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Augusta Half Ironman 70.3

The calm before the chaos.

We were up before dawn. We were in downtown Augusta before dawn. We’d been on a school bus and got down here to the transition area before dawn. The Yankee was a mile up the street, waiting for parachutists to drop in and the national anthem and a canon to blast and all of the waves to start. As we are running a relay, the unwanted step-children of these races, she was in the last wave.

She still beat a whole lot of people out of the water.

We, Jenni (our runner) and her husband Gavin (our cheerleader) sat on a railroad berm and watched the first part of the morning come and go. We watched the sun rise, and that was not a bad seat for it:

At 9:20 The Yankee was finally able to get in the water. She swam 1.2 miles and then worked her way up the boat launch ramp and then ran a little more than 100 meters to the relay pen, in the very back of the transition area, because, remember, we are the step-children of the race. We’ve watched the pros and quite a few of the age-groupers come and go. A few of the relay teams had their swimmers come in and then came our water hero, having done all of the above in just 28 minutes. Not too shabby.

But these races don’t give you a lot of space. More cramped than a dive boat or darkrooms I’ve known.

Anyway, as I was standing there waiting, having done all of the preparing and water-drinking and snack eating and bathroom breaks I could muster, looking at the fancy bikes next to my bike I hear great stories.

One of the age-groupers was pronounced by friends of hers in the relay area as an idiot. Seems she’d completed a full Ironman last weekend and was doing a half today. That’s a 140.6 mile race followed by the 70.3. This makes no sense.

A guy was telling us about his nephew, who went to an Ironman race and was very excited. Ironman! But he was crushed when Tony Stark didn’t show up, just a bunch of people in spandex with bicycles.

That is a bummer.

The Yankee came in, I pulled the timing chip off her ankle — that’s our relay baton, if you will — and put it on mine. Grabbed the bike, ran out of transition and off we go:

Every other race picture the pros took of me is badly out of focus. Because I go so fast.

Here’s the course, a 56 mile joy ride through the countryside. I have made turned this into a ThingLink, which means it is an interactive image. This one is very basic. Mouseover and click on the black-and-white dots to see the notes. The race starts near the left margin and goes in a counterclockwise direction. The notes, as you might imagine, follow suit.

I finished my part, slower than it should have been, but I spent the back half of the race trying to measure my effort so I didn’t blow up the entire race. (We’ve not eaten well enough this weekend and proper fueling is key.) But I made it in, dismounted with great relief and found that the growing pain I had in both feet was something of a problem as I shuffled all the way through the transition area — because we were camped at the back.

I passed off the timing chip to Jenni she was off and running on her 13.1 mile run.

I, meanwhile, suddenly can’t walk. And I’m starting to cramp up. I got a cramp in my quad and made a facial expression and my face cramped. More water. Much more water. Get all of that under control, change clothes, get our things out of transition and back to the car and we got to watch Jenni go by on the run route. Then we had a snack at a nearby restaurant and watched her run by again. She was awesome.

And here she is at the finish:

Pay no attention to the time, as that clock counts from the beginning of the event, and does not account for the big delay in the wave starts. The important thing is that we finished. We had fun. We survived. And we got bling:

We also got massages. Actually we got stretched. The masseuses had closed up — with people still on the course, but whatever, who cares about those people, right? — so we got the active release guys. I put Jenni’s name on the list and then my name on the list. The Yankee didn’t want one initially, because she’d only done 28 minutes of work or something. But I decided she should get the active release stretch too. So I added her name to the list. The guy says he was closing up shop. He’d seen a ton of people. I explained I was trying to get my wife on the list and my name was his last customer. Before I could even think up the “Help me keep the domestic peace” jokes, he conceded.

“Put her on there,” he said, “And then write ‘No more customers!'”

So the four of us had dinner, deciding that the racers don’t like the relay teams not because we could use all of our energy in one event, but because we are athletes with social skills who know other athletes.

After dinner we got on the road. There was a long drive home — and it was a long drive home. We got in sometime just after 10 p.m., just in time to do laundry and put everything away.

Apparently we’re going to do the whole race as individuals next year. I’m exhausted from the requisite training already.

adventures / cycling / photo / swimming / weekend — Comments Off
27
Sep 14

A Saturday in Augusta

Woke up this morning and we went for a ride on the half Ironman’s bike course. It is a 56-mile counterclockwise loop that goes out of Georgia, into South Carolina and back. I rode the hilly part on the back half:

The Yankee was driving along, making sure I didn’t miss any of the turns. She took that picture at one of them, and had I known she was going to do that I would have really leaned into the turn.

I saw several people training today, they’ll all be riding harder tomorrow. I’m just hoping to get up and over the slow, gentle climbs tomorrow. It felt pretty good today, but I only did about a quarter of the route, which seemed pretty fast.

