Wussies

Luray Triathlon, Olympic Distance (1500m swim, 40 km bike, 10km run)

Nifty results analysis by Aaron

August 16, 2014

Luray, VA

When Aaron and I started dating, his ‘TRI GEEK’ vanity plate was almost a deal breaker.  I had known a smattering of triathletes, and by all accounts they were the crazies: the dudes who strutted around in outfits that would hardly fly in a 70s gay bar, and who had enough electronics to make a play for Inspector Gadget.  I objected to everything triathlon: the complexity of gear, the absurdity of costume, the obsession with data, all on top of my complete dismissal of all things swimming and biking.

My hatred of swimming started as a child at a sleep-away camp in the Pennsylvania mountains where the prime torture was a required swim class in a freezing, slimy green algae-filled lake.  Every feline hair in me smoldered.  Bikes were generally my friend as a child tooling around, and it wasn’t until adulthood that the fun of whizzing down hills was superseded by the sores on my ass, the terror of cars side-swiping, and being forced to ride that stupid exercise bike whenever I got injured running in college.

Aaron assured me that TRI GEEK was merely a relic of the past, and he hadn’t done a triathlon since 2008.  His VW died shortly after our first date, and the vanity plate was not carried over to the Jeep Wrangler he bought off Craigslist.  We carried on, under the assurance that I would never be made to bike or swim.

Fast forward a few years to the end of 2013, when I developed a kind of injury I had never had before, that threw my entire world for a loop.  I’ve struggled with all kinds of injuries over the years — IT band, knee issues, plantar fasciitis — but nothing like the fibroma, nothing that was visible — and *permanent*.  I was shaken to the root, and the terror of never being able to run again far exceeded my terror of the bike and the pool.  In no time, I had bought a new Speedo, ear plugs, goggles, a bathing hat, and eventually we retrieved one of his friend’s old Softride road bikes.  The conversion was complete.  Only I stunk.

The biking I took up pretty quickly, at least relative to the swimming.  There was definitely a learning curve — I don’t think Aaron will ever forget the time I got off my road bike and walked it down a hill because I was having trouble getting the brakes to work and didn’t want to risk flying through the trafficky intersection.  Once I got a hang of the brakes and gears and stuff, I quickly got comfortable on the bike, and pretty soon we were doing long (40-50 mile) rides in the mountains.  The swimming was pretty ghastly, though.  There was a lot of clenching of the side of the pool, gasping, half-drowning.  Half the time the goggles didn’t actually keep any water out of my eyeballs.

But I kept it up through the months, and by spring of 2014 I was game for signing up for the Luray Triathlon in August.  I was still a pretty crap swimmer, but I figured I could at least cover the distance and then the bike and run would be okay.  My biggest concern was the darn goggles.  It was going to be a challenge enough to swim the 1500 meters with functioning vision, but I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get through the swim half-blind and dumping the water out every couple minutes.  I threatened to do the swim without goggles entirely.  Aaron did not disguise what a terrible idea he thought this was.

We drove out to Luray early on Friday to get a test swim in.  There were many bits of the triathlon that I had never experienced before, including the open-water lake swim, the ‘bric’ (where you do a little jog after you bike to simulate what happens on race day), and the transition zones.  On Thursday night Aaron and I practiced transition zones and organizing all the stuff.  I typically hate this kind of thing, but Aaron made it fun by laying it all out on a towel as if it was a little picnic.  My bike handling skills are lacking, and it’s not easy for me to eat and drink while riding, so we concocted a strategy for getting calories in during T1 and T2 that centered around Ensure drinks.  Now the last time I had an Ensure was when I was puking two days from food poisoning back in June (the Ensure had gone down and then right back up), so I was banking on my stomach to not recall that experience on race day.

The results of the test swim were mixed.  On one hand, I loved everything about swimming in the lake, compared to the pool.  The water was fresh and clean, I loved seeing the sky and trees and mountains.  But the goggles were filling up with water no matter how I fiddled with them (tighter, looser, higher on the face, lower, over the hat, under the hat…).  The RD of the race, Dave Glover, is an old friend of Aaron’s from his Reston days, so we said hi to him after the swim.  Aaron introduced me, and I immediately launched into, ‘Do you think it’s crazy to swim in the race without goggles?’  There was a group of people clustered around Dave (Aaron thought they were lifeguards, but it turned out they were the pro athletes) who started whipping out extra pairs of goggles and offering them up.  I was overwhelmed and speechless by the outpouring of kindness, but one of the pairs from a woman seemed like it might be a real good contender, so I thanked her profusely and promised to find her after the race to return them.

