2015 Chiang Mai 10.6k

I return to Chiang Mai, the wonderfully affordable holiday destination, in hopes of achieving further glory at the Chiang Mai Marathon events.

  

I had placed first overall in the half-marathon four years ago, back when the event was a small, homey affair, and we chatted with the race director and got to know many of the other runners, and practically our only spectators at the sunrise event were some ladyboys heading home after working at the bars all night.  Now the Chiang Mai event has grown into a regional economic juggernaut with over 7,000 participants coming from all over the world, hundreds of volunteers, costumed dancers and musicians, and the entire city festooned with garish banners welcoming the runners and sound trucks crawling through the city streets blaring out announcements for the race. I had watched the first “Hunger Games” movie on the flight over, and all this new powerful, Chiang Mai Marathon event build-up and pageantry reminded me of the spectacle built up around the hunger games contest in the dystopian movie.  

I join over 2,000 other runners in the 10.6-kilometer event (there are 4 races starting one hour apart).  We start the race to an explosion of cannons shooting smoke into the air, rows of musicians beating on drums, and the city's top celebrities and political officials cheering us on.  I start on the front line which appears to have been a mistake as runners burst past me and I am nearly knocked off my feet by a guy in an orange singlet sprinting at absolutely full speed.

I stay behind Arnaud, and at 1k which we apparently ran in 3:53, there are at least 20 guys ahead of us and I wonder whether it was cocky of me to have expected to be on the podium at all – even just for my age group. 

At the starting line we had identified other runners in our age group based on their race numbers including a local 50-59 year old Thai clad in clunky red generic shoes and cheap cotton shorts, who had warmly wished me well in the race. He did not look like a particularly elite athlete – I understood him to say that he was a worker in a rice farming village to the south of Chiang Mai.  But this age-group rival burst quickly out at the start, and I knew he must be in the large pack ahead of me, a pack that seemed to be pulling further and further ahead. So I reluctantly surged past Arnaud and begin picking off the other runners one by one. By 3k I spotted the heavy red shoes of my local Thai age-group competitor and I settled in behind him for awhile. When I had gather enough strength to sprint past him he valiantly tried to stay with me, but after his fast start was laboring and eventually dropped off.

Ultimately I managed to move all the way up to 4th position almost catching the guy in the orange singlet who had almost knocked me down at the start and who apologized profusely when he turned and saw me cross the finish line.

Naturally there are lavish awards to the victors in this epic tournament.  Here you can see me being awarded with an extravagant 3,000 baht first-place cash prize – an enormous amount of money in low-cost northern Thailand.

My rival in the bulky red shoes is gracious and magnanimous in the face of his crushing defeat afterwards. I feel almost bad to have denied him victory, presuming he would make better use of the huge prize winning.  I ponder settling in Chiang Mai myself and living off the prize money.   

Instead I somehow managed to squander every last cent of my precious winnings within the next day, frivolously blowing it all on over-priced, airport pastries and cappuccinos, useless plasticky Christmas trinkets, and ephemeral, online text stickers...

My "off-season" - 4 random races over 5 short weeks

I felt exhausted after my effort at the Korea Half-Ironman.  Korea was my end-of-season “A” race.  According to most any authority on endurance training, this past month should really have been my “off-season”-- a time when I primarily rest along with some strength work and perhaps spend some time on my various minor technique weaknesses (my swim kick, my bike cornering, quickly removing my wetsuit…) 

But no, no, no – I have an odd assortment of events on my calendar: FOUR completely different competitive endeavors over the five weekends following October 4^th:

1.     Shimoda Triathlon 4 / October 11 – I can’t miss the social event of the season – the 4^th informal Shimoda Triathlon.  I enjoy my strongest swim in 2 years in the stormy Shimoda cove, but the fact that it pours down rain during the bike effectively ends my competitive effort halfway through the bike.  I just try not to crash on the scary steep downhill sections amidst the total deluge. 

2.     Inage Aquathlon / October 17 – I have long wanted to do an Aquathlon – a two-stage run/swim race - and I could not pass up the opportunity to join a half-dozen teammates for this 1.5k swim and 10k run.  I really was curious to experience running immediately after the swim and address the question of how strong of run I could do coming off the swim, versus coming off the bike.  The answer: not very strong at all.  I have always been dazed at start of bike in triathlon.  On the bike I could coast.  On the run at Inage I was just suffering – struggling to do 4-minute pace (ouch).  Still I mange to win my age group in time of 1:14:14.

