ON THE ROAD TO OCEANSIDE, TAUPO AND ABU DHABI 速
JUNE /JULY 2011 : ISSUE 06
SERIOUS TRIATHLON
JUNE/JULY 2011
速
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The largest international distance triathlon series in the world. 2011 5150 Series United States March 20
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May 22
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June 19
Washington DC Triathlon (Washington, DC)
June 25
5150 Provo (Provo, Utah)
July 10
Boulder Peak Triathlon (Boulder, Colo.)
August 7
Nautica New York City Triathlon (New York, N.Y.)
September 4
Hy-Vee Tri/5150 U.S. Championship (Des Moines, Iowa)
September 11
5150 Lake Lanier (Gainesville, Ga.)
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Visit www.5150.com for more information on the 5150 Triathlon Series, including International events. 5i50™ and 5150™ are trademarks of World Triathlon Corporation. ©2010 World Triathlon
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006 : LINEUP
LAVA publisher JOHN DUKE heathergordon@ironman.com
:
editor BRAD CULP
:
jayprasuhn@ironman.com
johnduke@ironman.com
:
associate publisher HEATHER GORDON
bradculp@ironman.com
:
senior editor JAY PRASUHN
features editor SUSAN GRANT-LEGACKI
art director ERICA KRYSTEK donald@donaldmiralle.com
:
ericakrystek@ironman.com
:
susanlegacki@ironman.com
senior photographer DONALD MIRALLE
photo editor SAMMY TILLERY
sammytillery@ironman.com
: online editor
JENNIFER WARD BARBER jenniferward@ironman.com : account executive LISA BILOTTI lisabilotti@ironman.com account executive SEAN WATKINS seanwatkins@ironman.com : account executive KIRK BAUSCH kirkbausch@ironman.com : account executive LAURA AGCAOILI lauraagcaoili@ironman.com office manager KAYLA NEWBY-FRASER kayla@ironman.com Phone 858.366.4444 : Fax 858.504.7062 : Subscriptions & Customer Service 800.839.4537; lavamag@pcspublink.com Circulation Inquiries heathergordon@ironman.com : Editorial Inquiries bradculp@ironman.com : Web Site www.lavamagazine.com
LAVA. (ISSN 2155-1081), World Triathlon Corporation, 514 Via de la Valle, Suite 300, Solana Beach, CA 92075-2718, is published bi-monthly (Dec/Jan, Feb/Mar, Apr/May, Jun/Jul, Aug/Sep, Oct/Nov). The entire contents of LAVA are copywrited and may not be reproduced, either in whole or in part, without written consent. LAVA™ and Serious Triathlon™ are trademarks of World Triathlon Corporation. Basic subscription rate is $19.95, Canadian remit $30.45 in US funds (includes GST), other international mail $47.95 in US funds only. Application to mail at Periodicals Postage Prices is pending at Solana Beach, CA and at Additional Mailing Offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to LAVA, PO Box 469023, Escondido, CA 92046. Printed in the U.S.A. SUBSCRIBE, RENEW, GIVE A GIFT, REPORT MISSING ISSUES, PAY YOUR BILL AND CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS AT LAVAMAGAZINE.COM LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
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012 : LAVA FLOW
JUNE : JULY, 2011
ISSUE 06 DESTINATIONS
features
welcome
TRAINING
014 : EDITOR’S NOTE
054 : THE DREAM MACHINE
108 : THE HYPE
016 : CONTRIBUTORS
Canadians Heather and Trevor Wurtele are on the road to triathlon greatness—literally.
Man vs. Wild: Scientists look to the animal kingdom for the next evolution in free speed.
018 : LAVA ONLINE
By Susan Grant-Legacki : Photography by Donald Miralle
020 : THE BUZZ
066 : A TOUGHER BREED
022 : SEEN & HEARD
A trip to Taupo to find out what makes Kiwis Samantha Warriner and Cameron Brown tougher than all the rest.
By Jim Gourley
By Brad Culp : Photography by Delly Carr
116 : COACH’S COUNSEL Nocturnal training: Getting to bed after a late-night workout. By Troy Jacobson
GEAR 026 : ON DISPLAY
078 : GOLDEN TICKET TRI
120 : SIDELINED
A first-time destination competitor ditches the tour guide to find that racing the Abu Dhabi Tri is enough of a trip on its own.
PRP therapy: Using your own blood to help you heal.
By Jennifer Ward Barber
Quintana Roo Seduza By Jay Prasuhn
090 : LOGAN’S RUN
028 : TECH FEATURE
Marine Logan Franks’s journey from the desert of Iraq to the finish line of Kona.
Design pressure: Do UCI rules really affect tri bike design?
By Fred Drier : Photography by Andrew Burton
By Jay Prasuhn
054
036 : PRO FILE
By Nathan Koch PT, ATC and Anthony Lee, MD
126 : THE FULL SPECTRUM Characteristics of elite performance: What you can learn from elite triathlon and business performers. By Matt Dixon, MSc
134 : TO YOUR HEALTH
Jan Frodeno and his Specialized Tarmac
Extreme-efficiency exercises: Waste less time in the gym.
038 : REVIEWED
By Ben Greenfield
Nineteen’s Frequency Wetsuit
142 : COMPETITIVE EDGE
By Jay Prasuhn
Going sub 10 (or 12): Going faster than you ever thought possible at Ironman.
040 : WORKBENCH Get personal with your saddle: It’s not about the nose, the cutout or the groove—it’s about you.
By Mark Allen
By Mark Deterline
RACING
048 : RAPP REPORT The vertical compliance system: In pursuit of the perfect ride, start where the rubber meets the road.
152 : IN FOCUS Ironman 70.3 California, ITU World Champs Sydney, Ironman 70.3 New Orleans, Ironman 70.3 Texas
By Jordan Rapp
160 : BOARDING PASS The Caribbean’s hidden racing paradise: Nevis TriStar 111
ON THE COVER: Marine-turned-Ironman Logan Franks, shot in New York City.
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
DONALD MIRALLE
PHOTO ANDREW BURTON
By Ben Greenfield
168 : THE LAST WORD Michellie Jones vs. Heather Jackson
are yo u na tura l?
all-natural protein shake
014 : EDITOR’S NOTE
CAL, KENYON & CAMERON
W
e’ve all heard the expression, “records were made to be broken,” and I think most of us would accept it as generally true. Someone will eventually surpass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s 38,387 career points. A running back will come along and score 165 career touchdowns to break Emmitt Smith’s career mark. And if Tiger ever gets his head on straight, he’ll top Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major titles. Almost every record was made to be broken ... but maybe not all. Between 1925 and 1939 Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 consecutive games for the New York Yankees, only ending his streak when the disease that now bears his name made it impossible for him to play. It was a record that many were certain would never be matched. Fifty-six years later, Cal Ripken Jr. finally broke Gehrig’s record, and then went on to play an additional three seasons without missing a start. The consensus among baseball historians was that if it took 56 years for Gehrig’s record to come down, Ripken’s streak of 2,631 straight games might always be out of reach. Believe it or not, the most unlikely-to-be-topped record in American sports involves the NCAA Division III Men’s Swimming National Championship, which was won by Kenyon College (Ohio) every year between 1979 and 2010. The streak only ended this March when Denison University (also from Ohio) finished the national championship meet one point ahead of the 31-time defending champs. No other college sports program has come close to approaching 31 consecutive national titles, and it’s almost impossible to think that one ever will.
Triathlon has its own share of impressive records. Chrissie Wellington’s world-best 8:19:13 finish at Challenge Roth last year left many wondering if it’s physically possible for a woman to go any faster. Alistair Brownlee’s perfect 2009 season was seen as a once-in-a-lifetime, only-if-you’relucky kind of thing. But when the time comes to pick the most unbreakable record in multisport, it’s hard to look past what Cameron Brown accomplished at Ironman New Zealand on March 5. When he crossed the finish line, Brown became the first and only athlete to win the same Ironman on 10 occasions. Most impressive of all, he did it in 10 straight attempts, if you don’t count the 2006 race (which most people don’t), when a massive storm forced organizers to shorten the race to just a 56-mile bike and 13.1-mile run and Brown finished second to Ain-Alar Juhanson. Asterisk aside, Brown may indeed hold the one record in this relatively young sport that cannot be matched. As the sport grows and the talent pool continues to spread, it’s hard to fathom an athlete taking 10 straight Ironman titles, especially at a marquee event like New Zealand. Find out more about Brown’s unprecedented record, as well as Samantha Warriner’s surprise win in “A tougher breed” on Page 66. At the post-race press conference in New Zealand, Brown was quick to dismiss the notion of his record being out of reach for future triathletes. “I think all records are made to be broken. Some will just be a lot harder than others.” As for your own personal records, those were definitely made to be broken, so get to work. LAVA
Train safe,
Brad Culp Unlike your mother, LAVA encourages talking back. Let us know what you think by sending an e-mail to bradculp@ironman.com. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
016 : CONTRIBUTORS
With 499 triathlon magazine covers to his name in 25 years of shooting the sport, DELLY CARR is recognized as one of Australia’s top freelance sports photographers.. While he is best known for his work in triathlon, Delly has also photographed six Olympic Games. See how Carr dealt with the awful conditions at this year’s Ironman New Zealand in “A Tougher Breed” beginning on page 66.
RICH CRUSE has been a photographer since childhood. His first triathlon photo was published in 1987 and he has been shooting the sport ever since. Rich has photographed the Ironman World Championships 16 times and was the official photographer of XTERRA for eight seasons. Cruse headed to the jungles of Guam to capture this month’s racing section opener on page 150.
DELLY CARR
RICH CRUSE
FRED DREIER
ANDREW BURTON
FRED DREIER (“Logan’s Run,” Page 90) graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2010. The Colorado native used to share a pool lane with Julie Dibens in Boulder during his days as a triathlete. Dreier was formerly an editor for VeloNews magazine, and he covered the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. He currently lives in New York City where he covers sports and politics for a variety of publications.
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
ANDREW BURTON is a photojournalist based in New York. He focuses on major news events—most recently the Egyptian revolution and Japanese earthquake. His work has been distributed through Getty Images, the Associated Press and Reuters, among others. Burton captured the incredible grit of Marine-turned-Ironman Logan Franks for this month’s cover feature (“Logan’s Run”, Page 90).
The finish line just got closer. NEW
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018 : LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
HOW TO LOSE
FAT NOT
MUSCLE
JUNE : JULY, 2011
LAVA ONLINE
By Robert Portman, PhD Most endurance athletes are concerned about their weight and periodically diet. Since each pound contains about 3,500 calories, if we reduce caloric intake by 1,000 calories a day, we lose about two pounds each week. Logically, the higher the daily caloric deficit, the faster the weight loss. But not all weight loss is good weight loss, and unfortunately, the faster you drop weight, the more muscle you lose. This observation was made by researchers at Rockefeller University. Researchers looked at the effect of different daily caloric deficits on weight loss. As might be expected, the fewer calories the subjects consumed, the more weight they lost. What wasn’t expected was where the weight loss came from. In individuals who moderately reduced their daily caloric intake, 91% of the loss was fat and only 9% was muscle. But in subjects who severely reduced their daily caloric intake, fat represented 48% of the total weight loss and muscle 42%. In other words, the greater the daily calorie restriction, the greater the loss of muscle mass. For endurance athletes, loss of muscle mass can produce a decrease in strength, power and a decline in overall performance. This research also explained why the longer one is on a diet that severely restricts calories, the harder it is to keep losing weight. As the body loses more muscle mass, the body’s overall metabolic rate decreases, since a resting muscle cell burns almost eight times more energy per day than a fat cell. Ironically, severe calorie restrictions are unnecessary. A recent study showed that a group that maintained a 200-calorie-per-day deficit lost as much weight in six months as a group that maintained a 750-calorie-per-day deficit. The bottom line: if you want to lose fat, not muscle, a moderate diet plan is the only way to go.
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
MULTIMEDIA s 7ATCH A SLIDESHOW OF THE PRODUCTS THAT KEPT LAVA ONLINE EDITOR *ENNIFER 7ARD "ARBER SMILING through her ďŹ rst destination triathlon in sauna-like Abu Dhabi at lavamagazine.com/desert-salvation, or by scanning the code above with a QR app like NeoReader. s ,EARN HOW TO PERFORM "EN 'REENl ELD S %XTREME %Fl CIENCY STRENGTH TRAINING MOVES 0AGE properly at lavamagazine.com/ee-exercises
EXTRAS s 3ENIOR EDITOR *AY 0RASUHN S BEEN ON THE MOVE THIS SPRING &OLLOW HIM TRAILING 0ETER 2EID AND "EN (OFF man at Specialized’s Development Triathlon Team Training Camp (lavamagazine.com/specialized), or scoping out new gear at this year’s Sea Otter Classic (lavamagazine.com/seaotter).
featured columnist
don’t miss SERIOUS SMOOTHIE SUNDAYS: posted on our site every weekend to help you recover from your long runs and rides. Catch up on what you’ve missed by trying our favorite so far at lavamagazine.com/chai-blueberry
%VERY MONTH AUTHOR COACH and Serious Recovery columnist SAGE ROUNTREE works hard to bring you the best of recovery, whether it’s advice on self-massage, sleep, or compression. You’ll ďŹ nd her COLUMN IN OUR 42!).).' SECTION
tweet of the (bi) month
V
Dr. Portman, a well-known sports science researcher, is co-author of Nutrient Timing and Hardwired for Fitness.
Scan with a QR app to see the slideshow
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Visit lavamagazine.com for the latest race results, articles on nutrition and training, and reviews of new books.
Work harder, easier. Dave Scott, six-time world champion and coach, knows that the better you feel, the better you race. The reason has to do with “perceived exertion”, or how hard it seems to run, bike or swim at the pace you want to go. According to Dave, “It’s no coincidence that perceived exertion is highest before you hit the wall, because high levels of perceived exertion actually produce fatigue. High levels of perceived exertion are caused by a drop in branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) that triggers the release of fatigue signals in the brain.” Previous studies1, 2 have shown Accelerade superior to other sports drinks in terms of endurance, hydration and reducing muscle damage. However, new studies3 from James Madison University explain why athletes drinking Accelerade feel better even though they are exercising harder. The scientists found: – Accelerade lowered levels of perceived exertion. – At the same level of exercise intensity, athletes consuming Accelerade did not experience as much strain. – Unlike other sports drinks, protein-powered Accelerade helps maintain BCAA levels.
"The bottom line..." says Dave,"Accelerade makes your hard work easier."
Sugar 50% M Calories 33% M Endurance 7% L
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PacificHealth Laboratories The uncompromising pursuit of science
© PacificHealth Laboratories 2011. All rights reserved. Accelerade® is a registered trademark of Motts, LLP. 1. Saunders, MJ, Kane, MD and Todd, MK. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 36:1233-1238, 2004. 2. Seifert, J., Harmon, J., and DeClercq, P. Protein added to a sports drink improves fluid retention. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 16:421-429, 2006. 3. Saunders MJ, Todd MK, Valentine RJ, et al. Inter-study examination of physiological variables associated with improved endurance performance with carbohydrate/protein administration. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 38(5):S113-S114, 2006.
020 : THE BUZZ
In response to Anonymous in Texas’ letter in the April/May issue…
“H
ow do you tell if you are having dinner with a triathlete?” “You don’t, he tells you.” I am a proud Yuppie. For those of you who don’t know what that meant in the 1980s, it stood for “Young, Upwardly Mobile Professional.” I’m not sure how this is a bad thing. I paid my dues in the workplace as a young man and now at 44 I have a dollar or two to spend on whatever I want. Thank you for your ads and articles in LAVA, they really help me decide what to buy next. Even if I don’t need it. —Randall Cooper, Two-time Ironman Salt Lake City, UT
D
ear Anonymous in Texas, Bite me. —Keith Andersen Charlotte, NC
letes in this sport and find the overall majority of them to be great individuals, looking for a challenge, and appreciative of others’ efforts. —Proud to be non-anonymous in Illinois, Steve Buschkopf
I
was very surprised to read the letter from Anonymous in Texas in last month’s issue of LAVA. My first though was, “Is she talking about me?” After rereading her letter I wondered if her clients know what she thinks about them. I don’t know that I consider myself wealthy, but I have a job, do several races a year and have a coach. For the record, I’ve never met a triathlete that has possessed the traits the author ascribed to most triathletes. In fact, I’ve found them to be a nice bunch of people, always willing to talk to newer athletes and share some of the lessons they have learned. I love going to races and meeting new people for this very reason. Mrs. Anonymous, if you don’t like the magazine just stop reading it. —Arnie Lachner
A
s a former collegiate swimmer I came to this sport at age 50, almost 10 years ago, with the goal of finishing a sprint triathlon and hopefully finding an athletic venue for my next few years. With over 50 triathlons completed, including two Ironmans, I am surprised at the disgruntled attitude that seems to be prevalent among some who participate in this sport. It takes a huge amount of time and effort to train for and complete an Ironman race, and to be broad-brushed as an elitist, snob and a yuppie (at 59 years old) is simply ridiculous. I have met and coached literally hundreds of ath-
F
irst and foremost, I very much enjoy this magazine. The information is always enjoyable to read, but also very informative for those of us involved in this sport. With that being said, I must say that I somewhat agree with this person’s perception of triathletes. Yes, I believe a good number of us have some ego issues, but I feel they are justifiable to a certain degree. Do some go to extremes? Yes, but let’s not forget that the majority of us also have pushed ourselves farther than we could have ever imagined. Now, with that said, this person’s message simply displays a little cowardice! How could someone sign “Anonymous”? If you’re going to take a stand and are as passionate about something as this person is, why avoid signing your name? Is this person afraid of losing clientele due to her approach toward the sport? Have some guts! Sign your name and be confident enough to stand behind what you say. Where does this person get the idea that “triathletes are superior beings”? I certainly don’t feel that any of us, professionals included, are superior beings. We are simply passionate about the sport and are driven to accomplish our own personal goals. I’ll go ahead and sign my name.
K
eep up the great work with the magazine. I would like to point out that “Mrs. Anonymous” had to spend 25 percent of her letter touting her credentials. Fifty-three marathons—wow! I’m more impressed that she kept track of the amount more than by the number she has completed. Next time she writes a letter just sign “Anonymous.” Don’t bring Texas into this. There are a lot of nice people down there that I call friends.
—Greg Steenberg
Editor’s note: We received an overwhelming number of letters in response to the letter penned by “Anonymous in Texas” last issue. In every response we received, the author assumed that “Anonymous in Texas” was male, when, in fact, the author was female. As such, “he,” “him” and “his” in the preceding letters have been changed to “she,” “her”
—David Nazaroff
and “hers,” respectively.
Please give us your thoughts on our magazine by emailing the editor at bradculp@ironman.com.
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
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Japan’s Hiroyuki Nishiuchi breaks into a short dance number at the Ironman New Zealand finish line on March 5. Nishiuchi finished ninth overall in 9:25:39.
022 : SEEN
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
HEARD : 023
5
The number of British women in the top-10 overall at the Abu Dhabi International Triathlon on March 12. Source: Abudhabitriathlon.com
08.04.2012 & 08.07.2012: THE RESPECTIVE DATES FOR THE WOMEN AND MEN’S OLYMPIC TRIATHLONS IN LONDON, WHICH WERE CONFIRMED IN MARCH. Source: Triathlon.org
$2,425 28.33 $500 M.P.H.
What you could save by biking instead of driving to work everyday for one year given a 24-mile roundtrip commute. (Based on the IRS’ 2010 standard mileage rate of 50 cents per mile, which factors in gas, insurance, maintenance and depreciation.) Source: Kiplinger.com
THE ROUNDTRIP COST OF CHECKING A BIKE ON LUFTHANSA FOR AN INTERNATIONAL TRIP,
Chris Lieto’s average bike speed at the Miami International Triathlon on March 20. He finished the 40K bike leg in 52:31 en route to finishing fifth overall. Source: Mitriathlon.com
THE MOST OF ANY AIRLINE. Source: Lufthansa.com
1 Million Dollars The amount of money promised to Andreas and Michael Raelert by shoe sponsor K-Swiss if the two brothers finish together, in first place, at this year’s Hawaii Ironman. Source: Kswiss.com
240,000 CALORIES: The amount of energy you could burn by riding your bike to work everyday for one year given the same 24-mile roundtrip. (Calculation based on a 160-pound male burning an average of 40 calories per mile) Source: eHow.com LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
GEAR
024 : GEAR :
026
on display 028
tech feature 036
pro file 038
reviewed 040
workbench 048
rapp report
“Since lateral stiffness is important, the tubes need to be stiffened up to resist the regular forces of pedaling, sprinting and climbing. At the same LARRY ROSA
time, the bike needs to be kept relatively narrow to preserve sound aerodynamics.” —Jordan Rapp, (Rapp Report, Page 48) LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
: GEAR : 025
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
026 : ON DISPLAY :
QUINTANA ROO SEDUZA
ROLL IT: If excellent value paired with a comfortable fit are your primary purchasing objectives. RACK IT: If you’ve established a long, low aero position, the Seduza’s increased headtube length will have you riding too high.
