What happens when two brothers with two high end digital cameras combine powers in a road trip across America?
The answer when we get there.
I was a bit apprehensive before starting this race as I didn’t think it would turn out any better than Wilmington and I’ve been having some mild pain in my right shin ever since then. I told myself I wouldn’t worry about the outcome and just give it everything I’ve got. I took my speedometer off my bike so I could concentrate on how I felt instead of how fast I was going. Dave came down to watch me race which was a really nice gesture on his part and much appreciated on mine. The swim started off pretty standard, me swimming a 5:10. Not particularly surprising, although Dave did say I swam my first lap in 1:30 so if I would just pace myself better I could bring my time down.
Then came the bike. 14 miles, fairly long for a sprint distance triathlon. I got on, took it easy for the first 200 yards while my legs got used to things, then pushed hard for the rest. Wasn’t sure how fast I was going but felt great. Way better than Wilmington where I was just miserable for the entire race. The guy who started right behind me in the swim, #155, was the only person to pass me on the bike which was good motivation for me to not let him get too far ahead.
Got back to the transition area and into my running shoes and I was still fairly close to #155. Started the run to Dave yelling “Set your eyes on #155! Run him down! Go go go!”. It didn’t take long to pass him with some authority, beating him by over 3 minutes on the run course. The run felt really strong. At Wilmington I have a particularly vivid memory of starting the run and immediately thinking “Oh god. This is going to suck.” and feeling awful throughout the entire thing. It was extremely mentally taxing. This was a much more pleasant experience where I felt better starting the run and didn’t start to feel completely spent until the last leg of it. I think a lot of it has to do with the bricks (biking and then running immediately afterwards) workouts that I’ve been making an effort to add.
When it was all said and done I was happily surprised to end up getting 11th overall (500+ people registered) and 1st in my age group. Thanks for coming out Dave and looking forward to getting a reality check next weekend at White Lake.
Overall men’s results here. Note: The guy in 6th place was disqualified for taking a wrong turn on the bike course and cutting 20+ minutes off his time. Age group results here.
The month in training: Big strides for me including 1000 yard swims, a 14 mile run, and a bike-40-miles-then-run-5.5 brick which left me feeling not so hot for a couple days (should have eaten more & rested the day after).
In 2 days my final homework assignment of the semester will be turned in.
In 3 days I will be competing at Riverwood, a sprint distance triathlon.
In 6 days I will be taking my first of 4 exams.
In 9 days I will be taking the last of my 4 exams and my 4th year of college will be officially over.
In 11 days I will be competing with the big boys at White Lake, another sprint distance triathlon. This will be my first race in the more competitive North Carolina Triathlon Series. Previously all my races have been in the so called Triathlon Development Series which is geared more towards beginners. It will be my largest race yet, with over 900 people, plus it will be my first open water swim race. Instead of the typical 300 yard swim in a pool, it will be roughly 750 yards in a lake and will (hopefully) be wetsuit legal and I’ll be able to use my brand spankin’ new wetsuit at it.
In 14 days I will begin my drive to California. A day later I will meet Michael in Oklahoma City (he’s flying in from Bozeman and flying out of San Jose) and together we will continue on our voyage across the country.
In 27 days I will be starting my first day of work at Cisco in San Jose.
A lot of really exciting things coming up, just need to get these exams out of the way first.
Also, it appears commenting may or may not be broken. This is probably due to the fact that I’ve been bombarded with spam comments over the last 6 months. The spam filter I recently added a month or so ago has already collected around 200,000 spam comments total (insaneeeeeeeeeee). I don’t foresee myself having any reasonable amount of time to spend on this until I get to California so it’s likely it won’t be fixed for about a month. Oops.
In other not so great news I lost my cell phone so will be phone less for a bit until I get a new one.
In the never ending battle to acquire Japanese comprehension I have won another long-awaited, difficult victory. Previous to this battle I knew how to write and understand each of the 2000 standard use kanji, but just the meanings. Now I know at least 1 word for each character so I am well on my way to knowing the readings for all of them. This will allow me to learn new words insanely quickly as they will now all be simply combinations of readings and kanji I already know, instead of brand new ones that are significantly harder to learn. I’m fairly confident this doesn’t make too much sense unless explained properly, so I’ll do that later when I have more time. Next step: start reading Japanese novels.
In a more whimsical note: How often are you disappointed with the Internet? It’s a fairly rare occurrence that I put something into Google and come up completely empty handed. The other day I needed to find a page with just really absurd French names like Jean-Pierre-Claude-Van-Damme-McSanderhosen but when I put “ridiculous French names” into Google I was surprised to find that within the roughly 35 billion websites online there appears to be nothing on the internet dedicated to this illustrious topic. Who will rise to the occasion and create this monumentally important website? Who?!?
err, anyways, things are great, definitely not having a problem staying busy. Looking forward to an amazing Summer!
