Post Race Blues

When preparing for a race, especially the days and weeks preceding the event, my life becomes very structured and meticulously planned out. I spent a significant amount of time worrying about my fitness, workouts and health so much so that a snippet of my day looks something like this:

Monday AM:

Start running to work

Focus on form and think about the transition from Bike to Run.
Worry that I haven't done enough brick workouts to get my body used to the transition.
Worry that I haven't done enough transition practices to put on my run shoes without falling.
Worry that I haven't hydrated properly before the race.
Drink a huge swig of water to compensate for the lack of hydration.
Choke on water.
Try to keep running at a good pace despite the choking.
Realize that I've only been running for a half mile
Pick up the pace
Slow down to not burn out my legs
.
.
.
Take a bite of my salad
Make a spreadsheet of everything I've eaten for the past week
Call my friend to see if he remembers what I ate last Friday after the bar
Plan out my swim workout for that evening.
Call another friend to see if he's going to go swim as well.
Change swim workout from distance to intervals because friend wants to grab dinner afterwards with the crew.
Contemplate going to Spin Class because...well... it's there and I'm not dead, so I might as well give it 110%.
...

This level of neurosis is pretty typical of me prior to a race. It may be my personality type.

*Shrug*

After a race, however, is when the s#!t hits the proverbial fan...

I succumb pretty heavily to Post Race Blues...or PRB...not to be confused with PBR... which may be a cure for PRB in-of-itself.

PRB is that empty feeling after a race that one has trained hard for and had consuming one's life for many, many weeks. I'm not entirely sure if it's a mild form of depression, but, if it is, I wouldn't be surprised. Personally, I experience some, if not all, of the following, usually in the week directly following my big race: I fidget alot, have troubles sleeping from having a lot of extra energy, get tired quickly, am prone to lethargy, get confused as to what to do with all the extra time I have, and generally am extremely apathetic about training.

For me, getting over PRB is all about setting a mandatory training break for recovery purposes and telling myself that once the break is over, I'm going to jump back into the swing of things. The concept behind the mandatory break is that my central nervous system and muscles are most likely completely fried from the emotional high and stresses of the race. As such, if I were to try to work out during that period directly after my race (usually a week), my body would not only respond poorly to the training, but also not give the customary 'highs' that come with physical exertion.

Generally, for me, poor training leads to further apathy with regards to training.

The week off gives my body enough time to repair so that when I jump back into training, I can hit the workout hard, enjoy the afterglow, if you will, and get pumped up for the next session.

During that week off, my plan is usually to stay active, but instead of training all the time, I try to do all the things I've wanted to do for a while, but haven't been able to due to their conflicting nature with pre-race health or training. 

This past week after the Nation's Triathlon, I went on a food binge and ate everything I could get my grubby hands on:  Pizza, fried chicken, fried catfish, peach cobbler, cheesecake, cookie dough, ice cream, more pizza, fruit punch, cheese of all sorts, bread, tortillas.. you name it, I ate it.  The only time I went to the gym was to stretch and catch up with my buddy who works there.

This past Sunday was the first day back after the week long hiatus I hit it hard with a 50 mile ride out to the boonies of Virginia.  Since then, I've been hitting the workouts hard, and with some additional goal setting, I'm already looking forward to my next event!

2010 Nation's Triathlon Race Report

The Nation's Triathlon is held yearly here in our nation's capitol in September and for me, this year's event was my very first triathlon ever.

And this is my twisted recount on what actually happened.

Be forewarned, brave reader, because it's actually quite long. In fact, it probably took me more time to write this report than it took for me to actually race the event.

This year's event was the largest Nation's Tri ever, breaking the Guinness record for largest "International Distance Triathlon Event" with 4600 participants. Yay, us! The really interesting number is that there were ~7000 registrants for this event... which for you mathematically inclined, is 2400 more than the number of people who actually raced.

So, why the huge difference in registrants and participants?

In a word: rain.

I'll talk more about this later (ominous foreshadowing, indeed!).

However, to give some background on this experience, let me briefly recount how the Nation's Tri got on my calendar.

