My friends that are into endurance sports tell me that I’m built
more like a Kenyan than a Lance Armstrong impersonator. It seems
running comes a lot easier to me, with little training, whereas I’m
just mediocre at cycling, with a lot more effort. Unfortunately,
we’ll never know because I love riding my bike a lot more than I like
pounding on my knees. Well, until now…

Through no planning of my own, the 25 minutes a day of running that
has been going on at
Racing Apparel Headquarters have yielded dividends.

My running goal for the off-season was to break 21 minutes,
because… well, because my friend Ray said I couldn’t do it (easily).

So the past week or so, I stepped it up to 45 minutes instead of the
usual 25, and see if I could do a better 5k, this time at sea-level,
and on a flat course.

I tried to run it “bandido” which is short-hand, for just showing
up to the race, not signing up, and running. Hey, I’m not taking any
of their free Gatorade, and I’m already paying taxes on the streets,
so I’ve convinced myself that I somehow deserve it. Unfortunately,
only cripples and old men showed up, so I was having second thoughts
about not signing up. Perhaps, I’d show up in the top 5, and it would
be awkward. It’s one thing to end up 158th in your age-group, but
another thing entirely to arrive within a minute or two of the guy
breaking the tape. So, I buckled and paid $45 to run three miles on
public streets.

When the gun went off I kept telling myself “don’t be stupid; don’t
be stupid”. This was my mantra to remind myself not to go out too
fast. I consciously kept myself running at 7:00min/mile, hoping I
wouldn’t blow up. After the first mile, I was comfortably in 5th
place, and I started visualizing how cool it would be to arrive among
the first 3, with my friends, family, and especially my mom, watching.
I don’t think I had ever podium-ed in anything past pre-kindergarten
races (where everyone is a winner), so I started concentrating on
catching #4 and #3.

Luckily, as I sped up in the second mile, I was able to reel both
runners. The 1st guy was way out in the distance, apparently running
a race of his own, but the 2nd guy was actually within reach. I saw
my mom and sister at the finish line, so I figured I’d might as well
bury myself for the last 800 meters. Who cared if I walked the last
bit? So I pulled a kamikaze move– all or nothing– but unfortunately
as I was about to catch the 2nd runner at the finish line, everyone
started cheering us, alerting my prey and causing him to speed
slightly beyond my reach.

Long story short, I got third, but I did beat my previous record of
22:00 with a jaw dropping 19:48. Truth be told, my GPS marked 3.05
miles, which is 0.05 short of a 5k, but worse case scenario I’m safely
under the 21:00 mark, and pretty close to under 20, which is pretty
freaking awesome…especially for a non-runner.

So this is me, basking in the aura of kicking 40 years old right in
the ass, and being faster than I was in high school. My fastest mile
in high school was 6:20, and I did 3 of those puppies at 6:33 this
time, with the last one at 6:02. [And I didn’t actually throw up like
in high school.]

This one’s for you mom.

Training has started in earnest.  I’m at 7000 ft of altitude, training like all good cycling pros and trying to do what I can to not lose the fitness I gained last year (well, in my case, not so much fitness gained, but fitness lost in south Texas while drinking expensive wine and caviar– all indistinguishable from wine in a box and cheap tacos).

I hear other pros in northern latitudes are snow shoeing, so my off-season training partner and myself have taken to the trail to run up mountains in the snow.

The RV is conveniently parked at RA Racing Apparel headquarters in Santa Fe, and by the looks of it, it may never move from there (well, at least until spring).  My plan is to train in more temperate climates, but judging from the 12 inches of snow under the RV, we may never leave.

So… Velo and I went for a run today and…what the proverbial fuck…  My dog has been lying in a comfortable air conditioned apartment for the past 3 years, rarely getting off the bed (my bed), and never exercising for more than 3 minutes at a time while chasing what I can only describe as Texas rats (ugly, fat, and slow).  But apparently, a sedentary life is more conducive to athletic greatness than my periodic outings on the bike.

Velo ran circles around me, waited for me on every uphill, and when I thought he was actually getting tired, he was merely pausing to pee on the 500th tree today.  At various summits, I actually caught him looking back, with his mouth fully closed– not even tongue out to regulate heat.  Mind you, Velo is 56 in dog years, so the geriatric canine crowd is already passing me, and my season hasn’t even started.

It looks like dog food is doing more for hematocrit levels than veggies and beer.  I wonder if Alpo or Pedigree can also sponsor me.