$2,100 : with mixed Shimano components and Shimano RS20 wheelset. Quintanarootri.com By Jay Prasuhn
SIZES: XS (650c), S, M, L COMPONENTS AS TESTED: Shimano Ultegra RD, Shimano 105 FD, FSA Gossamer crankset, Shimano 105 1121 cassette, Shimano RS-20 wheelset, Velo tri saddle COLOR: Nude carbon/white
NICK ABADILLA
Q
uintana Roo, the company founded by tri pioneer Dan Empfield, has steadfastly maintained its bloodline as a multisport-dedicated brand, unrestrained by any federation design limitations. With engineer Brad DeVaney at the design helm now, that continues with many truly radical designs in the brand’s top-line models. Since QR’s early days the tri demographic has changed enormously, with more beginners and mid-pack triathletes than ever before. Appropriately, the brand’s offerings have grown too, with the Seduza hitting a broad target: price-conscious newcomers looking for value but not willing to give up too much. In this value-first, $2,000-$2,500 price range, the Seduza fights a ruthless gang war with Felt, Cervelo and Cannondale for the bestbang-for-the-buck bike. You won’t find a purebred component package on the Seduza, but the blend of Shimano Ultegra and 105 goods is plenty reliable. No poor-performing Tektro crap here.
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
One highlight of the Seduza is the seatpost, with the modular rail clamp built on a rising track as the rail goes forward. This means as a saddle goes forward, it must go up in a matching arc, preventing knee issues going forward or lower back problems going back. There are two key redesigns for this year’s model: a dual seat stay and brake bridge, as is found on the top-end CD0.1, replaces the monostay of old, resulting in a stiffer (and as QR claims more aero) aft. The other redesign is specific to the typical Seduza buyer. QR increased headtube length, reducing the amount of spacers the user will have to use under the stem. While some deplore this taller front-end design, there’s no denying that what a more conservative aerobar position costs in aerodynamics it repays in comfort. The Seduza frame itself is solid, and a bit heavy compared to other bikes in its class, but considering that it’s not meant for Alpine switchbacks, it’s not a major ding. On flat to rolling riding, the weight penalty was negligible. Steering—in or out of the aerobars—exhibited no touchiness, which is often a major problem with mid-tier bikes. You could spend three or four times the money but you’ll be hard pressed to get three or four times the bike. LAVA
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028 : TECH FEATURE :
THERE ARE THREE POSSIBLE ROADS TO RUIN:— WOMEN, GAMBLING AND TECHNOLOGY. THE MOST PLEASANT IS WITH WOMEN, THE QUICKEST IS WITH GAMBLING, BUT THE SUREST IS WITH TECHNOLOGY. —Georges Pompidou The folder sits like a slab—nearly three-quarters of an inch thick. It’s packed with reams of regulations. Approval protocol, printed PowerPoint displays. Preambles and definitions. Specifications and diagrams. In French and English. For Felt Bicycles senior design engineer Jeff Soucek, this nondescript black folder with the words “UCI Rules” typed across the top represents clarity. Not necessarily a huge breath of fresh air, but it’s something. “I honestly think the UCI is trying to find a good balance,” he said, gazing at the folder. Yes, it’s page after page of detail about restrictions. Yes, the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale, or International Cycling Union) recently put its foot down on several designs and forced some companies to scrap tens of thousands of dollars worth of frame molds. When paired with other decisions (a ban on the use of race radios most prominent among them) the UCI has gotten into the bad books of many who see the organization as trying to retard technological progress in the sport.
Cycling’s international governing body, the UCI, has been accused of obstructing progress in bike design technology with its heavyhanded execution of a recently updated rules charter. But is that ill will deserved? And how does it affect the bikes that triathletes ultimately buy? LAVA investigates. By Jay Prasuhn
DESIGN PRESSURE LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
: TECH FEATURE : 029
JAY PRASUHN
The Shiv, created by Specialized engineer Luc Callahan (right) and tunnel-proven by aero engineer Mark Cote (left) was one of several “super bikes” that helped force the UCI’s to re-establish bike design ground rules.
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030 : TECH FEATURE :
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the UCI wants a level playing field. By enforcing parity in bike design, small brands can compete with powerhouses like Trek or Specialized. And on an Olympic stage, an unsponsored Brazilian can fairly compete with a Cervelo P4-riding Dave Zabriskie. Such was the motive when the UCI created the Lugano Charter, the 1996 constitution of bike design, which established the “double-diamond” bike design as standard designing protocol. Gone were radical bikes like the Lotus, and radical positions like the Superman position pioneered by track cycling legend Graeme Obree. Gone too were the $70,000 GT Superbikes that earned two silver medals at the 1996 Athens Olympic Games. The rider, not the bike, would be the star. For years, the process for bike design approval was—by the standards of design engineers—vague. Longtime UCI technical advisor Jean Wauthier and technical coordinator GeorgesEmmanuel Denjean would receive production bikes, apply what amounted to a squint through one eye past an extended thumb, and give ’er a thumbs-up. So long as the bike adhered to a traditional double-diamond design and wasn’t an egregious affront, it passed muster. Apart from using jigs to ensure rider position aboard the bike was legal, the bikes themselves were approved under unclear rules. For engineers who live in a world of black and white, the charter’s grey area at that point was confusing. “We’d look at the rules and we couldn’t really interpret the meaning,” Soucek said. “We had a hard time getting hold of them to discuss it, so in the end, we ended up under-engineering the bikes, just to be sure we were safe. We weren’t sure we could push it.” But beginning in 2008, some did. Former Formula 1 auto racing engineer Simon Smart worked with the Highroad pro cycling team to help Giant develop a TT bike that would debut with plenty of interest at the 2008 Tour de France. The bike (which today is marketed to triathletes as the Trinity) featured a prominent nose cone that extended well in front of the head tube, creating a long, aero leading edge. Up to that point, the bayonet front ends that Felt and LOOK were running had been the most advanced leading edges on a frame, but with these new “super bike” designs making starts at the Tour, some engineers followed suit. But the fortnight of the 2010 Volta ao Algarve time trial marked a change—the first heavy drop of the UCI’s hammer. The night before the
de
AS THE INTERNATIONAL GOVERNING BODY FOR CYCLING,
TT, Alberto Contador’s Specialized Shiv was deemed illegal. The issues were material reinforcement between the head tube and down tube, which provided extra stability and aerodynamics, and an aero nose cone. Specialized contended that the nosecone was a structural fairing, and not aerodynamic. But the UCI wasn’t buying it and Contador instead rode a Specialized Transition—the tri-specific bike that Chris McCormack rode to a Hawaii Ironman world title in 2008—while Specialized design engineer Luc Callahan, the creator of the Shiv, had to hastily create a UCI-legal version of the bike. Never mind the UCI’s rejection of the Venge, a bike that debuted this year—a year later than planned. “What folks don’t know is we actually had two bikes banned then,” Specialized aerodynamics engineer Mark Cote said. “The Venge was complete and had similar design elements as seen on the Shiv—and the UCI shut that down. So we had to scrap the whole project. It gave us a chance to reinvest and improve, but we lost a year launching the Venge.” Callahan was frustrated. “I don’t think the UCI had ever considered that type of design,” Callahan said of the Shiv’s nose cone. “It wasn’t in the rule book and as a result, they said, ‘All these things, they’re out.’ What’s been hard is the lack of clarity. As an engineer, it’s easy to design when you have a clear set of guidelines, but when you’re not sure, it’s difficult. If I had one gripe, that was it.” The ruling would set into motion a new set of rules. Specialized wasn’t the only offender. Giant had to remove the nose cone and reconfigure the front end of the Trinity for its ProTour-sponsored team, Rabobank. Riders using certain 3T aerobars had to stick mao pr p terial to the top of the base bar to artificially Ia UC adjust the aspect ratio while 3T engineer Richw e en Th ard McAinsh scrambled to create a new UCI-legal aerobar. While Specialized and Giant were still able to market their “illegal” bikes to triathletes, Felt scrapped its summarily banned version of the DA with its 1 mm curve in the down tube—because of costs. Only Felt-sponsored pro triathletes Terenzo Bozzone, David Thompson, Michellie Jones and Tim DeBoom rode the illegal DA in triathlon. “We had to eat it, and we had to eat it big,” said Felt marketing manager Doug Martin. “To think that the DA debuted at the Tour de France, then suddenly, we were out two molds and all the sales from them.” “I think that was it—the UCI saw all these bikes and said, ‘All right, that’s enough: they’ve pushed it too far,’” Soucek said. “It was frustrating, because we’d taken that bike and the drawings to them before and they said, ‘it’s good.’ Suddenly, a new guy comes in and says, ‘no.’” The days of fudging the rules were over. New rules would be put in place with new processes, all revolving around a “UCI Approved” sticker. va l
At the moment, the Swiss-based UCI is being raked over the coals regarding the omission of race radios for safety reasons and its antidoping protocol. But as for bike technology, a deeper understanding of the backstory is in order. First off, the Wild West that is bike design has a new sheriff, and his name is Julien Carron. And despite recent venom directed at the UCI, the industry is convinced that the situation—and the bikes that triathletes ultimately buy—may be better for it. “I think there’s enough room for creativity in these rules that people can make distinctive bikes,” Soucek said. “If you look at those within UCI mandates, they don’t look cookie-cutter. There’s enough leeway to give companies identity, but enough regulation to keep them from running wild.”
BIKE DESIGN HAS A NEW WORLD ORDER.
Beginning this year, technical drawings must be submitted to the UCI in Aigle, Switzerland for approval. Once accepted, manufacturers may submit a preproduction sample. The process includes official inspection by the UCI’s agent, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Geneva, Switzerland, with a mandatory final approval of prototypes before permission is given
sportswear designed for athletes
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032 : TECH FEATURE :
JAY PRASUHN
Felt Bicycles engineers Jeff Soucek (left) and Ty Buckenberger discuss the current version of the DA from their Irvine, Calif., offices. Both are pleased to not only have a more concrete set of design parameters from the UCI, but also a communicative new UCI technical director in Julien Carron, an engineer by trade who is creating the Swiss federation’s new approval processes.
to race in UCI events. Once approved, it receives a decal, affixed under the clear coat. Bikes from 2010 and prior will be permitted via a grandfather clause, but 2011 bikes require UCI’s stamp of approval. The process will later evolve to include aerobars, wheels and apparel. When the new process was made public, it was poorly received. The fee of 12,000 Swiss Francs ($13,500) per frame size, per model was seen as a profit-driven move that would squeeze out small manufacturers. With several manufacturers retaining upwards of six or seven sizes per model, each bike model approved would run over $80,000—not including Swiss taxes. Multiply that by the models in a company’s line to be ridden by a ProTour team, from time trial bikes to road bikes to aero road bikes, and the figures skyrocket. The new fees, compounded by decades of poor communication between the UCI and the manufacturers, spurred the creation of an industry group—called the World Federation of Sporting Goods Industry (WFSGI), representing a singular unified front to voice concerns to the UCI. With a membership including Argon 18, BMC, Cannondale, Cervelo, Scott, Specialized, Felt, Fuji, Giant, Nike, Ridley, Shimano, Specialized, SRAM, Trek, and Zipp, it has serious clout. Realizing the cost implications to the industry after talks with the WFSGI, the UCI quickly did an about-face, reducing the cost to 5,000 Swiss Francs ($5,650) per frame size. And an eyebrow-raiser: the industry had never seen such direct dialogue with the UCI’s technical team. Much of the paradigm shift for the UCI occurred when it hired Julien Carron, a former engineer, as technical director. For manufacturers, sweeping out the old guard was a godsend. Carron inherited a broken process, but seemed in his first year to be trying to do right by the industry. “The real meaning of cycling for the UCI is to bring riders together to compete on an equal footing and decide which of them is physically the LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
best, and it’s sometimes difficult to differentiate the rider’s performance from the emergence of new technologies. It’s the role of the UCI to place the limit somewhere in between,” Carron told LAVA. “We’re not against innovation and technological advancement, but we want to eliminate unequal access to technology, radical innovations prepared in secret, a fait accompli policy, damage to the image of cycling sport and the credibility of performances. We want to come closer to the industry and work with the manufacturers to avoid any surprise during races.” Upon hire, Carron began clarifying rules. “The climate has calmed, has become so much more agreeable,” said Ty Buckenberger, design engineer at Felt Bicycles. “A year ago, everyone hated the UCI, but it’s better now.” Callahan at Specialized agreed. “To the UCI’s credit, it’s really invested in its technical team. They’re working on making the guidelines clear—that’s what the industry needs.” Regardless, the new approval sticker seems like a dissuading element for a company hoping to see its star rise on the sponsorship of a ProTour team. Would this added approval expense effectively serve the big brands like Trek and Specialized, who can incur the cost, while preventing the little guy like Argon 18 from becoming the next Cervelo? Callahan thinks so. “Those guys are as much a part of the industry as bike companies like Specialized are,” he said. “I think it’s going to be bad for them.” Others think that’s not necessarily true, stating that it’s already hard enough to get onto the big stage. “From the UCI side of things, those small companies simply have to contend with larger budgets, somewhere around two to three million dollars—plus bikes—just to get onto a ProTour team, and it goes way up from there,” said Quintana Roo marketing manager Mac McEneaney.
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034 : TECH FEATURE : “It’s just a whole different animal. The approval process would only add to it.” Felt’s Martin agreed. “The cost of frame approval is minor compared to what it actually costs to fund and run a team, whether it’s a Continental team or a ProTour team.” Certainly, the UCI’s collective actions of the last year were enough to cause mutterings of a UCI breakaway faction, with a new pro race series independent of the UCI. “We were like, ‘Wow—that would be interesting,” Martin said. “Would manufacturers and teams tired of the UCI go for this and suddenly enjoy making bikes without the UCI’s limitations?’” Perhaps—but they’re not likely to take action, because the UCI holds all the aces. Those rebel teams wouldn’t get to take part in key UCIpartnered events, the biggest media draws being the Tour de France, and the UCI’s other major partnership: the Olympic Games. Even if there were a rules split and a new governing body emerged with a no-holds-barred policy on frame design, Soucek believes that freedom could backfire, forcing brands to abandon frame molds that manufacturers typically use for a few years to recoup costs. The Trek Speed Concept would be trashed after just a year in favor of the next big thing. “If it’s wide open, everyone’s going to be throwing stuff out there, which is going to force brands to develop a bike every year instead of every two or three years, and that’d definitely drive costs up,” he said.
DOES TRIATHLON FUND THE UCI’S MISSION?
Perhaps it’s Carron’s myopic viewpoint or lack of understanding about the disciplines within multisport that makes him think that triathletes (at least those outside an Olympic-recognized governing body) aren’t affected by the rules. “From a triathlete’s standpoint, this approval procedure will not change anything as it only involves the road, track and cyclo-cross frames,” Carron said. “The regulations for triathlon equipment are completely different than for the other categories as this sport is not governed by the UCI, but by the International Triathlon Union.” To be fair, Carron is busy enough trying to resurrect a convoluted rulebook, much less staying up to task on multisport’s varying disciplines and governing bodies. But triathletes are indeed riding UCI-affected bikes, in spades. There aren’t any hard demographic figures on just who buys TT/tri bikes and what discipline they intend to use their purchase in, but many manufacturers estimate that up to 85 percent of TT frames sold are used strictly for triathlon. But there is some doubt about what creates a sale, beyond magazine reviews and white papers. Is it Chris Lieto or Fabian Cancellara on your T.V. while you’re doing trainer workouts? More often than not, it’s Cancellara. “We’re in road racing, and we know it’s a one-way mirror on road racing influencing triathlon,” Martin said. “We may sell more units on the tri side, but road drives those sales.” While it appears evident that manufacturers know which side their bread is buttered on, it’s still curious, looking at tri forums, that those same age-group tri buyers are needlessly concerned about UCI regulations, to the point that it affects sales. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Carron was right on one thing: Triathletes are only held to their own rules, be they individual national federations (USA Triathlon, Triathlon Australia, etc.) or those of an event organizer (World Triathlon Corporation, Rev3 or Challenge). “Our measures may not be necessary for triathlon equipment, as their regulations are less complicated,” Carron said. Simply stated, triathletes won’t be seeing the WTC or USA Triathlon officials banning bikes for design rules infractions. Those governing bodies have greater focus on safety regulations,
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particularly regarding certified helmet use and bar-end plugs. And even those checks are a rare prerace process, save for apex events like the Hawaii Ironman. “I’ve done a couple 70.3s and Ironmans, and have never had my bike checked, never had a tech inspection at a triathlon,” said Matt Bigos, a para-triathlete and world championship-level para-cyclist. Bigos’ experience is unique; as a triathlete, he can ride anything he wishes. But as a roadie, it’s a different story, and he has to consider the equipment he shows up with at a time trial start house. At the UCI Paracycling World Championships time trial last year, four of Bigos’ American teammates lined up with the same Easton Attack TT aerobar. Three were waved through by different commissaires. But the fourth was held up and made to hastily affix a rag to his aerobar with electrical tape to artificially increase the bar’s aero aspect ratio. “As a paralympic athlete, I’m one of a very few people who has to pay attention to being on UCI-legal bikes and bars,” he said. “But I find it funny when I hear triathletes worrying about if they can run this or that. I guess they don’t get that it doesn’t apply to them.” Perhaps the misguided concern is based on perception that someone will have to pay for that UCI Approved sticker on their frame. And if most consumers are triathletes, they’ll be the ones paying. But as Martin said, the cost won’t be significant enough to be considered a pass-along. “You’re not going to see bikes go up by a percent because of this,” Martin said. “If anything, our process got easier. It’s more defined, so the trial and error part of it is now gone. That was the most costly part of the process. We’d wonder if it was going to be cleared, and if you got it wrong, the trashing of the process—that was more expensive than anything the new process could match.”
ENJOYING THE SHOW.
For all the rules drama, the brands sitting back with huge grins are Ceepo, Valdora, Quintana Roo, Kestrel and TitanFlex, who have zero interest in catering to the UCI racing crowd, thus designing outside UCI mandates. This subset is happy to focus on one sport—triathlon. Titanium beams, single-stay frames and tubesets beyond a three-to-one aspect ratio? Go big or go home. “We’ve come out with the CD0.1 and we have the Project Illicito that debuts shortly with a single chainstay,” said Quintana Roo’s McEneaney. “We can build the best tri bike, period, without compromising. If we want to spec a certain aerobar or use a tube shape or design, we can do it. And because we’re not shelling out six-figure salaries for riders, we have the ability to price our bikes better for the consumer.” In the end, the buyers are still winning, rules or no rules. They can choose the unregulated bike, or a damn good UCI-legal ride. How much better could UCI-approved bikes be if the governors were lifted? Manufacturers say a bit, but the gains made these days, and differences from brand to brand—UCI-regulated or not—are fractional. “The differences between frame elements are gains of 10 grams, and just moving your head on the bike is 100 grams,” Soucek said. “You just have to look at the whole picture.” In the meantime, the industry and the UCI seem to be finding a common ground. “I’m happy now; now we know the rules, we can push the limits,” Soucek said. By the same token, the UCI seems dedicated to being a part of the solution. “We’re convinced that the base of our regulations is good and fair,” Carron said. “We only need to clarify some points and stay informed on innovations. After that, we feel we’re giving enough freedom to the manufacturers for design individualization.” LAVA
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036 : PRO FILE :
SADDLE: SPECIALIZED TOUPE, 135MM
NAME: Jan Frodeno
WHEELSET: ZIPP 404 ZEDTECH
BIRTHDATE: 8/18/81 AGE: 29 HEIGHT: 6’3 WEIGHT: 167 lbs. RESIDENCE: Saarbrücken, Germany WEAPON: Specialized Tarmac SL3 LTD, 61cm
CASSETTE: SRAM Black RED 11-23
GROUPSET: SRAM Black RED
ATHLETE LOGISTICS: The reigning Olympic gold medalist recently joined the growing Specialized cadre LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
: PRO FILE : 037
COCKPIT: SPECIALIZED S-WORKS STEM,110 MM; SPECIALIZED S-WORKS SL CARBON HANDLEBAR, CLASSIC BEND, 44CM
TIRES: CONTINENTAL COMPETITION 700X 22
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PEDALS: LOOK KEO CARBON
CRANKSET: SRAM RED 175MM -53-39
that includes fellow ITU athletes Tim Don and Javier Gomez and is run by former Irish ITU pro Bobby Behan. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
038 : REVIEWED :
NINETEEN FREQUENCY By Jay Prasuhn
$600 Nineteenwetsuits.com
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Perhaps Nineteen’s grassroots brand success is a result of founder Steve Fleck’s experience. He’s often on the ground at events with a demo program that has increasingly seen athletes entering waters from Penticton to Panama City in Nineteen suits. I open water demoed Nineteen’s top-level offering, the Frequency. What I discovered during my test of the Frequency was that Fleck certainly knows what the lion’s share of consumers want and need. What would constitute that “lion’s share”? While comparatively few triathletes come to the sport from swimming, many triathletes come from running or biking. And those athletes (when compared to swimmers) have weaker kicks in proportion to their upper-body pull. They’re still sorting out body balance in the water. I should know; coming from bike racing, I’m one of them.With most of my propulsion coming from a strong pull, I kick very little, and my four-beat kick is used primarily to help initiate body rotation. Nineteen has engineered a suit for just this type of swimmer. The Frequency has a standard downward zipper release, with a creative solution to keep the leash handy when exiting the water: the Leash Locker. A small neoprene pocket near the zipper houses the pre-packed leash. Not only is it protected from being pulled on by other swimmers in the race chaos, but by leaving a finger-length of leash exposed, it’s easy to find when you’re dashing onto the shore. In a mock swim exit, I discovered that it really works. Race day, it’ll provide nice peace of mind. The star of the show, however, is the back. Not just one rear panel, but the entire back. Most brands we found (some priced $150 higher than the Frequency) don’t run as much ultra-thin, stretchy 1.5 mm rubber across the back as Nineteen’s Wingspan System does. This year with the Frequency, Nineteen extended the 1.5 mm coverage from across the back and lats and lateral rib line to include the shoulders and upper sleeves. Few non-custom wetsuits have that much 1.5 mm rubber. Pair with a flexy, new inner jersey lining, and the suit provided excellent range of motion. There’s no forearm catch panel, but it’s not really necessary; your ability to hold an unrestricted high elbow through a one-hour swim is the Frequency’s selling point. At below-peak fitness, I found that even with lightly fatigued arms, there was minimal resistance from the suit. I could continue to swim strong, with good form, late in the swim. This isn’t to say the Frequency is the right suit for every triathlete. Those with a swimming background will appreciate the free upperbody mobility, but will likely prefer a 4 mm lower leg for less lower-body buoyancy, and a more flexible leg for less kick restriction with a six-beat kick.