Setting: Late Winter. At a bar with a beer in hand.

Enrique (a good friend of mine): So now that you've done a marathon (referencing my completion of the 2010 Rock 'n Roll Arizona Marathon), what's next?
Me: I don't know... but definitely not another marathon. My legs still hurt!
Enrique: Let's do the Nation's Triathlon! I signed up last year, but couldn't do it.
Me: I don't have a bike...
Enrique: So go buy one.
Me: (turning to my other half and slurring my speech from the beers) Honey, can I buy a bike? I love you!

And so, once April rolled around, I became the proud owner of a 2010 Trek 2.1 Road Bike.

April through September was a flurry of training as I started learning the ins and outs of cycling and relearning how to swim at the local community pool. To delve into the tales of training would be a whole series of posts, so I'll save those stories for later (and you, the reader, the headaches of reading them!).

To be completely honest, I can't be 100% sure that rain was the cause for all of the DNS' (did not start...or suffer as the case may be), but when I stepped out of my car at 5 AM into the chilly, light rain, I immediately longed for the warmth of my bed... So I can imagine that many others probably saw the forecast of rain (after 2 weeks of drought, no less) and decided to forfeit their registration fee. If I were a baller, I'd probably do the same thing.

However, my baller status is worse than "Nerf or Nothing!" and my other half has endured too many trips to the pool to pick my tired ass up and has been woken up too many times by me banging around and getting ready for an early weekend workout that if I didn't participate in this event, I'd probably have to run anyways, to avoid the vengeful wrath of the angry blond.

That being said, I met Enrique at the Old Convention Center parking lot at 5 AM and we clambered, bright eyed and ... well ... not so bushy tailed onto the shuttle and promptly got lost.

Lost?

Yep. Lost.

Our bus driver had no clue how to get to the Transition Area and a few domineering personalities started angrily giving contradicting directions. Big egos are always a fun thing to deal with at 5:30 AM.

*Sigh*

The bus driver eventually figured out how to get onto Independence Ave. and we stepped out into the pouring rain onto West Potomac Park, me with my Glad Unscented Kitchen Trash Bag filled with gear in tow.

The actual amount of necessary race prep in terms of Transition set up is actually pretty quick if one stops to think about what needs to be done. For a newbie like me, I had, fortunately, done all of my thinking the night before and had packed each sport's gear and nutrition/hydration into a separate plastic grocery bag, all protected from the rain. This made the amount of thinking very, very minimal as the idea was to rip open the grocery bag and put everything on.

So, my Transition Area prep took me 2 minutes to lay everything out. The port-a-potty trip took a good 15 minutes and the race chip acquisition line took another 10 minutes, leaving me with an hour of standing around, unshod, in the grass, in nothing but my tri shorts, a confused look and holding an extra Glad Unscented Kitchen Trash Bag.

To explain, back when I did the marathon in January, I had learned that pro-racers would often wear trash bags instead of real clothing to keep warm at the start of the race. As my marathon was in Arizona and I wasn't really racing for a time, but, just looking to survive, I had opted to grab a Wally world rollback special to toss after the first mile of the marathon as Goodwill was picking up all discarded clothing.

This time, however, with the rain, I opted to go with the pro route. Well, the semi-pro route because all the pros were wearing wetsuits and prancing around as warm as can be. F you, you multi-sport gods and goddess, with abs showing through your neoprene armor of cool... Unfortunately, what the pros won't tell you, is that if you have spent any reasonable time in the gym, or if you don't have the build of an emaciated refugee, a kitchen sized trash bag won't fit your shoulders.

So there I stood, in the rain, struggling to get this narrow bag over my shoulders and looking rather sausage-esque once I stretched the bag wide enough to get the bag to cover my upper body. Naturally, success in donning the bag mean that I had forgotten to grab something out of my pile of transition gear and so the bag came off not 10 seconds after I had succeeded in enrobing myself in plastic..

This on and off debacle happened a few more times as I realized that I had forgotten to grab my ear plugs, forgotten to take a shot of gel, forgotten to grab a swig of water to wash the gel down, forgotten to stretch, and forgotten to attach my bike computer on my bike. I'm glad to know that short term memory loss runs in my family and that I'll look stupid for many years to come...