We spent the night at Portobella, which Doug and Kerry have seriously spiffed up over the last year, and drove back to Luray the morning of the race.  We were one of the last cars to arrive and had to park in the far corner.  Given that this was my first triathlon and I didn’t know any of the drill, we should have given ourselves plenty of extra time for all the required set-up.  But good luck with that.  The pre-race set-up was entirely chaotic — there was no room for my bike on the rack, I didn’t know I had to get my number written on my arm, I never had a chance to pee, and when Aaron and I finally thought we were in the clear and approaching the start on the beach, we realized that both of us had forgotten to put on our ankle chips.  We streaked back up the stairs to retrieve the chips, and I barely made the start with my age-group.   The morning was chilly (in the 50s), so at least all the dashing around had warmed up me.  But my goggles had also entirely fogged up.

On my way into the water, I splashed the goggles to defog them, squatted and peed, and managed to start with my wave.  The never-before-tested pair of borrowed goggles performed far better than any of the previous pairs I had tried, so that was extremely fortunate.  What was not so fortunate was that my wave was the 3rd out of 8 waves (set only 2 minutes apart).  So my game plan of ‘swim real slow and don’t drown’ was met with the clawing hands and karate-kicking feet of the hundreds of swimmers advancing on me.  The first ten or so times I got mowed over were jarring and I’d swallow at lot of water and have to tread a bit to get re-oriented.  But eventually I got used to the sensation of being dragged under water, knocked in the head, and otherwise abused.  I tried to just focus on staying on course and not hyperventilating.  I gave one dude a sharp kick in the gut when he over-groped.

I managed to stay collected, and crawled along at my snail’s pace.  I breathed every stroke, and just kicked weakly, with a main goal of not going too far off course.  My right side is my strongly dominant side, and I’ve only recently begun to learn to swim on the left side.  But didn’t want my dominant arm to get too tired, so I breathed left occasionally.  Out of the 33 women in my 30-34 age group, I came out of the water dead last.  It had been irksome to spend much of the swim getting mowed over and mauled and knocked, but I had found the swim effort itself not to be difficult or tiring.  And I really loved swimming in the fresh open water in the sunshine.

I trotted up to the bikes and completed the routine we’d practiced, including downing the whole Ensure.  The vast majority of bikes were long gone, giving me an indication of how far behind I was from the rest of the field.  But I was really looking forward to getting on my bike and not have to worry about anyone’s foot colliding with my head.

The bike ride was the ultimate highlight of the race.  I enjoyed it end to end.  And I was way too newbie to be able to push myself, for fear that I’d blow up (I’ve done about ten long bike rides in my life).  So I just tooled along as the course rolled through the beautiful valley, lined with horses, cows, and goats in the morning light.  I relaxed, ate my snacks, drank my drink, let myself speed down the hills.  The course was two loops, so there were a lot of people doing their second loop while I did my first, and then my second loop was pretty darn lonely, as there were only the real stragglers left.

Aaron had warned me that the first mile and half of the run would suck after being on the bike.  He did not lie.  But he had prepared me for it, and I was able to push through and have an awesome run.  The course wasn’t ideal — a double out-and-back that was all downhill on the way out and all uphill on the way back, and mostly exposed in the hot sun.

But it sure was good to be in my element on my feet again.  I ran the 10th overall fastest time of the day (38:25 for the 10k).  Aaron was the only non-elite who ran faster.  Ironically, the run was the only event of the day where I had any real discomfort or suffering, because it was the only event where I knew how to push myself.  The road was hot and exposed, and my chronically tendonitisy right hamstring squealed and groaned.

Aaron was waiting for me at the finish line, having had a fine day himself.  He was very relieved to hear that I had thoroughly enjoyed the triathlon and was game to do another some day.  As we wandered around the finish area, we ran into a whole bunch of Aaron’s old Reston triathlon buddies, who were awfully glad to see him back in action after his six-year hiatus.  It was a bit of a Homecoming for him.  We tracked down Calah, who had given us the goggles, and she was very relieved that the pair had worked well for me and told me to keep them.  We insisted on giving her money for them, and she said she could find her at the awards ceremony.  In fact, it turned out she’d broken the course record that day and finished 6th overall, beating many of the elite men!  She was a total rockstar.  Her down-to-earth friendliness somersaulted by entire impression of the Triathlete.  Maybe the Luray event, with its low-key, homespun feel attracts the triathletes that are super-friendly and relaxed.  Luray was a great first triathlon: a great blend of being small and friendly but extra well-organized and filled with volunteers.

On the way home to DC we made a little pit-stop to have DQ with Sean in Leesburg.  Afterwards Sean was game enough to sit down for our first podcast recording for NECTR (Neglected East Coast Trail Running).  There was some major doubting of my whole podcast idea going down, but I was determined and made them sit and do it.  In the end, everyone agreed after the session that it was a lot of fun and accomplished what we set out to do.   We need to get some technical upgrades (GarageBand would stop recording after a certain song length and sometimes we didn’t notice and kept talking).  But proof of concept was a success, so stay tuned for the first episode of NECTR!