Afterward, we got cleaned up and did the formal check in down town. We then walked from the convention center to the transition area. Walking was a mistake.

You can’t help where the civic center is in relation to where the logical places on the water — in this case the Savannah River — are relative to one another. On the way walking back up I measured the distance. It was 1.7 miles.

In between was where the swim will actually start, so The Yankee had to double back on her walk. When she finished her practice swim, she pronounced it nice and fast, I drove down to get her. So we’ve done more walking than we wanted and not enough eating today. Great way to prepare for a race!

On my walk back up from dropping off my bike in transition I noticed this:

That’s the back of the Augusta Chronicle, which is a fine paper. There was a large man loading his old, beat up car with some sort of publication. It was about 2 p.m., (I know because I was frustrated that I still hadn’t had lunch) so it was too late for the Saturday paper and too early for the Sunday issue.

Back behind him, and seen in that picture, there were two guys sitting on the equipment in the paper’s loading bay. Those aren’t seats, but they’ve probably been used that way for generations, the job done, the rest won, the pressure off the feet. Behind them is that billboard for the Chronicle’s tablet app.

Make of all of that what you will.

We parked near this mural. This is a part of a four picture arrangement, a quadtych, if you will. It is old and in disrepair and it wouldn’t have looked any better if it was still brand new:

We had that late lunch, followed by an early dinner with lots of carbs. Tonight we’ll try to go to sleep early. Tomorrow, we wake up early.

Oh, I walked by this sign, too:

Indeed.

cycling / overwriting / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Sep 14

Just some pictures

I had these shots from my ride on Sunday and I’ve been staring at them. The colors are beautiful. The light is perfect. The road just sings to you. There’s a great whir, whir, whirring in my imagination from the rubber tire on the road. When you get close enough you can smell the clay:

On my bike I am always trying to ride hard and fast, because I am not fast. But in my daydreams I’m lazily drifting onto the center line, where the road noise is different, quieter. When I have the space to ride on a painted lane I always wonder if it moves faster. Maybe the paint makes less friction, somehow. It is quieter. There’s just your breathe there, just the whoosh of the wind in your ears. And then you can really see the things around you:

Not far from there at all, really, I looked up the road and saw the prettiest site I’ve seen on an otherwise normal, and freshly paved, ribbon of road:

And I started doing the only other kind of riding I know how to do, the slow back and forth tilts from the shoulder to centerline, making big swooping curves over the asphalt. Sine waves. Sign language.

In my mind I’m sitting on the saddle. In reality I’m sitting in my office chair, wondering why it is lately less comfortable.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / Monday / photo / things to read / video — Comments Off
22
Sep 14

Some of these children are our future

Some friends and I have a little joke on Twitter we call Why I Love The Internet This Week or #WILITW. Usually the subject matter is a video, but the premise is always “Without this amazing tool, we would have never had the opportunity to enjoy this.”

But for the Internet. I gave you this week’s entry:

Isn’t that adorable? Two cheers for the Wallkill Mighty Mites from Wallkill, New York. But now let’s watch it again and analyze some of the constituent parts. The first thing you notice, while keeping in mind this is in slow motion, that the entire team was running through that sign no matter what. That’s an admirable esprit de corps from such a young team so early in their season.

The second thing is the cheerleaders. Those girls never gave up the fight, and that’s a great demonstration of boosterism and support.

Which brings us to the mom in the foreground. She held her end of the sign for several waves of the team to break through. That’s dedication. That’s belief. That’s probably a mom who thought her son could get through the thing.

As opposed to the woman holding the other end of the sign. She literally turned her back on the pile up.

Meanwhile, the cheerleaders are cheering and clapping and jumping. And a half dozen kids will always remember this, all through their football careers, and they’ll never feel the need to be at the front of the team to break the paper on the high school gridiron.

The good news is they brushed it off and, apparently, won the game.

I got in a 43-mile ride yesterday evening. I was hoping for about 46, but I had to cut it short because of darkness. So I came home the slightly shorter way, with the big hill, which I was in no condition to deal with after 43 miles, thinking I need to start my rides earlier in the day.

My route was an amalgamation of two that I’m familiar with. It took me through a modern residential area, a shopping mecca, a historic part of town and then out through the countryside. I sailed by the old union headquarters that is now apparently a church and another old plant that will probably never have a new tenant. I was almost clipped by a pickup and the trailer he was hauling. And I worked my way back out into the countryside, where I turned off of a road with a name onto another with just a number.