Check out Craig and Team Road ID www.RoadID.com/Team
040 : WORKBENCH :
GET PERSONAL WITH YOUR SADDLE It’s not about the nose, the cutout or the groove—it’s about you. By Mark Deterline
If you take only two things from this article, we hope they are the following: You need not suffer numbness or severe discomfort on a bike saddle to excel at triathlon. You need not switch to one specific type of saddle to find relief.
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SAMMY TILLERY
Caption for all 3 goes here..... Fi’zi:k recently added a relief indentation down the length of the Arione in its Versus subset of saddles.
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
ast season my cycling team scheduled several long weekend rides (90–105 miles) as training for upcoming races. Some teammates had rarely logged that kind of volume in a single day, and it was educational for them on multiple levels. Saddle comfort was one thing a number of them learned the hard way. Our team saddle sponsor specialized in narrow-nose, split-structure designs. The men were the first to be converted, but our women’s squad captain, NorCal District Road Race Champion Susannah Breen, had finally found relief from less comfortable, male-centric designs and was getting the women on them as well. Looking around on that ride, we could see that both the sponsorship and our longing for all-day comfort had won over most of the team. As a longtime user of narrow-nosed ergonomic saddles, I feel comfortable touting their benefits because there is a need for balanced discussion. Saddle preference, like one’s beliefs or values, is personal. There is no single correct style, which is why we see so many different saddle styles in transition. Breen and I have tested numerous models from many of today’s most prominent saddle lines, including ISM, Fi’zi:k, SMP, Specialized and Cobb Cycling. Most of the manufacturers I consulted acknowledged that there is always room for improvement, as continued research and rider feedback fuel further innovation. Only ISM seemed convinced that its wide, noseless designs are completely dialed in. Which is understandable: ISM boasts several
CHRISSIE WELLINGTON CHRIS McCORMACK CRAIG ALEXANDER TERENZO BOZZONE H E AT H E R J A C K S O N ANDY POTTS DEDE GRIESBAUER CHRIS LIETO LUKE McKENZIE MAGALI TISSEYRE M AT T Y R E E D JOE GAMBLES H I L L A R Y B I S C AY CAMERON BROWN CAIT SNOW JULIE DIBENS LUKE BELL TOM LOWE MICHAEL WEISS CAROLINE STEFFEN CHRIS LEGH KIM LOEFFLER SAM WARRNER R E B E K A H K E AT ETHAN BROWN ALEX McDONALD CHRIS McDONALD RUTGER BEKE a n d m a n y m o re. . .
042 : WORKBENCH :
The Prologo Nago Evo Tri 40 represents a typical triathlon saddle with a thicker nose for aero riding.
sit on the front end as they would the edge of a chair, which puts pressure on the lower glutes and upper hamstrings. Apparently this is a worthwhile trade for some. ISM does tend to enable triathletes to rotate their pelvis forward in an aerodynamic position without placing too much weight on their most tender areas. It’s something that aero expert John Cobb has been preaching for decades: For optimal power and efficiency, riders must rotate their hips forward, and to maintain a pelvis-forward position they must be comfortable. And while Cobb was actually involved in the development of the original ISM Adamo designs, he has diverged from the noseless path, opting for a series of nosed models that each represent a unique solution.
SAMMY TILLERY
SUPPORT AND FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT. For Breen and I, the wide front portion
high-profile advocates—including professional athletes and bike fitters—who insist that only an ISM can resolve certain issues. For female tester Breen and I, ISM models were not an ideal fit. Like Newton Running shoes, an ISM saddle either works for you or it doesn’t. In a telephone interview with ergonomics expert Dr. Roger Minkow, R&D, consultant for Specialized’s Body Geometry designs, we discussed the issue of nosed vs. noseless sadLAVAMAGAZINE.COM
dles. Although both ISM and Specialized have consulted with acclaimed urologist Dr. Frank Sommer at the University of Cologne, Germany, their respective approaches to saddle development are drastically different. Minkow reinforced Breen’s and my experience with noseless saddles. Yes, they definitely take pressure off genital soft tissue in both women and men. However, the front of the ISM saddle is so wide that riders tend to
of ISM models puts too much pressure on the inner thigh, cutting off circulation and eventually causing lower-back pain. Minkow claims that 15 percent of triathletes complain of back pain at any given time, and that 75 percent of triathletes will experience significant back pain at some point. The worldwide success of Fi’zi:k’s narrow-nosed saddles over the past 10 years is a testament to the validity of their front-end designs, while the continued growth of SMP in the road and mountain bike markets is further evidence that a slimmer front end works better for some. Obviously, it’s not solely the narrow nose of the SMP design that makes it unique. Minkow’s Romin saddle has adopted similar, albeit less dramatic, lines. Minkow explains that in order to promote and enable proper pelvic rotation, thereby alleviating lower-back strain, the rear of the saddle should be raised. This is especially true for triathletes looking for comfort while maintaining an aerodynamic position. Fi’zi:k has resisted the trend toward noseless, cutout and split-saddle designs, banking instead on full-surface support by accommodating a rider’s ischial tuberosities (aka sit bones) once the pelvis is actually rotated into the ideal riding position. Suzette Ayotte, Fi’zi:k’s North American Marketing Manager, explains that sit bone width actually narrows as a rider assumes an aerodynamic position, an issue that is addressed by the brand’s popular tri line of saddles. Fi’zi:k had 510 saddles on the pier in Kona last year, the most of any
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The unconventional ISM Adamo TT has a design that promotes pelvic tilt.
In other words, pressure on soft tissue and the resulting restriction in blood flow cause discomfort or numbness, which can eventually lead to nerve damage. Herein lies the risk of the “no pain, no gain” mentality many of us share as endurance athletes. There is a difference between exertional discomfort and biomechanical dysfunction—the latter is never good! Pressure mapping in its various forms enables researchers to determine where and to what extent a rider’s anatomy is coming into contact with a saddle. Cobb and Minkow, in addition to a number of other researchers, have spent plenty of time carving away saddle material until pressure is removed from undesired areas. Cobb also explains that he measures surface temperature changes around a rider’s seat region to establish what effect changes in saddle shape and positioning have on a rider’s body.
SAMMY TILLERY
STRUCTURE VS. PADDING. According to
manufacturer by more than 150, and a testament to ongoing popularity of saddles with a “conventional” nose.
BLOOD FLOW AND PRESSURE MAPPING. Which brings us to the salient part of our discussion. We’ve heard what lies beneath the immediate discomfort, potentially leading to serious, long-term consequences, such as perineal nerve damage. We’re hearing increasingly about cycling potentially causing damLAVAMAGAZINE.COM
age to the superficial perineal artery and the system that feeds it, the internal pudendal artery. Steve Toll of ISM summarizes: “The perineal area is a section of the body that was not designed to be sat upon. It is an area void of skeletal structure to support the weight of the human body. The area is home to the pudendal nerve and the pudendal artery. The pudendal nerve acts as an early warning system to alert the rider to potential problems in the area. This warning is numbness.”
Minkow, focusing too much on padding or soft spots, however, has its drawbacks. “The thicker or softer the padding, the more your pelvis sinks into it, reducing blood flow,” he explains. Virtually all manufacturers emphasize proper width in the rear of the saddle as a key component of comfort and ergonomics. Specialized even supplies its dealers with a simple Body Geometry measuring pad, affectionately known in some circles as the “Assometer,” to determine the distance between a rider’s sit bones. Again, Ayotte advises riders to assess this width in their actual riding position, and cites Fi’zi:k’s Spine Concept, which pairs saddle shape with spinal flexibility, as a good place to start. In a less pronounced fashion than SMP designs, the Specialized Romin features a dipped nose and a channel that extends through the entire front end. Fi’zi:k’s new Versus series features “relief zone” channels added to their top-selling Arione, Antares and Aliante designs to further reduce pressure on sensitive areas. Regardless of how many different saddles you experiment with (and we encourage you to try as many varieties as possible), the right saddle will never feel right without the right fit. “The bike must be fit to the rider!” stresses Minkow. “If the top tube is too long, you’ll compress arteries and nerves when seated. If the saddle is too high, you’ll rock back and forth on it. Cycling is a sport of countless repetitions—multiply improper fit by innumerable repetitive moves and you have a biomechanical nightmare,” he concludes. LAVA
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FIRST CLASS SEATING Of a rider’s three contact points on the bike, the saddle is the most intimate, so selecting the best seat for you is personal. We’ve highlighted seven new seats that can help you find long-ride nirvana. By Jay Prasuhn
Prologo Nago Evo Tri 40 $269; Prologotouch.com With an ample, flattened nose, the Evo Tri 40 has slightly raised tactile ribs to help keep you from sliding fore and aft. It’s finished around carbon, Kevlar and an aluminum filament-wrapped rail.
Bontrager inFormTT $130; Bontrager.com Debuting this season, the TT was based on Bontrager’s original Inform RXL saddle that was developed for Lance Armstrong. A short, wide oversized gel and foam saddle nose has a no-slip texture to keep you in place while in the aerobars.
Specialized Romin Pro $160; Specialized.com With six width options and set atop carbon rails, the Romin Pro has an upswept aft, keeping riders forward, and a wide, blunt nose and accompanying wide channel for uninterrupted perennial blood flow. ISM Adamo Time Trial $225; Ismseat.com The newest saddle in the ISM line has a slightly sloping nose through its 245mm length, but the new twist is the narrower aft, allowing for more aggressive positioning with less inner thigh restriction at the bottom of the pedal stroke.
Fi’zi:k Arione Versus $149; Fizik.it The new Versus line (also available in the Aliante and Antares) adds a visible pressure relief channel down the length of the saddle midline. The flat front-to-back profile makes it as great for climbing as aerobar riding.
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Selle San Marco Aspide TT $249; Sellesanmarco.com A thick, domed and slightly sloping nose and a swept tail encourage a cush ride on the front third. Light BioFoam and carbon-wrapped aluminum rails get it down to a feathery 150 grams.
Cobb Cycling SHC170 $190; Cobbcycling.com Set on ti rails, the SHC170 opts for a narrow nose, complimented by a wide, flat aft that helps distribute weight over the perineum. Cobb’s signature aft allows for increased inner thigh clearance through the pedal stroke.
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VERTICAL COMPLIANCE 101 In pursuit of the perfect ride, start where the rubber meets the road. By Jordan Rapp
JAY RRASUHN
S
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uspension might seem like an odd topic for a triathlon magazine, unless of course the focus was on XTERRA racing, which isn’t the case here. But road (and tri) bikes do have suspension. Unlike a mountain bike, which uses a specific, purpose-built module (like a shock) for suspension, a road or tri bike’s suspension is a combination of characteristics of the frame, wheels and tires. On a mountain bike, suspension is simply called “suspension,” but on a road bike it’s usually referred to as “vertical compliance.” Vertical compliance—the ability of the tire, wheel, frame and fork to deform in the vertical plane—is generally viewed as a good thing, because it helps absorb bumps in the road. Lateral compliance—where the same system flexes left to right (along the horizontal plane)—is a bad thing, as the road can’t really transmit force to the bike laterally, but the rider can (and does) transmit a significant amount of lateral force to the bike due to the asymmetric nature of pedaling. Lateral stiffness is a major “sex appeal” feature of bikes. It’s usually broken down into torsional stiffness (the ability of the frame to resist twisting) and bottom bracket stiffness (the ability of the bottom bracket to keep from moving left to right as you pedal). Weekend warriors love to hear about the latest improvements in frame stiffness, and I have lost count of the number of recreational riders who have told me that they need a stiff frame because they generate a lot of power. Stiffness sells, but vertical compliance should sell too, because it can be an even more significant factor when it comes to speed. Vertical compliance provides benefits in two ways. The first is the obvious one. Imagine a small pebble on the road. Let’s say it’s 1 mm in diameter. On a bike with no vertical compliance whatsoever, you and your bike would have to ride up and over that pebble. To move you up that 1 mm requires overcoming gravity. Imagine it as a very small hill. And, just as with bigger hills, when you come down you don’t get back what you put in to go up. A single 1 mm pebble would
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050 : RAPP REPORT : matic tires have been smoothing out the literal bumps on the road for over a century since then. But the exact benefit of that, aside from Dunlop’s son’s headaches going away, has rarely been examined, and the few studies that do exist have concluded something along the lines of, “there is something to this, but we need more research to quantify it.” There’s little doubt that vertical compliance increases rider comfort and should therefore increase speed over the long haul, but quantifying just how much speed would require much more than a single magazine article, so for the sake of this column, I’ll stick to the most tangible benefit of vertical compliance: the ability of equipment to deform around an object. With road bikes, striking a balance between vertical and lateral stiffness is a primary focus of the engineering team. Some companies even
By default of their tube set orientation, aero triathlon bikes have decreased vertical compliance, making optimal (not necessarily the highest) tire pressure important to improving ride quality and rolling resistance.
SAMMY TILLERY
WITH TIME TRIAL BIKES, AERODYNAMICS MOVE TO THE TOP OF THE PRIORITY LIST. AND EVERYTHING ELSE MOVES DOWN—WAY DOWN.
be no big deal. But now let’s imagine you are riding on a typical backcountry road—where the best riding is usually found. The little (and not so little) bumps start to add up. All those trips up and down slow you down. What vertical compliance does is allow the tires, wheels and bike to move up and down underneath you. Now, all of a sudden, you are squishing your tire around the pebble (best case scenario), or flexing the wheel and frame up and down underneath you. A loadLAVAMAGAZINE.COM
ed-down training bike only weighs 25 pounds on the high end; even for a featherweight rider, it’s much better to just move the bike up and down than to move both bike and rider. The second benefit of vertical compliance is more interesting but more nebulous. It has to do with the effect rough roads and vibration have on a rider. John Dunlop created the first pneumatic bicycle tire to help alleviate the headaches his son got from riding on rough roads, and pneu-
define entire model ranges by the way in which this balance is weighted. Specialized offers the Roubaix, with a focus on vertical compliance, and the Tarmac, with a focus on lateral stiffness. The Roubaix, with vertical deflection in the frame of as much as 6–8 mm depending on the frame size (when loaded with 250 pounds at the saddle), offers significantly more compliance than the Tarmac (only 2–4 mm of deflection under the same test). The goal with the Roubaix was to make the bike ride as if it had 30 pounds per square inch (psi) less pressure in the tires, according to Specialized’s road product manager, Mark Cote. When I asked about the Transition and the new Shiv, two of Specialized’s time trial bikes, Cote summed up the amount of deflection by saying, “basically, it’s just negligible.” And that’s true of triathlon bikes in general. The reason is that with time trial bikes, aerodynamics move to the top of the priority list. And everything else moves down—way down. Lateral stiffness is still really important, because these bikes get hammered out of the start house
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052 : RAPP REPORT : and coming into the finish line by pro tour riders, but vertical compliance takes a big hit for two reasons. One is that tubes with large major axes in the vertical plane are really good for aerodynamics. But those same airfoil tubes are really stiff vertically and really compliant laterally—which is exactly what you do not want in a bicycle. Since lateral stiffness is important, the tubes need to be stiffened up to resist the regular forces of pedaling, sprinting and climbing. At the same time, the bike needs to be kept relatively narrow to preserve sound aerodynamics. The end result, with most top triathlon frames, is a frame that offers excellent aerodynamics, enough lateral stiffness to handle the power of top pro cyclists, and virtually no vertical compliance. Add in the fact that you are giving up your body’s own internal suspension—the ability to flex your arms—by laying your body down on aerobars, and the effect is even more pronounced. Besides the advantage of being able to bend your arms to soak up rough roads, road bikes also enjoy an advantage over typical triathlon
bikes with regards to the compliance of their wheels. Zipp’s new 303, the wheel of choice of many ProTour teams for the often-bumpy Spring Classic races, are roughly 40 percent more compliant than a typical box-section rim with 32 spokes. Even as the frames may be getting stiffer vertically to increase aerodynamics, you still can rely on wheels to soak up a lot of road vibration and bumps. In technical terms, bikes and wheels have similar “spring rates,” according to Josh Poertner, head of Zipp’s engineering department. The frame can pick up some of the slack for wheels that are stiffer vertically (such as the deeper-section rims favored by many triathletes) or vice versa. But the deeper the wheel, the more stiff it becomes vertically. Just as with triathlon bikes, the vertical compliance of a disc wheel is close to nothing. Certain disc wheels use specific features to increase vertical compliance, but in general, compliance is an afterthought. HED’s Jet and Stinger discs feature a carbon skin laminated over a spoke wheel to increase vertical compliance, while Zipp’s Sub-
9 disc is built with a hollow, bulged outer section, to provide just a little “spring.” When it comes to the final part of the vertical compliance system—the tire—the same adage holds true: narrower is faster, aerodynamically speaking. But there is still a great deal of vertical compliance to be had in even the narrowest tire. One of the nicest things about the compliance of a tire is that a tire’s spring rate is an order of magnitude lower than that of a wheel or frame, according to Poertner. That means that your tire is going to be the first line of defense against rough roads, even with a compliant frame and wheelset. A very narrow race tire (18 or 19 mm) can still compress almost 2 cm before bottoming out on the rim. Of course, this would likely lead to a pinch flat, but it’s important to realize just how much compliance your tires can provide when they need to. Wolf vorm Walde, the senior product manager for tires at Specialized, asked that I emphasize that the maximum pressure (what’s printed on the sidewall of most tires) is not the same
CFM< D< K<E;<I John Cobb’s narrow rear saddle designs free up your hamstrings and allow your pelvis to rotate forward for more comfort, efficiency and power.
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: RAPP REPORT : 053 as the recommended pressure. Recommended pressure, unfortunately, is a lot harder to figure out: it depends on rider weight, road conditions, weather and, of course, tire width. For a 23 mm tire, Vorm Walde estimated that a typical “all around” pressure would range from 95 psi for a light woman (roughly 120 pounds) to 125 psi for a heavier man (roughly 200 pounds). Even to get those numbers, however, I had to twist Vorm Walde’s arm. He was really resistant to giving a formula. He did say that even for narrow tires, at pressures higher than 130 psi you no longer see improvements in rolling resistance, as the tire starts to “push out” rather than willingly deforming. For a wider tire, you can run lower pressures, but aerodynamics are affected, even on the newer generation rims that are designed to minimize the aerodynamic penalty of wide tires. There is a common misconception that wider rims are optimized for wider tires, meaning wider tires are faster on those rims. Even on something as “fat” as the new Zipp Firecrest wheels (with a rim width of 26.5 mm for the
82 mm-deep 808), the fastest tire is still a 21 mm tire. The aerodynamic penalty for running a 23 mm tire is much less than on the older, narrower Zipp rims, but it’s still there. Yet again, there is no simple formula. But with vertical compliance largely eliminated from the rest of the bike, the tire is the last area you have for optimization of this important part of the system. The more you can rely on your tires to absorb imperfections in the road, the faster you will be. Allowing a tire to deform around road imperfection is much more efficient than getting bounced around by them. The internal losses from the tire changing shape and the friction between the tire and tube are much less than what it’d cost you to move up and over a small imperfection in the road. While there is no one right tire for all, learning to tune your tire pressure based on your weight and tire width can indeed get you to the finish faster. Vorm Walde emphasized that the most important aspect for an athlete to consider is the specific application of the tire. Balancing flat
protection, aerodynamics, grip and durability is ultimately up to the individual. Some folks want the fastest tire possible and are willing to risk more flats. Others want the very best flat protection and a tire that will last for an entire season. Neither choice is right or wrong, as long as it is an educated decision. The second most important choice an athlete can make with regards to tires, according to Vorm Walde, is what pressure to run. “What feels slowest is often the fastest because you simply roll over everything,” he said. So get out your stopwatches and floor pumps. Your next PR may only be a few psi away. LAVA
Jordan Rapp received his B.S.E. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2002. As a professional triathlete, he is able to work as a true field engineer for the product development teams at Specialized Bicycle Components and Zipp Speed Weaponry. When not riding his bike, he can be found behind his laptop fulfilling his duties as the Chief Technology Officer for Slowtwitch.com.
