Wild Turkey 5 Mile Road Race Report

I've been looking forward to the Turkey Trot in Salem for weeks. Why? Three reasons:

1. The web site said that the t-shirt was going to be "tech fabric".
2. It's a late fall race, so the t-shirt was pretty much guaranteed to be long sleeved.
3. The registration site allowed you to specify your t-shirt size, so I was sure to not get XXXL.
   

Really, can you ask for more in a race? I think not.

Since 5 miles isn't even as long as my training runs have been lately, I decided to run this event for speed. Well, "speed" is a relative term I guess, but my goal was to break 45 minutes, or 9-minute miles. I usually avoid "speed" goals because I invariably go out way too fast, have GI distress by mile 1, and sometimes puke. It'll be different this time! I assured myself.

And what better way to prepare for a speed goal than riding my trainer for 2 hours and 45 minutes while watching Chariots of Fire and sprinting during all the running scenes to make sure that my legs were nice and fresh. Two observations about Chariots of Fire:

1. All English guys really do look gay.
2. The only thing that looks gayer than an English guy in 2007 is an English guy running in white man panties in 1922. (Really, watch that first scene where they're running in the waves, they run like a bunch of girls!)
   

Wakeup was at 5:30 to be out the door before 6:30. Driving up to Salem it was so foggy that you couldn't see the road signs until you were right under them. The fog never burned off over the course of the morning. I was a little upset that I wouldn't get to see the sea views, but I decided that it would be more spooooooooooky to run through Salem in the fog. Unlike the last time I ran in Salem (the Witch City Sprint), we got to run past all the creeeeeeeeeepy stuff that downtown Salem has to offer: the Witch Museum, the Wax Museum, the Myths and Monsters Museum, and the statue of Nathaniel Hawthorn which gives adults nightmares for weeks about high school English classes. The only thing creeeeeeepy about the part of town we ran through in the Witch City Sprint triathlon was that this was probably the part of town where people would dump a body.

Beforehand everyone was complaining that it was sooooo cold. I was actually feeling okay in my surfing top and ninja sweatshirt (sans hood). I was happy about this turn of events, until I started running and immediately began to overheat. The ninja sweatshirt is NOT easy to get off while running, so rather than elbow a fellow runner in the face trying to pull it off I just sweat it out. You're welcome, guy with Jesus tattoos on each of his calves.

The first mile I went out really pushing the pace, sitting right at what I hoped would be my anaerobic threshold. Turns out I was going a bit harder than that, and by mile one breakfast was reminding me that this is not the way we do things around here! My smoothie was threatening to make its way out the front exit, while my intestines turned to jelly to let my English muffin out the back way. I let off a bit, but there was this chick in front of me that had very unfortunate cellulite distribution. Not only that, but Thunder Thighs seemed to know everybody on the whole North Shore, runners and spectators alike, and while I concentrated on keeping my sphincter closed she was waving to runners coming in the other direction, calling them by name, and yelling hellos to spectators watching from their porches. Pet peeve: people like that. I was NOT going to be beat by a chatty Cathy with Thunder Thighs. I now had a reason to dig deep.

We came out onto a little peninsula with some "views" of the ocean (by "view" I mean that the visibility was about 10 feet out to sea, so you could see spoooooooky looking rowboats bobbing away in the fog, waiting for the ghosts of fishermen lost at sea to come and claim the bodies of tortured runners). Here there were a lot of spectators out to cheer us on at 8:30 on a holiday morning. A morbidly obese woman stood in her driveway cheering, one family had a table set up with dixie cups of beer, another had a big bell (the kind they have on ships) and one of those horns that they blow before setting the fox free in a steeple chase, and yet another had the whole family, 7 members from grandma all the way down to grandson lined up in age order along the porch, all wearing Red Sox sweatshirts (I wonder if this was planned).

By mile 4 I'd backed off enough that I was starting to feel like I could press a little harder. That lasted about 2 minutes. What was frustrating about the weather was that, since you couldn't see 20 feet in front of you, you couldn't tell when the finish line was getting close, or even when you were coming into town. It made the last, painful mile seem to go on forever. I have no idea if Thunder Thighs was ahead of me or behind me. I couldn't see the finish line, but I began running faster and faster until I was gasping for air and my GI tract melted into a steely yuckiness. Let's get this over with! I thought. I sprinted into the finish trying to overtake a middle aged woman with a sloppy stride. I did eventually pass her, but since there was no finish line on the ground I may have just cut her in line in the finishing coral. My time: 44:33! I broke 45 minutes!!! (although mapmyrun.com clocks the course at only 4.77 miles, but we'll ignore that, I'm sure that my mapping of the course was inaccurate. Yeah, that must be it.)