The race start was delayed by 25 minutes due to downpours and electrical activity, so Enrique and I eventually wandered down to the corrals and found that beautiful grassy field that we strode on the day before while racking our bikes had turned into a pit of mud from the 4600+ athletes and spectators traipsing about. Mud that would be an exciting obstacle in Transition later in the day.

I felt severely uncool wearing my trash bag at the corrals so off it came yet again (this time for good) and I started warming up and stretching amidst a sea of neoprene. The national anthem played at some point, the former Mayor Adrian Fenty had some words of encouragement, and I decided that I really, really, REALLY had to pee. Thankfully, I was in wave #3 and eight minutes after the pros swam off away from the dock, I was jumping into the Potomac and making the river water arguably less toxic.

No, I did not see any snakeheads, three headed fish, bull sharks or unidentifable body parts.

Infact, I didn't see anything at all, because the water was so murky, that it my range of sight underwater was about 6 inches. It was like swimming through diluted pea soup. Pea soup the color of fecal matter.

Anyways, the swim waves were 4 minutes part, and with ~150 men in my wave, my goal was to stay at the back of the pack and not have to use my jiujitsu skills to fend off the impending flailing armfest when the gun went off. To calm my nerves, I spent a couple of minutes floating on my back with my toes poking out of the surface and probably looked like that one weirdo who mistakenly thought that this group swim was a lazy river experience..

Eventually, the gun went off and all those hyper competitive overachievers took off like a black and red (swim cap) wheat thresher, churning up the water to a froth. Actually, I think that the water did froth. Must be some of the weird things in the river... Me, I waited 3 seconds and started off after them, careful to not get in anyone's way. This was especially difficult as I couldn't see past my elbow in any direction while swimming and within 200 meters, I had swum over someone (sorry guy!), gotten kicked in the face twice, and kicked in the chest.

Undeterred, I kept plugging along, taking care to swim from one mammoth orange buoy the size of a house to the next in as straight of a line as possible. Naturally, this was also one of the most popular routes as swimming extra yardage generally turns people off, and so dodging limbs became a constant challenge. The other challenge was the directionally challenged dude in front of me for 3/4 of the swim who would swim diagonally (in comparison to the line of buoys), pop up to sight his direction by doing breaststroke (with the very dangerous breaststroke kick), and then swim to the next buoy, but over correcting so that he ended up tracing a crazy zig zag path throughout the river. Infact, watching him progress through the course was like watching a pinball tracing a path of destruction.

The swim, being 1500m, is generally the shortest in duration of the 3 sports and I actually enjoyed counting down the meters as the buoys came and went and in no time I found myself at the exit ramp where I jumped out of the water and tore up the dock smirking at all the people struggling with their wetsuits. "Hah!", I thought, "That's what you get for wearing a wetsuit in 76 degree water!" Little did I know that karma would bite me a few minutes down the road...

As my feet hit pavement, I heard a "Go, James!" from Enrique, as his wave was about to be called and I almost ran into a tent pole as I half turned to wave while still running. Good thing I had saved some energy in the swim, as eating the tent pole would have been a great way to make it onto Failblog...

The run into the Transition Area was quite long (about a quarter mile or so?) and with all the mud dodging, it took a while to actually get to my bike. Once there, I tore open my bike bag, grabbed my tri top and started to wrestle it on. Naturally, it got stuck. My tri top got stuck on my shoulders and had rolled up on itself as I tried to pull it down. My angry mutterings got me some weird looks from fellow age group competitors as I struggled to dress myself and as they calmly took off their wetsuits, revealing their tri tops underneath.

Screw you, karma.

Eventually, after multiple restarts and lots of loud cursing, I finally got my top on and the rest of my transition went well as I: strapped on my helmet, donned my sunglasses, sprayed my feet with a water bottle to clean off the mud/grass, put on damp socks and damp bike shoes, stashed my gel + electrolytes, grabbed my bike and ran out to Independence Ave.