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machine thedream
By Susan Grant Legacki
Photograpy by Donald Miralle
I
t’s morning in the Wurtele household, which, naturally, means it’s time to turn on the propane tank. Trevor Wurtele, 32, Canadian professional triathlete and husband to 2010 Ironman St. George champion and fellow Canadian pro Heather Wurtele, 31, steals out of bed past his barely awake wife, throws on a jacket and heads out the front door. It’s so quiet outside I can hear the gravel crunch under his feet as he makes his way to the tank. Once back inside, Trevor, an admitted coffee snob, turns on a burner and sets his steaminfusion coffee kettle on the stove. The smell of strong java and warm almond milk fills the room. Their cat, Manah, unfurls herself from my pillow and takes a seat at Trevor’s feet, meowing for her breakfast.
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This is the beginning of nearly every morning at the Wurtele household. Simple. Routine. Until a semi’s horn blows in the distance and I remember that we are at a truck stop somewhere outside Las Vegas in a tiny RV the Wurteles have called home for two and a half years. I also remember that the fold-out bed I’m sleeping in doubles as the dining table—so I’d better get up if we’re going to have breakfast. The Wurtele home, a Triple E
This RV, along with a small trailer, holds the entirety of the couple ’s belongings. Regal Class C RV, isn’t one of those penthouse-on-wheels behemoths you see music stars rolling around in on tour. At roughly 23 feet long (including the RV’s front driving space) and just under eight and a half feet wide, Team Wurtele’s living accommodations are smaller than many other professional triathletes’ garages. At 6 feet 3 inches and 6 feet 2 inches, respectively, Trevor and Heather aren’t exactly built for compressed living, but they admit they’ve had their lives on wheels for so long they will find it difficult to go back to a stationary existence. Make no mistake— this isn’t Robinson Crusoe. The basic necessities are accounted for: bed, toilet, shower (which they really don’t use and instead have turned into additional closet space), kitchenette and dining area. This RV, along with a small trailer they tow behind them that contains their bikes and a scooter for short trips, holds the entirety of the couple’s belongings. “We sold or gave away pretty much everything,” says Heather. “It was freeing to just purge ourselves of all the things we didn’t need and just go for it.”
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The idea of “just going for it” and starting a nomadic existence could have easily been one of those impulsive decisions couples make and then almost immediately regret—like getting matching tattoos. But there’s a method to the Wurtele madness, a kind of optimism mixed with blind determination and thirst for adventure that they both share. To put it simply, they’ve found focus where others would only see chaos. “We had a smooth life before,” says Heather. “And I think we were both just left wondering ‘is this all our life is?’ It was about a total commitment to the highest performance we are capable of. We literally and figuratively got rid of all the extraneous crap in our lives. It’s not for everyone.” Back in 2008, Heather and Trevor were newly married and living in a condo in Vernon, British Columbia, balancing full-time jobs with training and racing professionally. Heather worked for Natural Resources Canada as a scientist, while Trevor worked as a currency trader. The Wurteles traveled down to Lake San Antonio, Calif., for the Wildflower Long Course triathlon, and had an “aha moment” that changed their lives forever. “We stayed the whole weekend with friends in an RV and it was just so much fun,” Heather says. “We looked at each other at the same time and just knew that we could live like this.” Without a mortgage, utility bills and other daily costs associated LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
with home ownership, they reasoned, they could quit their jobs and really make a go of it as professional triathletes. “It was either rent little places every place we go to train or just go for broke and buy an RV,” says Trevor. “We decided to go with the RV option.” A few months after Wildflower, Heather won her first Ironman in Coeur d’Alene, and they paid off Heather’s remaining student loans with the prize money and put their condo on the market. Trevor’s father helped them find a used RV on an online auction website, and they received an offer on their condo around the same time. By the end of 2008 they had downsized all of their belongings and made a plan to keep working for six months while living out of the RV until they had saved up enough money to hit the road in the spring. “Everything happened so fast, it was just like it was meant to be,” says Trevor.
“TREVOR, IF YOU TURN ANY HARDER WE’RE GOING TO JACKKNIFE,” says Heather calmly, staring in her rearview mirror. “It’ll be fine,” he replies, turning the wheel farther to the right as we try desperately to fit our traveling home into an awkwardly placed gas station near Barstow, Calif. We were bound for St. George, Utah, where Heather and Trevor would be staying for the next month in preparation
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When they pull into an RV park, they are often met with looks of bewilderment from the largely senior-citizen crowd. for Heather’s defense of her 2010 Ironman title in early May, and where Trevor would finish up his prerace training for Ironman 70.3 New Orleans. “You’re going to jackknife it,” she says again. Trevor stops the RV, looks in his mirror and smiles. “We’re going to make it.” Heather and I hold our breath, and I look up at Manah, who is sound asleep in her cat bed, which sits just above Trevor’s head on a storage shelf. We move forward a few feet. Then a few feet more. And then finally, we straighten out and slide in next to the pump. “See, I told you we would be fine,” declares Trevor, hopping out of the RV to pay for gas. “We’ve only jackknifed once,” says Heather. “And I wasn’t the one driving.” You acquire a certain set of skills living in an RV: Amazing abilities to secure any object to another object using bungee cords. An almost encyclopedic knowledge of the best RV parks, truck stops and cheap gas stations throughout the U.S. But probably the most useful tool you learn is the delicate art of parking. “The idea is to find a spot that is either free or cheap, and more than anything you want to find somewhere that’s quiet and yet large enough that you can easily get out,” says Trevor. He LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
boasts that during their first year on the road, they only paid for parking spots a handful of times. They spent a lot of time driving through small neighborhoods looking for places to park. “You never really relax that way though,” he says. “You’re always worried that someone’s going to knock on your door in the middle of the night and tell you to move.” Nowadays, the Wurteles still avoid the more expensive campsites, preferring a nice corner at a rest stop or the occasional truck stop. When they do pull into an RV park, they are often met with looks of bewilderment from the largely senior-citizen crowd. “I think they are really worried that we’re going to be these young, loud punks who party all night,” says Heather. “And of course, in reality we are the quietest—in bed by eight and up at the crack of dawn.” They do cause a stir when they whip out their trainers for a workout, but curious looks often lead to friendly conversations between the Wurteles and their parade of neighbors. “We’ve really learned never to judge anyone,” Heather says. “We’ve honestly met all kinds visiting these truck stops and RV parks, and, you know, you just can’t judge anyone until you get to know them.”
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Occasionally, however, they are the ones who are judged. Last year while seeking out a pool to swim in during a stay in Salt Lake City, they found a recreation center that was connected to a junior high school. The recreation center’s parking lot was small and unaccommodating for the Team Wurtele-mobile, but the junior high parking lot was practically empty, so they pulled right in and headed over to the pool. After swimming a few laps, Heather looked up and noticed the lifeguard was pointing her and Trevor out to a police officer. “I got out of the pool and proceeded to be grilled by this officer while I stood there dripping wet,” remembers Heather. “‘Where are you from? What type of athlete are you exactly? Why do you have a camper with the blinds pulled down parked at a junior high school?’ I explained that we had expensive bikes inside our RV that we didn’t want stolen, and that the bigger parking lot at the school was the only place we could fit the RV, but I’m still not sure he was buying it.” And there have been dark times. Like those first six months when they were living out of the RV up in British Columbia and still working. When the cold Canadian winter froze their plumbing pipes. And when it snowed so badly outside they had to set up their trainers inside the tiny two-and-a-half-foot-wide walkway of the RV and pump out two-hour workouts until the windows fogged up and they could barely breathe. “I’ll admit I felt vulnerable in here at first,” says Heather. “And LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
even now people are always offering us a room for a few nights, as if they think we need to be saved from this.” But while they enjoy visiting with friends and family for a few days, this is their home now, she says, and they don’t need or want to be saved.
LOVE’S #340 OFF HIGHWAY 15 IS THE FOUR SEASONS OF TRUCK STOPS. Free Wi-Fi inside the station, a smorgasbord of fast food delicacies and 20 different kinds of jerky. They even have showers. Still, like a pig wearing lipstick, a truck stop is still … well … a truck stop. And when the winds in the valley outside Vegas began to scream around 2 a.m., knocking the Regal around like a dinghy in a typhoon, I was initially convinced that a gang of thugs were making a very loud, clumsy attempt to break into Team Wurtele and hold us for ransom. I felt a warm bump next to me on my pillow and rolled over to see Manah, sleeping soundly beside my head. I calmed my frantic imagination down, and listened to the sounds of the wind batting against the aluminum windowpane. The Regal dipped gently back and forth, eventually lulling me back to sleep. “Yeah, that wind last night was crazy,” admitted Heather the next morning. “I love it though. Living in here gives you this closeness to the outside that you just don’t get in a regular house.” Okay, I’ve had about enough of this.
“No words can describe the experience. Only three digits.“
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064 : FEATURES What keeps Team Wurtele going without a complete marital implosion? I once took a cross-country road trip with a boyfriend and threatened to leave him at a rest stop outside Memphis. Had the gas card not been in his name, there’s a solid chance I would have. What is it about the Wurteles that makes them genuinely enjoy living and training out of a 23-foot trailer on wheels? In order to find out, I went straight to the source—I talked to their parents. Linda Danforth, Heather’s mother, is so upbeat and proud of her daughter that Heather says during the last few miles of her marathon in St. George last year, Danforth ran up and down the course informing everyone within earshot that her daughter was about to win the race. But when I asked Heather what her parents thought of her decision to abandon her science career, sell her house and go driving with her husband through the U.S. competing as a professional triathlete, she admitted the move was “a hard pill for them to swallow at first.” According to Danforth, they didn’t second-guess their daughter
When we return to the camper after our run we discover that Manah was also in need of a stretch, rolling in the red sand so much that her white muzzle turned pink. We kicked off our shoes, grilled up some veggie burgers and enjoyed the view of Zion National Park from the Regal’s kitchenette window. Last year, when Heather won the Ironman here, it was a bit of vindication for them both that their way of life was paying off. But Heather has only been racing professionally since 2008 and Trevor since 2009, and they both feel their bodies are only now becoming accustomed to the heavy mileage and race savvy of elite competition. This year, they’ve made some tweaks to their regimen, most notably joining Paulo Sousa’s Triathlon Squad team. This means the Team Wurtele-mobile will make the trip to several training camps this year throughout the Southwest, including Las Cruces, N.M., and Tucson. At these camps they’ve been forced to work through 20K a week swimming workouts—the one leg of the race where they both have struggled in the past.
"They were towing a Smart car behind them and they had some nice mountain bikes on the back of the RV. I could live like that." for long. In fact, the Danforths even purchased an RV of their own and make frequent trips down south to watch Heather and Trevor race. “Really, her whole life up until a few years ago had been about academics,” says Danforth. “But she sat us down and basically said, ‘I’ll always have my brain, but my body will only be able to perform like this for so long.’ And she’s living her dreams; how many people can honestly say that about their lives?” Yes, but, did they have to live in a trailer? I pressed further. “When my kids were young, I used to put all these magnet quotes up on the fridge that said inspirational things. When she was a teenager she used to say how cheesy they were,” remembers Danforth. “But not long ago, she admitted how much one quote in particular meant to her, and I think it kind of sums up their way of life right now. It said, ‘The best things in life are not things.’” I think back to Heather and Trevor’s utter sanguinity during our trip, and it starts to make sense. Having to fill up a water tank every few weeks to have running water; the almost constant spilling of cupboards and rattling of stovetops on rough roads; the occasional septic backups—they don’t focus on that. They’re too busy noticing how green the California coastal valleys are this particular spring. Too busy enjoying a new trail or bike path during an extended stay on a friend’s ranch outside Solvang, Calif. They are simply too focused on how much faster and stronger they can become to notice much else.
GOING FOR A TRAIL RUN IN ST. GEORGE, UTAH, IS LIKE RUNNING ON MARS. Red rock cliffs, black lava beds and arch formations for as far as the eye can see. After more than 24 hours in the Team Wurtele-mobile, we were all in need of some exercise and a stretch. This is Trevor and Heather’s favorite place to train, and it’s easy to see why. A cheap pool to swim in, endless roads with lungbursting climbs, and people so nice it takes you off guard at first. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
Sousa says he immediately noticed the Wurteles’ positive attitudes, and he believes this is what makes their lifestyle choice work for them so well. “It just shows you their commitment to the sport, to each other and to their training,” says Sousa. “I’ll admit it isn’t an ideal situation sometimes, but they minimize the amount of traveling they do and it is allowing them to make a living as professional triathletes.” Their lifestyle, much like their training, is evolving as well. For the first time since they hit the road, Heather and Trevor will have entirely separate race calendars, meaning one person may not be there to support the other one at a race. It’s a sacrifice for them, but it allows them to enter races that work more to their individual strengths. “I would say the best for Heather and Trevor is yet to come,” says Sousa.
“HEY, TREV, CHECK OUT THE POP-OUTS ON THAT CLASS A OVER THERE,” says Heather, pointing to a tricked-out RV parked next to us at Love’s. We’re at my bed/the kitchen table enjoying Trevor’s famous coffee and some cereal before hitting the road. “Oh wow. They have a plasma TV in there!” says Trevor, leaning his face against the window for a closer look. “I can’t even imagine how much power it would take to keep a plasma TV running with the engine off. They must have a generator.” Seeing an opportunity to perhaps discover some need or desire of theirs for material things, I ask if they would ever consider upgrading to a larger, more luxurious RV like the one next to us. Heather is quick to shoot me down. “We don’t need something like that,” she says, motioning out the window. She wraps her hands tight around her coffee mug and leans in closer to me. “We did see this RV once. It wasn’t much bigger than our Regal, just a little bit more room, a little wider with a pop-out for the kitchen area. They were towing a Smart car behind them and they had some nice mountain bikes on the back of the RV. I could live like that.” Heather laughs and looks out the window. “Maybe if I win Kona.” LAVA
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A TOUGHER
BREED Samantha Warriner won her debut Ironman four months after having heart surgery. Cameron Brown also did the impossible, winning the same Ironman race on 10 consecutive occasions. What do they have in common? They’re both from the tiny island nation Down Under that produces the toughest triathletes in the world. By Brad Culp I Photography by Delly Carr
A
t this year’s Ironman New Zealand awards dinner, race announcer Mike Reilly, who had just called his 100th Ironman, likened the previous day’s conditions to the 2006 Ironman Wisconsin. He said the races were two of the coldest and wettest he’d ever witnessed, but then he pointed out one major difference: 11 percent of the field failed to finish in Wisconsin in 2006, while only three percent did not finish in Taupo this year. “I guess they just grow them tougher down here,” Reilly said, and the applause from the crowd indicated that they agreed. It’s difficult to put into context what Cameron Brown accomplished when he won his 10th consecutive Ironman New Zealand title on March 5.* When Reilly was asked where the achievement ranks in the triathlon record books he said, “It’s among the top 10 things that have ever been done in this sport. Maybe even the top five. I don’t know that it will ever be done again.” To win 10 straight Ironman races is one thing, but to do so in New Zealand, at the oldest Kona-qualifying race in the world, is something entirely different. This is a place where the legends have come to compete for 27 years. Past champions include Scott Molina, Scott Tinley, Tim DeBoom and Lothar Leder. For the last decade, no mix of legendary talent, terrible conditions or botched race plans has been able to keep Brown from the top of the podium. To win his 10th title this year, Brown was forced to deal with the toughest conditions he’s ever seen and his country’s next multisport superstar, Terenzo Bozzone, nipping at his heels. Brown’s victory didn’t come easily, but the win by countrywoman Samantha Warriner was an even more Herculean feat. Just four months before attempting her first Ironman in Taupo, she underwent heart surgery to correct a problem that was threatening to put an early end to her career.
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SAMANTHA WARRINER. “For me it’s all about getting back up after you’ve been knocked down. I was at rock bottom after the Olympics in 2008. I was supposed to be a medal contender. When I won the World Cup title a few months later, it meant so much more because of how disappointed I was in Beijing. It’s the journey to get there that I’m most proud of with all my results, and I feel the same way about winning in Taupo. It means so much more because of what I went through this winter.” Sam Warriner expects a lot of herself. Throughout her decorated career she has believed that if things weren’t going right on the race course, it must have meant she wasn’t pushing herself hard enough in training. So when the 39-year-old Kiwi fell into a racing rut late last summer, she chalked it up to poor training and tried pushing harder, just like she had always done. But this time her fitness continued to fade. “I’m not willing to buy into the theory that I’m too old to go fast again,” she wrote on her blog last October. “But something has gone wrong with my form and I’m really scratching my head looking for answers at the moment.”
WARRINER’S CHOICE WAS SIMPLE, ALBEIT SCARY AS HELL: HAVE HEART SURGERY OR PUT HER TRIATHLON DAYS BEHIND HER AND MOVE ON TO THE NEXT PHASE OF HER LIFE.
Shortly after a disappointing race at Ironman 70.3 Austin last fall, Warriner decided to call an end to her season and flew home to New Zealand, instead of staying Stateside to train for the Ironman 70.3 World Championships in Florida. The veteran assumed she was just going through a mild case of burnout, and that a month of rest would have her back on form, both physically and mentally. After four weeks of complete rest Warriner returned to training in mid-November and realized, almost immediately, that something else was seriously off. Maybe it wasn’t just burnout this time. She had been diagnosed with a heart condition known as Supraventricular Tachycar-
dia, or simply SVT, as a child, but after more than 10 years of competing at the highest level, she was certain the condition would never affect her triathlon performance. SVT is characterized by the sudden onset of a rapid heartbeat, climbing as high as 240 beats per minute for over a minute at a time. The spike is caused when under certain conditions, the upper part of the heart creates a new node that creates its own electrical pulses. For Warriner, those conditions all of a sudden included swimming, biking and running, three things that never bothered her SVT much in the past. If left untreated, all activities that trigger the SVT must be stopped to prevent serious damage to the heart. Warriner’s choice was simple, albeit scary as hell: Have heart surgery to repair the SVT and get back to racing, or put her triathlon days behind her and move on to the next phase of her life. Neither choice was particularly appealing, but the latter wasn’t an option. She still had plenty of unfinished triathlon business to attend to, namely finishing her first Ironman and qualifying for Kona. She made the decision to undergo surgery on December 1 of last year, giving her only four months to recover, retrain and get ready for her first Ironman in Taupo on March 5. Warriner has never been one to scare easily, but she admitted that when her hospital bed was wheeled into the operating room and she stared up at the fluorescent lights, she was more than a little unnerved. “As far as heart surgeries go, it was a relatively simple procedure, but it’s still scary to think about having your heart operated on,” Warriner said. “I really wasn’t scared leading up to it, but as I lay in the hospital bed and waited for the anesthesia to kick in, I remember being a little terrified.” Everything went according to plan, the node was ablated, and when Warriner came to, she was told that there was only a five percent chance of her SVT returning. She was sent home from the hospital the following day, and within a few weeks, her doctors told her she could resume moderate training. “My goal in Taupo really isn’t the win, and I know people will find that hard to believe,” Warriner wrote on her blog on January 26. “In the past I’ve just gone hard to get to the front and then even harder to stay there. This just won’t work for the Ironman.” If Warriner’s goal wasn’t to win, she threw everyone for a loop on race day. After enjoying the first three months of consistent training she LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
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Carfrae was brilliant in her first Ironman outside of the Big Island, battling back from a pair of flat tires to finish second. The Aussie’s 3:01 marathon split was faster than all but the top two pro men.
had put together in almost a year, the veteran showed up eager to compete and grateful for the opportunity to do so against some of the world’s best. Her rivals for the day included seven-time Taupo champ and course-record holder Joanna Lawn, and reigning Ironman world champion Mirinda Carfrae. Few pegged Warriner for the win, but the confident Kiwi knew she had done the work necessary to finish around 9:30, and also knew that unless Carfrae put together a perfect race, 9:30 would put her right in the mix. “Leading up to this race I felt a little different,” Warriner said. “Maybe it was just because it was my first Ironman, or maybe the surgery gave me a good perspective. I felt like my head was in the right place. I felt lucky to be racing again.” As the top swimmer in the race, Warriner found herself with a lead of almost two minutes at the start of the bike, and even though she knew patience was the name of the Ironman game, she also knew her only chance to steal the win would be to get away from Lawn and Carfrae before the run. She kept reminding herself that her goal was just to get through the day, not to destroy herself going for the win, but now she had the lead and her mind was preoccupied with keeping it. As the morning drizzle gave way to a steady afternoon downpour, Warriner buried her head and did her best not to think about the rain, the wind and the cold, or the fact that she still had five hours left to ride, followed by what would only be her second marathon. “To be honest the conditions didn’t get to me much,” she said. “I knew it was really cold, but I don’t remember feeling that cold.” LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
Midway through the bike leg, there was more good news for Warriner, but she was too far up the road to know about it. Lawn had flatted and spent nearly 20 minutes on the side of the road. Moments later Carfrae suffered a pair of flats and also lost a large chunk of time. Warriner made the final turnaround with 45 kilometers left to ride and got the news that she was almost 20 minutes up. For a moment she assumed she had received the wrong split, because she knew she wasn’t riding that hard at the front. A few minutes later, she got the news that both Carfrae and Lawn had flatted, but now they were back on the road and slowly chipping away at the lead. She tried to be patient. She tried to remind herself that she had a comfortable lead and now it was time to wait for the run, but something in her head told her to go. “Sometimes in racing you have to ignore your instincts, but I felt good enough at that point to really push the last hour of the ride, so I went for it,” she said. “I really paid for it at the start of the run, so maybe it was a mistake, but I also had a 20-minute lead, so maybe it wasn’t. I felt like absolute shit coming into transition though.” As Warriner started her marathon it appeared to the thousands of spectators huddled under umbrellas near transition that she would pay the price for her late surge on the bike. She suffered through the first two miles at slower than an eight-minute pace, but she was running with the professional men, while the rest of the women were still fighting through the final miles of the bike.
