The New Blog Post Is Here, The New Blog Post is Here!

Navin Johnson: The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!

Harry Hartounian: Well I wish I could get so excited about nothing.

Navin Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding?! Page 73, Johnson, Navin, R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at the internet every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, you’re name in print, that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

Well, it has been over four months since my last post.  My initial excitement has worn off, and I have somewhat settled into a pattern of training.  The big news is that I finally completed my first triathlon last weekend.  It was only an Olympic distance, but I survived (barely).

Despite my initial enthusiasm, I have been slowly easing into training.  Although I had planned to start swimming in addition to biking and running in January, I decided to wait on the swimming. I didn’t want to have to swim when it was cold out in the mornings, and I quickly figured out that I needed to spend a lot more time building a base in biking.  Consequently, I spent the first three months of the year just running and biking.

My goal was generally to bike 100 miles per week, and to try and do increasingly longer long rides on the weekends.  This seemed to work pretty well, and I was fairly consistent in January and February.  By the end of February, I was able to ride 60 miles at a time, without too much problem.  I was pretty happy with myself that within the course of a couple months, I was already up to riding over half the Ironman distance.

This increase in biking, however, came at the expense of my running.  Before I started biking, I was averaging over 100 miles per month of running. Once I started biking, my running mileage fell to under 50 miles per month.  Fortunately, my speed and my endurance did not seem to suffer very much.  I ran a 15 km race in March, and my time was within a minute or two of the two times I had run the same race in the past, when I was running much more consistently.  It seemed that my time was better spent developing the muscles I would need to bike for six plus hours, rather than to get just a little bit faster at running – especially with so much time left before my race in November.

When March rolled around, I had a lot more going on with my kids and their track meets, and I was not as consistent getting my long rides in on the weekends.  My mileage fell off, and I was not being as consistent as I should have been.  I kept rationalizing it to myself that I still had eight months until my race, and I had plenty of time to ramp up my training. To be honest, the initial excitement had worn off, and it was getting to be a bit of a drag.

Finally, in the first week of April, I decided it was time to start swimming. I joined the YMCA that is within about a half mile of my house, and decided to give it a try.  I was very hesitant at first.  Unlike biking, which I was able to do on my own without an audience, there is no way to avoid having other people see you swimming. I had not done any serious swimming in 25 years, and even then, I had stunk. I remembered that even back then, I struggled to go 250 meters without hanging on the edge and gasping for breath.

Fortunately, I set very low goals at first because I didn’t know what to expect.  I figured that since I was already up to being able to bike half the Ironman distance, I would set a goal for trying to be able to swim half the Ironman distance within the first month or two. I figured that when I was training for marathons, I tried to run a minimum of four times the distance – or at least 100 miles – each month.  I decided that would work for a swimming goal, and that I would try to do four times the half Ironman distance  - or a total of about 5 miles – in my first month.

The first day of swimming was awful. I went down on Monday morning and decided that I would swallow my pride, and make a fool of myself. It turned out to be just as bad as I expected. Although my arms and legs were working like they should, I couldn’t breathe. I had real trouble exhaling underwater. Every time I turned my head to breathe, I had to both exhale and inhale. Within a few minutes, I was gasping and totally hyperventilating. My heart rate shot up in no time.  I had to stop and catch my breath every 50 or 100 yards. After 20 minutes, I had only gone 700 yards, and I was exhausted.

I went back again the next day, and it was a little bit easier.  I was able to start developing a bit of a rhythm, and started getting a little more comfortable breathing. My second day was still ugly, but it was definitely an improvement.  Because I was feeling a little more comfortable, I decided to increase from 20 minutes on Monday to 30 minutes on Tuesday.  I was still stopping nearly every 100 yards to catch my breath, but it was definitely feeling much easier than the first day.  I made it 30 minutes, and was able to go 1,300 yards, almost double what I had done the day before.