There were two adjacent finishing corals, and both were really crowded, and the transition from sprinting to standing still made me pretty woozy for a minute. When I got to the front of the line to hand the tearoff slip from my number to the volunteer she looked right at me and froze with a look of horror on her face. "Uh oh!" she said.
"What?" I said, wondering if I looked ashen. All the blood was probably pooling in my legs now that I'd stopped running. She pointed right at me, mouth agape. "What?" I repeated, feeling to see if I had a booger on my face or something. Then I turned around just in time to see...

... the girl behind me in the other coral spew chunks. Blaaaaaaagh!! she went and ralphed all over the exit to her coral. Blaaaaaaaaagh!! she went again as the crowd dispersed so she wouldn't hurl on their shoes. What must have been her mother ran up to rub her back as she retched again. Don't judge, we've all been there. Now that's how you make room for a nice, big t(of)urky dinner! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Reminder: This blog moves on Tuesday morning.

My first ironman, sort of

Yesterday Silvia, my trusty sidekick, and I participated in our first ironman... as volunteers. It wasn't an official IM so there weren't tons of participants, and for many triathlon seemed to be a hoby (I'll get more into this later). Most of all, the organizers were local, so the thing went off like just like you would expect something like this to go off if a Spanish person organized it: without a hitch - mostly by luck and a little bit of faith that mankind was smart enough to figure out what to do for themselves. My job was to stand by the metal gates blocking off side streets and make sure that no cars went through and drove onto the course anyway. Of course, the organizers hadn't put any indication down the road to warn drivers that the main road was closed, but never mind, when they got to a big, yellow gate at the end and we made them back it up they figured it out.

The race was in a little town that is called, fittingly, L'Ampolla. If you don't get it I'll help you out, ampolla means "blister" in Spanish. The race organizers tried to open themselves up to participants from all around the world with the following image on their web site, but despite all their efforts, most of the participants were locals.
(in counter-clockwise order starting from top center: "The Milky Way", "Earth", "Spain", "The Ebre Delta", "Blister").

My hat goes off to ANYONE who participated in this race. Well, my hat goes off to anyone who has completed an ironman (and if you, reader, have finished one, my hat goes off to you too; you are a rockstar), but especially those roughly 111 people I saw slogging away past me yesterday. First of all, after months of rain, it was hot and sunny yesterday (around 80 degrees) and the course had no shade anywhere, as far as I could tell. But worst of all was the course. I guess when a small town tries to put on a big race you get a lot of loops. This course was a SEXTUPLE (that's the word for 6 times, right?) out-and-back bike AND run course. That means that the bike course was only 15k (9.3 miles) out, and 15k back, six . flipping . times. The run course was only three and a half kilometers (2.2 miles) out and 3.5k back six . futher . mucking . times, on the same course as the bike! I'm confident that I would have the physical fortitude to finish an ironman one day, but to complete a race where 72% of the course was on the same 2.2 mile stretch that I had to cover twenty-four times in one day would break me before I ever got to the finish line (for the 24th time).

When Silvia and I were taken in the back of a white van to our post it was 1:30 in the afternoon and the guy in first place still hadn't finished his final bike loop. I didn't know about the 6 "loop" (read: "out and back") situation, and since we were only about a quarter of a mile from the finish line/turn-around point/transition area I started screaming my head off for everyone that came by, and then again when they came back in the other direction 5 minutes later. When I saw them come back again I would start screaming, "Way to go! You're here! You're finished!" Some people yelled out "I still have 2 to go". I figured it must be 3 loops. I wonder how many morales I broke that way? One guy rode by with a ham and cheese sandwich flapping in the wind and I screamed out, "¡Que aproveches!", which I thought meant "Buon Apetite!". "It's que aproveche," Silvia corrected me. Turns out that I'd said something like, "Hope the sandwich enjoys you!" Oh well, he stuck his hand out and waved anyway. There were surprisingly few smiles as people came in from their last loop, but man, if you could have seen the few smiles that there were. One guy audibly said, "¡Por fin!!" ("Finally!").

By the time the bikers had all trickled in and were pacing back and forth on the run course I was getting pretty famous. Some of the people I saw so many times that I could have sworn that they were throwing the little bracelets they got when they finished each lap into the sea. I think one guy said it was great running past me, but then again I either didn't hear him right, or didn't understand the expression that he used. Either way, he used the word grande ("great" or "big") and seemed to like me. When another ran by smiling (or maybe grimacing) I yelled, "Just keep smiling!" and he trotted for a bit grinning and doing the Queen Wave. Another guy who'd been running back and forth for ages (it turns out he took second, I think) was coming up behind someone else, "Come on, you got him!" I yelled. He kind of gave me a dirty look. "Honey, he's totally wasted (está hecho a polvo, litterally "ground to dust")," Silvia said. I felt bad. Another guy who looked like he was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other passed and I yelled, "Just one meter at a time!" Only as it turns out there's no expression in Spanish to say, "one at a time" and I was screaming gobbeldygook at him, something like, "Remember, all at once one meter".