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As the rest of the pro women trickled onto the run course in the pouring rain, onlookers frantically checked their stopwatches and started doing the math. Warriner’s lead was massive, but she was the least proven marathoner in the race, and there was some serious talent chasing her down. Lawn was the first of the contenders to make her way onto the run course, and although she looked much more put together than Warriner at the start of the run, she was still 14 minutes back and had to contend with the sport’s best runner, Carfrae, coming from behind. After running a 2:53 marathon to win Kona last October, Carfrae appeared invincible heading into her first Ironman outside of Hawaii. It seemed likely that she’d trail Lawn and Warriner at T2, but this was a worst-case scenario. The reigning Ironman world champion was absolutely flying as she started her run, but she was more than 22 minutes away from the lead, and even she questioned whether or not her legs could make up the deficit. “I can’t catch her. Not today.” Carfrae yelled to a friend as she passed the first mile marker. While Carfrae seemed to think the win was out of reach, her torrid pace indicated otherwise, as she made up almost five minutes through the first seven miles of the run. Lawn was also eating into Warriner’s lead, bringing the gap down to under 10 minutes with 15 miles to go. “I knew Jo [Lawn] and Rinny [Carfrae] were catching up fairly quick, but I also knew that my legs would loosen up a bit,” Warriner said. “I expected LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
to be tight at the start, but I don’t think I expected the end to hurt so much.” Warriner found herself with a lead of just over five minutes with five kilometers left to run. On the outside, things were looking good for the soon-to-be Ironman finisher. But on the inside, Warriner was in a world of hurt and was doubting herself for the first time all day. “Between 35 and 40 kilometers I was really in a bad place,” she said. “That’s somewhere I’ve never been before. My coach told me that if I got to the 40K mark with the lead, the crowd would pull me in from there, but at 38K I didn’t think I could make it another two kilometers.” True to her coach’s word, the pain slowly eased away after the 40K mark, and for the first time all afternoon, she sensed that the end was near. She could stop moving her legs soon. She’d be inside and away from the rain. She’d have a change of clothes and something warm to eat. Best of all, she’d be an Ironman champion in her first-ever Ironman. That was enough to get through the final two kilometers. Carfrae passed Lawn for second, and continued to make up time all the way until the finish, but Warriner remained out of reach, stopping the clock in 9:28:24, three minutes ahead of Carfrae. “There were a couple of times throughout the race when I thought back to my surgery, and what I had gotten through to get there, but I tried not to dwell on it,” Warriner said. “There were a few rough bits, though, where I thought to myself, ‘Sam, remember how lucky you are to be doing this,’ and I think that helped me get through it.”
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CAMERON BROWN. “I probably feel more pressure racing in Taupo than in Kona. There’s an expectation for me to win when I race here, and, of course, I really want to win in my home country. The spotlight isn’t on me in Hawaii like it is here.” Within 10 minutes of arriving in New Zealand, I realized just how big a deal Cameron Brown is in his home country. When I told the customs agent what had brought me there, he replied, “So you’ve come all this way to see our boy Brownie win again.” I told him that was indeed why I had come, and then asked if he was a triathlete himself, assuming that only a triathlete would know who Cameron Brown was. “Are you crazy?” he said. “Do I look like a triathlete to you?” (He definitely did not.) “Everyone around here knows who Cameron Brown is,” he added. Becoming a household name in his home country may sound like a dream come true for a professional triathlete, but with such notoriety comes big expectations. It’s impossible to understand the pressure that Cameron Brown felt in the week leading up to this year’s Ironman New Zealand. In the nine years since he first won in Taupo, Brown has become one of his country’s most celebrated sports stars, garnering front-page coverage in the papers whenever he races. As a triathlete, Brown’s celebrity status in New Zealand may be hard for many North Americans to comprehend. “New Zealanders really get behind their athletes who are doing well,” Brown said. “We’ve always had success in triathlon with athletes like Rick Wells, Erin Baker, Hamish Carter and Bevan Docherty. Now when you show LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
up to a big race, people know about it and they check to see how you do.” For Brown, the Hawaii Ironman is the crown jewel of the sport, but in New Zealand, winning in Taupo is paramount, and he’s made sure the Ironman New Zealand title has stayed in Kiwi hands for the past 10 years running. “I don’t really feel the pressure to perform until race week,” Brown said. “But by the time race day comes around I’m usually ready to have it over with. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the race, but I get to the point where I just want to have a good race and get it behind me.” The pressure on Brown this year wasn’t abated by the presence of countryman Terenzo Bozzone, who had finished as the runner-up to Brown in Taupo for the past two seasons. Bozzone has all the makings of becoming New Zealand’s next triathlon superstar, already earning a world title at the 70.3 distance and an endorsement deal with Kellogg’s, which has the 26-year-old’s face on Nutri-Grain cereal boxes in every supermarket in New Zealand. There’s no question that Bozzone is his country’s next big thing in Ironman. All Brown could do for now to stay on top of the Kiwi triathlon totem pole was win an unprecedented 10th title at his country’s most significant event. “You know, 10 is a nice, round number, so if Cam [Brown] gets number 10, there’s really no reason for him to come back and race here again,” Bozzone joked before the race. “The best thing I can do is keep him from getting number 10 so he keeps racing.”
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From the start of the race, Bozzone made his intentions clear: He wanted to get to the front early, knowing that his best chance to beat his countryman would be to build a lead before the marathon. After an impressive 47-minute swim, Bozzone took a three-minute lead onto the bike. The youngster wanted to push the pace early to get away from Brown, but in his four previous Ironman races he had learned the importance of staying patient early in the bike, so he pulled things back and watched his lead disappear. By the time Bozzone hit the first turnaround at 45K in Reporoa, his lead was down to only a few seconds, and he could see a long line of men eager to join him at the pointy end of the race. The most notable of the men closing the gap was, of course, Brown, who was now right where he needed to be to take his 10th title. “I think the conditions really slowed things down on the bike,” Brown said. “Once everyone came together at Reporoa, it seemed like everyone was happy riding together, so I started looking for a chance to get away.” In the decade that he’s been winning Ironman titles, Brown has been called everything from one of the most consistent triathletes of all time to one of the best runners the sport has ever seen. One thing he has never been labeled, however, is a biker. So when Brown shot off the front of the main group shortly after the halfway point of the bike to go after leader Scotty Curry, he left many, especially his competition, scratching their heads. “I don’t have a reputation for going hard on the bike and maybe that helped me a little today,” Brown said afterward. “I didn’t plan on building LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
a big lead before the run or anything, but I was feeling good and wasn’t happy with the pace so I decided to make a little break.” Brown returned to Taupo with a five-minute gap on Bozzone and two minutes on Swiss ace Mathias Hecht, who had emerged as the day’s other top contender. Bozzone matched Brown’s pace through the first three miles of the run, but the wheels slowly came off and the gap never came down. “I had nothing on the bike today,” Bozzone said. “I knew I wouldn’t catch [Brown] if he got on the bike, but there was no way I could go with him.” Brown went unchallenged on the marathon and crossed the finish line to become the first athlete ever to win the same Ironman on 10 occasions. While the always-humble Brown shied away from questions about the historical significance of his win, others, including race announcer Reilly, were quick to point out the magnitude of his achievement. “You could have any athlete do the same Ironman 15 times and not come out with 10 wins,” he said. “Brown has come here with a giant target on his back for a decade and every time he’s found a way to pull it out.” For Brown, his 10th win was a touch bittersweet. Dominating his country’s biggest event for a decade is more than he ever dreamed of, but the race that occupies his dreams takes place in Hawaii, not New Zealand. “This is pretty special and I don’t want to take away from it,” Brown said of his 10 Taupo titles. “But I’d give up every one of these wins for one in Hawaii. And I haven’t given up on that just yet.” LAVA
*Ain-Alar Juhanson won in 2006 on a course that was shortened to only a 56-mile bike ride and 13.1-mile run due to severe weather.
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GOLDEN TICKE
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andering around San Diego International and Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hare itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s obvious whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bound for Abu Dhabi. Not only are there more of usâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;registration for the second annual Abu Dhabi International Triathlon (ADIT) doubled this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a little like bad undercover spies, given away by our K-Swiss jackets, Zoot shoes and TYR bags. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a peculiar class: stuffed into coach, choosing water over alcohol, getting up to stretch on the hour to loosen our muscles. As the plane creaks to life on the runway in Chicago, the screen in front of me ďŹ&#x201A;ickers and a few lines of Arabic appear. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a travelersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; prayer from the Quran. A hollow male voice begins to chant the words as I try to relax in the seat Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll occupy for the next 14 hours. I may be heading to one of the most liberal Muslim countries in the world, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s already clear that Etihad, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, is no American Airlines. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand Arabic, but beginning my trip this way suits me just ďŹ ne. What triathlete couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use a bit of extra assistance from the powers that be? Not that I need a miracleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m just trying to survive a race in a level of heat Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seldom experienced, let alone raced
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in. Throw in a bike leg Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve just learned will be 100K, not 40, and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m prepared to take any help I can get. I arrive after sunsetâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;my favorite way to begin in a new place. Abu Dhabi is tabula rasa, emptied out, unassuming. I leave the bright airport, with its gaudy attempts at cultural immersion, and am greeted by ďŹ&#x201A;at darkness. I team up with Jessica Jacobs (last yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ironman Florida winner), and Canadian pro Angela Naeth, whose coach and boyfriend Chuckie â&#x20AC;&#x153;Vâ&#x20AC;? Veylupek secures a cabâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a beat-up looking 1970â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Toyota van. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been told to expect nothing less than luxury to greet me in the United Arab Emirates, but I almost preferred the disheveled crew cramming three bike boxes into the vehicle like their lives depended on it to some sleek vehicle sent by the Tourism Authority. It reminded me of the travelerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s balance of losing oneself to the here and now while keeping a ďŹ rm hold on stuff like safety and street smarts. If any of us were experiencing culture shock, it quickly comes to an end. The freshly-paved highway weaves through modern developments, their lights twinkling in the darkness. Our driver points out the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, the second-largest in the world, and one of the
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RYAN BOWD
Luke McKenzie takes a smooth corner on the Yas Marina Circuit.
hisLye GTO DarE’sNfolloTwICup prov atI the event wasn’t ju KETedTthR st a flas
h in the pan; and even thou gh it’s not run by one of the big tr iathlon players, it can run with the best of them.
city’s many landmarks that bears the late Sheikh’s name. It’s not unlike an American megachurch in its stature—one that had a capable architect on staff. Minarets dot the cityscape with their characteristic neon green lights. Everything is perfect and new and orderly. This is the modern Middle East. It’s not long before our driver deposits us safely at the Khalidiya Palace Rayhaan, the official race hotel. It’s surrounded by construction, heralding the future. I step inside, and whatever is left of the scruffy LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
backpacker in me crumbles. The slave to luxury that exists in all of us rises, and for a second I wish I’d done my nails. I’m not Carrie Bradshaw enough however to let the bellhop carry all of my bags, and so I grab hold of my bike box and offer to wheel the mine-for-a-month 2011 Felt DA to my room by my own power. Even though it’s the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi lives very much in Dubai’s shadow. It’s the second largest, second to get started, second most heard-of. But there’s one thing it can lord over its grown-up neighbor to the northeast: it has officially caught the triathlon bug. Through the vision of Faris Al-Sultan and Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority Manager Faisal Abdulla Al Sheikh, this little oasis of Middle Eastern modernity staged an impressive debut in 2010 and continues to attract an impressive line-up of pros. This year’s followup proved that the inaugural event wasn’t just a flash in the pan; it’s not run by one of the big race event players, but it can run with the best of them. The race is put on by IMG, a global sports, fashion and media business that, according to its website, sees triathlon as a “mass
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GREG DONOVAN
The Khalidiya Palace Rayhaan offers a luxurious lead-up to race day— and a spectacular breakfast buffet.
participation event” that provides a “unique way to connect with dedicated amateur athletes who are highly educated and affluent.” The organizers might not live and breathe the sport (or even pretend to), but they put on one heck of a race. From the brochures in my media pack to the athlete guide I receive as a participant, everything has the impeccably organized, tastefully designed Abu Dhabi flavor. Over the next two days there are photo and interview opportunities, a press conference, and a cheesy staged boxing match between top pros Craig Alexander and Chris McCormack—for the pleasure of President Sheikh Khalifa, I’m told. I gather stories and images, packing some away for later, and publishing others to share with those who can’t be a part of the circus this time around. But it’s not all about the pros. Sure, rubbing shoulders with the only real celebrities I care much about these days is pretty cool, but there is a cohort of amateurs that puts any other field’s diversity I’ve witnessed to shame. I catch Mohammed Al-Sanea and Sara Al-Haji, LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
first-time triathletes from Kuwait at the race briefing and pasta party. They’re both here to do the sprint after joining a triathlon club in Kuwait “by chance,” as Al-Sanea says. They say the sport is growing at home, and that this race—only an hour and fifteen minutes away by plane—is, in a way, the perfect “local” race. Long-course hopeful Garry Whyte, from Scotland, works here in the oil industry and trains every week on the course. He advises me to drink loads, and, of course, to wear sunscreen. On what the region has to offer a sport bursting at the seams, he says weather (which he loves) and iconic venues and locations. “There’s a lot going on here,” he says. “There are new ideas and lots of investment into sport here now. They’re always thinking of new things.” Abu Dhabi was, for me, a triathlon bubble. Every day a parade of pros, journalists, and industry gurus marched through the hotel, which I barely had time to leave, save for the race grounds. I only met a handful of true locals (and even they were ex-pats from South Africa, New
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WOUTER KINGMA
The planetory Emirates Palace boasts a $3 billion construction bill, and of course, gold-flecked camel’s milk lattes.
Zealand, and North America), and the one thing I really wanted to try—a gold-flecked camel’s milk latte at the Emirates Palace that Jordan Rapp had put in my mind—stayed just out of reach. I was a little too sunkissed after dropping my gear off at T1 and T2 (a few miles apart) to attend many of the media field trips, including the stop at Ferrari World, which I heard was as fast as promised. I didn’t shop at any of the city’s famed malls, go to the Mosque or dune-crash on a 4x4. Racing—something I wrongly supposed I could do “on the side”—ended up taking more out of me than I’d budgeted for. But why should I have had it any other way, in the city of superlatives and lofty goals, where I lacked no creature (or triathlete) comfort? In contrast to my pre-LAVA self, I had been given everything I needed to give this race my best. Why not see how triathlon and I got along in a new context, one where open-water swimming didn’t require a wetsuit, cushy F1 tracks weren’t closed and 95-degree heat wasn’t cause to call off a 10K run? So what if the wind felt like it was coming from a solar hair dryer, causing me to whittle my wishes of LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
ForLth GO days DreEeN amK TIIC a begi Ter RI again, and all the an ET nn xi ety and innocence I though t I’d left at the start of my first ra ce comes flooding back.
a sub-2:40 bike split on the flat Sheikh Khalifa Highway down to a more reasonable 3:00? I craved exhaustion. At dinner the night before the race I start chatting with veteran Ironman athlete Greg Donovan, who also happens to be Cameron Brown’s good friend. He’s a New Zealander, employed in Abu Dhabi to oversee carbon fiber in the construction of the fifth largest private yacht in the world. I tell him about my short stint in the city, and that out of all the things I came here to do—play reporter, editor, photographer, tweeter, blogger, and video producer—I’m just hoping to do one of them well. I tell
RYAN BOWD
088 : FEATURES him I’d better get my rest for my race in the morning. “How many hats are you wearing?” he asks, incredulous. And that’s the kicker. I am only part journalist, trying to capture a place and an event for all of you dreaming from the comfort of couches, deck chairs and café booths. But I am also part athlete. I hadn’t been stressing over my packing list for just another work trip. For three days I am a beginner again, and all the anxiety and innocence I thought I’d left at the start line of my first race floods back. It’s kind of a rush, to tell the truth. You know what I’m talking about. About the journalist part, well, you can’t please everyone. One reader tweeted (and then deleted) a question on how it is that people get paid for “this kind of journalism.” I’m not sure whether he was expecting me to uncover some sort of secret, like that certain pros never planned on finishing the race at all and packed casual shoes into their T2 bags. Maybe he thought it my duty to unearth some deep-seated corruption, or to be the first to break the news of the first across the finish line—neither of which I could even pretend to have done. And about the athlete part? Not only did I have a smile on my face over every inch of the course, I got to watch not only pros doing what they do best, but people experiencing that new first-time race feeling. I was reminded of the joy this sport brings to so many people. Over 1,500 athletes came from 48 different countries to be part of this, and they took to the course in a rainbow of tri suits and bikes I don’t often get to see at home. The guy with the radio and speakers duct-taped to the handlebars of his mountain bike and the woman wearing long pink tights in the heat? It was a traveling circus—a freak show of most inspiring kind, with baba ghanoush and gold-flecked camel’s milk lattes waiting at the end of the rainbow. Did I give it my best? Besides a short post-race stint in the media tent to post a gallery and race report, I was out of commission until the awards dinner. Abu Dhabi had given me the chance of a lifetime, and I didn’t hold anything back. What do destination races accomplish in our identities as triathletes? Most of us aren’t pros on the circuit, so why don’t we stick to races closer to home? They’re cheaper and less complicated. They don’t take us from our families. But they lack something in the challenge department, and another in the good old-fashioned fun arena. Doing this race reminded me—not that I’ve forgotten quite yet—of how fun, plain and simple, it is to be part of this sport. On the flight home I meet a young Wisconsinite who epitomizes the traveling triathlete. He carries a massive backpack stuffed with books and snacks. He tells me about his race plans for the year, dropping the names of events like horse-racing gamblers rattle off their picks. I think to myself that this guy must be rich. When I find out what he does for a living, I decide he must be so crazy about the sport that it’s simply not good enough on its own. It must be taken to new contexts and shared with new people, whether strangers or friends. For him it’s a love that must be lugged around in airports, sweated out on long, dusty freeways and chased down on F1 tracks. Backyard triathlon suits some just fine, but for others, those willing to put in the money and time, travel reflects the same sense of momentum all three of our sports are rooted in. LAVA
Lucie Zelenkova cycles to a seventh-place finish in front of a photo of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed.
See a gallery of the gear that got the author through the race at lavamagazine.com/desert-salvation LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
090 : FEATURES
LOGAN As a Marine Reservist, PFC Logan Franks went to Iraq seeking discipline, direction and adventure. He returned a triathlete with his sights set on Ironman greatness.