The bike went pretty well, all said and done. I forgot to reset my bike computer so I had no clue how far I had traveled and as such, was just executing my strategy via my memory of the route. Remembering some sage advice that many people screw their races up by going too hard on the first half of the bike, I decided to not push hard until after I had reached the turnaround on Clara Barton Parkway. Regardless of my average speed (19.3), which is pretty quick for me as I had just acquired my bike a season ago, I was getting passed left and right by testosterone fueled superbikes. If you've never heard a disc wheeled superbike pass you, it starts with a quiet voice saying "Passing!", followed by a *whump* *whump* *whump* sound, and usually culminates with a hunched over dude flashing by you on some futuristic carbon thing.

If I am correct, I do believe I saw former Mayor Fenty standing on the side of the road on Clara Barton with a grim look on his face. He either had a flat tire or was serving a penalty. Or both. No matter, he did eventually beat me by 5 minutes...

It's okay though, I didn't lose the Democratic primary...

Overall, the bike was relatively uneventful. However, on the return trip on the Whitehurst Freeway, a guy on a mountain bike ahead of me got distracted, swerved to the right, over corrected to the left, almost crashed into another rider and due to the slick roads, ended up sprawled on the pavement. Right in front of me. It took everything I had to avoid the wreckage and ask if he was okay, although I was already slowing down at that point. Luckily, the downed rider responded that he was okay and I continued on my merry way, now just a bit more cautious of the slick roads...

As I approached the Transition Area again, I gingerly came to a full stop as skidding out on my face was not something I was particularly keen on displaying to all of the spectators/photographers lining the roads. I counted all of the minor victories as I cleanly dismounted from my bike, didn't trip over my bike shoes as I ran to rack my bike, and successfully wiggled my toes into my Vibram Five Finger Bikila's.

As I was running around the Transition Area to get to Independence Ave., who should I see, but my other half, who had finally woken up and was watching with amusement as I slogged through T2. Thankfully, I thought to check my shoes prior to getting to all those spectators on Independence Ave, as my Velcro straps were flopping every which way. Naturally, I had forgotten to fasten them in my haste to get out of T2. "Learning opportunity"? I think so.

While cruising along , all I could think of while running the first three miles was 'port-o-potty!' and for the first three aid stations (one at each mile), I was asking everyone if there was a port-o-potty around... and all I got back were confused looks. As such, I'll blame my first three mile splits on a purposefully short stride. One nice perk on the run was that the volunteers were handing out water with ice! What a luxury! I wondered if the later waves would get the same treatment...

Thankfully, I (and a few other of the situationally gender advantaged) found a bridge post to duck behind to relieve ourselves... Upon rejoining the race, I commented aloud, "Wow! I feel so much better!!" to the sound of crickets and awkward chuckles. Hey, I thought it was funny...

My stride definitely improved, however, and I trucked through the aid stations at miles four and five pretty solidly, remembering another sagely point of advice of "If you can finish strong, you'll pick off more than a few people at the end." The advice paid off in the end as I passed a few people in the last half mile while kicking it up to near ludicrous speeds.

Actually, that's a lie. I think I passed one person in my final sprint. But to my credit, I did sprint the final stretch and made a conscious effort to not block anyone's finishing photo...

That said, the final sprint took a lot out of me and my finisher photo looks like ass because of it: eyes scrunched up in pain, mouth agape, limbs flailing every which way.

But I finished... (2:50:00)

And that's all that matters.

Actually, that's a lie, too.

What matters is that I got a sweet medal, some of the best tasting burritos I've ever eaten as post race food, and a healthy respect for this sport.

Will I be back to the world of Triathlon? Yep. You can bet on that!

-Chu


Data for the geeks:

Overall place: 1752 out of 4418 (39.7 percentile)
Age group place: 250 out of 486 (51.4 percentile how's that for average?!)
Gender place: 1472 out of 2853 (51.6 percentile and here, too!)
Time: 2:50:00
Swim: 30:04 (Rate: 1:50/100m)
T1: 5:21
Bike: 1:17:01 (Rate: 19.3 mph)
T2: 3:18
Run: 54:17 (Rate: 8:46 min/mi)
Penalty: 0:00