Ed and Beth were married in a spectacular setting – at a farm where they’ve been planting and mowing and grooming the grounds just for this magical event.

It was a beautiful ceremony with an incredible backdrop.

Their vows were self-composed and very moving.

It was a mob scene!

Sara and I had our photo taken with the Llama.

Except we weren’t really _with_ the Llama, because they spit and bite and are totally attacky.

Click here for the photo gallery.

It was a small, intimate, and delightfully unique ceremony.

Perfect for Roem and Amber, who are also delightfully unique.

The Garden is beautiful.

So is Sara.

There was dancing.

Click here for the photo gallery.

The numbers:
Race: Silicon Valley International Triathlon
Course: 1.5km (0.93mi) swim, 40km (24.9mi) bike, 10km (6.2mi) run
Overall: 2:41:21, 261st/726 racers (64th percentile)
Swim: 29:42, 287th place (60th percentile)
T1: 2:41, 335th place (54th percentile)
Bike: 1:12:29, 142nd place (80th percentile)
T2: 1:43, 288th place (60th percentile)
Run: 54:47, 424th place (42nd percentile)

After the Wildflower I was totally psyched about my next triathlon. I had suffered a number of setbacks like not defogging my goggles and swimming around like a drunk trying to stumble a straight line, not drinking enough before the start and cramping my left leg in the swim, and sucking pretty hard on the run. Even with these challenges I finished in 2:57, just under my three-hour goal.

The Silicon Valley course is supposed to be super fast, so I set an aggressive 2:30 goal. I figured if I could improve my swim by five minutes, my bike by 10 minutes, and my run by 10 minutes, while also shaving off some time in the transitions, I might be able to break 2:30. It sounded like a good plan: get faster in all disciplines and generally perform at a higher level. Awesomeness here I come! The bike was advertised as “one of the fastest courses available”, so sure, no problem, sign me up for a 29-minute reduction in my times.

I met Bingels and Jingels in San Jose and we drove the bike section of the course and it looked pretty flat. I mean, the Prius had no problems with any of the hills. Even with three people inside! We ignored the one monster hill and the long gently-upward-sloping 10 miles before the hill. Lots of nice downhill to finish up the ride. Funny how there seemed to be more downhill than uphill.

We had a great homemade dinner with the Ingel’s friends Kevin and Shannon. It was so yummy I had two gigantic plates of pasta. Brad was drinking a whole bunch of beer and I was so totally enjoying the thought of him throwing it up the next day that I forgot that I shouldn’t be jamming as much pasta down my gullet as possible. I didn’t get the memo until later, but it turns out that scientific research has totally debunked the awesomeness of the carbo-loading process. It turns out eating 3.5lbs of pasta isn’t necessary for a short little Olympic tri. It’s not necessary for anything. It just makes you fatter and heavier and slower and crampier.

Bingels insisted on getting up at like 4AM. For a 7AM start. When we were staying only 15 minutes from the start. Jenni agreed to the plan but then refused to get up, so I tormented her by going in and out of the hotel room about a million times while we loaded Brad’s truck. I didn’t bring a room key with me so I would bang on the door each time. Hahaha. Even with an hour of dilly-dallying we were fifth or sixth in line at the pits when they opened at 5:30AM.

We setup our pits and I need put in a shout-out to my awesome teammate who had totally scoped out the situation the day before and figured out the ideal pit location that would minimize unnecessary running back-and-forth. The SVIT pit arrangement includes one-way sections that are a little confusing. We racked up our bikes, laid out our shoes, and chilled for another hour and a half. I’m not so pleased at my over-eager teammate who had us getting ready so early.

Bingels also convinced me to have a caffeine pill. I think the only reason he succeeded in getting me to try something new – ON RACE DAY – is because I was totally tired and full of pasta. Trying a new fueling strategy on race day is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. It’s something that everyone knows not to do. Why would you change your routine on the day your performance will be tested? Dumb dumb dumb.

Making matters worse is that I don’t drink coffee or tea and rarely drink caffeinated pop drinks. Oh, plus Bingels took all my non-caffeinated Gu and left me eating more and more caffeine. So I’m pretty sure the nervous eye twitch and uncontrollably-racing heart-rate may have negatively affected my performance.

