Xterra Nationals Video Highlights

Another cheap thrill of having a cameo appearance in the Highlights video for this year's Xterra Nationals.  I like how everybody else looks serious and focused and intent and I look sort of . . . confused.  Or something.

I appear pulling on the sleeve of my wetsuit in transition at the 25-26 second mark for about a second.  At least they didn't show the part a few seconds later where I started swinging my arms around to warm up and smacked a guy walking past in the head, sending his glasses flying.  Felt bad about that.  There's also some good footage of the mass swim start.  Not as crazy as an Ironman start but still gives you an idea of the chaos involved.  The folks in yellow caps are the age groupers, the blue and pink caps are the pros and they had a much smaller field and a head start.



Waffling a bit about my goals for next year.  Usually by this time I'm somewhat decided and already getting excited but right now I feel tired.  Probably because I'm at the tail of an unpleasant souvenir of sickness that Jonny brought back with him from his plane ride home from Scotland and I'm feeling a bit dragged out.  I did renew my USAT membership (sanctioning body for Xterra and most races) so I guess I have to do at least 4 Xterras to make that $45 fee worth it.  USAT is such a racket but unfortunately they sanction most races so if I want to race I have to pay their blood money.

There's a new Xterra this year near Aspen on private land that I'm kind of excited about.  Supposed to have some artificial obstacles, wood bridges or something.  The land is owned by a mountain bike enthusiast who built a bunch of trails and features so it's an interesting and unique opportunity.  Will have to start hitting up the Boulder bike park for practice.  Supposedly it's intermediate level challenges, easier than Curt Gowdy and I survived Curt Gowdy so I should be able to handle this.  Sounds like a fun new challenge to try.   I'll probably also do Xterra Lory, Xterra Buffalo Creek and, yeah, probably Nationals again.  I'd like to try an out of town Xterra not because I enjoy traveling but because I'd like to try something new.  We'll see if I can get over my dislike of driving enough to go somewhere new.  Would love to do one of the Xterra Epic races which are much longer versions of a regular Xterra but the closest one is a 15-16 hour drive in Arkansas.  There's one in Marquette, MI that I might consider flying to, could combine it with a trip to visit my aunt but I'm not sure how technical the trails are and wow, that sounds like a lot of money and hassle for a race.

Not sure about dog goals either.  Strum will be 9 next March and though he's still going strong he's also at that point where you never know what will happen so for now we enjoy our runs in the moment and that's it.  Can't be bothered going after an ADCH and the nice thing about that is that I don't feel obligated to enter every run that's offered.  Yay for not staying late for Pairs at the end of day or getting up at the crack of dark for Gamblers.  I like the Masters Challenge courses so we'll focus on those.  And Steeplechase!  Whee ha, Strummer's favorite class.  Not going to Nationals this year so no point blowing money on Grand Prix though I may enter one here or there in a half assed attempt to qualify for Regionals which is only 45 minutes away this year.  But yikes, what a price tag to enter Grand Prix at Regionals especially if I have not intention of going to Nat's.  Maybe if I can get a bye and thus a guarantee of 2 runs.  Strum is fast enough to win a bye if we can run clean but it's not something at the top of my goal list.

Not going to get another dog anytime soon, at least I hope not in the sense that one of my current dogs would have to pass away before I'd get another and I don't want that to happen.  I like having 2 dogs, a good sane number.  I like the energy of it and the ease of it and I feel like I can give them each a lot more attention plus Strummer counts for at least 2-3 dogs so I'm happy not to have any more right now.

Hopefully once the fog and energy drain of my cold clears I'll be feeling a bit more motivated.  Also I'm hoping to get  a new GoPro video camera in the next few weeks/months and I've got some ideas for video projects that have been on the back burner for forever so that should be an interesting new challenge and hopefully will provide some entertaining video.

USDAA trial this weekend, indoors on the fun rubber flooring.  Strummer will be off his head.  Should be fun.

Wandering

Last year at this time I knew exactly what my goals were for this year.  Now it's this year and I'm resting and rebuilding after finishing up those goals and wondering what's next.  Because at some point I have to turn off Honey Boo Boo, get off the couch and get back to pursuing something.  The big question is what to do about agility goals.  I'm not going to Tennessee for USDAA Nationals and even if I do decide to go to DOCNA Champs, Strum's already qualified and it's not a super challenging goal.  Chasing titles is not an appealing goal either.  Can't quite muster up enough 'give a damn' about them.  Of course I want to get out of Starters/into Masters in USDAA but aside from training dogwalks until I'm blue in the face there isn't much to work on because that's the main thing holding us back.  Wish USDAA would let everybody into the Masters Challenge events but they don't and not every trial offers them anyway.  So wish we had UKI but I'm stuck with USDAA Starters and DOCNA.

