you don’t get many like that.

Big weekend for me. big, biG, bIG, BIG! Here’s the lowdown from the showtown.

Amy arrived Friday night. We went out for dinner at Moxi’s with Pete and Cathy. Delicious. Saturday during the day was pretty chill. I had an easy run, some bike cleaning, some movie watching, and an easy swim to do to get ready for the race the next day. Amy and I had plans to see Batman at night but that didn’t go down…

Because I proposed! And she said yes. And we’re getting married in December! Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you’ve been to this place before, you know what it’s like. Words can’t do it justice.

That night I had arranged for Amy’s whole family (and mine as well) to be in Guelph for a big, Italian dinner. Big surprise for Amy and a massive carbo load for everyone else.

On Sunday morning we saddled up and headed for Niagara. Both families came out and supported me. I had my best race of year, too! I swam fairly well, getting on the feet of the guys I wanted to be close to. The bike was a bit of a mess as another draft pack formed. I was sure (really, this time I was) to keep my distance. But the bike course was so, so flat it was impossible for anyone to get too far ahead. I got onto the run in 8th place. I felt great on the run, though, maybe because I was wearing Sharratt’s fancy pants one piece race suit. Between 1-3k, I moved into 2nd place. I was feeling really good so I went “balls-to-the-wall” for 3k. At 5k I knew I wasn’t going to get caught so I eased off a bit so that I could rip at the finish a bit. Hey, I had a fiance and the in-laws to impress! As I finished, my brothers were yelling, “He got engaged last night!” The announcer then said, “Maybe that’s why he’s running so fast!” (I ended up running 3:24/k which is on pace for a 34min 10k).

Anyways, weekend went by in a kind of blissful state. It’s a little cheesy to tell your fiance how you feel about her for all www to see. So I won’t.

But she’s great! 

trying to breathe.

The last two and a half weeks have been frenzy-ing-ly busy. I can make up words like frenzingly because I have a master’s in English.

My day looks like this: 6am wake up. Do work for the online course I’m taking (why, why, why did I take this course!). Eat breakfast in the car on the way to swim practice. Swim 4k. Go straight to my first swimming lesson. Teach non-stop until 6pm. I’m going to repeat that because 9hours straight of swimming lessons is really difficult. So…teach non-stop until 6pm. Come home. Straight out the door for workout #2. Suffer like a person who just stood in cold water and yelled at kids for 9hours straight. Eat something. Get to my computer by about 9pm. Do online course stuff for 2 hours. Fall asleep around 11pm. Repeat.

In all of this, I have managed to find time for Amy, and to train. Swimming, in particular has been going really well. Yesterday we did 3X6X50 on :55 (avg. 33highs), followed by 4X400 on 5:30 (with paddles). I swam all 4 in 5:11-5:13. So that was sweet. At night I did 5X1k running in the heat (after, of course, the swimming craziness). It went so-so (3:15ish for all of them).

I thought Coach would go a little easier on us this morning. No such luck. Main set was 6X100, 600, 5X100, 500, 4X100, 400, ALL on a base 100 time of 1:25. Essentially, I swam 3k straight. But I made them all so that’s grand. I drafted off Tom like a champ though.

So yeah. Big weekend coming up. Amy is watching me race this weekend and so I’ve asked coach if we can rest a little more than normal going into it. He agreed. And since “chicks dig scars” it’s time to go to the well.

kind of like an apology

First things: thanks for the compliments on the video. Glad you enjoyed it.

Now on to more pressing matters: an apology.

Here’s the lowdown. The Peterborough Sprint Triathlon went off at 9:00am. After 750m of swamp-like swimming (no kidding…I could actually use the weeds to pull myself through the water), we jumped on our bikes for what was supposed to be a 20-k-ride-alone-without-sucking-wheel-bike. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what happened.

It went down like this. After 2 or 3k I rolled up behind a “group” of 4 or 5 cyclists riding “quite close” together. Now, because there was 4 of them (riding “side-by-side”), I had to brake, and tuck in behind them. Isofacto, I “sinned” for about 15seconds. There just wasn’t anywhere else to go. My frustration soon got the best of me and I yelled, “Too close!” Shocked (I think they thought I was a course marshall), all 4 of them turned, looked me, and immediately stopped “what they were doing” [I hope my intentional avoidance of the D word has not gone unnoticed].

Anyways, they let me by. I spent the next 10k mostly “on my own.” However, “on my own” could be loosely translated as, “no one was in front of me.” But every time I turned around, what did I see? You know what I’m talking about. Something that looked like a Tour de France paceline. Pacelines of this sort are not legal. Insofacto, they are illegal.

But then, to my shame, I became a “violator” myself. For the last 3k, I went back and forth with another athlete. I passed him going up hills, he passed me going down hills. And I know there were moments when my front wheel was too close to his back wheel. I was trying not to do “it,” but when you’re continually going back and forth like that, “it” sometimes happens.

The last k of the ride treated me to a harsh rebuke from an athlete (or two) who came up behind me. So that wasn’t pleasant. As I got onto the run, I could hear his words in my head, and it was very difficult for me to push the pace knowing that if I beat him, he would think it was because I did “it.” Insofacto, I didn’t push, hoping that would serve as a kind of “sorry I did it, but can we still be friends?”

Sometimes this kind of stuff happens, and it takes away from the sport a bit. So I’m sorry for that.

If anyone who reads this was beaten by me today (I finished 5th overall), then I’m sorry that it went down like this. I figure you can add 15-20 seconds to my time. And that’s kind of like an apology.

In unrelated news, I saw “The Incredible Hulk” last night (the new one with Ed Norton that was filmed in Toronto). Amazing! If you’re a marvel geek you’ll love the ending [Warning: spoiler coming]. Tony Stark (who later becomes Ironman) says to the guy who created the Hulk, “we’re putting together a team.” And the dude replied, “Whose ‘we‘?” Oh snap.

a video!

Hello hello.

I have a brother who is a genius. Mikey accompanied me on a run a did yesterday, took some video, and came up with an AMAZING little short film. In it, I suffer badly, talk about why I got into triathlons, and give some insight into why I do what I do. I hope you like it.

Mikey tells me this video is part of a project that he’s working on that looks for ways to combine body, mind, and soul. I’ll post his website link when things are ready.