Eventually the sun came up and we meandered down to the Lake Almaden beach-front start. It’s a beautiful place, wonderful golf-course-like grass with smooth fine sand leading to the crap-filled Mercury-laden soupy water. I didn’t realize the water was so bad until everyone in my start was talking about Mercury poisoning and goose poo.

The pros set off and were already around the first buoy before Brad’s second wave started. They got the gun and were off. Well, most of them were off. Bingels didn’t want to get punched or kicked so waited a minute for everyone else to swim off ahead of him. Interesting strategy in a race. I was hoping to bump into him on the swim so I could give him a good luck punch or kick.

I positioned myself at the right pin end and got a good start, much less panicky than my performance at Wildflower. I was bumped, punched and kicked a few times, but I held my rhythm and managed to get through the worst of it without freaking out. I settled down and started working on twisting my hips, reaching further forward, and bending my wrists sharply to propel myself through the water faster. I think I need to keep working on this because whenever my mind would wander, which, frankly, is often, I would find myself flapping around ineffectually.

I think I’m getting better at swimming in a straight line. I used the same sun-angle-on-my-goggles trick I discovered at the Wildflower, but I noticed I was making fewer course corrections. I even cut back on spending time looking where I was going and spent more time just swimming away.

I had fewer ‘oh crap I’m never going to finish’ thoughts and I have to say that I felt pretty good. I had enough left in the tank on the final leg of the swim to dig a little deeper and push hard to the finish. I don’t know if it helped me go any faster, but it sure helped me get my I’m-in-pain face on. Check it out.

I was in and out of T1 in 2:41. It felt like a long time. I think I need to investigate a sock-less bike shoe strategy. Except my feet get cold, so maybe I’ll just train putting socks on faster. I just bought an awesome new aero helmet, you can kinda see it in this picture.

I came out of the pits FAST. I looked down half a mile into the ride and was riding at 28mph with a 26mph average! Uhoh, that’s not sustainable. I backed off a little and tried to pace myself at 25mph on the flat section. I found myself passing other riders with an awesome regularity.

Opponents would appear on the horizon and I would hit them with the tractor beam, eat up the distance between us, and hit them with a decisive pass. I always like to push a little extra hard during a pass to break the will of anyone who might want to keep up. I was passed by two or three guys on the 15 miles before Bailey Hill. In each case I tried to stick with them for a while (outside the draft zone, of course) but was eventually unsuccessful.

Bailey Hill started very quickly. Maybe riding it beforehand had psyched me out, but I found myself spinning my granny gear right away and was passed by four guys who booted it uphill like they were on fire. They were hopping in and out of the saddle and were quickly out of sight. I kept my cadence up and slowly but surely spun my way up the hill. It wasn’t too steep or too long, maybe I could have pushed a lot harder here.

At the top of the hill was the SVIT-advertised water station. Whew, I was looking forward to getting some water! But wait. It wasn’t a water station. It was a table with several hundred Aquafina water bottles on it. There was no one there. Water bottles had been knocked off the table and littered the ground around the table. I tried to thread the dangerous landmine bottles and grab some water at the same time but at the last minute chose to abort my grab rather than crash and eat asphalt.

It kinda sucked. Come on, SVIT couldn’t get one wonderful volunteer to work the ONLY water station on the course? With the $160 fees we’re paying to race I want some well-paid scantily-clad coed handing me ice cold pre-opened water bottles! Self-serve water? On a 25-mile all-out bike race? Crazy.

I hammered the downhill and saw speeds up to 40mph on some sections. It took me almost 15 minutes of tractor beaming but I caught and passed one of the guys who had passed me earlier in the race, which I felt good about, and I rocketed into T2 on totally worn-out legs. I finished the 24.9 mile course in 1 hour, 12 minutes, and 29 seconds, which puts me at an average pace of 20.63m/h. Yes, I suppose this is a little faster than Wildflower, but I would not characterize this as a super fast course. There’s gotta be something flatter.

Time to run, bitches! Despite my mental commands I knew I was in for a world of hurt when my legs refused to obey my orders and I barely managed to unclip from the bike. I almost fell into the dude working the bike in section. I hobbled back to the pit.

