Another Perfect Weekend

This past Sunday the New York City Triathlon hosted the the Paratriathlon national championships for the seventh consecutive year. I, too, was there for a seventh go at it. As one my expect, everything over the weekend went perfectly and life was enriched because of it.

The notables started, as they often do, at the airport on the way out of Denver. I took advantage of the technology Expedia offered and downloaded my itinerary—which my prosthetics provider A Step Ahead of Hicksville, NY provided me—directly to my computer’s calendar. This made it so easy to keep track of my departure time and, hence, show up with plenty of time to spare. Nevertheless, I missed yet another flight.

Let it be a lesson to you all that despite a departure from the Mountain time zone, the downloaded version of your itinerary could be on Eastern time.

The nice lady behind the counter at check-in actually remembered me from my flight to South Africa a couple of months back. She kindly checked, free of charge, my bike and bag a healthy 14 hours before my newly scheduled 1:00AM flight, making it a breeze to head back home and cook up a delicious kale soup to enjoy with my family and neighbors in our driveway—the kids played on bikes and scooters while the day’s light dwindled. After dinner and toddler clean-up, I snuck in an hour of shut-eye before heading back to DIA for the red-eye.

Airline sleep is typically difficult to come-by so I did something completely novel for me: I brought my own pillow! And it worked perfectly. I had a whole row to myself, laid my head upon my personal bedding and slept so well they had to wake me up on the tarmac in NYC after everyone had already deplaned. Perfect.

It was then 6:30AM EST and the nice people at Delta ensured me that despite my luggage’s alternate route to Minneapolis, it would be in by 2pm and delivered to my hotel by 6pm. This would make my trip into the city so much smoother without having to lug that bike with me. Perfect.

At 6pm the nice lady at Delta’s baggage counter informed me that my stuff had been noted as “Departed,” but just to make sure she’d check it’s progress toward Manhattan. “Looks like it never left the deck. It’ll got out on the 8pm delivery, you’ll have it by 9.”  The mandatory bike check-in would close at 9PM. Wow. How perfect.

At 9PM, with the delivery remaining elusive, Delta assured my things would be at the hotel by the wee hours.

I slept well, perhaps as good as I’ve ever slept before a race, knowing that my machine would be with me when I awoke.

The wake-up call came at 4AM and I immediately proclaimed, as I’ve done many time before, “Rrrrrace Dayyyyyy!” I headed right downstairs to put my bike together so as to arrive at the race start no later than 5AM. But it wasn’t there…

I pulled out my iPhone to make a few calls, eager to come up a bike somehow. The first couple calls provided nothing; the third call was a winner: Justin Modell, a local triathlete and the organizer of the paratriathlon division, had a bike for me and, since he was already at the race, he made the call to his doorman to let me in. I cabbed it over, grabbed his bike and his right shoe and peddled my way to the race, arriving at 5:15AM, in the clothes I’d donned 36 hours prior.

(I would later learn that my bike and wetsuit arrived, in perfect timing, the moment I jumped in the water to start the race at 7:10AM, by a company aptly named, no joke, Perfect Delivery Service!)

Surprisingly, without the wetsuit, I swam one of my faster races there and exited under 17 minutes, ninety seconds ahead of the fastest one-legged triathlete out there: JP Theberge. That 90 seconds turned hard into a seven minute deficit. I had a tough time riding crunched up on a too-small road bike with my bike leg unable to clip in on the mismatched pedal/cleat combo, i.e., I was unable to pull up with the prosthesis or get out of the saddle—JP blazed by me about a third of the way through the ride.

Without my speed lace race shoe I was forced to sit and tie the lace of the race shoe I’d traveled in (probably doesn’t mean much to most of you) and stopped twice before exiting transition to stretch my aching crunched-up back, making for a very slow T2.

I knew I was at least seven to eight minutes off pace of JP when I saw him coming the other way from the 180 turnaround near the bike finish. So, with no hopes of winning, and with the thin skin from the recently-healed blister from the previous weekend’s race, I sucked it up and pre-emptively rebooted a few times on the run. This, I’m happy to say, resulted my first blister-free finish of seven there. More perfection.

(I must note that JP had a fantastic finish time of 2:19, edged only by the ageless and legendary One Arm Willie Stewart. Wingers Joel Rosinbum and Tommy Knapp also had great races and I wrapped up the top five. The top five on the women’s side were visually impaired Robin Caruso, below knee amp Meg Fisher, VI Yvonne Mosquera, wheel-bound Carly Waugh and in fifth was my very good friend and one of my worldwide favorite people, above-knee amp Sandy Dukat.)

So don’t let this photo fool you. I wasn’t stomping mad at Mile 1 as I ran straight at Erik Shaffer, my prosthetist and sponsor from A Step Ahead. I was, atypically, just having a little fun on the run.