3.     Pacific Northwest Cross Country Championship / November 1 – Hey, why not jump in the local cross country championship in my continuing pursuit of varied events?   Of course I was very much out of my element.. All (and I mean all) the other guys on the Club Northwest team seem totally (and I mean totally) focused on cross country – “I have been doing dedicated cross country workouts since mid-summer” one of the guys tells me – “these are far and away our most important races of the year”.  I have done zero dedicated cross country workouts this year (along with this one last year).   None of the athletes I know in California, Tokyo, Singapore, etc. ever talk about cross country (bar a few hard-core British runners).  I am asked if I will wear spikes in the race. Spikes?  I haven’t worn spike in decades. I haven’t even remotely considered wearing spikes in decades.

So I guess it was understandable that I floundered on the steep, slippery half of the course, but I would like to do better in this type of event.  What was particularly disconcerting to me was that even when I got to the hard-packed trail portion of the course I was still way off my recent race pace.  My pace for the 6k course?  3:59 per kilometer (again - ouch)  28th place out of 64 guys.  

4.     Barbeque 10k / November 8 – I am there for the barbeque (and opportunity for a pure running event).   

I run 37:20. 

 Compare to last year’s 36:59 when my training had been more concentrated on running.  Felt surprisingly good at the start of the race, but my energy fades over the 10k.  (Only 10k - how can I fade?!  Apparently the lower running mileage 30k-40k per week this year versus 50k-70k last year?  or the lack of race-specific training?) 

Qualified for World Half-Ironman Triathlon Championships

I make the podium at the Korea Half-Ironman triathlon on Sunday finishing in second place among the 44 entrants in my age group.

As you can see I am happy to make podium in a triathlon (one thing for me to make the podium in a run event, but triathlon has been a bit more challenging/competitive)

My time of 5:11:37 falls short of my dream of breaking 5 hours, but it is my PB for the distance by 6 minutes: 

Swim -   43:37

Bike -  2:42:52

Run -  1:39:19

T1&2 -   5:47 

Total -  5:11:37

Swim- My swim felt strong, but when I look at my watch at the end, I am a bit dismayed to see that I am still swimming way slower than the pace I consistently raced at several years ago (even slower than the splits at my two Ironman distance races – both splits at Frankfurt where I swam a 1:16 in a wetsuit with a broken zipper).  I have done far more quality swim training sessions in 2015 than any other year.  The more swim training I do, the slower it seems that I swim. 

Bike - I don’t really allow myself to worry about my slow swim though as I stagger into T1. I tell myself that a slow swim is not fatal to my overall race time goals given the relatively small weight of the swim in a half-ironman triathlon, and I manage to turn my attention to consuming gels and powering up to race pace on the bike.  






I also manage pay some attention to the picturesque mountain setting - Gurye is nestled in a mountains of south, central Korea –an ideal venue for a half-ironman with the flat river plain. 









I averaged 33km/hour on the relatively flat, fast bike course – my strength ebbing slightly over the last 20k or so. It was during these last 20k thatI caught my mates Henrik and (amazingly) David who I presumed was far, far ahead of me, but was having an off day.  It really helped to have the teammates to pull me along.  My shortage this year of long bike training sessions was starting to make an impact.  This lack of training did not seem to have actually affected my race performance yet – though it would take a toll on the run. 

Run - I chatted with David in the transition tent, and when I passed him at the start of the run he shouted encouragement at me to break 5-hours.  Breaking 5-hours would entail running an extraordinary pace for me given how trashed my legs felt from the bike. But I told myself that I felt strong, I would give it everything I had or die trying, and soon I was actually running close to 4-minutes per kilometer pace.  Amazingly all the way through the first lap of the 2-loop run I managed to maintain this suicidal pace. 

But when we started the second lap things deteriorated. From 12k to 16k was just a bad, bad period. I hear other endurance athletes talk about being masochistic – enjoying the pain somehow.  Well, I would prefer to minimize the amount of time I spend at the level of misery I felt during that section of the run.  After walking through the aid station at the turnaround at 16k and starting to head back toward the finish line I managed to regain strength and achieve a better mindset and focus on “form under duress”.  

I felt pretty satisfied with my effort as I crossed the finish line and the medical staff dragged me to the massage tent and I thought about how my hard triathlon training was finally over.  And I’d vanquished the ghosts from my debacle in the Taiwan half-ironman. 

 

Oh.  And I qualified for the World Championships. 

Making it to the Worlds had been something of a goal for me to justify the training and feel like a real triathlete again. But spots in the half-ironman championships next September in Australia have become increasingly coveted.   

I was ready with my credit card in case I did qualify. Yes, they charge you for the entry fee and even expect you to pay right on the spot.  People have asked me if I received any prize money or cool stuff like in running events..  No, no, no – remember triathlon is targeted at an upscale demographic market segment.   Basically in triathlon if you place well you just earn the privilege of registering for even more wildly expensive events.  