My T2 time was okay but I wasn’t feeling great. I had eaten another caffeinated Gu just before coming into the transition and it was sitting in my stomach funny. I drank some sugar-water and tried to stretch my feet apart as I ran out of the pits. Amelia and Andy were there cheering me on with cowbells as I went out the chute. I can’t tell you how awesome it is to have someone cheering for you – especially when they’ve also got cowbells!

I made it around the next corner and my stomach shut me down. I was cramping and hurting pretty badly. I’m not sure if I could have pushed through it if I had dug deeper, but it doesn’t matter because I didn’t dig deeper, I gave up and started walking.

I hate walking. As soon as you walk once you’re screwed. Your brain figures out it can make the hurt stop, and so it then becomes harder and harder to run without walking. I try to force myself to walk for only ten paces before starting to run again, or I’ll do little tricks like trying to jog-walk instead of just walking.

The hurt was definitely in my gut. My legs weren’t feeling great but they had something left. I didn’t have a stitch, I felt bloated and crampy. It sucked. I started running again but I was super slow and totally discouraged.

The mental aspect of defeat was eating at me and I was in a pretty miserable place. Other racers were streaming past me, probably laughing to themselves about how the fast bike guy bonked on the run. I was passed by fast guys and girls, medium guys and girls, and one or two really slowpokes lumbered by me. It sucked. It wasn’t until the third mile that I started to recover. By this point I had walked three times, once for almost a minute.

I dunno but suddenly something good happened. I just started running faster and my stomach stopped bothering me. Let’s be serious here, I was still running pretty slowly, but I was feeling soooo much better. I was powerful. Invincible, maybe.

The heat was also starting to affect me. I was now splashing more water than drinking it in the excellent aid stations. I pushed on.

The last few miles felt pretty good. My legs were feeling better and my gut was pain-free. I finished with a nice sprint.

My run time was 54:47, which really sucked. I can run a 10k ten minutes faster without trying too hard! My time works out just faster than 9-minute miles! If we assume that I was running super-sucky 10-minute miles for the first three miles, my comeback in the second half would be something like 7.5-minute miles. Now that’s not good, but it’s better.

I finished the triathlon in 2:41:21, which was 11 minutes and 21 seconds slower than my goal of 2:30. I know what I need to do before the next race: get faster. I’m going to work the run, this is clearly where I am weakest and I have the most to gain. Plus this is where Bingels says he’s eventually going to beat me (he didn’t meet his 3:00 goal either, but he improved much more than I did versus the Wildflower).

My next race is USA Productions’ Olympic length Silicon Valley International Triathlon on June 13. Olympic length courses consist of a 0.93mi swim, 24.9mi bike, and 6.2mi run.

Even though I weigh right around 200lbs I’m not going to degrade my honour by registering for the over-200lb Clydesdale class. I’ll race with all the skinny minis in the Male 30-34 class instead. To be honest, I was a little tempted by the promise of a podium opportunity, but after I heard that the Clydesdale class isn’t officially sanctioned by professional or Olympic class rules, I didn’t want to tarnish my future induction into the Triathlon Hall of Fame. No asterisks, that’s how I roll.

The course is pretty flat with only one 400ft mile-long climb on the bike section and basically no elevation change during the run. It should be fast!

Brad will be joining me on the Olympic course and his wife Jenni is going to try the Sprint course on Saturday the 12th. Hopefully my wonderful wife Sara and her wonderful sister Amelia will be cheering us on as well.

The numbers:
Race: Avia Wildflower Olympic Triathlon
Course: 1.5km (0.93mi) swim, 40km (24.9mi) bike, 10km (6.2mi) run
Overall: 2:57:09, 460th/2363 racers (80th percentile), 71st/224 in age group
Swim: 32:25, 1113th place
T1: 4:35
Bike: 1:21:30, 299th place
T2: 2:31
Run: 56:08, 926th place

I’ve been training three or four days a week for the last three months in preparation for the Wildflower. It’s one of the hilliest triathlon courses – the Wildflower website describes it as ‘brutal’ – and I wanted to be ready. I’ve been swimming at the gym, running mostly at the gym, and biking to work. My post-race hindsight says that I probably need to step up the training and take it outside, especially for the swim. I’m still fast on the bike and slow everywhere else, but at least my transition times are getting better!