 

 

 

 

 

Aaron and I decided that his parents’ visit with us in Canaan Valley would be a perfect opportunity to try out the Aaron’s big lens for detailed nature photography. At a nearby marsh, nature cooperated beautifully, and we were inundated with goldfinches, green herons, cedar waxwings, bobolinks, bluebirds, what we believe was a northern harrier, and a variety of colorful butterflies.

If you’re petrified of getting old, hanging out for a day with Aaron’s parents should cure that.  Aaron’s dad is turning 80 next May, but was totally down for the 3.5-mile hike to the Freeland Road wildlife refuge, and up for the walk to feed the ponies later in the evening.  Aaron’s mom did a tough 4+ mile hike the next day through the Sodds with us, navigating those rocky trails with billy goat aplomb.  When they weren’t adventuring, they were trying to sell us on joining them on upcoming winter ski trips to Colorado, Oregon, and Austria.

 

 

The domesticated cat is an absolute miracle of evolution.  Cats in the wild are fully solitary creatures (except the outlier lion).  Tigers, leopards, bobcats, lynxes, cougars, jaguars, the Middle Eastern wildcat from which domestic cats are believed to be descended…..all these lead solitary existences once they leave their litter-mates.

So while it makes complete sense that dogs, which naturally are highly sociable animals that frequently live in packs (wolves, African wild dogs, etc.), would adapt themselves well to living with humans, there’s nothing in a cat’s behavioral history that would suggests it could ever make a good pet.

Instead cats were historically kept for their main function as mouse-catchers.  In fact, in the Middle Ages in Europe cats were persecuted for their perceived association with witches.  There’s a theory that the persecution of cats indirectly facilitated the spread of the Black Plague (Yersinia pestis spread via fleas carried by rats) due to the strong temporal association with cat eradications, but the spatial association within Europe appears to be weak.

Cats of course have long been held in high esteem in Egypt, where they earned bonus points for killing cobras as well as vermin.  Egypt still has some of the largest cat populations in the world.

Cats certainly are perfectly capable of a solitary existence if a social opportunity is not available.  But as our dear Leda here demonstrates, cats are flexible, adaptable creatures who can form very strong bonds with humans when they select to.  The key is to socialize cats to humans while they are still in the malleable kitten stage.  The more human handling they have in their first eight weeks, the more likely they are to be comfortable around humans — both familiar and unfamiliar.

As Joey C and Brit Z can attest, Leda is a highly affectionate creature.  She greets me at the door when I come home from work, she loves laps and cuddles.  There’s only one human Leda doesn’t care for: she is deathly afraid of Bob.

 

When I was a child I would tell people I wanted to be a veterinarian when I grew up.  I would then return to smothering my face in my cat’s belly, or cantering around the house jumping over intentionally placed obstacles, making sure I corrected my leads in the corners.  My interest in animals persisted through high school, and when I got to Stanford my freshman year, I had decided that I wanted to be a wildlife veterinarian, something that would combine my loves of creatures, science and medicine, and adventure in the woods.  Stanford didn’t work out, and transferring to Amherst College for my sophomore year was the best decision I’ve ever made.  But Amherst was a decidedly non-professional school.  There were no Business, Law, or Medical schools, not even an Engineering program, which were all deemed too career-track.  Amherst was about philosophy and broad liberal arts learning, focusing on how to think rather than learning a trade.  English was the most popular major.  I loved Amherst, I took classes in Art, Art History, Religion, Creative Writing, Biology, Jurisprudence, Russian Literature, it was all cranially expansive and exciting.  I thought about going pre-Med (I was a Biology-Russian double major anyway), but the pre-Med kids didn’t seem like my ilk.  The pre-Med kids were the ones who quibbled about how their exams were graded and seemed driven by resume-building.  They were the triathletes of the academic world.  Other than pre-Med, there wasn’t much career-building support at Amherst, and there certainly wasn’t a pre-Vet track.  I had no idea there were requirements for veterinary school, and was far too wrapped up in philosophical questions to bother with such practical details.

Although I agree with Amherst’s high-minded philosophy in concept, most of Amherst’s graduating seniors are utterly unprepared for the real world and have so little clue what they’re going to do with their knowledge of Kant and Herodotus that the majority fall into Wall Street and finance by default.  I thankfully avoided that fate, and am so fortunate to have slithered my way back to the natural sciences and gotten my PhD in biology.  I won’t go into the whole circuitous route from Amherst to the NIH, but here’s a brief synopsis: after Amherst I worked for a Diabetes newsletter, then I backpacked around Southeast Asia with a high school friend for six months, and then I got a job at RAND Corporation doing consulting work in the field of global health.  Then I made what I consider the second best decision of my life in getting my PhD at Penn State with Eddie Holmes, and then I took a post-doc at the NIH.