On Thanksgiving day I woke up to loud pounding on the RV door. For crying out loud, it was 7am and I was on vacation like the rest of America. Hadji was screaming something about a 5km turkey trot at a local school. As much as I tried to reconcile both words, I couldn’t figure out why they would call it a trot, because the only one trotting would be me. Perhaps, this was a personalized race for moi!? Unlikely!

I scream back something about being tired, and my bastard of a training sergeant said something along the lines of “we have the rest of the day to be tired”. I’m like…it’s Thanksgiving, it’s the only day of the year when I drink coffee just to be sufficiently awake to keep on eating.  Being tired is not part of anybody’s Thanksgiving plan.

It was below freezing, so I put on every conceivable item of sports clothing I had and walked out the door: I looked like a poorly decorated Christmas tree. As soon as I got in the car, Hadji said…we’re only going to warm up for the race, so go get your dog.  I still puzzles me that Hadji thinks I need warming up. You don’t need warming up when all you’re going to do is start slow and then taper off.

My trusty partner Velo, came along, and I was forced to “warm-up” 3 miles up to 8000 feet. I tried as best I could to hide the fact that the “warm-up” had been a race in and of itself.  At this point we drove back to the house, shed some clothes, and drove to the race, where over a hundred people had decided to duke it out for a turkey or pie.

I ran positive splits, which is to say, the worst way of running a race– the first mile at 6:40, the second at 6:45, and the last one at 8 something– I progressively got slower and slower. Somehow I managed to get passed by cripples, little girls, and cardiac patients, all on my way to scoring a personal best of 22:00, at 7,500 feet, in freezing temperatures, long pants, and with nothing flat but the 5 meters under the finish line banner. Luckily, I have a lot to improve, and running’s not even my sport!

At the finish line we met some other pros. These were west Kenyan runners, and possible one of the few people who make me look fat. Since pros tend to congregate together, I introduced myself as a newly minted pro, and proceeded to trade training and diet tips.

Apparently, I’m fat…by a long ways. At 5 foot 3 inches, one of them weighed 102-104lbs, depending on the time of the year. So, all things being equal (which they’re clearly not), I would have to weigh 116 pounds to put out the kind of speed his lanky ass legs can put out.

When I was racing my bike, I managed to drop down to 138 lbs one year, and friends of my parents thought I had cancer. I can only imagine what they’d think of me at 116 lbs. Clearly, I’m going to have to either find another sport, or find other things on which to improve.

I thought perhaps I could lose a few pounds, so I grilled them on diet. Apparently, that’s a no go as well. Breakfast is tea and milk. Second breakfast is 3 slices of bread, fruit and orange juice. Lunch is rice, lean red meat, and fruit. The afternoon snacks consist of nuts. And dinner is enough to weather you through the night without waking up hungry. Apparently the trick is to always be semi-hungry, but not starving. Again, nothing I’m willing to improve upon. I’m going to have to concentrate on training.

Initially I thought training was very doable, until I realized their 18 miles a day weren’t on a bike. They were running. The easy weeks in the off-season include 80 mile weeks, whereas the regular weeks mid year consist of 140 mile weeks. Hmmm… I wonder if I’m currently even doing 80 mile weeks on the bike… probably not.

Ok, so I can’t get any skinnier for fear of affecting my social life. I can’t eat less, because…well, beer tastes so good, and I can’t train more unless the 80-140 miles are on the bike, so that pretty much leaves sleep. I’m sure I can sleep more– even on par with professional athletes. So there!

But then again, I’m not getting paid to win races, but to write, so back to eating the pie Hadji won at the turkey trot!

A friend once told me that if you hang around experts in any field long enough, you can probably fake your way into a job.  I was skeptical at first, until I found out that after years of dating computer geeks, she landed a system administration job at a Fortune 500 company, and has since moved up to director.

The past 5 years have only reinforced the above notion.  I’m pretty sure that not only can I describe how the sodium-potassium pump works, but if held at gunpoint, I may even be able to recite how the Krebs cycle functions, intubate a patient, put him to sleep, and give them Versed to forget it ever happened.  And this with barely a 7th grade biology class under my belt.

However, as exciting as drug induced anesthesia sounds, it is not nearly as interesting as passing out under your own effort while an entire cadre of cyclists pass you by; consequently, this is about something else entirely.

Late fall is the time of the year when professional athletes are usually looking for a sponsor.  I’ve been around professional athletes long enough to recognize the late autumn jitters when scoring a sponsor, a team, or a new contract.  I’ve heard both sides of the negotiation long enough, that I’m now beginning to think that I should get myself a sponsor, just in case software engineering doesn’t work as expected.  After all, you need some sort of backup, financial diversification of sorts, and multiple streams of income as it’s called nowadays.