Actually tho the registration did include this dorky hat and this really keen combination bottle-opener/keychain 

HIIT and the Social Athlete

The NYTimes published a series of articles last year extolling the virtues of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT).   High Intensity training is simply a series of very short burst of exercise at near maximum effort followed by recovery. The training concept has long been utilized among endurance athletes (Sebastian Coe doing wildly fast 200-meter repeats, the Tabata Protocol workouts, etc) with more rapid and efficient improvement in aerobic capacity and racing performance versus steady-state workouts.  More recently there has been various research suggesting metabolic benefits - fat-burning, insulin resistance, long-term cardiovascular benefits, neurological benefits, and more - hence the NYTimes articles urging even the most sedentary types to take on a regiment of painfully intense sprints on stationary bikes, rowing machines, boot-camp calisthenics, etc. 

  

 I seem to have inadvertently become something of an evangelist for this High Intensity Training myself. Saturday after Saturday I find myself leading a group repeatedly sprinting up  a series of nearby hills.  I had started these sessions some 20 months ago with two other runners as a brief off-season strength building effort.  These two teammates are long gone.  But, much to my surprise -- my extraordinary surprise -- the painful Hill Repeats have lived on.   

I thought perhaps everyone else had been reading the NYTimes Wellness columns.  Why else would they subject themselves to hill repeats?   But the other participants look at me blankly when I asked them if they are joining the workout because of the metabolic benefits..

After reading all these articles I had started to assume that everyone must be on the HIIT bandwagon, however when I look around at pool or gym, 90% of other people exercising are just plodding along at a steady pace.  Even  in my spin class, many of the participants hardly follow the instructors urging them to sprint and to climb.   I can certainly understand why most people prefer a long, easier steady workout -- I envy the blissed out swimmers gliding serenely through water while I am bent over the edge of pool gasping for breath.  I much prefer just being lost in thought on run through forests and not being a slave to my watch.  So I was not surprised last week the NYT comes out with a story about Danish researchers who are shocked, shocked!, that not every middle-aged, overweight, sedentary person has embraced a  intense, painful interval regime

The Danish researchers go on to contrive a formulaic workout which they argue will make high-intensity training appealing to the masses.   But my own experience with Saturday Hill Repeats makes me wonder if turning a challenging exercise program into a habit is so much a function of the specific workout structure.  The Hill Repeats benefit more from the fact it works for all speeds with the fastest runners turning around and uniting with the slower runners as they jog back down the hill after each hill repeat (in contrast to say a long, fast group bicycle ride where all but the fastest cyclists ride in constant fear of being “dropped” and then struggling on their own for the remainder of the ride, perhaps becoming hopelessly lost on some distant mountain course).  The Hill Repeat dynamic is similar to what has made the Hash House Harriers surprisingly popular with its weird, convoluted system of a “hare” setting up a false course so the fastest runners would intentionally get “lost” and backtrack to the slower runners.  

 

Moreover, the Saturday Hill Repeats team is very diligent about Social Media. We seem to always take time for the all-important photo ops.

Not to mention the critical post-workout reward and camaraderie with Starbucks and museum visits and global brunch experiences after each workout

Shimoda Triathlon 3

I compete in the 3rd Shimoda Triathlon last weekend

I am forced to borrow a bike after my triathlon bike is slightly damaged during shipment back from Hiroshima.

The borrowed bike is agonizingly slow and heavy and on the downhill it feels like I am trailing a parachute behind me. 

I imagine a serious cyclist/triathlete with their thousands upon thousands of dollars of bike gear and fetish for having fastest technology would be outraged about suffering the pain and  indignity of using slower equipment.  As for me, I was bummed to not experience the glorious 40k per hour speed on flat like at Miyajima Triathlon, yet when I consider the results over the 37-kilometer Shimoda course, the slower bike does not seem drastically significant.   Thanks to drafting and some long uphill sections I am able to move up from 8th place to 5th place during the bike segment. 

In fact once again it is my slow swim time that has the bigger impact on my race.  It takes 24 minutes to swim some 1000 meters.  I have been doing considerable swim training this spring with lots of focus on strength and form.  But I am not getting any faster.  My results are getting slower.

Not that the results matter that much on Sunday - it is a fine, scenic weekend with friends.  And anyway I finish 2nd - way, way too far from 1st place to even trifle over whether one component would have made a difference.

Miyajima Triathlon

In a continuing effort to experience more novel and unique endurance events I travel to Hiroshima last weekend to participate in the Miyajima "Woodman"Triathlon. 