I went a few more times that week, and was able to get more and more comfortable each time.  I kept it to a max of 30 minutes that week, but by the end of the week, I could swim 1,400 yards in a half hour without too much problem.  By the end of the week, I was doing OK, but I still had to stop every 100 or 200 yards to catch my breath a little bit. As I feared, my shoulders and my back got pretty sore during the first few weeks of swimming. As a runner (and now a little bit of a biker), my lower body was fairly fit.  My upper body, however, was pathetic. Swimming used a whole bunch of muscles I wasn’t used to dealing with. It wasn’t terrible, but it reminded me of the soreness in my neck and shoulders when I started biking.  There were a few nights I had to get out the heating pad to relax my shoulders so I could sleep.

Since I had joined the YMCA, I also started doing some of my bike rides on the stationary bikes there.  For some reason, I found it easier to ride the stationary bikes when it was dark outside.  I had been doing a fair amount of my mid-week rides in the dark up to then.  It wasn’t terrible, but it was easier to convince myself to get out of bed in the morning, or get off the couch at night to ride if I wasn’t doing it alone in the dark.  Although stationary bikes are just as tedious as treadmills, I found I was doing more miles again once I started riding indoors.  I still preferred to be outdoors, especially for longer rides. Since the gym part of the YMCA opened at 5am, but the pool did not open until 5:30, it was fairly easy to convince myself to go pedal for 30-45 minutes before I would swim for 30-45 minutes.

One advantage of the stationary bikes was that it was easier to customize a hill workout.  Depending on how much time I had, and how I felt, I could customize rides to work on cadence or heart rate, and it was much easier to hold a threshold heart rate on the stationary bike than on the road.

Anyway, by the end of April my swimming had progressed surprisingly well.  By the end of the month, I was able to swim 2,500 yards, which was more than half the distance of the Ironman swim. I was able to swim a mile in one workout without much problem, and without having to stop and catch my breath except one or twice during the workout. Although my goal for April and only been five miles, I ended up doing over 11.  I cut back on my biking a little in April, but I was still able to get in over 350 miles for the month. Because I was doing more threshold rides on the stationary bike, I probably gained more fitness in April than if I would have just rode 400 miles on the road at somewhat normal paces.

Several of my friends were doing an Olympic distance triathlon in Tempe in mid- April.  I was too new to swimming, and knew I was not ready for that.  I did go down and watch them, however, and that sort of rekindled my excitement.  Their paces were not too far off what I was doing in training, and it got me thinking that I was getting close to being ready to try a tri for real.  Although I had been combining swimming and biking, I had not yet done any real running off the bike.  I tried it a few times, and quickly discovered that it is not at all like running with fresh legs. It took me about two miles to loosen up and adjust, and to settle into a comfortable running pace.

Fortunately for me, there was another Olympic distance in mid-May.  I debated whether or not I was ready for a long time.  Finally I talked myself into it.  To make sure I could do it, I swam 2,500 yards in the pool without stopping on the Thursday before the race. That went pretty well, and I was able to average under two minutes per 100 yards for the entire 2,500 yards. Up until then, the longest I had ever gone without a break was 1,500 yards, so I was feeling pretty confident.  I was a bit nervous because I had not done any training in open water, but I convinced myself that since I had spent several summers when I was a kid swimming in the lake near my home town, and doing lots of waterskiing, that I would not be freaked out by the open water like lots of triathletes are. 

I went down to register the day before the race. The race included at least parts of the course for Ironman Arizona, so I was looking forward to it. I had some goals in mind, but I really did not know what to expect.  I had routinely done longer segments of swimming, biking and running, but I had never done all three together in any distance approaching the race distance. Based on my paces in training, I thought I should be able to finish the swimming in 35 minutes or so, the bike in about an hour and twenty minutes, and the run in around an hour. I thought this was a very conservative goal, since I was able to do each of the legs much faster than those paces in my training.

I showed up Sunday morning feeling pretty good about myself.  I got to the transition area nice and early, and set up my bike and the rest of my equipment.  Since most of my friends had raced in April, they were not doing this race.  I didn’t recognize anyone in the transition area, and I didn’t know what to do to kill the next hour until the race started.  I waited for the portajohn and then went back and reorganized my gear again.