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T
o Private Logan Franks, the Marine chaplain’s question felt like a steel-toed kick to a hungover head. “How do you want to be remembered?” the chaplain asked. It was the summer of 2008, and Logan, then 21, was two weeks from shipping out for an eight-month infantry tour in western Iraq, where the occasional roadside bomb and insurgent skirmish still interrupted the simmering post-surge occupancy. Logan, however, wasn’t scared of returning to his home in Plattsburgh, N.Y., in a wheelchair, or worse yet, a flag-draped coffin. He was more concerned with the damage he’d done to his reputation in the bucolic upstate community where he’d grown up. In the previous months Logan had etched a few chapters into his growing list of boozy fuckups. On Thanksgiving 2007 he accidentally fired a shotgun into his buddy’s ceiling. Another night Logan punched through a glass window, earning some heavy blood loss and a jagged scar. During a drunken wrestling match a few weeks later, Logan fell onto the sharp corner of a stereo, tearing open his face just below the eye. More scars. Those events were minor indiscretions, however, compared to the incident that occurred during finals week in 2007 at the State University of New York, Delhi. Logan was stumbling back home from a bar, hammered. A cop stopped him for urinating on a building. He walked into the SUNY dorms while drinking a beer, despite the campus’ rules against alcohol. He tried to clog a sink with a towel. He pulled the fire alarm,
N’SRUN By Fred Drier
Photography by Andrew Burton
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IN JUST HIS SECOND IRONMAN ATTEMPT—THE 2010 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS IN KONA— LOGAN FINISHED JUST THREE MINUTES SHY OF BREAKING THE NINE-HOUR MARK.
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which awoke the Resident Advisor. The RA told Logan to leave. Logan told the RA to shove it. A scuffle ensued and Logan gashed his head on a doorframe. He beat the shit out of the RA. The cops came. Logan resisted arrest. “I thought to myself, ‘I just destroyed my life,’” Logan says, thinking back to the two days he spent in jail (the charges were eventually dropped, although Logan was kicked out of school). “I made a fool of myself. I was that guy with so much potential, and I had wasted it. I made the Marine Corps look like shit. I became the kind of guy I despise.” And so the chaplain’s question lodged in Logan’s brain. If he were vaporized by a bomb, how would he be remembered? As a drunk? A bully? He thought about it on the 18-hour flight to Iraq’s Al Asad Air Base, where he was stationed with the 2nd Battalion of the Marines 25th Division. The question dominated his thoughts during the boring eight-hour patrols in the scrub-brush desert. Logan made a decision. When he returned stateside, he would undertake something big, something amazing—a challenge to change his life’s direction. Three years later, Logan occasionally revisits the chaplain’s question, although not with the same sense of dread. Logan found his challenge in the sport of triathlon. His reputation in Plattsburgh these days is overtly positive. His former high school teachers want to shake his hand in the parking lot at Applebee’s. Customers at the Price Chopper, where Logan slices lunchmeat in the deli, know him by name. And they should. Logan is the Marine who left for Iraq and returned an Ironman. That story is, of course, overly simplified. Logan’s transition to triathlon began in a frigid swimming pool at Al Asad in 2008 and ended at the finish line of the 2010 Ironman Lake Placid, where he finished as the second overall amateur in his first Ironman attempt. Along the way he learned how to buckle a cycling shoe, swim freestyle and perform the sport’s other basics. But while endurance sports usually reward patience and experience over raw talent, Logan’s rapid rise does stand out. He won his first half marathon and ran 2:42 in his first marathon. In just his second Ironman attempt—the 2010 world championships in Kona—Logan finished just three minutes shy of breaking the nine-hour mark. He plans to turn professional this year. And from a lifestyle perspective, the Logan of today is a stark contrast to his pre-triathlon self. Gone are the late nights and mischief. Logan wakes up at 5 a.m. to ride the trainer, and then he’s off to class at SUNY Plattsburgh, where’s he’s studying sociology and criminal justice. The “mad ADD” that Logan has dealt with since childhood used to thwart his patience. Today he rides
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his bike for hours in the Berkshires, runs countless miles on the farm roads and swims at the local recreation center, often by himself. Besides the occasional chicken wing, Logan maintains a vegetarian diet. He has a few beers each week, but the booze benders are a thing of the past. Logan even looks different. In the Marines he weight lifted his way to a muscular 180-pound frame. These days Logan weighs 150 pounds. He bears the gaunt physique of an elite endurance athlete, complete with the sunken cheeks and lattice of veins on his forearms. His chest barely fills out a T-shirt. “It used to be you would put alcohol in that kid and he would just go crazy. We’d see him at drills and just say ‘Oh, what did you do this time?’” LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
said Brian Becherini, a friend and fellow Marines reservist. “Now he doesn’t even drink. Everybody is like ‘what the hell happened to this guy?’” Logan steps onto the shaggy living room carpet at his father’s house and laces his Nikes. On tap for the afternoon is a 15-mile run past the ranch houses and boarded-up storefronts of Keyesville, about 10 miles south of Plattsburgh. Outside, freezing rain falls from a ceiling of grey clouds onto the two-foot-high snowdrifts that look like mounds of dirty cookie dough. In two weeks Logan will head to Tucson for his first warmweather training camp in preparation for his debut in the pro ranks. But today he’ll need a raincoat. At 24, Logan sports a military buzz cut. A green tattoo of a busty woman straddling a bomb peeks out from under one of his sleeves. The shading of
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another tattoo creeps up from his bicep. It’s an enormous tapestry of a bald eagle clutching an American flag in front of the World Trade Center towers with “USMC” scrawled out in block lettering. “Every tat I have is in some way associated with the Marine Corps, it’s how I show who I am,” Logan says of his 13 tattoos. “It’s about me and my patriotism.” Patriotism led Logan to enlist in the Marines in 2006. So did a desire to blow shit up, shoot guns and get out of upstate New York. Logan says he realized he would be shipped to Iraq and welcomed the fight. He admits he knew little at the time about the United States’ motives for invading. “You don’t get to go to war every day,” Logan says. “There was an adventure element to it.” But Logan’s decision did not sit well with his father, Dean Franks, who had gotten divorced from Logan’s mother when Logan was five. Logan and his two brothers moved in with Dean in Keyesville when they started high school. Dean had served in the Army, and his father LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
had been in the Air Force. But to Dean, Logan was the hyperactive middle son whose playful imagination ran wild after he stopped taking Adderall. Logan was not a commando. He wanted Logan to go to college. “Logan kept me entertained, and I didn’t want to see him go,” Dean Franks said. “And I worried about him. There was a lot of bad news coming out of Iraq at the time, and I knew that he’d probably end up there.” In the Marines, Logan found the adventure he sought. He fired machine guns and lobbed grenades during boot camp at Paris Island, S.C. During a month-long operation in West Africa, where the Marines trained Senegalese commandos, Logan slit the neck of a goat with his bare hands as part of a tribal ceremony. He excelled at the physical challenges and never scored less than perfect in fitness tests. And since he was a part-time reservist, Logan attended school. He pulled average grades and ran sprints on the SUNY Delhi track team. Logan says he expected the action to continue in Iraq, and prepared for terrorist attacks and firefights during a three-month training buildup
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“WE ALL WENT INTO [IRAQ] EXPECTING SOMETHING TO HAPPEN, AND WHEN IT DIDN’T, IT WAS A REAL LETDOWN ... THE REAL ENEMY WAS BOREDOM.”
at Camp Pendleton, outside of San Diego, before his deployment. The vision became reality on his first Humvee patrol from Al Asad, as an enormous explosion on the horizon signaled a detonated roadside bomb. “It was like OK, this is what I signed up for,” Logan says. “I was sweating my balls off. I started to think everything was a bomb.” The bomb turned out to be the first and last that Logan would see in Iraq. Nicknamed “the Lion,” Al Asad was one of Saddam Hussein’s largest airfields and was one of the first major bases to fall to Coalition forces after operations in Iraq began in 2003. Al Asad became the major hub for allied action inside the Sunni Triangle and was the port of entry for men and material coming to fight insurgents in nearby Falluja and Ramadi. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
But by 2008, military action around the huge base—which has a perimeter of 15 miles—had cooled. Marines casually referred to Al Asad as “Camp Cupcake” for its safe atmosphere, not to mention the presence of a Cinnabon and a Burger King inside the base. Still, Logan’s company performed the tasks of most occupying Marines. They went on five-day patrols into the desert looking for arms smuggled into Iraq from Syria. They performed “hearts and minds” missions with the locals. They found an endless scrubby desert, and little else. “We all went into [Iraq] expecting something to happen. When nothing did, it was a real letdown,” Becherini said. “The real enemy was boredom.” To quell the boredom, the men cruised Facebook and pumped iron. Logan played pranks on his fellow soldiers, throwing rocks on the roofs
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FEATURES : 101 of steel dormitories at bedtime. He and Becherini also began running. Becherini—an NCAA Division I track runner at Syracuse—took Logan on sweltering 10-plus-mile jogs into the desert, and they ran intervals on Al Asad’s track. Logan also trained with a medic named Tristan Welton, who was preparing for a Navy SEALs tryout. Welton entertained Logan with tales of the SEALs’ punishing training regimen and hard-man image. The stories appealed to Logan, and he contemplated taking a stab at the SEALs himself. But the SEALs must be experts in the water, and Logan’s stroke was an uncoordinated thrash. Becherini and Logan had heard that Al Asad’s luxuries included a sizable indoor swimming pool, and when they eventually found it, they couldn’t believe their eyes. Inside a concrete bunker sat a lap pool, not unlike those found in a typical recreation center stateside. “There was blue and white tile, a locker room, showers and wood benches,” Becherini said. “It was like we weren’t even in Iraq anymore.” During another discussion, Welton told Logan that SEALs regularly competed in Ironman races. Logan had never heard of the event, and his eyes lit up as Welton explained the distance of each leg. Logan’s focus shifted. He wasn’t going to train for the SEALs. He wanted to race the Ironman. “We told him ‘Franks, there’s no way you’re going to run the Ironman, you’re too stocky,’” Welton said. “None of us thought he had the focus to do it. First he wants to be a SEAL, now he wants to run the Ironman.”
PLATTSBURGH SITS AT THE FOOT OF THE ADIRONDACKS on the western edge of Lake Champlain, about 20 miles south of the U.S. border with Quebec. Once a major Air Force town—the base closed in 1995—the town survives on summertime tourists and a steady flow of Canadian shoppers seeking deals on cheese and cigarettes. It is worlds apart from the country’s endurance sport capitals. Winter lasts from October through April. The sky is grey, the ground is wet, and temperatures rarely rise above the high teens. The town’s only bike shop is called Mountain Riders, and it opened in April 2010 when mountain bike-enthusiasts Paul and Corinna Maggy relocated from Lake Tahoe. The Cervelo P2C that Logan bought upon his return from Iraq hangs signed and mounted above store’s cash register. The Maggys now sponsor Logan with free tune-ups and gear and helped line up a bike sponsorship with Specialized. “Logan has become like a spokesman for cycling and triathlons,” said Corinne Maggy. “A lot of locals follow his progress or they know about what he did at [Ironman] Lake Placid.” Logan’s performance at Lake Placid—he finished 11th overall and broke the 19–24 age group record by 10 minutes—made local headlines as far away as Saratoga Springs. Newspapers told a similar story: a local Marine reservist learned to swim in one of Saddam Hussein’s private pools; gave up on the Navy SEALs after discovering the Ironman triathlon; dropped $6,000 on triathlon gear on his second day
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103 : FEATURES home from Iraq; trained four hours a day for a year and a half; and crushed the competition in his first Ironman race. In truth, Logan’s suffered the usual headaches felt by all newbie triathletes. He had never ridden a road bike, and a friend had to convince him to purchase a helmet and cycling shoes. He crashed on his first ride while trying to pry his foot out of the pedals. And then there were Logan’s problems in the water. After they found the pool at Al Asad, Logan, Becherini and Welton swam regularly. But without any formal training, Logan still thrashed through the water. A month after returning home, Logan competed in his first race, the North Country Triathlon. He finished nearly half an hour behind the winner. “I walked the run. It sucked,” Logan says. “I was so heavy. I looked like a robot.” Logan went looking for a coach, and a friend put him in touch with Scott Bombard. A sales manager for a construction materials provider, Bombard had volunteered at the Lake Placid race since its inception in 1999. Bombard himself had never completed a triathlon, but decided to advise Logan anyway. He remembered Logan from the local high school—his own son graduated a year behind—and felt the youngster could use some direction. “Logan was the football player who couldn’t catch the football and the baseball player who couldn’t hit,” Bombard said. “He was one of those kids who never found his identity in high school.” Bombard helped Logan learn some basics of swim technique and put him on a plan that included long miles on the bike and plenty of fast, hard running miles. Logan’s body devoured the training plan. At the end of the summer of 2009, Logan could finish an Olympic distance race in 2:15. The following April he won the local Plattsburgh half marathon and in May he qualified for the Boston Marathon. The results set the stage for Logan to shine at Lake Placid. No longer content to simply finish the race, Logan wanted to break the age-group course record and qualify for Kona. So when he exited the water in 800th place, his parents and girlfriend Kayla began to wonder if Logan could reach his goal. Once on the bicycle, Logan began chewing through the competition. By the second lap of the run, he was alone at the front. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
“I hugged my dad and was like ‘I’m going to Kona!’” Logan says. “Then it hit me. Oh shit, I need to keep training for another month.” Logan crossed the line wearing a black jersey emblazoned with the red skull “Punisher” logo of the comic book star character. The image ran in the local Press-Republican, and the story now proudly sits in a white binder alongside other newspaper clippings. Dean Franks compiled the binder in the weeks after his son’s victory and used the press clippings to raise funds for Logan to travel to Hawaii. The local Moose lodge held a spaghetti dinner and silent auction for Logan, and Dean Franks now proudly displays the announcement above his personal bar in his living room, alongside a gallery of photos of his three sons. It’s been three years since Dean Franks watched his son struggle with the transition into adulthood. Logan, he said, always had natural talents as an athlete. He simply struggled with discipline. When asked whether it was the Marines or triathlon that turned Logan’s life around, Dean Franks said it’s a combination of both. “The Marine Corps came first, and without that Logan wouldn’t have gotten into [triathlon],” Dean Franks said. “He had to find something he was really good at and loved, and then he could dedicate himself to it.” Logan also acknowledges that neither the Marines nor triathlon is solely responsible for changing his life. Sure, Iraq straightened him out, but several nights after returning to the U.S., Logan went on a serious bender with his friends. While staring into his own vomit, he suggested they get tattoos. He awoke with the words to his own poem (“I’ll sing you to sleep every night if you dream of me when you close your eyes”) tattooed across his chest. “I was a straight edge dude and got to college and had never really drank,” Logan says. “I could have been a great athlete, but I just got drunk every night.” While triathlon has put a stop to the benders, it has presented other challenges. At the time of LAVA’s interview, Logan said he was struggling to pass his classes. Although this is his final year in the reserves, his schedule with the Marines will force him to miss the early season Ironman 70.3 races. “It’s a balance. I’m going to take [triathlon] as far as I can go, but I need to find a way to
104 : FEATURES
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make it work with my life,” Logan says. It’s working, for now. Logan and Kayla rent a modest apartment just north of downtown Plattsburgh. A Honda Element with a huge Punisher sticker is parked between the snowdrifts out front. Inside, the walls are a shrine to Logan’s military and racing achievements—a gaudy blown-glass trophy reading “Peru Turkey Trot Champion” sits alongside Logan’s certificate of promotion to Corporal. A framed certificate of Logan’s military physical fitness test hangs from the wall. “I trained my balls off for that,” Logan says, pointing at the piece of paper. He earned a perfect score. LAVA
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DONALD MIRALLE
106 : TRAINING :
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TRAINING
: TRAINING : 107
108
the hype 116
coach’s counsel 120
sidelined 126
the full spectrum 134
to your health 142
competitive edge
“Most triathletes don’t include enough brick workouts to truly run comfortably off the bike. A long ride on Saturday followed by a long run on Sunday does not cut it.”
—Mark Allen, (Competitive Edge, Page 142) LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
108 : THE HYPE :
MAN VS. WILD Scientists look to the animal kingdom for the next evolution in free speed By Jim Gourley
Speedsuits work by mimicking the drag-reducing properties of shark skin.
F
or several years now, aerodynamic and hydrodynamic improvements in triathlon equipment have adhered to fairly conventional wisdom—adopting the most streamlined cross section of the bike, wheels, rider, helmet and clothing will make for the greatest gains in speed. While technology has provided drastic improvements in aerodynamics and hydrodynamics over the past century, when it LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
comes to cheating the Earth’s atmosphere (or water), the science of mankind doesn’t always have the answers. So a few years ago, Professor Alessandro Bottaro of the University of Genoa in Italy went to mother nature to find out how to make things move faster. What he found was that some of the greatest innovations in aerodynamics have been right in front of our faces since the dawn of time.
In a recently released research paper, Bottaro announced the discovery of a revolutionary aerodynamic technology in birds. Working with zoologists in the U.S., Bottaro examined the behavior of different types of feathers on birds during flight. What he found was that certain smaller feathers, called coverts, perform a unique trick during flight. As a bird lands, coverts on the top of its wings
110 : THE HYPE :
During landing small feathers on the ends of a bird’s wings protrude upward to prevent stalling, while at the same time reducing drag by letting air pass through them.
fluff up. This might seem counterproductive to flight, but these feathers serve the same purpose as dimples on a golf ball. The coverts cause turbulent flow over the top of the wing, thus delaying flow separation and keeping the bird from stalling before it touches down. While it’s true that flaps on aircraft have been performing a similar function for decades, the real discovery was in how the coverts reduce drag. Whereas flaps require air to pass over them, coverts allow air to pass through them. The drag reduction occurs as the tiny filaments that make up the individual feathers vibrate. On a minuscule level, they virtually throw air backward off the wing, thus getting rid of those pesky vortices we’re told are trailing off our bikes and wetsuits. And that’s where the application to triathlon comes in. While his research is only in the preliminary, computer-modeled stages, Bottaro projects a 15-percent reduction in presLAVAMAGAZINE.COM
THE U.S. NAVY IS EXPLORING TECHNOLOGIES EVOLVED BY DOLPHINS, SPECIFICALLY THE FLUCTUATION IN THE SURFACE OF A DOLPHIN’S SKIN THAT HELPS IT MOVE FASTER THROUGH THE WATER.
sure drag through the application of a hair-like coating on the trailing edge of a sphere. The principle would work in either water or air, but there are qualifications. The size, shape and material composition of the individual filaments, as well as how closely they’re grouped would be dependent on the speed of the airflow and shape of the object they cover. So
don’t go tarring and feathering yourself before a race just yet. All of this is due to the fact that the individual filaments have to vibrate at the same frequency as the occurrence of vortices against the surface they cover. Because of the frequency issue, these kinds of coatings probably won’t make it onto the back of tri-suits, since what’s good for airflow won’t work in the water. The most likely application of this technology appears to be on helmets, but there’s no sign of helmet manufacturers feathering up their lids just yet. Research on fluid dynamics is also being done in the ocean. The U.S. Navy is exploring technologies evolved by dolphins, specifically the fluctuation in the surface of a dolphin’s skin that helps it move faster through the water. The motions are similar to sucking in your gut or flexing your abdominal muscles, except on a much smaller and more subtle scale. Scientists theorize that the creation of these ripples
112 : THE HYPE :
A dolphinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skin is able to change surface area to help it move faster through the water, and the U.S. Navy is looking to mimic this with the outer layers of ships.
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Racing is competition and healthy competition builds character.
along the surface of the skin helps to maintain turbulent ďŹ&#x201A;ow. While the idea that dolphins have that level of ďŹ delity in surface-area control and make conscious use of it is disputed, the results are not. The Navyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research is a bit more advanced, in this case. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re looking for a form of active control, in which they would continuously deform the skin of a ship, morphing the ripples to suit their speed requirements. Carbon ďŹ ber is a little less forgiving than a shipâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hull, but that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean the pattern of ripples canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be optimized to help reduce drag at typical race velocities, and with ďŹ ve whole millimeters to play with on your neoprene suit, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be surprised to see new designs trying to help make your next swim a breeze. Bottaro points out that thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s another animal out there thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cracked an element of the aero code. In the pursuit of faster forks, the humpback whale may have beaten us to the solution millennia ago. The leading edge of the whaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ďŹ ns are lined with a series of bumpy protrusions known as tubercles. This peculiar and counterintuitive
Photo: Eric Wynn
Chris McCormack rides the 808 Firecrest wheelset, Zipp Tangente Tubulars, and SRAM RED components
HIT THE GROUND RUNNING. We launched the new 808 Firecrest at Kona, and Chris McCormack took full advantage. Out on the Queen K, his 808s with Zipp Tangente tubulars were the fastest, most efficient, best handling wheels on the road. And in the marathon’s final mile, he had enough left in the tank to win one of the most dramatic duels in triathlon history. | Not only is Firecrest more aerodynamic than any other rim design, its distinctive wide profile also improves handling in crosswinds, wheel strength, and overall ride quality. It only took one shot for Macca to prove that it’s simply a better wheel in every way. | But that victory wasn’t the only one for Zipp this year. Mirinda Carfrae won on 650c ZEDTECH 4s and Karin Thuerig set a bike course record with a 303/1080 setup. Zipp once again dominated the Kona Bike Count with nearly 60% of all aero wheels. Clearly, superior technology makes a difference for every athlete.