The Wildflower triathlon is held at Lake San Antonio, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The lake and surrounding countryside is beautiful at this time of year, green rolling hills and lush vegetation that haven’t yet been burnt by the summer sun. I had my UC Davis MBA class in San Ramon on Friday and Saturday, did some homework for a few hours after class, picked up my parents from SFO that evening, and drove us all south two and a half hours to King City. Sara and her sister Amelia and my training partner Brad and his wife Jenni met us there at the hotel. We chatted a bit and hit the sheets around 11PM.

We got an early start and headed out for the hour-long drive to the lake. Brad used directions the hotel people gave to him and started to freak out a little when they didn’t match the directions his Droid was supplying. I must confess that I fanned the flames of confusion a little. Hahaha. It was strange that the road we came in on was totally empty, but we made it to the park with lots of time to spare, parked, and started heading down to the main race area.

There are a LOT of people at the Avia Wildflower! 2363 people finished the Olympic length triathlon. 1860 finished the Long course on Saturday and 998 finished the Mountain Bike course. Something like 20,000 people camp at the park during the week leading up to the races. It was crazy, but I have to say the organizers were really good about managing the huge numbers of competitors. The pits were carefully guarded, the swim start was managed carefully to separate the different waves of competitors, and even parking was surprisingly easy.

Brad and I left our cheering squad and setup our pit area, put numbers on our bikes, and had our numbers and ages written on our legs and arms. I was starting to get anxious butterflies and couldn’t wait to get started. I must have checked my gear setup four or five times, making sure the cytomax was premixed, shoes were open, socks were waiting nearby, gels and drinks were neatly arranged at the back.

Of course I missed a bunch of stuff: I had only mixed drinks prepped, no water, which sucked when I came off the bike. I didn’t use any anti-fog or spit in my goggles, which sucked during the swim. I didn’t reset my bike computer, so I had no idea how far I had ridden halfway into the bike. I also didn’t drink enough in the hike down to the pits from the car and while waiting around. Dumb dumb dumb.

We grabbed our wetsuits and headed down to the start. The lake was wavy and the course looked really long. Man what were we doing?! I started trying to get into the zone, repeating my swim mantra “just keep swimming, just keep swimming” from Finding Nemo. Brad and I took a quick dip before the first wave started, had an energy gel (no water, dumb!), and settled in to watch the first start.

With a huge cheer from the crowd the white-capped pros shot into the water and started swimming off in the wrong direction! Everyone was asking “uh, do they know something we don’t?”. All those pros must have been following the one fast swimmer in front who wasn’t looking, and it was a long long time before the group abruptly turned 60-degrees and started heading for the buoy. Wow, for professional athletes that must have been a really crappy way to start a race.

Brad was in the fifth group, starting 20 minutes after the pros left. It was insane but the first swimmers were coming back in to shore before Brad even left! I guess the little detour wasn’t a big deal. I was two waves behind Brad, so he got a nice 10-minute head start. His group started, then the group ahead of me started, and finally it was my turn. I took another quick swim in the five minutes between starts and lined up on the front line on the inside.

My strategy was to go hard from the start to get some separation, stay on the inside line right beside the kayakers to minimize the distance swam, and sight the first buoy fairly often until I could get into a rhythm. At the horn I charged into the water and started ’swimming’. I use quotes because I wasn’t swimming. I have no idea what I was doing, but I wasn’t doing it right. I was breathing every stroke, my head was all the way out of the water, and my careful training had degenerated into wild flailing. I was doing my best impression of drowning.

Everyone passed me. I was making very little forward progress, but it wasn’t for lack of effort! I guess I started to panic at how shitty things were going and I thrashed more wildly. Kinda dumb I guess. I kept trying to calm down but someone would kick me or grab my leg and I would bob up and look around. My goggles fogged and then I couldn’t see anything either. The waves weren’t very big, but they were choppy enough that I was occasionally sucking water while trying to breathe.

It wasn’t until I was well past the first buoy that I was able to force myself to calm down. I was freaking out and I needed to focus. I gave myself a stern talking to. I pushed my head and chest further down into the water. I started breathing every third stroke, and I focused on stabbing my hands forward and gliding. Stab and glide, stab and glide, stab and glide, breathe. Suddenly it all came back to me. I turned my head further towards the sky with each breath and started to get away from the waves. I could breathe again!