The last little bit of perfection relative to the race transpired a couple days later: my customer service experience with both the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission and Yellow Cab was so much more satisfying than that with Delta. After a series of phone calls placed by myself and the lovely Dr Sharon Wetherall, FedEx delivered my iPhone I had dropped in the back of the cab at JFK!

(Regarding the photo, that was kinda how I felt sitting on the tarmac for two hours, waiting to depart, when I discovered the missing phone…)

Back to The Rock

San Francisco is known to have a few free-spirited citizens. It’s known for a notorious former federal penitentiary. It’s known for steep hills. My fellow triathlon teammates from Team A Step Ahead had the pleasure of experiencing all three and more this weekend when we tackled the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon.

I had two goals at this year’s race, primarily to win the physically challenged division and to better my 2003 time of three hours, two minutes. Nine guys with parts missing lined up this year—that’s seven more than when I raced there six years prior. (Legendary One-Armed Willie Steward being the hold-over.) .

What makes this race a “check list” event with highly sought after slots are not the unique experiences of the city itself but that of the race logistics. Athletes begin their journey by climbing onto a bus near the finish line for a trip to the ferry dock. There the wet-suit clad endurance-junkies board the ferry for a trip out to Alcatraz Island. Parked a few hundred feet off The Rock, upon completion of “Stars ‘n Stripes,” 1800 athletes receive the word and leap off the deck—at three separate launching points—within a six minute span and begin their 1.5 mile swim to the beach just west of Marina Green. Check out these swim pics, http://bit.ly/14dVHH.

Before the race even began I added a new item to my check list with a simultaneous check: en route back from registration to our hotel on our race bikes, Team A Step Ahead found itself entering an intersection simultaneously with 30 or so nude cyclists! Mostly not-so-fit men. Like a train wreck, it was painful to watch yet held our attention. Teammate Jeff Glasbrenner, from Little Rock, AR, claims the boys back home might not believe him.

Training volume as of late ain’t what it used to be, so I was relying on experience and better prostheses from A Step Ahead Prosthetics and Orthotics to attain the day’s goals. Pool time has been a notch above bare minimum; I’ve managed two to four swims a month this calendar year, which got me about what I was hoping for: 2003 swim time was 45 minutes;  2009, 46 minutes.  Overall Swim Rank: 665. A tad behind schedule while Jeff, a fellow below-knee (BK) amputee, was already ahead of me by three minutes. BK teammate and national marathon record holder Tommy Koehler came out of the water right behind me and a nice little race was heating up.

Felt pretty good on the three-quarter mile run to transition and looked forward to the next discipline. No question if I was going to beat Tommy and catch Jeff, I’d need to lay it down on the bike. I’ve managed to get in reasonable riding time between power-developing efforts pulling Jack and Luke in the bike trailer and good cardio on the “Expresso” stationary bike at the YMCA while the Y’s child-watch staff entertained the boys.

I caught Jeff about half way through the 18-mile ride and put time on Tommy in the process. 2003: 55 minutes. 2009: 55 minutes. Rank: 62.

I set off onto the eight-mile run with limited confidence that I’d hold off my chasers. Unlike the ‘03 race, I had little to no debilitating gut cramps and only minor prosthetic problems. I rebooted the leg within the first mile only because I had donned it somewhat sloppily in transition and opted for a better fit. A challenging trail climb led to a fast, paved descent before we hit the quarter-mile beach sand section approaching the turn-around at Mile 4. That deep, soft sand was as energy-sucking as I remembered. Upon heading in the reverse direction I saw that neither Jeff, Tommy, nor Andy May (last year’s gimpy champion), nor any other in our group were imminently on my tail. Applying the “out of sight, out of mind” rationale (it’s psychologically much easier to catch your prey if you can see them), I laid it down as hard as I could to reach the infamous “sand ladder.” Once at the base of the 400 steps up a steep sand/log climb, I knew I had at least four minutes on everyone.

From the top of that section, it was only a few hundred more feet to crest of the hill before a long descent down the steep trail that we’d ascended earlier. Before heading down I rebooted to relieve Stumpie of the present discomfort, which made the funky footing required a bit easier to control. I kept the heat on when I reached the flats with just two miles to go and both goals in mind: first and faster.

The race also boasts one of the largest spectator counts in all of triathlon and the cheers we all welcomed along that last mile grew and grew as we approached the 100-meter grass landing to the finish arch. With half the chute behind me a smile broke out when I saw 2:53 on the clock and confirmed that age ain’t got the best of me just yet! Overall finish rank: 220th and 29th of 253 in the 40-44s.

And the weekend memories still weren’t quite complete. Without unnecessary details to the reader, I won’t soon forget the scorpion bowl race, the B.O of a certain toothless female cabbie or the big blue bunny drag-queen humping someone’s detached leg.

Check out this link for a local broadcast plugging some of the challenged athletes: http://tinyurl.com/n5cmtn