I think for now I'm going to play around with trying more handling moves at trials that I'm not 100% sure of.  There were 2 places at USDAA Nationals where I think a Ketschker turn was a great handling choice but because it was Team at Nationals there was no way I was going to take a risk with it.  Time to start testing the things I've been training.  I have a DOCNA trial this weekend and I'm not optimistic that there will be many opportunities for trying stuff out but you never know.  Maybe I'll see if I can make up some challenging courses for myself in the 2 Gamblers classes.

As for triathlon, it'll be a couple of months before race dates start getting announced and this may determine goals for next year.  Would love to return to Utah for Xterra Nationals if it's in Utah again.  Definitely won't schedule so many races so close together, that was the biggest lesson of the season.  For now, I've gone back to fitness boot camp with a vengeance.  Weights, track work, Kangoo boots, I'm so sore right now but it's a good kind of sore, a 'my muscles are getting stronger' kind of sore.  Haven't been back to masters swimming because my arms are so sore but for now I'm not too worried about swimming.  It's nice to take a little break and do something different.  I think a big weakness of mine, especially on the bike, is lack of muscular strength and muscular endurance and it's hard to build this up during the regular training season.  I think boot camp will be good for agility too, especially the plyometrics.  I've been having fun with it anyway.

Went for an easy 3 mile hike in the high country and it felt positively decadent not feeling like I had to be on some marathon expedition.

Snow on the high peaks, Mud Lake in the foreground

And still a few bursts of color left

Somebody had a lot of fun

For now I'm shifting my energies into my hypnosis practice.  I've got a lot of plans for the website - videos, articles, etc. and I'll post links here as I get stuff up that might be of general interest.  I'm doing a talk up at the University for the psychology club and that should be fun.  More on all that as it develops.

Goals, Intuition, all that fun stuff

Lory State Park, site of one of my races this year.

I had a major, unexpected goal shift this week on the triathlon front.  My goal for the year has been to qualify for Xterra Nationals and last year my age group and Region had 5 slots available, 4 of which were used (1 person either didn't claim her slot or didn't go to the race, I was next in line but went to DOCNA Champs instead).  Without going into too many tedious details the gist of it is that there is one person who went to Nationals last year who I could maybe sort of catch up to this year and if just one of the other top 4 people didn't go it would mean I'd have a shot at qualifying but I'd have to work really really hard so this was a good goal.  I don't care much about titles, beating people, etc. but I do like goals where winning or running clean means you get to do something.  For example qualifying in USDAA Team means I get to go to Nationals, getting good placements in Xterra races means I get to go to Nationals, there's some concrete reward for my efforts as opposed to a ribbon or title or some sort of glory in beating someone just for the heck of it.  Nationals events for whatever sport have a special feel to them, it's a great feeling of accomplishment to attend them even if I'm not shooting for top awards.

However I found out this week that Xterra is taking a whopping 10 slots from my age group for Nationals this year so I could pretty much do 1 or 2 races and qualify no matter what place I got.  Last year there were 18 women in my age group who got points and only 7 did 2 races or more.  On the one hand this now makes my goal of qualifying not very challenging at all.  On the other hand it does take some unpleasant pressure off of me in that I was starting to obsess a bit over who else was showing up to races I had entered which is obviously something I have no control over.  I'd much rather focus on my own personal improvement rather than trying to be better than someone else and now I can shift focus to that rather than worrying about who will or won't show up to the races I've entered and how it will effect my ability to go to Nationals.

Which brings me to the intuition part of the story.  I hemmed and hawed a bit about entering the Xterra Mountain Champs because it's a longer, more difficult race than my others plus a lot of hassle due to the logistics of the race (2 1/4 hour drive in the mountains, 2 transition zones, etc.).  In the end I went with my gut and entered it before I knew about the extra slot for Nationals and now I'm glad I did because it's largely been the motivation for all the early season training I've been doing.  If I'd known I didn't need to do 4 races for Nationals I probably wouldn't have entered it but now that I've spent the money and there are no refunds I have to train for it and do it.  Nationals will also be a longer, more challenging course so even though I don't need to work hard to qualify, I will need to work hard to finish and do well there.  I've not got a shot at the podium but it would be nice to have a good solid race and not be struggling at the back of the pack.  And it's nice to know that I'll be able to go for sure so I'll be all the more eager to put in the hard work.