My goggles were driving me nuts, so I paused long enough to spit into one eye cover and wipe it clean. I don’t know why I didn’t do the other eye, that drove me nuts the rest of the swim. I also figured out that I could use the angle of the sun on my goggles to keep me pointed in basically the right direction, so I sighted the next buoy carefully, mentally marked the angle of the sun, and settled down into a rhythm.

The second and third buoys came and went quickly. I was back in a groove and was passing people. After the third buoy I started to see other colour caps, which meant I was passing earlier waves of swimmers! The last few legs of the swim was hard. My right leg had started cramping when I pointed my toes, so I stopped kicking. That slowed me down but also was super frustrating. Why was my leg cramping? Would I be able to bike? Probably, but what about the run? Had I hurt my soleus again? Mentally this was tough. I promised myself I would finish no matter what, even if I had to walk the run portion.

In hindsight I think the cramp was brought on my lack of water in the morning. I hadn’t drank anything since getting up four hours earlier, and with all the walking and prep I’m sure I was a little dehydrated.

At the last buoy I was starting to feel better and was eating up the arm and shoulder strength I had left. I swam into someone and he yelled “Hey!” It was Brad! He was swimming side-stroke to keep his face out of the waves and looked like he was hurting. “Dude, we’re almost there! Keep it up!” I yelled as I powered off. He looked like he might have grabbed me and pulled me under if I had stuck around. No one likes a drowner, Brad, cut it out.

My swim time was 32:25, which kinda sucked. I’m betting at least 3 minutes was due to my frantic panic from the start and another two or three minutes was due to my cramping leg.

I knew that getting out of the water and running into T1 would tell me if the rest of the race was going to suck. As soon as I stepped up and started running I knew it was okay. Phew! I pulled off the top half of the wetsuit and ran into the transition area. Oh man I was happy my leg was working. I think I had a pretty big smile on my face, especially when I ran by Sara, Amelia, Bekks, John, and Brad’s wife Jenni cheering me on.

My T1 time was 4:35. The pros were in and out in 2-3 minutes, so there are obviously precious seconds being wasted here. I know several of those seconds were spent carefully pulling the wetsuit off my right leg, I always feel a cramp when doing this so I took extra care not to pull anything. I decided to also invest a few seconds in putting on socks; I’ve never biked or ran without them and I don’t know how the pros do it. I need my socks!

Wetsuit off; socks, cycling shoes, helmet, glasses, and gloves on; gulp half a bottle of cytomax; grab the bike; run! At the “Bike Out” gate I jumped on the bike, clicked in, and started powering up Lynch Hill Road. Man, people were riding slowly. Why weren’t they going faster? Why was that guy pushing his bike? Honestly I felt awesome, I powered up the ‘brutal’ hill like it wasn’t even a hill. I was on fire. I had to check myself and dial it back a little, I didn’t want to hit a wall or totally torpedo my run attempt.

I felt great and was powering along in the aero position when I heard a “whum-whum-whum” noise coming from behind me. I didn’t think it was my bike. I also had no idea how I was going to be passed, I was pedaling at 27mph on a flat! I concluded it must be a motorcycle when some uber-fast dude with an all-carbon solid rear wheel flew by me, maybe going 5mph faster. This guy’s legs were gigantic and he must have weighed 40lbs less than me. Damn, I guess I’m not going to win the bike stage.

The rolling hills on the course were starting to take their toll and I was slowing down a little on the uphills, but I was spinning out on every downhill. I need better gearing! My fastest speed was 50-something-mph, which I feel pretty good about. My right leg was fine and apart from a slow burn in my quads I was feeling great. I had mixed the drinks on the bike too strong and my mouth was feeling like it was coated with sugar, at the aid station I grabbed a water bottle and chugged it, but next time I’m going with a weaker mix.

At one point in the ride I was passing another rider uphill and asked him “Hey, how far have we ridden?”. I didn’t look at the rider before asking, I just gasped it as I rolled by. He yelled “Will!”, and I swear I thought Brad had somehow passed me in the pits or something. I almost fell off my bike. It wasn’t Brad, thank goodness, the second guy I randomly ran into on the tri was the only other person I knew who was doing the tri: Mark J, a friend from b-skool. I slowed down and we chatted for a few minutes before the motorcycle police pulled up and I took off trying to avoid a penalty. Little did I know that these few minutes would come back to haunt me.