But as I toured NC State’s animal hospital, watching veterinarians perform an angioplasty on a dog, I had this immensely gratifying sense that I had finally ended up where I belonged.  I was 36 hours into my marathon interview as a candidate for the Infectious Disease cluster hire at the NC State veterinary college, which was all going splendidly.  And I had this feeling of relief that I would have been a terrible veterinarian: I would have hated dealing with sick, hurting animals, watching them suffer.  I’m not nearly practical-minded and details-oriented enough to operate in a hospital, where policies have to be  meticulously adhered to.  But as I conversed with the veterinarians I realized that we all played our own roles: they were good with scalpels; I was good at thinking about the big questions, things like the spatial dynamics of the pathogens they were encountering (was canine influenza endemic in North Carolina, or were they simply seeing spillovers from other areas?).  I wasn’t supposed to be a vet after all — all those endless requirements for admission did a good job of weeding out people like me who have difficulty with too many rules and would never be able to follow procedure in a clinical setting.  Rather, I had arrived at the College of Veterinary Medicine through my own circuitous route, and had experiences and skills that would complement the activities in the clinic.  I could never have planned it this way, but things seemed to have a way of sorting themselves out.

To clear my head the morning of Day 2 of interviews, I put on my running shoes and ventured beyond the Comfort Inn.  I quickly encountered a whole network of trails through the woods, first through Schenck Forest and ultimately landing at a huge park called Umstead.  I had to hurry back for my breakfast interview, but I trotted back with a relief that Raleigh had a nice set of forests near the veterinary college.  This might work, I considered.

The West Virginia ponies are back!  No, no more Chompers.  Timberline Stables has new management, and a whole new crop of ponies.  But they’ve caught on quickly to the carrot game.  The time when Chompers nibbled on Aaron’s ski seems to have had an indelible effect on Aaron’s confidence in horses’ ability to distinguish between carrots and, say, fingers.  So he leaves the carrot delivery to me.

This is our longest stay in West Virginia to date — 10 days.  We took our laptops and worked from the Chophouse M-F, taking a mid-day break each day to go out for an expedition.  My IT band has still been squirrelly since HS40, so I’ve been doing an ‘activity’ of running and walking.  I go through cycles where I take my running more or less seriously, and summer tends to be a time when I let my hair down and back off.  The woods are full of activity — woodpeckers in chase, swarms of tadpoles, bees bumping over wildflowers — not a bad time at all to slow it down and pay closer attention to what’s around you.  Aaron seems to have been stung by one of those bees, and has been on a mileage tear — no doubt a good sign that he’s finally kicking the last of the Lyme.  It seems to be a particularly bad tick summer, and several of my friends from State College have already been treated for Lyme.  One of the really nice things about West Virginia is the lack of ticks here.  It’s the only place you can run through the tall grasses without a feeling in the back of your mind that tiny fangs are sinking into your flesh.

There are some perfect trails for newbie mountain bikers out here — jeep roads, grassy double-track, and singletrack that are just tough enough to challenge you without making you want to get off your bike and walk.  I’ve even been scanning Craigslist for lady’s mountain bike prospects — quite a large number of people out there with nice bikes trying to offload them.

I’ve also been experimenting with the Hoka trail shoe as additional protection for my fibroma.  Overall, my verdict is that I’d rather not to have to wear them (I’ve always preferred minimalist gear — the old definition of ‘minimalist’, before it meant ‘vibrams’), but given the fibroma problem it’s definitely a safer and more cushioned way to go.  Because of the IT band, I haven’t had a chance to really test them flying down hills, but so far the results are auspicious.  Missteps seem to be less punishing.

I have the Lurray Triathlon Aug 16, and the Pony Run in Montana the week after that, so at some point I have to be able to start running regularly again.  But neither of them are events I’m taking very seriously, and I know better than to rush an IT band.  I’d rather be healthy and under-trained than in shape but hurting.  I signed up for the Women’s Half Marathon lottery, but there’s a side of me that’s a bit fatigued of that event.  Not that I don’t love it to pieces — I would still go and volunteer.  But last year I thought I was moving to Minnesota and imagined it was going to be my last WHM hurrah, at least for a while.  I’m glad I’m still in DC (I would have been miserably cold in Minneapolis), but I feel like I’ve kind of punched out at that race, and psychologically I’m ready to let the WHM go for a bit.  Maybe it’s just hard for me to get psyched for a fast race when I have so many lingering issues — my fibroma, IT band, hamstring, low weight.  It’s hard to get in a racing mindset.  I’ll see which way my gut is going come decision time, but these days I’m far more concerned with whether the ponies get their evening carrots than whether I break another record.