After speaking with Jason and Hadji, I realized that sponsors are not as interested in a podium athlete, inasmuch as a good story that sells.  Who cares about the shy guy on the top of the podium with no story?  We’re more interested on the one-legged professional jump-roper who overcame an abusive father, an ugly girlfriend, has a VO2max of 20, but at the very least can write entertaining prose and has lots of Facebook friends.  That, my friends, is me: a free-agent cyclist with absolutely no wins (apart from Strava records on climbs no one knows about), a shitty bike, the body of a starving east-Kenyan runner, and a blog that roughly translated means “fuck it, I’m doing it anyhow”.

So… I drafted my proposal to RA Racing Apparel, so I could champion their brand.  I would race in the lowest of the cycling categories, would even do charity speed walking events (with pizzazz), and would look anorexic like real endurance athletes.  I explained to my sponsor that readers have more in common with me, the every day man, than with a 130lbs cyclist that climbs Alp d’Huez in under 42 minutes.  Who are you more likely to see on the street and ask “why, where did you buy that jersey”?  Cadel Evans, Lance Armstrong, or a middle of the pack cat 5 racer that looks cool in tights?  Seriously, this is a no brainer.

Anyways, after much hand waving and negotiating, RA Racing Apparel has agreed to sponsor all my events in exchange for parading their clothing brand and reporting on races I will most definitely suck at. All while agreeing that I can’t really train that much, because physical exercise lowers the blood flow to my brain, thus rendering my day job activities worthless.  Oh…and of course, to be considered a professional athlete, one needs actual money, clothes alone won’t do. So we’re in the process of negotiating a salary– somewhere between $1 and $2/month.  I already have a letter of intent!

So stay tuned, because I’ll be living in the RV, traveling to races, drinking Gatorade mixed with whiskey, and trying not to get upgraded to a more serious category.

I’ve been boycotting flying with my bicycle for quite some time.  The exorbitant $300 round trip fees has had me looking for alternative measures.

This weekend on my way up north (and for us South Texans, north is anywhere north Falfurrias, the US Border Control checkpoint 70 miles north of the border).. I decided to fly.  The bicycle had to come along, but via Greyhound bus, for a cool $40.  Since the bike pump couldn’t fit comfortably in the crammed box, I decided to take it as a carry-on– big mistake!

Everyone was amused with the bike pump until I arrived at the TSA checkpoint.  I was grilled as to why I was traveling with a bike pump, given that I wasn’t traveling with a bike.  I offered them 300 different reasons, but then they got confused as to why I didn’t check it as baggage.  I explained the economics of checking in a $30 pump for $30.  I *thought* they understood, but then there was some mumbling and hand waving, until the manager came to inspect the bike pump.  There was a quick shake of the head, and I was told that it was a big metallic object.  I tried to explain that it was really a hard plastic covered in metallic paint, but the TSA agent was unimpressed with my high school grasp of materials and chemistry.

I asked if they could keep it while my wife came to pick it up, but I was denied (in my defense, this has worked before).  The TSA agent kindly pointed me to the Department of Aviation office, where she suggested I drop off the pump for someone to pick up.

The Department of Aviation attendant, on the other hand, informed me that he couldn’t take the pump because of liability.  I asked if there was any other way, to which the agent responded… “I can’t take it per se, but if you give it to a TSA agent, they can bring it back as a lost-and-found object, and I can take it from them.”.  I breathed deeply, closed my eyes, and asked… “ok, you want me to `lose’ the pump in front of the agent so they can take it to lost-and-found which is in your office, and *then* my wife can pick it up from you?”.

“Exactly!”.

Unable to indulge this stupidity I went back to the ticketing agent who told me she would have to charge me $30 to check-in my $30 pump. I kindly declined, but after listening to my sob story, she offered to keep the pump if someone could pick it up within the hour.  At this point, I called my wife…

[I’d like to take a brief pause from this this account to explain that the Spanish phrase for air pump is “bomba de aire”.  For those with either insufficient imagination or mono-linguistic limitations, the exact phrase can be (incorrectly) translated as “air bomb”.  You can probably guess where this is going.]

As luck with have it, a TSA agent was passing right by the ticketing counter while I was on the phone with Yano.  In no time flat, after I was done explaining to Yano to come pick up the “air bomb” I wasn’t allowed to pass through security, the TSA agent tapped me on the shoulder, and sternly said “please follow me…”.

Yup… full cavity search once again, and I wasn’t even sporting a beard this time.

Man, I’m going to miss these intimate encounters when I move up north.