it. Chris spent a ton of time going through everyone's videos, and it was really informative to watch not just your own video, but everyone else's as well. The difference in the video from the first day and the second day was really pretty dramatic in some cases. HUGE improvements. Definitely a first-class camp and I would recommend FreshAirSports' camps to anyone (www.freshairsports.com). Everything was really well organized, and we all got a lot of great information to take home. The coaching was phenomenal. Chris and Wendy are two really classy folks, who have an amazing amount of knowledge and experience to pass along. We had some really great Q&A sessions - having a small group really kept that informal, comfortable and un-intimidating. Huge bang for the buck.

6/16 - 6/21
Monday was my last long ride (~5 hours). I started around 3:20 and planned to meet up with Sharley at 6. I intended to ride to Sisters and take Jeff his gym shoes that he forgot that morning, but I forgot the shoes and had to go back for them (grrrr….). I met up with Sharley around 6:20 and we rode together for a couple more hours. Since I was late getting started, I hammered to Sisters and back (about 20 miles each way). I also wanted to see how I would feel later in the ride if I hammered the first part, since I tend to do that in races. Well, at 4 hours I was dragging. I also tried Baker's Breakfast Cookies, since that's what will be "served" on the bike course, and they made me want to hurl while I was riding hard. I've had them before, but never while training. I don't think it was this particular food item that made me want to toss my, well, cookies. I just can't handle bars and that kind of food on the bike. Felt like a brick in my stomach. Once I slowed down a bit with Sharley, my stomach was fine. But I'm not taking any chances in the race, and will stick with the Sustained Energy - that has worked well for me. Attempted a short 15 minute jog after the ride and it was a disaster. My knee was fine for the first few minutes, then I had to go up on the sidewalk to avoid a car and started having problems again. Oh well…I didn't intend to run the whole marathon anyway…

Monday was sort of a freak-out day for me. I had meetings from 6:30 am until 1:00 pm, then I had to finish some stuff for work and get on the bike. I really wanted to take a few minutes and write out my race/nutrition plan so I could de-stress about it a little bit. Then I read John Bingham's Penguin article in this month's Runner's World, about when he and a colleague (Tommy) agreed to be a "sweep" for a TNT group at the Mayor's Midnight Sun Marathon in Anchorage. Basically, he had to walk the course and bring up the rear (it took them 8 hours, 29 minutes). At mile 15, he starts getting hungry, so Tommy gets on his cell phone and orders a pizza, which arrives at mile 17. At mile 19, someone brought them McDonald's and Heineken. At mile 21, more McDonalds and beer. The article cracked me right up and put things a bit more in perspective. My race isn't going to fall apart if I put three and a half scoops of Sustained Energy in my 4th water bottle rather than three. I decided to take it down a notch :).

Tuesday/Thursday was morning masters, Wednesday was a short ride/run brick followed by a massage (ahhhh…..) We're going to go broke, I swear.

Friday we left for Victoria (Jeff's racing New Balance again this year).

IM-CDA Race Week Report