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114 : THE HYPE :
Research shows that the tubercles on the fins of humpback whales generate power as they move through the water.
adaptation generated great interest in zoologist Frank Fish. After a series of tests conducted at the research facilities of the United States Naval Academy, Fish published his findings in 2005. The results were startling—tubercles on airfoil leading edges yielded significant improvements in performance. Wings could operate at much higher angles without stalling (a condition in which airflow separation causes the wing to lose all ability to generate lift), and even when stalls occurred they did so more gradually. This has already led to revolutionary designs in the wind energy industry, with a wind turbine manufacturer even taking the name “WhalePower.” Some of the research is production-ready. Some is still in its primitive stages. In all cases, the fact that these species are still here to give us clues about their engineering marvels is a testament to the fact that they’ve endured centuries of field testing. From the wings of an eagle to the fur of a sea otter, the technology of tomorrow already exists today. It has for thousands of years. LAVA
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116 : COACH’S COUNSEL :
NOCTURNAL TRAINING Coach Troy explains how to get some shut-eye after a late-night workout
DONALD MIRALLE
By Troy Jacobson
Q:
DEAR COACH,
I just started a new teaching job that keeps me at school until 6 p.m. most nights, which has pushed my workouts until 7 o’clock at the earliest. With my last job I was able to work out at around 4 p.m. and I was getting to sleep a lot earlier. Nowadays, if I finish riding or running at 8:30
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p.m., I’m lucky if I get to sleep before midnight. Any ideas on ways to get to sleep earlier after an evening workout? I’ve tried switching my workouts to the morning, but I’ve never been able to keep my workouts consistent in the morning. Please help! —Claire Felder Portland, Ore.
A:
DEAR CLAIRE,
You touch on an important topic: sleep and its impact on athletic performance. Studies have shown that too little sleep causes the body to release more of the stress hormone cortisol, which can impair recovery from hard workouts. Furthermore, inadequate sleep has been shown to
118 : COACH’S COUNSEL : slow the metabolization of glucose by up to 40 percent, a negative performance factor for the endurance athlete in heavy training. These are just two of the many reasons that professional endurance athletes, people whose livelihoods depend on their performance, are reported to sleep nine or more hours per night along with taking short mid-day naps. Performing intense exercise just before bed makes it difficult to fall asleep for a few different reasons. One is that your metabolism is cranked up and consequently, so is your body temperature. Your body temperature typically cools as you get tired and go to sleep. And although exercise ultimately reduces stress levels, stress hormones are elevated during and immediately after training, especially after intense exercise. If your schedule makes it necessary to train in the evening before going to bed, you need to employ specific strategies to help you nod off. Here are a few key points from the Mayo Clinic:
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
Go to bed and wake up on the same schedule each day. Don’t eat or drink large amounts before bedtime. Avoid caffeine, nicotine and alcohol in the evening. Make your bedroom cool, dark and comfortable. Sleep on a comfortable bed and pillows. Maintain a relaxing bedtime routine. Go to bed when you’re tired and ready to turn the lights off. These are sound general guidelines, but as an endurance athlete training at night, you may need to go further. Consider the following points targeting the specific needs of the competitive endurance athlete: Try to avoid high-intensity intervals just before bed, as they tend to charge your metabolism more than lower-intensity, aerobic training. Work to finish your training at least two hours before bedtime. Establish a relax-
ing post-exercise routine in order to wind down from the day’s activities. Try to limit the number of evening workouts you do each week, remembering that adequate sleep can be just as important as training for enhanced performance. Try taking a melatonin supplement (just 3 mg should do the trick), or try drinking valerian root tea an hour before bedtime. As busy triathletes, we all need to do our best to balance our training with other areas of life. Focus on managing your schedule so that sleep and the important role it has in your performance doesn’t take a back seat. LAVA
The official coach of Ironman, Troy Jacobson is a former pro triathlete with sub nine-hour Ironman Hawaii credentials and was a top half-Ironman distance racer in the 1990s. The creator of the Spinervals Cycling Workout series, Jacobson has coached triathletes of all levels since 1992. Visit Coachtroy.com or email him at Troy@coachtroy.com.
“All of my power goes straight to the pedals.”
“I don’t put in countless hours building power just to have it lost. I choose Speedplay Zeros because my foot is positioned closer to the spindle and there’s no slop in the connection like with other pedals. Every watt of my power translates into speed, so nothing goes to waste.” Find your power at Speedplay.com
120 : SIDELINED :
PRP THERAPY A centrifuge and a little of your own blood may be all you need to heal your next injury. By Nathan Koch PT, ATC, and Anthony Lee, MD
PRP therapy works by injecting a patient’s centrifuged plasma directly into the injured soft tissue.
U
sing your own blood for anything other than a donation might cause concerns in the endurance sports community. However, recent medical advances in the treatment of chronic injury are creating a viable and legal option for using an athlete’s own blood to promote healing, especially in soft tissue (muscles, ligaments and tendons). One of the most promising new procedures for treating soft tissue injuries is platelet rich plasma therapy, or simply, PRP.
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
Most soft tissue injuries are self-limiting and will heal over time with minimal interventions, such as rest, ice and heat, and over-thecounter anti-inflammatory medications. This conservative approach does not necessarily speed the healing process or allow for a more complete recovery, but it’s usually sufficient to alleviate the acute symptoms. These treatments are aimed at decreasing the pain and reducing the inflammatory process. Unfortunately, recovery is not always complete. The
injury can become chronic, leading to longterm impairment. Platelet rich plasma therapy (PRP) has emerged as a popular regenerative option among many physicians. PRP uses the body’s natural healing process to restore function and activity levels. Research shows that by injecting portions of the patient’s own blood (PRP) directly into an area of injury, it’s possible to stimulate the body’s own mechanisms for repairing the injured tissues.
122 : SIDELINED :
Blood plasma that has been put through a centrifuge has up to eight times the amount of platelets of regular blood.
BLOOD PLASMA IS RICH IN PLATELETS, WHICH ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR INITIATING AND MAINTAINING THE BODY’S NATURAL HEALING PROCESS.
Currently, the treatment regimen prescribed by physicians consists of rest, ice and/or heat, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs), or a referral to physical therapy. If the pain and limitations continue despite conservative treatment, or if pain is severe, local steroid injections have traditionally been used. As beneficial as they are in reducing pain and improving function, steroid injections LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
can become harmful if overused. Steroid injection has been shown to be effective for acute injuries, but there is widespread concern in the medical community about its safety as a long-term solution. In addition, some studies indicate that a tissue rupture can occur following steroid injection. Platelet rich plasma has surfaced as an alternative treatment of soft tissue injuries, especially those that have become chronic. The PRP process begins by withdrawing a small sample of the patient’s blood, and then separating the blood into its various components using a centrifuge. The plasma portion of the blood is rich in platelets, which are responsible for initiating and maintaining the body’s natural healing process. The centrifuged plasma has a concentration of platelets up to eight times that of normal blood. PRP therapy therefore delivers a concentrated dose of growth factors directly into the injured tissue, enhancing the body’s
natural healing process. This may contribute to a faster, more efficient and complete restoration of the tissue to a healthier state. Musculoskeletal ultrasound is used to visualize the affected area and to assist in delivering the PRP to the exact location. A local anesthetic may be injected before the PRP injection to maximize patient comfort. Once the area is localized, the previously collected sample of the patient’s PRP is injected into the injured area under ultrasound guidance. Following an injection, the patient may experience soreness that can last for several days. This is similar to the discomfort of the normal inflammatory process. To follow up, the patient will begin an extensive rehabilitation program under the guidance of an experienced physical therapist. Complete regeneration of collagen may take up to six months. In many cases, the patient may require more than one injection to achieve complete muscle regeneration.
124 : SIDELINED :
Although PRP is becoming more widely used, little research has been done on the therapyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most effective method or its long-term effects.
The risks associated with PRP injections are minimal. Because PRP is derived from the patientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own blood, there is no concern for adverse reactions such as rejection or disease transmission. Although it is becoming more mainstream, PRP therapy is still in its infancy with regards to research. Very few well-controlled human studies are available. In addition, more information is needed to determine ideal concentration, application and appropriate conditions. In particular, there is a question as to the effectiveness of platelet rich plasma in the joint itself. There are also investigational studies in progress to determine the effectiveness of platelet rich plasma within the vertebral discs. While the process may sound more complex than traditional therapy methods, research suggests that PRP therapy may be an extremely effective method of eliminating nagging soft tissue injuries, one of the most common injuries among endurance athletes. For more information, contact your physician or physical therapist. LAVA
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126 : THE FULL SPECTRUM :
CHARACTERISTICS OF ELITE PERFORMANCE 10 ways to reach peak performance on and off the course. By Matt Dixon, MSc
LARRY ROSA
O
LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
ne of the most interesting features of our sport is the accessibility of the sport’s professionals to the large field of amateurs who also enjoy the sport. There aren’t many sports where elite athletes are so accessible before, during and after competition. This has led to a unique connection between the elites and the amateurs, feeding the hopes of many aspiring competitors who dream of membership among the sport’s highest ranks. But just what are the key characteristics necessary for success at the elite level? At Purplepatch I am lucky enough to work not only with elite performers in triathlon, but also with top performers in the business world, and I am continually intrigued by the parallels between the two sets of high achievers. These people who excel in their own disciplines provide a wonderful opportunity to help you find your own optimal performance by observing the characteristics that make them successful. Some of the characteristics are challenging to learn, but understanding and implementing them can have dramatic effects on your evolution to peak performance, both on and off the course. This article focuses on identifying the characteristics common to many of the elite performers whom I have observed, coached or followed. This should enable you to assess your approach to training—or other things in life for that matter—and help guide your own performance gains. Before we delve into these points, I feel it would be a mistake not to establish a foundation of thought relating to what it takes to excel in any endeavor, such as getting to, and staying at, the top of a sport. To rise to the top takes a tremendous amount of sacrifice, hard work and commitment. It does not happen overnight, but is a continual journey that is always filled with a
LARRY ROSA
128 : THE FULL SPECTRUM :
deep level of commitment and drive. As I review all the characteristics below, you should remember that our sport’s top performers have decided to make an almost unbelievable level of commitment to excellence, and while they have a genetic predisposition for their level of performance, it’s these other characteristics that have allowed them to step up from good to great. Their commitment comes in many forms: not just in training hard, but where the athlete is based, who they surround themselves with, how they manage the financial challenges— the list goes on. Not many are designed for elite athletic performance—that is why it is called “elite”—but you can certainly learn from these great performers. The lessons extend well beyond sport: in fact, as you read through the characteristics of professional performance, I challenge you to go back to the top and read again, and this LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
time imagine that you are looking through the lens of business performance. Elite athletics and business performance are not as different as you may think; in fact, if you consider some of the key characteristics and traits that elite athletes display in separating themselves from their competition, they may strike you as remarkably similar to an “elite” executive’s skill set. The following are 10 characteristics and components that I have found crucial to achieving peak performance, both on and off the course.
#1
GOAL-ORIENTED THINKING: Let’s start with an obvious, but worthy, characteristic. Every elite has measurable and firmly established long-term goals, with shorter-term goals to provide the essential stepping stones to success. The journey is seldom an accident; it is planned well in ad-
vance, and the goals are continually revisited and assessed, not just put on a piece of paper and locked in a drawer. These goals help create the framework or road map of an athlete’s career.
#2
ASSESSMENT: No athlete can
consistently achieve success without a continuous cycle of assessment. This process allows the athlete to stay on track and acts as a road map to success. Ignoring this critical element can lead to disastrous consequences and no way to understand where things went wrong. An elite performer understands the need for assessment of both good and bad performances, the latter often being the most important. The value of assessment is, of course, greatly enhanced with a strong and established set of goals and a road map, allowing a loop of continuous feedback.
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130 : THE FULL SPECTRUM :
#3
SUPPORT: Behind almost ev-
ery successful athlete is a team of people that facilitate success. The smartest elites understand their own strengths and weaknesses and rely on a network of people that work toward a shared vision. This is often a key role of a coach, but it can also include other key players that help the performer excel, including partners, mentors and experts in specific fields. Elite performers do not try to have every answer themselves, but will often look outside to gather guidance and support, and define their vision.
#4
SPECIFICITY: The best athletes have a great instinct for focusing on the important factors that will lead them toward their goals. They ignore variables
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that impede progress, act as a distraction from their mission, or are out of their control. It often takes time to develop the full recipe that works specifically for them, but elite performers know how to narrow their focus to what is important to their goals. Those who are talented but easily distracted often find themselves pulled in many directions and seldom find the right path for themselves.
#5
RESISTANCE TO ADVERSITY:
Elite athletes tend to thrive in stressful situations (despite the fact they also feel the same nerves and anxiety as the rest of us!) and do not panic when not everything goes according to plan. They remain solutionsbased and focus on controllable factors that they are able to influence. Adaptability and resilience are key for athletic success. This is
displayed in multiple levels in our sport, following poor training sessions or races, inevitable curveballs that occur in race situations, or when entire seasons don’t go as planned. Failures are often where the most important lessons are learned, but only if the athlete is able and willing to learn from them.
#6
BALANCE: In the journey to-
ward success there are bound to be peaks and valleys of success and failure. A great athlete is not too distraught at a short-term failure, nor overexcited by shortterm success. Emotional homeostasis, or balance, helps the athlete stay on track toward long-term goals. It is obviously important to enjoy success and celebrate victory, but each peak is really just a stepping stone toward continued success.
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132 : THE FULL SPECTRUM :
#7
PATIENCE (AND RESILIENCE):
Every elite performer understands that the journey to excellence does not happen overnight. The ability to set the path of progression and stay on it—not just through a season, but for multiple seasons—is absolutely crucial. My fundamental belief is that patience will allow progression to a level of performance that can hardly be imagined at the start of the journey.
#8
PASSION: Even if all of the above ring true, it is still impossible to excel without passion. Elite performers have passion for their goal, their journey and their entire endeavor. Passion will not diminish the challenge, but it enhances the enjoyment LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
and commitment to that challenge. The passion of the elite shines through not only in their words, but in the actions they take in daily life toward the goal.
#9
RISK-TAKING: This trait is very
difficult to train into someone, but the willingness to take smart and calculated risks is essential for optimal results. Channeled correctly, with a logical approach, risks can lead to great results. This is often the foundation of the “X-factor” in performance: a willingness to be exposed in front of one’s peers without a fear of consequence.
#10
RECOVERY: Ultimately, this
may be the magical lesson that we can all learn from. Nearly anyone can
train hard, but the very best understand how to recover and allow their body to adapt. Recovery does not make the journey easier, and is certainly not a shortcut to performance, but it does help maintain health and create the runway for massive gains. Perhaps more important than the physical benefits of recovery are the mental benefits that come from a brief period of rest from exercise. Our gains from all that hard work are only realized after we rest. We are not all destined to be professional athletes—that honor is reserved for those with both natural talent and the desire to make the sacrifice toward the goal. But we can always learn from those at the top by extracting some of the characteristics that facilitate elite performance and applying those lessons for our own performance gains in our sport, work and life. LAVA
134 : TO YOUR HEALTH :
EXTREME-EFFICIENCY EXERCISES Waste less time in the gym by targeting major movers and support muscles at the same time. By Ben Greenfield
S
trength training experts and triathlon coaches frequently emphasize the importance of tending to small, supportive muscles, which are notoriously weak among triathletes. Such support muscles include those of the rotator cuff, the gluteus medius and the muscles surrounding the core. As important as these muscles are to supporting the major muscle groups, it simply doesn’t make sense for
[ Photography by Isaiah Eyre
the average time-crunched triathlete to devote a couple of extra hours per week to something that is so seemingly insignificant. After all, the types of exercises traditionally used to strengthen these muscles have very little cardiovascular, calorie-burning or coordination benefits. For example, a common exercise for the rotator cuff involves multiple sets of internal and external rotations with a piece of elastic
tubing. If you have 45 minutes at the gym over your lunch hour, do you really want to spend 10 minutes of that time standing relatively motionless with only a few small muscles in your arm and shoulder firing? Most athletes will find their limited time better spent doing cardio-intensive, multi-joint movements that incorporate the rotator cuff muscles but also use many of the major mus-
EXERCISE 1: ALTERNATING LUNGE JUMPS WITH OVERHEAD PRESS (GLUTEUS MEDIUS, SCAPULA, CORE)
Begin in a standard lunge position with your left leg forward and a light dumbell resting on each shoulder. As you jump up with both legs, bring your left leg back and right leg forward while pressing the dumbells straight up. Return the dumbells to your shoulders as you kneel and repeat with your right leg forward.
EXERCISE 2: DUMBBELL OR BARBELL CLEANS TO OVERHEAD PRESS (ROTATOR CUFF, CORE)
Pick up two moderately heavy dumbells from the floor by bending your knees and keeping your back straight. Next, bring the dumbells into a shoulder press position by bending your elbows and bringing the dumbells forward. Finish the movement by completing a standard shoulder press, using your legs to help drive the weight upward. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
136 : TO YOUR HEALTH : cles of your body, thus producing coordination, motor-unit recruitment and muscular endurance while also strengthening the rotator cuff. Two such examples are barbell or dumbbell cleans, and pull-ups, both of which involve multiple large muscles as well as the smaller, stabilizing muscles of the rotator cuff. In this article, I’ll give you the top nine exercises I’ve found to be
highly effective for strengthening the common weak links in triathletes, while also producing a high heart rate and rapid development of strength and power. I call these “extreme-efficiency exercises.” By incorporating these exercises into your weekly routine, you’ll never find yourself standing on a mat in the far corner of the gym working one tiny muscle at a time as you watch the minutes slip away.
EXERCISE 3: SINGLE-LEG OVERHEAD PRESS WITH KNEE DRIVE (GLUTEUS MEDIUS, CORE)
Begin standing with two medium-weight dumbells in the shoulder press position. As you press the weights upward, lift your left knee as high as possible and then return to the starting position. Repeat with the right knee.
EXERCISE 4: SINGLE-LEG ROW AND THROW (SCAPULA, ROTATOR CUFF, GLUTEUS MEDIUS, CORE)
Begin standing with a cable pulley to your right side, holding the handle with your left hand. With your left leg off the ground and right knee slightly bent, row the handle toward your chest as you straighten your right knee. Finish the movement by “throwing” the weight by extending your left elbow.
EXERCISE 5: SLOW DESCENT JUMP PULL-UPS (SCAPULA, ROTATOR CUFF, CORE)
Start on the ground, facing a pull-up bar. Jump up toward the bar and use the momentum of your jump to help lift your chin as high as possible over the bar. Then begin to slowly descend, taking as long as possible to straigten your arms. Return to the floor and repeat. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
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138 : TO YOUR HEALTH :
EXERCISE 6: LATERAL STEP WITH REVERSE FLY (GLUTEUS MEDIUS, ROTATOR CUFF, SCAPULA, CORE)
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Stand with a cable pulley to your right side, holding the handle with your left hand. As you step to the side with your left leg, lift your handle up and to the side at a 45-degree angle. Keep weight low to prevent possible damage to the rotator cuff.
EXERCISE 7: LATERAL LUNGE TO OVERHEAD TRICEPS EXTENSION (GLUTEUS MEDIUS, SCAPULA, CORE)
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Begin standing straight up with two light dumbells in a tricep press position. Perform a lateral lunge by stepping as far to one side possible, pressing the dumbells upward as you step. Return the dumbells to the starting position before stepping back to center.
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EXERCISE 8: REVERSE WOODCHOPPER (CORE, ROTATOR CUFF, GLUTEUS MEDIUS)
Begin by holding a dumbell or medicine ball near your left foot with both knees bent. Lift the weight up by exploding with your knees and core, ďŹ nishing with the weight above your right shoulder. Repeat on the other side.
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: TO YOUR HEALTH : 139
EXERCISE 9: STABILITY BALL PUSH-UPS (SCAPULA, ROTATOR CUFF, CORE)
Begin by holding a Swiss ball with your arms straight, roughly shoulder-width apart. Bring your body all the way down to the ball before pressing yourself back to the starting position. Keep your core muscles as tight as possible throughout.
Below is a sample table that shows how to incorporate exercises 1–9 in a 3x/week routine with sets and repetitions. The following training schedule allows the major muscle groups to recover completely before the following workout. You can easily perform each day as a circuit, moving from the first exercise to the last with relatively little rest, then going back to the beginning, until you’ve completed all sets for each exercise.