The road bottoms out at a creek bed and you’re surrounded by judgmental cows and someone shooting a nail gun nearby. I went by a man sitting on his porch and another working on his roof. I cruised by the brand new post office that is shiny and new for a community that consists of a church, one store and a volunteer fire department. Just past that is a stop sign and that store, a junk store, where I years ago discovered my love for junk stores. If you go straight you find yourself on about a mile of the worst chip/seal pavement you can find in the rural South. But then you go under some trees, round a curve, pass a pasture and you find yourself on a brand new and nearly pristine asphalt and large rollers.

I did about five or six miles on that, surrounded by red clay and pine trees and only the most occasional house, before I turned around for home. I stopped there and took a few of the pictures that were shared here yesterday, where I was talking about the lumber yard and old wood. I also took this picture there:

What is in those woods? The whole road which, again, has always been eerily empty, is covered with various posted and no trespassing signs. But a human silhouette target sign? I didn’t previously care about that gravel path, but now I’m curious.

Things to read … because reading keeps us curious.

These first two are about the opposite of transparency … City of Anniston institutes policy change for media interaction

8 ways the Obama administration is blocking information

And a few more quick journalism links … How 5 news orgs have updated their apps for Apple’s new operating system

News for the Minecraft generation: Gannett experiments with virtual reality

This is amazing work … Photographer Captures Tens of Thousands Fleeing ISIS, Entering Turkey

We’ve been banging this drum for a few years now … Brace For The Corporate Journalism Wave:

In short, while the journalistic staffing is shrinking dramatically in every mature market (US, Europe), the public relation crowd is rising in a spectacular fashion. It grows in two dimensions: the spinning aspect, with more highly capable people, most often former seasoned writers willing to become spin-surgeons. These are both disappointed by the evolution of their noble trade and attracted by higher compensation. The second dimension is the growing inclination for PR firms, communication agencies and corporations themselves to build fully-staffed newsrooms with editor-in-chief, writers, photo and video editors.

That’s the first issue.

The second trend is the evolution of corporate communication. Slowly but steadily, it departs from the traditional advertising codes that ruled the profession for decades. It shifts toward a more subtle and mature approach based on storytelling. Like it or not, that’s exactly what branded content is about: telling great stories about a company in a more intelligent way versus simply extolling a product’s merits.

The invasion of corporate news:

With the president-felling image of Woodward and Bernstein still hanging over the profession, and a geekily hip narrative of data-driven analysis pointing to a new future, few journalists like to acknowledge the role PRs play in their stories. Many are well-informed, professional, clever, helpful and fun. Some are former colleagues. Some become friends. But for most journalists, it is an involvement we put up with warily. PRs are spinners of favourable stories, glossers-over of unfavourable facts and gatekeepers standing between us and the people we want to get to.

But as journalists bemoan such PR obstacles, they rarely admit an important fact: the PRs are winning. Employment in US newsrooms has fallen by a third since 2006, according to the American Society of News Editors, but PR is growing. Global PR revenues increased 11 per cent last year to almost $12.5bn, according to an industry study entitled The Holmes Report. For every working journalist in America, there are now 4.6 PR people, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.2 a decade ago. And those journalists earn on average 65 per cent of what their PR peers are paid.

More sad news in Africa … Lockdown Begins in Sierra Leone to Battle Ebola

And happy news … Marine severely wounded in Afghanistan marries the woman who helped him hold on

Grand Prairie Homecoming Queen Shares Her Crown:

On Friday night, in front of thousands of friends, family members and fans at the Gopher-Warrior Bowl, that is exactly what happened.

Principal Lorimer Arendse, now in his fourth week at the helm of Grand Prairie High School, was let in on the plan shortly before halftime and the planned announcement of the homecoming winners.

“In all my time in school, this is probably the greatest moment I’ve ever experienced as a principal,” said Arendse, who has five years of prior experience in school administration.

Kids these days, eh?

cycling / photo / weekend — Comments Off
21
Sep 14

Catching up

The weekly post of extra stuff, full of extras that haven’t advanced beyond the lovely level of stuff. Here’s the stuff, then.

Scary thought I had the other night in the parking lot, “Is it possible that I’m getting tired of Whataburger? Is that the reason I stood beneath that sign, watching it like it was flying away?”

A few not-quite-wild brown-eyed Susans:

I believe this may be a thin-leaved sunflower that had just popped up in a walking path and was hanging on to the end of the season. Life finds a way:

Oh, just the most perfect pine cone in the world. At least this side of it was:

I put new handlebar wrap on my bike. Looks great, was very frustrating to get on and will be dirty instantly. But, finally, my handlebars match the saddle. I pulled some of it out of place on my first ride with it this afternoon, but it rewrapped easily enough:

I call this one, The Colors of My Day:

I wonder what is down that path. Through the woods there is a saw mill. You could smell them chopping up old lumber this afternoon. Old lumber, I decided, has a more dull smell on a calm afternoon. The new, green, good stuff has that crisp bite in the nose. What was floating around today just made you want to sneeze. But what is down there?