Wilmington Athletic Club sprint + Ecuador pictures
Published April 13th, 2008 in triathlon and Ecuador. 5 CommentsWoke up in time to say good night to my roommates on Sunday morning (3:30) and drive the 2 hours to Wilmington for another triathlon last weekend. I had to arrive early to register late, as I had forgotten to do it on the website. This one was quite a bit larger than the last, with around 275 people registered. That meant I had to wait an hour and a half to swim while I watch everybody else start. When it finally got to be my turn I jumped in the pool, checked my goggles, and I was off at the count. I kicked off and was immediately greeted by chlorinated 84 degree water flushing into my left eye. I had apparently not checked them well enough beforehand and paid the price for it with a swim time 45 seconds slower than my previous time in Asheville a week earlier. Oops.
The bike course was flat and devoid of wind so I was looking to set a pretty good time on it. Was frustrated to discover I averaged 20.5 mph, hardly any faster than during the Cary duathlon where I biked 3 times as far. My run time was about 22 minutes, also a little slower than I had hoped although still pretty solid. Overall I’m pretty happy with 29th in men and 4th in my age group. Full results here. Only top 30 finisher with a 6 min+ swim time, huzzah!
More Ecuador pictures:
I got a chance to be in a couple races recently, the first of which was a duathlon in Cary, a neighboring city. No, not a biathlon where you cross-country ski then shoot a rifle at targets, a duathlon where you run, bike, then run again. This one consisted of a 5 mile run, a 32 mile bike ride, then another 5 mile run which took me 2 hours, 49 minutes, and 41 seconds all together.
I didn’t really know what to expect beforehand so I told myself I would run the first 5 miles at a comfortable speed, continue on the bike at a comfortable speed that wouldn’t kill me before the last run, then give it everything I’ve got left for the last run. Well, that’s exactly what I did and felt great until the last 10 miles of the bike ride when I started to think “Okayyyy, this bike ride could end now.” Once it finally ended the last run was brutttal. I was thinking it wouldn’t be too bad since I still felt pretty good at the end of the bike but quickly realized how wrong I was once I discovered that my legs had, in fact, turned into lead weights. I kept thinking that my results would be completely spoiled by an absurdly slow final leg of the run. I was pleasantly surprised at the end to see that I ended up running the first 5 miles at 7:06 per mile, biking 20 mph, and running the last 5 miles at 7:36 per mile. Turns out my last run didn’t spoil my results, and I ended up 28th overall in men and 3rd in my age group. Full results here.
Saturday was my first triathlon. It was a small one, with roughly 75 people and took place near Asheville. Chris, Billy, Mom, and Dad were all kind enough to come despite having to endure the rain and ridiculously early morning hours. It started in a pool, everybody lining up in order of submitted swim times. Fastest people in the front, slowest in the back. Competitors start every 15 seconds. Zig-zagging across all 6 lanes, down and back, 300 yards. I was number 25, but was pretty nervous because I’d been swimming pretty poorly recently. I pulled it together for the race though and ended up with my best swim time by far at about 5:15 which put my swim time at about 15th overall.
After that it was a matter of running to the transition area, ripping off my goggles and swim cap, putting on my jersey, bike shoes (no socks), sunglasses, and helmet, and then onto the bike portion of the race. Mom was cheering loudly for me as I left the transition area and quickly encountered a series of steep hills to climb, the worst of which I was going about 5 mph up in my lowest gear and still managed to pass a couple people, one of which had given up and started walking. My bike time was 10th overall, despite the fact that my average speed turned out to be about 16.5 mph, 3.5 mph less than the 20 mph I had biked at the Cary Duathlon the previous week. Just goes to show I shouldn’t worry about speed so much as my time compared to others.
Biked back into the transition area, Mom still there cheering me on telling me I’m doing great. Helmet, glasses, bike shoes off. Running shoes on. The bike-run transition was considerably different this time from the duathlon in that I started feeling awful and gradually started to feel better and be able to turn up the speed. I only saw one person during the run, a guy who smoked me, so I wasn’t sure how it was going. Ended up with a 23:19, slow because of the hills, but still fast enough to be the 5th fastest overall run time.
Overall I ended up in 8th place, and got 1st in my age group. Full results for men are here.
A couple pictures from the Cary Duathlon:
The month in training:
Houses in Ecuador are a bit different than the standard American house in that they generally hardly consist of more than concrete walls and a roof. Which means our house building was mainly hole digging, rock shoveling, large rock moving (by hand), and concrete mixing. And by concrete mixing I mean taking 2 wheelbarrows full of rocks, 2 wheelbarrows full of dirt, 1 bag of cement mix, many buckets of water and having a few people with shovels constantly stirring the mix around until it gets to the right consistency. At this point you have to continue mixing it so it doesn’t harden and shovel it into buckets which are then passed through a line of people to its destination.