Miyajima boasts perhaps the most spectacular swim start of any triathlon in the world (well perhaps second to the notorious Escape from Alcatraz) --the Miyajima Island World Heritage Site and its iconic floating torii gates. 

We were ferried out to the island at sunrise where we  change into our wetsuits and prepare for the swim in a 500-year old wooden shrine.

Then we proceed through the orange corridors of the main Itsukushima shrine where all the athletes stop to pray (in my case praying to survive the swim which preoccupied me at that moment, though in retrospect I should have prayed for more strength coming off the bike and onto the run).  

The island is overrun with deer who aren't at all skittish about creatures in wetsuits

The swim was surprisingly pleasant with the mass start of 500 age group swimmers spread out over a wide course, and the straight, point-to-point nature of the event eliminating the congested turns around buoys. 

I was a bit off-course with my tendency to drift right – as you can see in my swim path here (in grey)  vs Keren's more direct route (in red): 

I have lost count of how many times Keren has told me since the race just how terribly slow my swim split was at 48:42  for 2.5k.  But I was reasonably pleased with it given how much I've struggled recently to do 100s in the pool on a 2:15 cycle, and having not been out in open water at all this year. 

I came out of the water in 222nd place and started moving past people on the bike's early short uphill sections.  I had read and heard the warnings about the long, steep switchbacks on hill #4  toward middle of the bike section and hill #7 toward the end.  The hills were definitely challenging –   but I felt surprisingly strong and the crowds of spectators and drummers toward the top of these hills helped.  

Admittedly I struggled on the final 2k descent with young girls rocketing past me -- my arms felt bizarrely tired and I just  focused on not crashing on the tight corners.    Still by the time I finished the bike I had overtaken 134 competitors to move up to 88th overall with a bike in time of 2:21:27.

The long hill on the run I had also been warned about, and in contrast to the bike hills the climb on the run proved far worse than I anticipated. By 11k I feared that my run time was going to be a disaster, but thankfully  much of the last half of the run is downhill and I was able to regain my form and some strength and finish the race in around 4:51, good for 5th place.  I was told that Woodman is somewhat equivalent to a half-ironman distance race, and 4:51 is far faster than my previous efforts at that distance. 

So it was certainly worth the extra effort to journey to a unique, new endurance event.   Apart from about 50-minutes of sheer, unsurpassable, torturous misery during the middle 8k or so of the run, I was smiling and enjoying most of the triathlon. 

Moreover, the triathlon was a good excuse for visiting the Hiroshima area.  Keren and I flew down to Hiroshima on Friday morning on the new Spring Airline low cost carrier (only 7,000 yen each way though you have to travel via the notorious new Narita Terminal 3), and I shipped pretty much everything but a small daypack to our weekend hotel, so there was none of the usual effort to lug bikes and wetsuits and gear.

This facilitated our fine tourist experience – visiting the obligatory and sobering Atomic Bomb Museum and Park, sampling the Hiroshima-style IPAs at the craft beer pubs, swimming at the Hiroshima-style public swimming pool, lounging at the European-style cafes along the river filled entirely with Australians, and  eating Hiroshima-style okanomiyaki at Okanomiyaki Village, a building filled with floor after floor dedicated entirely to mom-and-pop okanomiyaki stalls.

More adventures with the quantified athletes - the Vivoactive Smart, Fitness Watch

I joined the Palo Alto Run Club at the start of my second running life back in 2001.  I had no friends there.  It was tough to make conversation with the runners.  I tended to just stand all alone before and after the workout -- no one ever really  talked to me since we lacked anything in particular to talk about.  Then one day a colleague who worked at Nike asked me to test the company's new high-concept sports watch.  The following Wednesday I wore the Nike watch to a Palo Alto Club workout.  Suddenly all the guys gathered around me asking questions about the watch's specs, functionality, price point and retail availability.  It was even a way bigger hit than when I brought my cool, new Hot Wheel toy cars to Maple Park Elementary school back in 1st grade.

I have read so many long, flowery paeans to running's pure, non-material, spiritual  nature.  But then the reality that I observe is like much else -- it is all about the gear.  And in running nowadays that means the sports watches (much more than the shoes or compression gear). 

And so I feel reluctantly compelled to keep up with social norms.  My Garmin Forerunner 205 has long since fallen out of fashion.  So for more than a year I had been awaiting the long-rumored Apple Watch.  However when the Apple Watch is finally announced it is clearly not even a remotely acceptable triathlon watch -- for numerous well documented reasons.  Presumably a later version, perhaps version 3.0 or 4.0 will be more suitable, but for the present I realized that I needed to stick with a dedicated fitness brand of watch. 