Silvia could have sworn that we were only going to be there for 2 hours, so when they drove by at 3:30 we thought it was to pick us up. Then 4 arms stuck out of the driver's side window with two sandwiches and 2 8oz bottles of water. Silvia sat back down in the shade where she'd been sitting all day (in her neon traffic vest, see right) and lit another cigarette. I opened the foil and looked at what was inside. Ham. No sandwich for Claire (Claires are vegetarians). It wasn't quite as blisteringly hot anymore, but it was still sunny, and we had forgotten sunscreen. By the time they finally came to get us at 5:30 I was starving and thirsty and both of us were sunburnt (me more than Sílvia, but she wins for having the racoon-eyed sunglasses tan). I wanted to stay and watch someone finish, figuring that some of the people that I'd seen run by half a million times must be finishing soon, so I stalled by asking for a t-shirt. In the 15 minutes that we were waiting for the t-shirts, no one crossed the line even though I saw some of the bracelet chuckers come through the aid station... again. When we left to catch a train at 6:00 (hour 11) only 3 people had finished and I didn't get to see the look of satisfaction on anyone's face as they became an ironman.

Now, this is an event that I had almost planned to do. I even started training for it in October, but wound up falling back into drinking and smoking instead and had to admit that this was NOT the time. Since Europe tends to be more serious about athletics I didn't want to be the one to show up just trying to survive and finish grumpy because I was dead last instead of with a smile on my face. Nevertheless, when I got there, I saw people doing a lot of things that even I thought were silly. Here are some of the things that I saw:

• Long-sleeved, all-black jerseys.
• Disc wheels on a windy day (like you usually have on the coast).
• People way in the back wearing aero helmits (you have to be going fast for them to give you any advantage) with the point sticking way up in the air like they were trying to pick up satelite cable.
• A bottom-of-the-line surfing wet suit hanging on the bike rack in the transition area
  
• Mountain bike shoes
• One guy running with his bike jersey still in his hands.
• A transition bag that was nothing more than an IKEA shopping bag.
• Countless people with elite gear and a weekend warrior's fitness.
  

But it's so easy to sit there and be critical from the sidelines. And I'm not making fun of those people, I'm only saying that I would have felt a whole lot better signing up for the race if I'd known that some of the competition would be as ghetto as me. And speaking of competition, there was only one woman in the race. ONE. She was among the last of the bikers - the ones that we thought for sure were going to miss the cut-off. The complete results aren't up yet, so I don't know how she did overall, but she did the swim in 1:23:43, and wasn't off the bike for about 7 1/2 hours. I couldn't help but think, 'dude, I should have trained for this race. I would have won my first ironman." Now, again, watching from the sidelines on fresh legs and calm lungs is quite different from racing head-to-head. I've never even swum 4000m straight without stopping or turning, and have never quite made it past 100 miles on the bike, and I can't even imagine a marathon after something like that. I won't have any idea how my body reacts to the race until I try it myself. Either way, it was hartening and it got me pumped to try one (a different venue) next year.

I'd asked Silvia along to keep me company, but I did have an ulterior motive in asking her. I was hoping that it would get her fired up to get off her ass and start moving, but her reactions were more of shock than awe. When we showed up a guy in his 50s was in the transition area with his bike. "Isn't he a bit old to be doing this type of thing?," she asked. Pretty soon we figured out that he was dropping out, and she said, "This is too tough for an old body like his". As it turned out that he had won the race a year before. "Ooh, look at his jersey, it matches his pants!" she said. "He looks like he's about to fall off his bike," she giggled. "Isn't he a bit fat?" "Oh my god! Look at that guy's muscles! He looks like Victoria Beckham!" "That guy just cheated! He took a sandwich from that chick with the baby carriage!" And when we hadn't seen someone in awhile she would say, "He probably dropped out." (me: "No, I don't think he did, he's probably just going very slow.") "I bet he died." When I asked her what she thought afterwards she said, "It's enough to kill you. I don't know why anyone would do that to themselves. I mean, you looked at them and they were dying." I had to give in and not be angry when she said that she didn't want to do the 11k walk/run with me the next day (stay tuned: to be talked about in upcoming blog).