I also went with my gut and decided not to enter USDAA Regionals in April.  Cancelled my hotel reservations and had a huge surge of relief.  The main reason is the expense, it's too much time and money.  Right now both Strum and I are so rusty from time off for his injury, bad weather, etc.  I went out to the practice field this morning and it wasn't horrible but it wasn't fabulous either.  There was a USDAA standard course set up from one of the judges for Regionals and it was a fun little course but I had issues with sloppy handling and Strummer's dogwalk, which had been doing pretty awesome lately, had fallen to pieces once again.  He even had some misses with the stride regulator for the first time ever.  He's just turned 7 and at his age I simply can't put the reps on his body that it'll take to fix all our issues so I'll continue to plug along and try to find ways to train them but I don't want to spend a zillion dollars traveling to try to get a Grand Prix Q and he has one little mistake.  We have 5 local (2 hours or less) trials left and if I can't get 1 GP and 2 Steeplechase Q's out of those then we probably shouldn't blow the money entering them at Nationals anyway.  I know I can go in Team and whatever extra warm up games they have so I'm happy with that.

More pictures from my ride at Lory yesterday.  Was sunny, mid-70's, breezy, another picture perfect day.

Make a wish.

There's a creepy looking general store on the way to Lory.  One of these days I'll stop and go in and take better pictures of the creepy murals on the walls.

I cropped out the Harley biker guys and blew up the mural but it's still hard to see and I missed the creepiest part of it altogether.  I was taking this from a moving car.  Guess I'll just have to go back.

Final Xterra Standings, Lory Race Photos, What Next?

Some links to photos from Xterra Lory:

Attack Position (bike)

Run

Slip-n-Slide

I'm not sure how I've come to a point in my life where I find myself dressed in a skin tight lycra suit and sitting on a Slip-n-Slide but oh well.  At this point I'm not sure which of my sports is weirdest.

The final rankings came out for Xterra and I ended up 7/18 in my age group in the Mountain Region.  If I had done the Mountain Regionals in Beaver Creek and simply finished I would have come in 5th in the overall standings and qualified for Nationals without having to do any out of state races.  Or if I had done one other race and come in 4th place or better I also would have qualified.  Unfortunately qualifying and being good enough to go and be competitive are 2 different things and I'm a long way from there.  Also qualifying wasn't a goal for this year so I only entered 2 races and you can count points from up to 4 races.

The big question though is do I try to qualify and be good enough to go for next year?  I looked at the slowest and fastest of the competitive people who did the 2 races I did and I'd have to improve 1.9-2.8 mph on the bike for Lory, 2.5-3.6 mph on the bike for Indian Peaks (more technical, longer and at a high elevation).  I'd have to improve 4:10-4:45 min./mile on the run for Lory, 4:56-5:31 for Indian Peaks.  My swim times are competitive (faster at Lory) with the slower person but way off the fastest person.  I'd have to go from 1:54 min/100 yards to 1:25 min/100 yards and that represents a lot of work for very little overall time gain.  I know I can take a few minutes per mile off of my run because I'm so slow right now.  I just didn't have a lot of time to build up my running after recovering from the hamstring strain this summer.  But can I take off enough in a year to be competitve?  Not sure about the bike speeds either.  I can certainly get a bit better but how much hammering away can these old joints take?  And is the type of training going to be fun and worth it?

I could shoot for the long course Xterra's instead.  But is that training going to be even worse for injuries?  Not sure I have the patience and desire any more to train for a race that takes 6 hours.  I know I can do it but it's tedious and time consuming.  Training to be faster/more competitive might be more fun and certainly a different challenge than I'm used to.  I guess I've got plenty of time to decide, they haven't even announced date/location for next year's nationals let alone all the qualifying races.  I hate the end of race season, I always wish there was more and start obsessing over next year.

Strum says, yeah, whatever

Maybe if you got yourself a big stick you wouldn't worry about such silly things as races

A Little Touched in the Head

You all are setting goals for next fall already aren't you?  And by next fall I mean 2012.  I got an email from DOCNA that sent a pebble in the pond ripple effect for my plans for next year.  Next year they're adding another trial to 2012 DOCNA Champs (right now there's an East and West Championship) in Sedona, AZ which will effectively turn the Champs in Denver into a local trial.  Sure, they'll combine the results of the NAC but that's about the only connection between the 3 events.  The thing about a Champs event for me is the actual experience of the event.  I want to see a bunch of dogs competing that I don't normally get to see and I want the atmosphere of a bigger event.  That's a big part of what makes a Champs event special and fun for me.  I don't care about combining a bunch of numbers on paper and declaring someone a winner.  I had to choose this year between DOCNA Champs and Xterra Nationals and I wisely chose DOCNA because no way am I good enough for Xterra Nats. at the moment.  Not even in the ballpark.  But this new format of DOCNA Champs doesn't interest me in the least.  If I have nothing else to do I'll probably go because it's only 40 mins. away but if Xterra Nats. are on the same weekend again and in a fun sounding place or in Utah again I think that may be my new goal for next year.  Don't know what my agility goal will be but I'll come up with something.