So I frantically begun researching other triathlon watch options.  The hardcore triathlon teammates I diligently consult with are shocked and dismayed that I am not interested in the Garmin 920XT, the watch of choice for the serious triathletes.  The 920XT is just way, way too complicated for me, too expensive, and too heavy.  I conclude that the Forerunner 220 is perfectly adequate, and am ready to order one, but then read about the introduction of Vivoactive, a combination GPS sports watch, fitness tracker, and smart watch for the same price.  

The Vivoactive announcement states the new watch will be released in Q1 2015, but mine did not actually arrive until late April.  When I do finally see the package in my mailbox  I am pretty excited of course, as evidenced by my making the de rigueur "unboxing video" --> 

As excited about the watch as I may be, it still takes me a week or so before I actually make it through the tiresome, circuitous, and absolutely un-intuitive process of synching up with my iPhone (I needed to upgrade OS for the app), re-establishing a long-lapsed Garmin Connect account, figuring out how to turn on the cycling function (while riding in traffic), etc. 

So after all this wait and anticipation and effort to figure out some of the basic functionality of the Vivoactive how do I like it?  Um, it is pretty good I guess.  Ideally the battery life would be longer and GPS quicker to find satellites, but on the positive side it is very light, works for swimming, the touch-screen navigation is reasonably simple, and it synchs easily with Strava.

Being a "fitness tracker", the Vivoactive immediately starts to berate me about not moving around enough and alerting me each and every hour, about my progress toward reaching the daily goal of 6,267 steps that the Vivoactive established for me.  I had difficulty reaching this goal the first few days (partly because I was swimming and cycling and partly because I did not wear the watch throughout the day), and the Vivoactive expressed its disappointment with my seemingly sedentary lifestyle.  But my 21k trail run helped me to blow past the goal on Sunday (I recorded 37,801 steps), so I think the watch is placated for the moment.  

And once I finally figured out how to synch my watch I was surprised to be buzzed by a text message.  I had forgotten that my triathlon watch is also a "smart watch".  This means that now I am constantly being interrupted by vibration alerts upon receiving text messages on my watch (when carrying my iPhone).  I guess this is kind-of cool – constantly glancing surreptitiously at all the sundry status updates, maintenance notices, promotional ads, and various announcements on my wrist. I mean it did prove helpful when meeting some people in a crowded train station last weekend. Granted the whole constant multi-tasking and disruption lifestyle is what I have largely sought to minimize of late and stay focused on living and being in the moment.  

But hey, the important thing is that now I am reasonably up-to-date with the watch technology for the quantified athletes and I will thus be able to socialize with my peers. 

New triathlon training program - all intensity, all the time

I abandon plans to participate in Monday’s Boston Marathon.  I was never particularly enthusiastic about attempting a fast 42-kilometers on pavement, and felt mostly relief when I made the decision and abandoned my slot.  Right afterwards one of the guys beside me at a workout in Arizona starts talking about all his effort to run a “BQ” .  It took me a moment to figure out what the heck a BQ meant, and when I did I was reminded of the effort so many (particularly American) runners put in to experience the hallowed course.  I decided not to mention to this guy how I had just relinquished my coveted spot. 

So with Boston out of the picture, and no run events on my calendar, I shift into a new Triathlon Training Program. I enlist a “coach” - longtime teammate Keren - who creates a base triathlon training program for late March and April. 

All the training is intense.  Ten relatively short and relatively fast workouts per week. 

As far as the running - that Polarized Training concept I mentioned in my earlier post - that is completely out the window.  None of that “active recovery” that is considered so crucial by some run training gurus.   No easy runs, no foundation runs -- just hard brick-runs, track intervals, hills, and short bursts on treadmills. 

You see this vividly illustrated in my Strava run log for the past 4 weeks (versus my January run log I posted here on Feb 9).   Like in the lyrics of the old Coldplay song, “it is all yellow” - yellow meaning “workout” rather than the green for an easier “run”

Spin Class with the Quantified Athletes

I finally start cycling training for the 2015 campaign -->

a technology-enabled spin session at Tim Smith's new studio

But spin class with the quantified triathletes does not involve standing and pedaling faster as the  beat picks up in the songs of Black Eyed Peas or Journey...  no, none of the showboating and music I indulge in with all the housewives at the YMCA back in suburban America

Instead my eyes are fixed on the color of the bar graph measuring my wattage on a big computer screen in the front of the room.  

Endurance is my forte, but I am unable to maintain my prescribed wattage level during the final brick of our 60-minute workout