EXERCISE
DAY 1
#1
3–4 X 8/SIDE
#2 #3
DAY 2 3–4 X 6–8
3–4 X 8/SIDE
#4
3–4 X 8/SIDE
#5
3–4 X 6–8
#6 #7 #8 #9
DAY 3
3–4 X 8/SIDE 3–4 X 6–8/SIDE 3–4 X 8/SIDE 3–4 X 6–8
Watch Ben’s demonstration of the exercises at lavamagazine.com/ ee-exercises LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
Any kid can participate.
REGISTER TODAY!
Go to ironkids.com to ďŹ nd a race in your area. The top 5 boys and top 5 girls from each age group (from all 23 national events) qualify for the Hy-Vee IronKids U.S. Championship in West Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, September 17.
142 : COMPETITIVE EDGE :
GOING SUB 10 (OR 12) The Grip’s guide to going faster than you ever thought possible at Ironman
LARRY ROSA
By Mark Allen
W
hat’s your four-minute mile? The personal time barrier that is the lure for some and the unbreakable for many is the sub-10-hour Ironman for men and the sub12-hour for women. If you are close, want to be close, or even if you have no idea if you could ever be close, this article is for you. Getting there may be more realistic than you think. With a moderate amount of smart training, big chunks can fall off your previous PR, so let’s get going.
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The first step is to set up the right mental game. Without this you will have made the biggest single mistake anyone trying to break a barrier can make. And that mistake is to prepare to break, rather than demolish, your goal time. If you are seeking a sub-10-hour Ironman, the tendency is to target splits that will get you what? Say, a 9:55? Maybe even a 9:50? Let me give you your first lesson in what demolishing a goal means: If you are shooting for sub-10,
get every cell in your body in line with the concept that you will be ready and capable of going 9:30. If your goal is a sub-12-hour Ironman, you better believe you’re ready to do 11:30 on race day. This gets you ready to go into race day expecting it to happen as opposed to merely hoping it will happen. You may already be thinking, “that’s impossible! My PR is almost an hour slower than that!” That’s fine. For the moment, let’s forget
144 : THE HYPE :
LARRY ROSA
Your Ironman game plan shouldn’t be based on a race where everything goes 100-percent perfectly—in an Ironman it never does.
what you think you are or aren’t capable of and look at why it’s important to get into this mindset. In an Ironman, the day rarely, if ever, goes according to plan, yet most athletes’ time goals are based on everything going 100 percent according to plan—and a specific plan, at that. Anyone who has raced Ironman knows that the only thing you can count on is that things will not go according to plan. Having these extreme goals gives you the cushion you need when your perfectly-planned race meets the real world. Next up is doing the right stuff. I am not going to reiterate the nuts and bolts of base, speed and tapering that you have hopefully experimented with over the years. But within whatever training program you have there are some essentials that will help lead you to breaking your personal barrier. One of those is to vary your type of training throughout the LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
season. The body becomes extremely efficient at just about anything over time. So what may have gotten you big fitness gains in January will likely give you very little bang for your training buck in June. How can you do this? First, vary the distance of your workouts week from to week. Don’t make your long ride five and a half hours every week. Ride six hours one week and five the next. Do one week hilly, the next rolling and the third hilly again, but do the loop backwards so the challenging sections come at a totally different time in the ride. Don’t do the exact same pace week to week. One week, push the flats, the next, work the rolling parts, and then push the climbs on the third week. I’m sure you’re starting to get the idea. Another key to your record-breaking performance is doing bricks. Most triathletes don’t include enough brick workouts to truly
run comfortably off the bike. A long ride on Saturday followed by a long run on Sunday does not cut it. Your Ironman won’t be spread out over two days. Train your body to be ready for this. At least every other week, head out the door for a run within 5–10 minutes of finishing your long bike ride. It only takes a run of 30–50 minutes to signal to your body that a run (not a nap) comes right after the bike. After that, the workout turns into more of an endurance test with very little true physiological benefit. What I mean by this is that doing a six-hour bike followed by a two and a half-hour run may look like it simulates an Ironman bike/run quite well, which it does, but it also causes huge amounts of tissue damage and the endurance benefits are minimal. The endurance you need to run a great marathon comes from over-distance work you do on the bike combined with your shorter bricks.
146 : COMPETITIVE EDGE : There is one exception to this rule for those of you with a lot of long-distance racing under your belt or those who only plan on doing one full Ironman each year. If you fall into one of these groups, you may consider doing an over-distance brick early in your Ironman preparation. This could be something along the lines of a six-hour ride followed by a two-hour run. Think of it as doing two-thirds or three-quarters of an Ironman. This is not something that can be done multiple times throughout your Ironman lead-up, and if you do attempt an over-distance brick, be sure to build in plenty of recovery in the two weeks after the workout. The next piece of your training is strength work. Sustaining your effort in an Ironman, especially on the marathon, is not necessarily about going fast, but rather slowing down as little as possible. Your Ironman pace is not a speed effort. It is a sustained paced effort, and one of the major causes of slowdown is muscle breakdown. If you have a little extra lean muscle to burn going into the race, your ability to
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SUSTAINING YOUR EFFORT IN AN IRONMAN, ESPECIALLY ON THE MARATHON, IS NOT NECESSARILY ABOUT GOING FAST, BUT RATHER SLOWING DOWN AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE.
maintain your pace even after the breakdown begins will be signiďŹ cantly better and will likely kick you over the lip and into your subgoal territory. When you do strength training, it has to be shorter-duration sets (roughly 12â&#x20AC;&#x201C;15 reps) with challenging enough weights to start to fatigue you at the end of each (without necessarily going to failure). If your strength program consists of sets of 20â&#x20AC;&#x201C;30 reps, you are doing added endurance work and will not get the big gains in lean muscle that we are looking for from this activity.
Next up is your race-day nutrition. A sub-12, or even sub-10-hour Ironman is nowhere close to the limits of human capabilities. So if you are trained properly, but have fallen short of your barrier-breaking performance, it just might be that you were not getting gas in the tank fast enough to sustain your effort. Target 300â&#x20AC;&#x201C;400 calories per hour in training to see exactly how many you need in order to do a long bike ride and ďŹ nish the bike feeling fueled up enough to head out for a run without scarďŹ ng down a massive meal ďŹ rst. This is easy to do in training; it can be almost impossible on race day. The reason has to do with the form in which the calories come to you on the course. The bulk usually comes at you in the form of maltodextrin, which works wonders in training. But in a long, hot race, when your digestive system is on the blitz, maltodextrin can be tough to break down to glucose. Then you get stomach backup and can end up nauseous or even throwing up. Search for sources that have some glucose or dextrose (same molecule, different names). This may help alleviate
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148 : COMPETITIVE EDGE :
LARRY ROSA
No matter how great your training has been, on race day your mindset is just as important as your body’s endurance.
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stomach upset late in the race. And if all else fails, reach for a Coke. Yes, in a tough nutritional moment in an Ironman, cola is the go-to source that can often bring you back from the brink and get you running along smoothly. The final piece of the puzzle is your raceday mind-set. An Ironman is tough, whether you’re the first-place finisher or the last to cross the line before midnight. There will likely be a few hundred moments throughout the race where you find yourself doubting your ability and questioning why you’re even there. You may find yourself desperately searching for some tangible nod that you are having a good day. Don’t waste your time looking for it. Instead, remind yourself that you don’t have to feel 100 percent at all times to have the race of your life. In fact, if you are having the race of your life, you probably won’t realize it until after you’ve crossed Snap with a QR app to watch Mark’s video on your phone the finish line. LAVA
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RACING
150 : RACING :
152
in focus 160
boarding pass 168
the last word
Guam’s own Hidetada Hayashi makes his way through a creek crossing at XTERRA Guam on March 26. The race is as off road as they come, taking RICH CRUSE
athletes into Guam’s
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lush jungle for the 8.2K trail run.
: RACING : 151
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PHOTOS LARRY ROSA
152 : IN FOCUS :
ROHTO
IRONMAN 70.3 CALIFORNIA APRIL 2, 2011 : OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA 1.2 MI. SWIM : 56 MI. BIKE : 13.1 MI. RUN MEN’S TOP FINISHERS
Andy Potts and Rasmus Henning went toe-to-toe for the entire run, until Potts, the 2007 Ironman 70.3 world champ, kicked away with less than half a mile to go. In the women’s contest, 26-yearold bike phenom Heather Jackson held
1. Andy Potts : USA : 3:55:49 2. Rasmus Henning : DEN : 3:56:07 3. Michael Weiss : AUT : 3:56:29
the lead through mile 12 of the run, but
WOMEN’S TOP FINISHERS
charge by reigning Kona champ Mir-
1. Mirinda Carfrae : AUS : 4:26:18 2. Heather Jackson : USA : 4:26:28 3. Magali Tisseyre : CAN : 4:27:22
inda Carfrae, who squeezed out the win
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she couldn’t hold off the last-second
by only 10 seconds.
: IN FOCUS : 153
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154 : IN FOCUS :
DEXTRO ENERGY TRIATHLON ITU
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
SYDNEY April 10, 2011 : SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA 1.5 K SWIM : 40 K BIKE : 10 K RUN MEN’S TOP FINISHERS 1. Javier Gomez : ESP : 1:50:22 2. Jonathan Brownlee : GBR : 1:50:29 3. Sven Riederer : SUI : 1:50:34
WOMEN’S TOP FINISHERS 1. Paula Findlay : CAN : 2:01:21 2. Barbara Riveros Diaz : CHI : 2:01:23 3. Andrea Hewitt : NZL : 2:01:38
Canadian Paula Findlay proved her breakthrough season in 2010 was no fluke, outsprinting last year’s Sydney winner, Barbara Riveros Diaz of Chile, to pick up the first Series win of 2011. Even a spill on the bike couldn’t keep reigning world champ Javier Gomez PHOTOS DELLY CARR
off of the top podium spot in the men’s race. The Spaniard closed with a 30:09 10K to top the younger of Britain’s brilliant Brownlee boys. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
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156 : IN FOCUS :
OCHSNER
IRONMAN 70.3 NEW ORLEANS APRIL 17, 2011 : NEW ORLEANS, LA. 56 MI. BIKE : 13.1 MI. RUN
While high winds and unsafe water conditions forced race directors to turn the New Orleans 70.3 into a duathlon, Germany’s Sebastian Kienle and Great Britain’s Julie Dibens turned out great bike and run splits to secure their wins.
MEN’S TOP FINISHERS 1. Sebastian Kienle : GER : 3:18:08 2. Paul Amey : GBR : 3:23:08 3. Paul Matthews : AUS : 3:25:23
PHOTOS ASI
WOMEN’S TOP FINISHERS
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1. Julie Dibens : GBR : 3:40:15 2. Sam Warriner : NZL : 3:41:31 3. Yvonne Van Vlerken : NED : 3:44:30
Kienle had a three-minute lead over the competition heading out of T2 and easily took the win. Dibens didn’t have the swim to put her out in front, and subsequently battled most of the day with second-place finisher Sam Warriner of New Zealand.
PHOTOS ASI
158 : IN FOCUS :
MEMORIAL HERMANN
IRONMAN 70.3 TEXAS APRIL 10, 2011 : GALVESTON ISLAND, TEXAS 1.2 MI. SWIM : 56 MI. BIKE : 13.1 MI. RUN
Chris Lieto was nothing short of brilliant on the bike, riding almost five minutes faster than his pursuers. Henning and O’Donnell both closed strong on the run, but Lieto made it to the finish with a gap of more than a minute to
MEN’S TOP FINISHERS 1. Chris Lieto : USA : 3:45:37 2. Rasmus Henning : DEN : 3:46:47 3. Timothy O’Donnell : USA : 3:48:16
WOMEN’S TOP FINISHERS 1. Catriona Morrison : GBR : 4:06:43 2. Angela Naeth : USA : 4:09:40 3. Karin Thuerig : SUI : 4:10:30
take the Ironman 70.3 U.S. Pro Championship. Scotswoman Cat Morrison sealed the women’s title on the run, closing with a race-best 1:18:18 half marathon to cross the line with three minutes on her competition.
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160 : BOARDING PASS :
THE CARIBBEAN’S HIDDEN
RACING PARADISE NEVIS is tailor made for TRIATHLON … just don’t tell too many of your friends. By Ben Greenfield
The inaugural TriStar Nevis triathlons debuted on April 2 in the Caribbean, and highlighted the tiny island’s triathlon-friendly roads and beaches.
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162 : BOARDING PASS :
TONY TYRELL
For an entire week in early April, the 36-square-mile island of Nevis was host to a variety of endurance competitions, including a 2.5-mile open water swim.
n early April the tiny, 36-square-mile Caribbean island of Nevis hosted Chris McCormack and a handful of other international triathletes for its inaugural TriStar Nevis week: a series of events that includes a 2.5mile swim competition, mini-triathlon, TriStar 33.3 (300-meter swim, 30K bike, 3K run) and TriStar 111 (1K swim, 100K bike, 10K run). As an extremely hilly island formed by a 3,000-foot dormant volcano, Nevis provides a challenging backdrop for this race. Aside from the white, black and golden sand beaches, a bike or run course any direction is guaranteed to include climbing, tricky gusts of wind and epic views from the rain forest to clear Caribbean water. If “off the beaten path” races are your cup of tea, Nevis is sure to deliver. Here’s all you need to know to make it happen in 2012.
I
GETTING THERE Small passenger airplanes that carry only about a dozen passengers will land in the Nevis airport from a connecting flight in nearby St. Maarten, and a larger direct flight from San Juan is also an option. You LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
could also fly into St. Kitts, the finishing destination of the cross-channel swim race, and simply take a one-hour ferry ride to Charlestown, the sleepy capital of Nevis. If you care to take part in the full week of events, plan on an 8–10 day stay, arriving on Friday or Saturday, in time for the Sunday swim event, and departing the following Sunday or Monday.
STAYING THERE The only moderately large resort in Nevis is the Four Seasons, which offers an 18-hole golf course that’s perfect for early morning runs, and also has a pool just big enough to squeeze in a few laps. The remainder of accommodations on the island are small, locally owned hotels scattered from the beachside up into the mountains. We stayed at the Hermitage Nevis, with a central great house built in the 1600’s, small, private villas developed across an old plantation and a network of hiking and mountain biking trails that extend up towards the volcano. Like the other mountainside accommodations, including
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164 : BOARDING PASS :
During your downtime, visit Cottle Church, the first church in the Caribbean built for all people, regardless of color, to worship together. The church was built by English planter Thomas Cottle in 1824.
the Golden Rock Hotel, the appropriately named Hermitage is quiet, but separated from the main town by a giant hill, so be ready to ride and run hills or plan to hitch a ride into town. We opted for the former, and by race day, were very familiar with the big climbs on the bike course.
FUELING UP With no fast food restaurants or franchises, every eatery on Nevis offers authentic local cuisine, and hungry athletes are guaranteed to eat well on Nevis. For a bit of everything, we’d recommend you check out the Friday night buffet at Rumours, where you’ll get to sample “Goat Water” (a popular local stew made with goat meat), the staple rice and peas, and lightly fried curried chicken. If you don’t start off the day with a buffet from any of the beachside hotels, you could start or end a training session with a carbohydratedense sweet potato pie from the Fancy Jamaican Bakery on the dock near the race start and wash it down with a bottle of homemade linseed juice. If you’re more daring, go for the fried sawfish. Grocery stores abound, but in the back of Superfoods, we discovered a small sandwich shop with fresh-baked bread and thick deli cuts of pork. Other must-haves include the rum punch at the Hermitage, coconut-encrusted shrimp at the Golden Rock Hotel, lamb shank at Bananas and a bit of beach cuisine at Coconut Grove. Most restaurants and grocery stores accept Visa, or you can use the local currency, the Eastern Caribbean Dollar (E.C.), which is fixed to the U.S. Dollar and is about 2.60 E.C. to one American dollar. LAVAMAGAZINE.COM
TRAINING AND RACING With extremely quiet beaches, relatively low-traffic roads and the impossibility of getting lost on such a small island, we found it easy to create daily training sessions on Nevis. Oualie Beach, Pinney’s Beach, Lover’s Beach and the TriStar swim start at Cades Bay all offer unlimited distance for swim training in mostly calm waters. The roads on Nevis are very rough, so bring your bike tools, spare tubes and tires. There is only one main road on the island, and an entire loop of this route, which you’ll ride on race day, is about 20 miles. Expect a very challenging two-mile climb and a fast descent on a hill that the locals dub “Anaconda.” Should you run into any mechanical difficulties, head for Wheel World, a well-stocked bike shop on Oualie Beach. Running terrain varies on the island. You can choose a squishy-soft golf course, any of the pristine beaches, the winding, hilly main road or even a scramble up the side of the volcano. We found the uncrowded beaches very conducive to swim-run sets up and down the sand.
LOOKING BACK The adventurous triathlete will welcome the non-touristy, friendly vibe of Nevis. Rather than spending your trip shopping, gambling, visiting night clubs or fighting through unfriendly crowds, you’ll get a heavy dose of authentic Caribbean cuisine, outdoor training, unpopulated beaches and a group of locals who will treat you like family. If you’re a triathlete transitioning to long distance, want a cycling-intensive event, or just want to try something new, Nevis is tough to beat. LAVA
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received. Taxes, when applicable, are the sole responsibility of the winner. Winner will be contacted by email, telephone or mail. Winner must follow the directions contained in any correspondence and return all completed forms within 7 days from the date of correspondence. Non-compliance will result in disqualification and the naming of an alternate winner. There is no cash exchange for this sweepstakes. Prize fulfillment may take 90 days or more. This sweepstakes is sponsored by the World Triathlon Corporation. Employees and anyone affi liated are not eligible. Sweepstakes subject to all federal, state and local tax laws. Void where prohibited by law. For the name of the winner, send a self-addressed, postage-paid envelope and letter of request to: LAVA QR Sweepstakes or LAVA TREK Sweepstakes, 514 Via de la Valle, Suite 300, Solana Beach, CA 92075.
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168 : THE LAST WORD :
JONES VS. JACKSON Twenty-six-year-old American Heather Jackson is attempting to become the Ironman 70.3 world champion after only three years of competing in triathlon. Luckily for Jackson, her friend and neighbor, Aussie tri legend Michellie Jones, knows a thing or two about winning world titles.
you got something out of it. Oftentimes you don’t learn anything from the races you win. The biggest thing is to be honest with yourself when you’re evaluating your races, and to be honest about what you need to do better.
Heather Jackson: Michellie, when you first started racing, what was your major weakness? Did you even have one?
Michellie Jones: Believe it or not, swimming was definitely was my weak sport. People don’t believe me when I tell them now, but I was a pretty terrible swimmer for those first few years.
HJ: How have you stayed motivated? Is it the big, “A” races that keep you going, or are you more motivated by short-term goals?
HJ: How’d you fix it?
MJ: I’m still fixing it. It’s a continuous thing. I still don’t know that I have it down, but I guess I do a pretty good job of faking it.
MJ: It’s a bit of both. At the start of every season, there’s always the big goal. Early in my career it was the Olympics, then Kona … you always need one big goal to structure the smaller goals around. But day to day, it’s the smaller goals and smaller races that keep you going. I treat the smaller events like steppingstones. The more effort I put into the smaller steps, the closer I get to my big goal.
HJ: Have you had any points throughout your career when you really wanted to walk away?
MJ: Of course. But it wasn’t always the bad moments that made me think about quitting. Sometimes, like after winning the silver medal or finishing second in Hawaii, I thought to myself, “What more do you really want to do?” Then when I came back and won Kona in 2006, I remembered why I do it—it just comes down to a love of racing. Your passions might change throughout your career, you might try different distances, but as long as you enjoy racing, you’ll find a reason to keep going. Where’s your passion right now?
HJ: You had a few races throughout your career where you always performed well, like Chicago and Alcatraz. What was it about those races and how did you find the ones that worked for you?
MJ: I can’t really say for sure, but there were always those two or three races each year that I knew would work for me. Sometimes it’s just a matter of learning the course well and becoming really comfortable racing in a certain place. Sometimes the terrain or the climate just really works for you. As you start to race more, you’ll find races like that. You may not know why a race works for you, but there will be a couple where you know you can always turn in a good performance.
HJ: It’s definitely 70.3 racing. I don’t have the swim to do ITU and I’m not interested in racing Ironman just yet. I’ve only been doing this for a few years.
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HJ: Did you ever do races where you knew
JAY PRASUHN
MJ: You know, I’ve always had this theory that it takes an athlete seven years to reach their potential. I think all that effort of being a professional triathlete really starts to show after about seven years. My advice is to realize that you’re probably still a few years away from seeing your fullest potential, so don’t become too frustrated if things don’t always happen quickly. If you look at most of the top athletes in this sport, it was about seven years before they got to the top.
you’d be outside your comfort zone?
HJ: How do you deal with a bad race?
MJ: My feeling has always been that if you can walk away from a race having learned something, then it’s a good race—it means
MJ: Absolutely. You have to do that every season to test yourself as an athlete. That’s the only way you improve. And sometimes those races are the most fun.
Log onto lavamagazine.com/last-word-6 for extra video footage.
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