Which leads to the next bit of insanity-Xterra Epic Iron Mountain.  It's an Xterra but twice the distance of your typical Xterra-1500 m swim, 34 mile mountain bike, 10 mile trail run.  There were only 2 in the country so far that I could find and one has already happened but this one is in October and not only would count for points for next year's Nationals but would count as extra points because it's so long.  There were only 3 women total in the other Epic race and none in my age group and while who knows who will show up to the Arkansas race there's a good chance I could get a lot of points just for showing up.  Which is the world's stupidest reason for entering a race if you ask me but the idea of this long course race is intriguing.  There's no info. on how technical the bike course is so it's hard to say but this could easily take me 7-8 hours.  If I'm lucky.  Which is kind of stupid.  Here's the other part of it that's stupid-15 1/2 hours of driving.  To go to Arkadelphia, Arkansas.  Any loyal readers out there from Arkadelphia, Arkansas?  I would love to know what this place is like.  And I'd only have 2 1/2 months to work myself up to those distances.

I don't know, I think someone needs to convince DOCNA to go back to having a real Championship so I don't do something Stupid.  In the meantime I have a mountain bike skills lesson next week that Jonny bought me for my birthday.  I'm going to learn to ride downhill from a real Olympic mountain biker.  And I have a DOCNA trial this weekend.  I suppose I ought to dig my weave poles out from the climbing weeds and cobwebs.  It's finally cooling down a bit and I'm itching to go back to agility training and poor Strummer is practically climbing out of his skin.

Anticipation

I love getting all my gear ready for race day.

I used to think it was a monumental chore and I'd get stressed out with it all but after discovering the nightmare of dog agility trials this is a piece of cake.  And I don't have to obsess about whether or not my mountain bike has taken a dump first thing in the morning.

I decided on a tri-suit to save time in transition because I'm for sure wearing the swim socks and those will cost me some time to get off.  Socks but no gloves.  2 swim caps.  Too bad I can't go with 2 wetsuits.

I have some very rough goals but that last race taught me that it's hard to anticipate pace when you're dealing with mountainous courses.  I think a better plan is to have a strategy and the times will fall where they will.  I'm going to go fast enough on the swim to stay warm but not get too aggressive.  It's going to be a long day and a 'fast' swim will only earn me a couple of minutes.  Better to save it for the bike/run.  Another reason not to go out too fast is that the race is at around 9500 feet elevation.

I'm going to go hard as I can on the bike and not save too much for the run.  The run would be slow even on fresh legs and until I can build up my training there isn't much I can do about it right now so may as well make good time on the bike.  I'll push myself on the run but it'll be what it is.  I'm going to force myself to walk the steep uphills.  Running up them only wastes energy and doesn't gain me much time.  Mentally that's hard for met to accept but I need to be smart and accept it.

Predicted finish time is hopefully under 3 hours 30 minutes, hopefully more towards 3:10 but could be 3:25.  Would love to finish under 3:00 but that's a huge stretch goal.

1000 m (1100 yard) Swim:  22-23 mins.
650 m (711 yard) uphill dash to transition: 6:00
T1:  2:00
14 mile Bike:  2:00 (1:45 stretch)
T2: 1:00
4.1 mile Run:  53:00 mins.

Overall:  3:10-3:25 hours

According to the start list there are 8 people in my age group which is a lot for Xterra.  At least 3 of them are way way faster than me so the chance of hardware is non-existent so no goals related to placement.  It's a time trial start anyway so it's possible I'll never see another woman from my age group for the whole race.  That's happened on several occasions.  I beat a woman at the Lookout Mountain Triathlon by 1 second but it wasn't a run off at the finish line.  Hard to say how things would have turned out if we'd been racing head to head.  So I'll have to focus on my own race and see how it all turns out. 

Weather should be perfect, 60's and sunny, won't have to worry about getting too hot.  A day on the trails is a great day one way or the other.