With one exception, the only dudes passing me were super fit and were riding awesome bikes. I didn’t get his number, but there was one guy on a total rat bike that was stalking me and just floated past uphill. It was funny because I would shoot back past him on the downs and flats, but I couldn’t make it stick. Clearly I need a better bike!

I struggled to stay with Mr. Rat Biker on the last uphill and hammered down the other side. Sorry to everyone who was coasting down into the pits, but come on slowpokes, this is a race, coasting is not kosher! Plus, if you are going to coast and ‘rest your legs’, get out of the way! Steer your stupid coasting bike over on the far right side of the road. Unless, of course, you’re a big fan of a 50mph enema.

I finished the bike section in 1:21:30, which I think is pretty good. It puts my average speed at 18.3mph over a course with 4438ft of elevation change (2219ft up, and 2219ft down). I think I did enough hill training, but just imagine how fast I would have been with a better bike!

I rocketed into the pits and quickly changed into running shoes. My T2 transition time was 2:31; the pros were in and out in 0:50-1:30. Not good, not bad.

Just like in the Pacific Grove sprint triathlon I did in Monterey, when I got off the bike and started running it felt like my shoelaces were tied together with bungee cords. I was slow. Really slow. The only good thing was that everyone else around me was slow too.

I was passed by some fast guys, and then a guy named Giovanni slowly ran by and I decided to try to hang with him. I picked up the pace and turned into his shadow. After ten minutes of drafting I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself and make friends. We chatted between gasped breaths and soon added another to our posse, a girl named Erin racing in the collegiate class from Oregon. The three of us ran together for a good twenty minutes, we even decided to form a team and came up with a name “Team What Are We Doing?”, but when I hit my second wind on one of the long uphills I split and focused on my own race.

I’m very proud that I was able to maintain a constant (but slow) pace and that I didn’t need to stop. There were a lot of casualties resting at the side of the road squeezing their calves and quads. It was a total bummer that the topless aid station is only for the long course! The girls with garden hoses spraying us down were probably better for our survival though.

On the long downhill back into the transition zone (and to the finish) I was stretching out the length of my steps and trying not to fight the motion with my knees when someone in my age group passed me. Getting passed is a fact of life, especially when you run as slowly as I do, but being passed by others from other age groups is much less meaningful: they’re either much faster than me and they technically passed me a long time ago, or I previously passed them on the bike or swim and I probably have them beat unless they horizon me.

But when someone in your age group passes you, it’s a real pass. They started at the same time you did and if they beat you to the finish line they beat you. So when this dude ran past me on the downhill with a “33″ written on his leg, I was being pushed back a spot. I called him a mother-f’er and he laughed and said “see ya later” and ran faster. I dug deep but just couldn’t hang with him. Downhill just isn’t my forte.

I let him go but kept beating myself up about it. When we hit the short section of flat before the finish line I noticed he was slowing down. Oh it was on! I poured it on and caught up to him with a tenth of a mile to go. Instead of tipping my hand and starting a footrace, I drafted as quietly as I could and hoped he didn’t look back.

A hundred yards from the finish I gave it everything I had, applied a decisive pass, and had a nice cushion on him by the time I hit the finish. It was awesome to hear the cheering squad yelling my name as I finished.

My run time was 56:08 (9:02 pace), which sucks. Even for a hilly course I should be something like six minutes faster over the 10k. I definitely need to focus some of my training on the bike-run together as a pair. The run section is probably the area where I could make the biggest gains.

My finish time was 3:27:09, which when you subtract the 30 minutes to account for my starting time, means I finished in less than three hours! 2:57:09! That was good enough for a 460th place finish out of 2363 other finishers; top 20th percentile baby! w00t!

I took my time eating in the recovery area and met up with everyone in the stands waiting for Brad. He had looked pretty rough coming in from the bike section and everyone was a little concerned he wasn’t going to be able to finish. He came running in looking good and finished with a time of 3:55:37. Not bad for his first attempt, and we’re already planning our next race.

Click here for the photo gallery.