After a while, they started announcing that they would be starting the sprint race in about 20 minutes.  Having nothing better to do, I decided I would go watch those waves start.  When I decided to head down near the water, I realized that I had no idea when I should put my own wetsuit on.  I had never even swam in a wetsuit in my life. I knew that they were tight, and hard to get on.  I had practiced putting it on a few times on Saturday night, and figured out that it took a lot of tugging and pulling, and basically giving yourself a wedgy to get the thing on. Then trying to zip it up by myself was a real challenge, and I kept getting my tri top stuck in the zipper.

I stood around in the transition for a while to try and see whether other people were putting on their wetsuits yet.  Some people already had their wetsuits on, and some people didn’t.  I couldn’t tell if the people with them on were doing the sprint or the Olympic.  Finally, I saw a couple older guys who were about my age, but way more fit than me, carrying their wetsuits down toward the beach.  I decided that they were so fit that there was no way they were only doing the sprint distance.  As a result, I grabbed my wetsuit, cap and goggles, and headed down toward the beach.

I hung out down by the water for quite a while, watching other swimmers warm up.  I had already decided I was not getting in the water until shortly before my race.  I wanted to save as much energy as possible to survive the race, and didn’t care too much about swimming fast.  As a result, I convinced myself it would be best not to warm up.  After a while, I was several people who looked like they must be doing the Olympic distance start putting on their wetsuits.  I got nervous, because of the difficulty I had on Saturday night getting my wetsuit on, so I decided I better not wait any longer.  Especially since I didn’t have any friends there to help me put it on, or zip it up, I decided I should get started even though there were still at least 20 minutes until my wave started. That was stupid of me. I ended up putting it on way too soon. In hindsight, I should have practiced putting it on and taking it off more before I showed up to race. Fortunately, I learned that triathletes are by and large nice people, and there were a couple people who offered to help me get zipped up. After I was zipped up, three or four people asked me to help them zip up.  Anyway – I zipped up too soon, and it got pretty hot waiting around for all the waves of the sprint to go off.

Once I started seeing the sprint waves go off, it started to sink in that my time was coming soon.  I started to get a little nervous.  All of a sudden, I wasn’t as confident that I was ready for open water.  This was going to be my first time ever swimming in a wetsuit, my first time swimming in open water in over 25 years, and my first triathlon.  The 400 meters that the sprint athletes were swimming all of a sudden looked pretty far, and the Olympic distance buoys started to look like they were in the next county. I tried to convince myself that it was no big deal, and to trust my training, but I was not totally successful in calming myself down.

Finally, they called my wave. They said you could either get out in the mob and tread water before the start, or wait on the beach. I thought about waiting on the beach, but I decided that I better use this opportunity to get used to the mob. Once I got into the water, however, the wetsuit started to feel like an anaconda squeezing my chest.  Between general nerves, the constricting feeling of the wetsuit, and treading water, my heart rate was already pretty high before the race even started.

Now I had read lots of advice online about surviving your first triathlon, and how much different it was to swim in open water with a mob.  Somehow I had convinced myself that all of my childhood swimming in lakes was going to insulate me from any problems.  Nothing I had ever done, however, prepared me for the mob.  I had also neglected to factor in the adrenaline and excitement of the start of the race.  Ever since I was in junior high, I have always had problems getting carried away at the start of a race, and going out too fast, and then falling apart at the end. I did it in my first half marathon, and again in my first marathon. I thought I had learned my lesson when I went to run my second marathon, and had convinced myself to just stick with a pace group. Before I knew it, I got carried away with excitement, and passed the pace group only to crash and burn in the last couple miles. 

In any event, when the starter horn went off, it was a churning mass of pandemonium. This was a relatively small race.  I can only imagine how confusing it will be in the real Ironman race next Fall when there are like five times as many people. Although I had started about two-thirds of the way toward the back of my age group wave, it was still terrifying. With every stroke, I was running into someone, or someone was running into me.  Nothing I had done in training prepared me for this. I tried to just start swimming so I could settle into my normal rhythm.  That wasn’t going to happen. Every time I ran into someone, I pulled my head up to try and figure out where to go next.  Every time someone ran into me, it would startle me and mess up my breathing.  Within the first three or four minutes, my heart rate was through the roof, I was struggling to breath, I was totally hyperventilating, and I was battling with myself not to go into a full blown panic attack.  I felt like I was going to sink to the bottom of the lake like “Iron Balls McGinty.” Within five minutes, I was honestly considering just swimming to the edge of the lake and quitting.  I didn’t see how I could ever calm down enough to be able to finish. 

Finally, I remembered reading that if you felt this way, you should just roll over on your back, and slowly swim until you calm down and can breathe.  I tried that and it helped a little.  Since I was less than 400 meters into the swim by the time I flipped over, I didn’t see any way I was going to be able to finish, but I decided to keep going and see how long I could last. After a few minutes on my back, I rolled back over and tried to start again. Although it wasn’t as bad, I was still colliding with people very frequently.  I decided to head to the outside of the pack to try and avoid that aggravation. That helped a little, but then I discovered my next problem – I sucked at sighting.  I was basically swimming zig zags now. 

By this time, any thoughts of my goal pace were gone. I was just trying first not to drown, and second to somehow finish the swim.  I kept repeating to myself that “dead f*#@ing last” was better than “did not finish.” As bad as it was, I decided that at worst, I would swim on my back the entire rest of the race, and have a funny story to tell when it was done. After about half way, it got a little better, but not much. I was able to swim 100-150 yards at a time without rolling onto my back.  Because the crowd was now more spread out, however, this caused new problems.  At one point, I was swimming on my back for a few minutes to try and catch my breath, and lower my heart rate.  Guess what – the sky looks the same no matter which direction you are swimming.  Apparently during those few minutes, I must have turned and started kicking at an almost 90 degree angle away from the course. When I finally realized what I had done, I was at least 50 meters away from the next pack that was now passing me.  This actually turned out to help me somewhat.  Because I was so far away from the pack, I was able to settle into somewhat of a rhythm a I headed back toward the course.  Once I found that rhythm, I was able to start swimming much longer at a time without rolling onto my back.  I wasn’t comfortable, but I started to believe I was going to be able to finish.  Unfortunately, by the time this happened, there were only 400 or 500 meters left to go. Somehow or another, however, I made it to the end of the swim.  I had hoped to finish in 30-35 minutes.  According to my watch, it had taken me over 43 minutes.

Most people get out of the water and start jogging toward the transition area to get their bikes.  Not me.  I felt like a drunken sailor as I was walking out of the water.  I know it probably isn’t right, but I actually felt better about myself when the lady who was getting out at about the same time as me fell down on the beach because she was even more wobbly than me. After about 30 seconds of walking, I felt good enough to start jogging – very slowly – up to the transition.

Now came another problem I had not fully thought through.  The first two triathlons I watched last fall both had wetsuit stripping crews. Until the pre-race meeting the day before the race, it had never dawned on me that every triathlon did not have them. At the pre-race meeting, some guy asked if they were going to have wetsuit strippers, and the race organizer said no, and joked that you only got them at races like Ironman that cost over $700.  I was pretty proud of myself.  After I heard that, I made sure to practice taking off my wetsuit a couple times that night at home.  Of course, at home the wetsuit was dry, I was not exhausted from barely surviving the swim, and there were chairs to lean on while I tried to pull the wetsuit off the bottom of my legs. I was able to get the top half of the wetsuit off while I was jogging up to the transition.  Once I was in the transition, it dawned on me that there was nothing to lean on while I took off the bottom half.  The only semi-stable things in the transition area were the bike racks, and they looked like they would collapse and crash everyone’s bikes to the ground if I leaned on them.  I struggled for quite a while trying to free myself from my wetsuit, but I finally got free. 

I started getting dressed in my bike gear when I decided I had drank enough of the lake, and I better use the portajohn again.  By this point, I had my helmet on.  As I exited the transition area to use the portajohn, the race officials thought I was from the sprint waves, and tried to get me to take off my helmet, and to send me out on to the run course. It took a few second for me to figure out what was going on, and explain to them that I was just going to the portajohn. After that, I went back, grabbed the rest of my gear, and got ready to go bike. 

Since I have an older Garmin GPS watch that is not waterproof, I had not worn it during the swim.  As I was getting ready to bike, I put it on, but because the transition area was under a freeway overpass, it could not pick up the satellites right away.  I took off, and went about a mile before I realized I had not started the watch. 

Given how exhausted I was from the swim, the bike felt surprisingly good.  Because I knew I had burned way more energy than expected on the swim, I intentionally held back on the pace.  There were lots of turns, including a couple hairpin turns.  As a result, it was kind of hard to get into too much of a rhythm on the bike.  I did OK, but I definitely held myself back because I did not know what to expect on the run – especially after my disastrous swim.  Overall, I was feeling pretty good about myself on the bike.  I passed a fair number of people, which made me feel good.  Then, with about five miles to go, I looked across and saw a group of bikers that were about two miles ahead of me on the out and back portion of the course. That’s when I got discouraged.  There was a big fat guy about my age with no shirt on riding a crummy road bike who was that far ahead of me. This guy was way over 250 pounds, and not in a fit football player sort of way.  He had fat rolls.  I convinced myself that I would catch him on the run – but I never saw him again.  I am guessing he beat me on the run too.

The bike was nice because my son and his girlfriend had come out to watch me.  They were able to see me, and cheer for me several times each lap.  Fortunately, they did not realize at the time how bad my swim had gone, and how far behind my goals I was.  It definitely gave me a lift to see familiar faces cheering for me.

I finished the bike portion of the race with no real problems. My legs were a little heavy, but the first few miles of the run felt surprisingly good. I was expecting to struggle for the first mile or two, but I was able to fall into a rhythm much earlier than I expected. The first 2.5 miles were a breeze.  By this time, however, it was getting pretty warm.  Although my legs felt fine, I could feel my heart rate climbing above where it would normally be running at that pace.  It wasn’t too bad, and I made it down to the Mill Avenue Bridge, that you had to cross to get back to the transition and start the second lap of the run.  I grabbed a water from a water station at the bottom of the bridge, and walked for maybe 30 seconds to drink it, and try to get my heart rate down.  That worked, and my heart rate came down a bit.  After I crossed the bridge, I saw my son and his girlfriend trying to take selfies with me in the background.  I tried to make faces at them, but they waited until I stopped, and then took the photos.

The second lap was even hotter, and my heart rate kept going up.  I ended up walking a couple times to keep my heart rate in check.  It was actually good that my son and his girlfriend were watching, or I would have walked a lot more toward the end.  I don’t know what kind of sick person laid out the course, but the last 200 meters of the run involved a fairly steep hill that was maybe 150 meters long.  Once you got to the top, you still could not see the finish line until you went down another 25 meters and took a hard right turn.  Because I didn’t know what to expect, I think I held back a little too much on the run.  I was concerned because I had used so much more energy than expected in the swim, that I was really concentrating on keeping my heart rate fairly low in both the bike and the run.  My goal was to keep my run pace under 10 minute miles, and I was able to keep the pace at around 9:47, even with walking several times. I am pretty sure that even with how tired I was after the swim, I could have gone 9:15 pace. 

Overall, with the exception of the swim, I was happy with my race.  As for the swim – at least I have one under my belt now, and I will know what to expect the next time.  I am sure it will still be stressful and hard to breathe at the start, but I learned what to expect, and I will know to focus more on my sighting so I don’t waste so much effort going off line.

I found some people I knew from one of my running groups after the race.  They are extremely nice, and could not have been more supportive of me as I explained what happened during my race.  They actually turned me on to the best post-race snack I had ever had.  They were handing out Otter Pop popsicles at the finish. I had never had those after a race.  We used to hand them out to the kids after middle school cross country races, but I had never tried them.  I normally don’t like sweets, especially when my stomach is upset from racing.  Given how hot it was at the end of the race, however, these slushy popsicles were fantastic. I ended up eating three of them.  If I had not wanted a shower so badly, I was going to stop on the way home and get a Slurpee just to get some more slushy sweet goodness.

Because I had not done a very good job of timing with my two watches, I stuck around until they posted my results.  The unofficial results said I had finished in three hours and 19 seconds.  Considering my goal had been three hours, I was happy to be that close, but frustrated to be that close, but not under three hours.

When I got home, I felt surprisingly good.  I sat and talked to my family for a while, and then took a shower. Normally after a big race like a marathon or half marathon, I can’t wait to take a nap.  After this race, however, I felt pretty good and wanted to go get lunch.  I was hungry, and I had a big old cheese burger, French fries, and a strawberry shake.  When I finished eating, however, that is when I couldn’t wait to take a nap.  When I got home from lunch, I ended up sleeping most of the rest of the afternoon.

When I woke up, I checked the online race results.  My time had gone from three hours 19 seconds to three hours 20 seconds.  My results, however, were all messed up.  The way they are posted, you usually get six times: swim; transition one; bike; transition two; run; and overall time. My online results only had three of these – swim, run and overall. It was obvious that the “run” time included both my bike time, my transition two time, and my run.  Although I had not started my GPS watch when I started biking, the combined time was about what I expected for my combined bike and run time.  I am not sure about the overall time, however.  The swim time they had listed for me was just over 31 minutes.  That cannot be right.  That would have been a good time for me if everything had gone right on the swim.  I wasn’t sure if I looked at my watch when I got out of the water or when I was in the transition area, but I remember it was over 43 minutes.  After I posted on Facebook that I was just over three hours, I think that the time they reported, and I then reported, was actually wrong.  I emailed the race director on Monday, and asked if they could check the video.  I am hoping they can get me a more accurate time.

Even if my time was actually 12 minutes slower, I am not too disappointed with it for my first effort.  My goal was really just to try open water swimming, and get some sort of baseline I can use to compare subsequent races. I guess the slower this race turns out to be, the more improvement I can claim in later races.

This past weekend was the start of the six month period leading up to my race on November 16. I have been telling myself for the past few months that I would consider the period up to six months out to be “base building,” and that the real training would start in earnest in mid-May.  So now I am going to get a little more serious, and disciplined about my training.  The track season for my kids is over, so I will not be going to meets once or twice a week any more.  It is also getting light out earlier in the morning, so it is easier to wake up and do my training before 5:30.

I also told myself that I was going to swim on my own for a while to build up some strength before I paid for lessons.  I don’t know whether it was smart or not, but I decided that I did not want to pay someone to fix a problem that was based on lack of swim fitness, as opposed to a flaw in my technique.  Now that I have at least a decent level of swim fitness, I think I should get a lesson.  Everything I have read and heard says that a majority of swim speed is the result of technique, as opposed to hours and hours of practice.  I want to get the technique part nailed down now, so I can focus on building up the rest of my endurance. 

Right now, my longest workouts have only been three to four hours on the bike.  I have a long ways to go to be able to handle 13 plus hours.

I am thinking about doing an open water swim again in early June.  One of the local masters swimming groups has an open water race at Canyon Lake, which is one of the closer lakes to Phoenix.  They have 1,500 meter, 3,000 meter and 4,500 meter races.  Since I won’t have to bike or run, I am wondering if I should go 3,000 meters or stick to 1,500.  God knows I had enough trouble with 1,500 a few days ago.  I have done over 3,000 a few times in practice, that has been in the pool where I could rest if I wanted to.  Maybe if I can get scheduled with a swim coach, I can get some advice on which would be better for me.

If that goes well, there is another Olympic distance race in Northern Arizona on June 21.  I think that might be a better test of my fitness since, in theory, I will have at least some familiarity with open water swimming by that point.  That’s all I need – open water swimming.  I don’t need anything else.  I need this remote control.  This remote control and open water swimming, and I don’t need anything else.

Now I am off to find a drink with an umbrella in it, and “Be Somebody.”