Revised Race Goals and Finally Some Agility

Agility's been on hold a bit lately between my heavier triathlon training schedule and the summer heat but I finally managed a decent practice this morning with my training partner.  We were out there bright and early at 6:30 and it was so nice and cool I even started out with a sweatshirt on.  By the time we finished at 7:50 it was getting warm though.  The exercises we did had contacts and weaves, exactly what we need to practice, and Strummy was pretty awesome.  Hit all his A-frames and teeters, 3/4 dogwalks, had trouble with a few weave pole entries but if I remembered to cue them soon enough he got them no problem.  We've got a trial next week and today's practice gave me some confidence despite our lack of training lately.  And it felt so good to get him out there to play, he's such a fun boy.

I've decided to adjust my race goals a bit for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that I think I was being way overly optimistic about my run time.  It kills me to admit it but I think I might end up with a 5k time over 30 minutes.  It's been a peak training week with a hard brick on Wednesday and when I took the road bike for a quick spin this afternoon to make sure I remembered how to ride it I realized my legs were more debilitated then I'd thought.  I had an ice bath and I'll stretch a bit and hopefully I'll wake up with a little more spring in my step tomorrow.  But that's the deal with a 'B' race, no tapering and it's like a hard workout.  So goals are now:

525 yard swim-9:40
T1-2:00
10.7 mile bike-43 mins. (could be shorter depending on the hills)
T2-1:00
5k run-33 mins. (ugh! but I don't want to push the knee/hamstring on a 'B' race)
Total-just under 1 hour 30 minutes (reduced from Monday's goal of 1:15)

The bike course measures longer on gmaps than advertised and it looks a bit hilly though not too bad.  I've made a few outfit decisions that will delay my time in T1 as well but after the horrible blisters on the arches of both feet after last year's Xterra I've decided to wear socks.  I timed myself and the socks cost me 6 seconds.  I would happily have added 6 seconds to my time last year in order to avoid those horrible blisters.  I'll spare you the photos.

Weather should be good, mid-60's to start the race and mid-70's at the finish and low humidity.  I'm guessing the folks from the Midwest and East Coast don't want to hear about the 11% humidity we had today.  It was in the low 90's and I didn't even need to turn on my swamp cooler.  Anyway, should be a great day for for a race on a fun course.

On an only slightly unrelated topic, best title ever for a blog race report goes to Punk Rock Tri Guy for 'She's Filing Her Nails While They're Dragging the Lake' for his Vineman 70.3 race report.  Thanks to him I had that classic Elvis Costello song in my head all day.  I'm only kicking myself that I never thought of it.  Trying to top that blog title will be the real challenge for tomorrow.

Ready or not

Tomorrow is race day. Thought maybe I should put down some goals.

1. No drowning.

2. No falling off mountain bike.

3. No tripping during the trail run.

4. Maybe, hopefully not finishing DFL

Swim is 750 m (686 yards), bike is 12 miles (11 on singletrack, 1 on dirt road), run is 4.8 miles on trails. Swim should be no problemo to easily finish but my time won't be great. Went to too many open water Reservoir masters swims instead of interval/pool workouts and I'm sure I've lost some swim fitness. Bike should be o.k., too. I've done a reasonable amount of riding this summer on harder trails than the one the race is on. I've got some new hunky tires on my bike that are ridiculous overkill for the trail I'm riding tomorrow (people were asking the race director is they could use Cross bikes which are beefed up road bikes) but I'm too lazy to change them. I'll probably have a weirdo panic attack at 10:00 tonight and decide I need to change them back to my skinnier more nimble ones but oh well. Run is 4.8 miles and will be the toughest part and biggest unknown. For some reason I thought the run was 4.2 miles when I signed up but only recently found out I was mistaken. Farthest I've been running is just under 3 miles. I'm up to a run/walk pattern of 8/1 which is near enough running straight through but the distance will be a big step up. I'm sure I'll be fine but how my knee will hold up is something of an unknown. Didn't feel like I could have pushed the getting back to running program much more than I did though and hopefully the steep hiking will have helped. I was up to 6 miles or so of steep hiking so I know I can cover the distance and I'll slow to a walk if the knee acts up.

I didn't do any brick workouts (bike then run right afterwards) which is a big mistake. This was mostly due to logistics as most bike rides were done in the mountains with other people who don't run so once the ride was over we drove straight home. Again, I'm sure I'll be fine but the first mile or so after T2 won't be pretty.

Racing is a rare treat for me and this is my first race in 2 years so I'm excited for it. The course is beautiful, the weather should cooperate and though I wish I was in better shape I think I did the best with my training that I could have given the constraint of my knee and I know I'm prepared enough to finish. Hopefully my knee will be in as good a mood as I am when I wake up tomorrow.