I was enthusiastic about all this and kicked some serious concrete ass the first two days. Okay, mentally I was enthusiastic about it for the rest of the time as well, but physically I felt like every inch of me had been beaten with a baseball bat when I woke up Wednesday morning. My frail raised-indoors-on-computer-games body was not used to this manual labor. I lost some steam midway through the week once bending down to pick up my shovel became a painful activity but was thankfully relieved of my constant concrete mixing command by reinforcements who came from the other work site.
Getting to travel to Ecuador for Spring Break was an amazing opportunity, especially to get to actually do something instead of the typical standing around taking pictures and not knowing how to help I’m used to. We were a group of 19 NCSU students and 1 staff member sent to Santo Domingo, Ecuador for a week with Habitat for Humanity. Monday-Friday was spent building houses (more on that next post).
We had Saturday and Sunday to do some non-manual labor things such as:
Stand on the equator
Stay in some surprisingly nice places.
Go dancing two nights.
Get to go to one of those beautiful high elevation spots you always see in pictures from foreign countries.
Get to ride in a cable car up to the top of a volcano. Unfortunately once we got there it was too cloudy to take pictures but the ride itself was worth it.
One of my favorite things: Long rides in vehicles when I get a chance to take pictures. I was lucky enough (and everyone was nice enough) so that I ended up with front seat for most of the rides. I was in heaven during the 3 hour van ride through the Andes mountains from Quito to Santo Domingo.
Also, Congratulations Dad! … on getting a pretty prestigious honor at UNCA for having some excellent creative ideas. And also on the purchase of a new 2008 Toyota Prius.
Cycling Races + Job Update + Ecuador
Published February 29th, 2008 in Me, career and Cycling. 4 CommentsFirst a big bearded Happy Birthday to my main Montana livin’ broseph, Michael. Look forward to seeing you soon!
And in other news
I got an internship this Summer!
With…
*drumroll*
…
Cisco!
Wooo woooo (the sound the whistles make)! I will be working in San Jose, California this Summer as an intern for Cisco. I am really-super-duper-extremely-tremendously happy about this. Was really freaking out about finding a job this Summer so this is not only a weight off my shoulders but a pleasant surprise to find that my first choice company picked me after only a 30 minute, fairly relaxed interview. Was nervous until they e-mailed me an offer expecting to have to go through some nerve wracking, ego shattering interviews.
San Jose: The 10th largest city in the US. Nearly 1 million people. Known as the Capital of Silicon Valley. Safest city in the US with over 500,000 people in it. An hour South of San Francisco.
Cisco: 63,000 employees. Headquartered in San Jose, designs and sells networking and communications technology and services under a couple different brands, the most well known of which are Cisco and Linksys. During the dot-com boom in 2000 was the most valuable company in the world. International work opportunities (i.e. me living in another country *cha-ching*). Employees speak highly of the company and the work experience.
Not sure exactly what kind of work I’ll be doing yet. Should have some input into the kind of project I want to be involved in but most things involved with networking are really interesting and, at this point, fairly mysterious to me.
Continue to read about and see pictures from my first bike races:
Despite the fact that my car broke down in Greensboro on the way back to Asheville last weekend and I stayed in a hotel overnight until my car could be fixed the next day, I woke up early Sunday morning to make it back to Raleigh for the 5k Run for the Roses race. Around 500 people were in the competition which I ended up placing 43rd in. You can see the results here if you are curious but I can summarize by saying my time was 20:46. That’s my “chiptime” which means that it’s the exact time from when the electronic chip attached to my shoe started and crossed the finish line. The ranking goes by the guntime which is the actual start of the race which explains the discrepancy between my two times as a I started towards the back of the pack. Next time I’ll make a point to start towards the front of the pack so I don’t have to wait to cross the start line and I’ll place better.
I wore a watch and timed myself for each mile to see what my times were: About 6:20 for the first mile, 6:30 for the second mile, and roughly 7:10 for the last mile (then add some time for the last .1 mile). Sooo, not so good at pacing myself. Felt really great after the first mile, still felt good after the second mile, then the third mile obliterated me, laying the hurt hold down strong for the last 5ish minutes. The last couple minutes I figured I had just pushed myself too hard the first 2 miles and had thoughts of just crumpling on the side of the street or walking for a bit. But alas, things turned out well, I pushed through and felt fine 5 minutes after it was all over. I’m pretty pleased with my time and glad that I have something to compare now and see my progress.
More about a Summer internship:
