Make sure to hit the Kelly’s IronMan Race page for all the latest updates.

Last weekend I drove to St. Louis to fly my remote-controlled sailplanes at the 2008 Mississippi Valley Soaring Association‘s “Gateway Open” content.  Friday was handlaunch, and Saturday and Sunday were the “big ships” – thermal duration. It’s a part of the Ohio Valley Soaring Series.

I managed 3rd on Friday and on Saturday I managed 10th out of 26th in a really tight contest.

Read more about the contest here: Flying Report – 2008 Gateway Open @ MVSAClub.com.

St. Louis soaring buddy Chris Lee took some excellent photos:

Kelly’s been using BeginnerTriathlete.com to help her train for her 2008 Louisville IronMan triathlon. Being the statistic-loving guy I am I went and pulled Kelly’s mileage totals for all of the training she’s logged since mid-April:

2008 totals

Bike:	  1814.42 miles in 122h 30m 46s
Run:	   332.94 miles in 59h 24m 16s
Swim:	    77.50 mi1es (124,865.7 meters) in 43h 16m 45s
Strength:   15h 55m
Canoeing:    2h 00m
Step:	        45m
Walking:     1h 40m

Man, that is far when you put it all together. Far!

Kelly is a total bundle of nerves, and there is still 10 days to go until IronMan Louisville 2008!

Want to help cheer her on?  Check out this handy page that will be updated with all the latest and greatest news and info I can muster: https://thelocust.org/blog/ironman.

Wanna join in the fun? Check out my Socializr invite: http://www.socializr.com/event/686211368

Update: This just in – Kelly’s race number is 877.  We’ll be making signs and such this weekend.

On Saturday, I competed in the 28th annual E. P. “Tom” Sawyer Triathlon (sprint-distance). I also ran in last year’s Tom Sawyer triathlon – my first ever! This year, I just wanted to do better.

…and I did!

Last Year: 1 hour 47 minutes 12 seconds

This Year: 1 hour 36 minutes 44 seconds

Woot! A great race, and I really felt the difference that my training made this year – I was much, much stronger than last year, and it showed. I cut nearly 6 minutes off the bike and almost 3 off the run, and my transitions were much faster. Awesome!

Kelly had the rare opportunity to watch me run a race while she spectated, and she took all the photos you’ll see here, including this one – a real gem:

During the last 50 yards of the run, I saw a guy coming up on my right side and when I looked back he was just behind me, so I took off on a sprint. He responded with “OK, boss!” and took off after me. He wasn’t in my age group and thanks to the seeded swim start, it’s impossible to know what time the other guy is at – but it was great fun and we had a good laugh over it. (Update: that guy is Kevin Maynard, and he finished in 1:32:44)

I’m also turning 30 this year – so I moved into the Men’s 30-34 age group, which helps my age group ranking a bit – 9th out of 22. Last year I was 2nd to last in the Men’s 25-29 age group. Though, had I stayed in the Men’s 25-29, I would have been 10th out of 13th. Age groups are a funny thing though – the race and your locality all play into it making it all a bit of a crapshoot. Though I do prefer to be in a crapshoot of which I finish squarely in the middle.

Being the stat nerd that I am, I took the results that you can find on HeadFirstPerformance.com (2008, 2007) and put them into a readable, sortable Google Spreadsheet you can view online:

2008 E. P. “Tom” Sawyer Triathlon Results (view in browser)

2008 E. P. “Tom” Sawyer Triathlon Results (Excel)

More photos in the 2008.08.02 – E. P. “Tom” Sawyer Triathlon gallery.

On Saturday, Kelly and I rode 100 miles on our bicycles along the 2008 Louisville IronMan route. I had originally only intended to do 80, which Kelly amended to 87. And if I’m going to be spending 6 hours on a bike saddle then I might as well make it worthwhile and go 100, right?

New, previously unexplored thresholds of pain and exhaustion were met and exceeded. That was the longest time I had ever been on a bike or constantly moving in my entire life. According to MapMyRun, a man for my height/weight/age running at a 16 MPH pace for 100 miles would burn in excess of 5000 calories. 5000!  That’s 9 Big Macs or nearly 32 cans of soda. I ate 3 PowerBars, 3 Gu Roctane packets, one bottle of Ale-8-One and one 12oz can of Coca-Cola. This adds up to a calorie deficit of somewhere between 3000-4000 calories. Insane!

The course we followed was essentially the IronMan course that Kelly will be riding for some 7-8 hours at the end of August. It was extremely hilly for the first 50 miles, with a combination of steep climbs, screaming downhills and a heinous grade on KY-393 that just goes on and on and on.  The last 30 miles back to Louisville along US42 is rolling, but generally downhill.  As I predicted to Kelly the week prior “I will be able to keep up with you up until mile 50 or 60, and then please just don’t leave me out on the course”. I hit 60 miles on the nose and was just wiped. All climbs were painful and punctuated with my muttering a single, choice curse word at the top of each hill. Recovering on the downhill only to repeat multiple times.

You can check out the course on MapMyRun’s nifty course widget:

There was a group of maybe two dozen out-of-state IronMan trainees there to ride the course on Saturday, and we had a number of pleasant chats here and there. We stopped at the mini-marts along the course and made sure to spend a little dough at each store on water and such. We didn’t have many problems with the auto traffic, but we did have an SUV full of kids throw a beer at us while on the return trip down US42. Seriously, license plate KY 163-GDV?

Along that save vein, Todd Heady over at HeadFirstPerformance.com has written a thought-provoking article on “Cycling Problems“. Timely as he talks about road-closures, the people who live and work and own businesses along road courses and the relationship between them and those who bike on the courses. Todd’s a certifiably insane athlete, but when it comes to organizing races or giving his opinion on tough matters he’s pretty darn reasonable.

And then, the next day….

2008 AMA/LSF Soaring Nationals Handlaunch

I awoke at 5:00am to drive back up to beautiful Muncie, IN for the 2008 AMA/LSF Soaring Nationals to compete in the handlaunch competition!  Much to my surprise I was ambulatory and did pretty well at the competition until the last two rounds, as is my custom at the NATS.  I placed 6th out of 22 and returned home with a plaque (“getting wood” as it’s known in the hobby).  You can read up on my exploits here in the AMA’s NATSNews coverage for July 28th.

You might remember that I covered the 2007 Soaring NATS last year, writing the NATSNews coverage each day. Unfortunately I couldn’t do it this year partially because of our Fall ’07 trip to Barcelona, but also because I wanted to be around to help Kelly train for her IronMan race.

Did I mention that I’ve got the 2008 E. P. Tom Sawyer Triathlon coming up this Saturday? Yeah, ’cause I do. Oh, and Power Creative has a softball game on Sunday versus the delightfully-named Got Balls? softball team.

The year was 1997…

In the years that I called college, I was a bright and cheerful young man… and not the weathered old salt that lies here before you. I was awesome, frankly. And being awesome, I certainly didn’t need to do stuff like, oh, go to all of my classes, study or display any manner of professionalism once so ever. I could do damn well what I pleased and at college there are more than enough opportunities to do whatever that damn well is, like joining the Army or plunging neck-deep into crippling credit card debt. Luckily I chose neither of those, but I did very much enjoy music, technology and (perhaps my greatest trait) making an ass of myself in a public manner. Now, where could a young ebullient man like me-in-the-past go to do that while at University? Oh yes, that’s right… THE CAMPUS RADIO STATION!

An aside: I love radio and technology, largely due to two friends of mine, Matt and Jason Chanda. Jason (the older of the two) was into computers and Matt went that way as well, having a computer long before I had my own. Matt was the first guy I knew with a modem and a connection to the Internet, way back in ’93! Jason worked at Radio Shack, back when they, you know, sold radios, built his own mini-studio in his bedroom, made his own antennas and radio gear and generally was a handy guy to have around if you wanted to raise some techie hell. They also introduced me to the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater. Young boy moves to new town, gets bored, sets up pirate radio station in his bedroom. I loved it. Probing that great wireless unknown, sending out your signal to those who were listening. It did and still does fascinate me.

I attended the University of Louisville from 1996-2000, and the UofL Belknap campus sported WLCV, Louisville’s Campus Voice, 570/1590 on your AM dial. Yes, good old tired AM. Then a grinding vortex of talk radio poobahs and unlistened-to visitor information on the highway and now… well, the same, but even sadder. So the story goes, WLCV tried to get an FM license for low power, but by the time the FCC was ready to give it out, those who had applied for it were long gone, and they gave it to WLOU, the now PRP owned classical music station. And, to make matters worse and the tale I tell all the more pathetic, the AM transmitter we were using wasn’t exactly functional. The only place to hear us was directly outside our tiny study via a Public Address system in the Student Activities Center, right across from Uncle Chen’s Chinese. We didn’t even have control over the volume of the PA. I still have my WLCV t-shirt that says “If you can hear us, you’re standing too close”.

The mascot on the shirt? An angry squirrel (I assume albino) hoisting a frothy beer mug giving a thumbs up. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about WLCV – drunk, angry and resigned to its fate as second-class institution on campus that subsisted off of peanuts. Rules were lax, there were occassional memos like “play the playlist and log it!”, but ultimately all that stuff was ignored and people came and did as they wanted. The “studio” such as it was an oddly-shaped glass-walled place in the lower level of the UofL SAC. It was filled with the relics of past DJs, promotional trash, signed posters and LPs, and just a ton of college music. We had racks of CDs, crates of vinyl, a mixing board, some mics, CD and tapes decks and two in-decent-shape Technics SL-1200 wheels of steel. In short, everything I could possibly ever dream of to recreate my Pump Up the Volume dreams.

I did the lone jock thing for a while, kicking out the assorted jams that I wanted to hear, attempting (in vain) for someone to please call up the studio and request a song (this never, ever happened). But I needed something more, some sort of straw to stir the drink that was that whole radio experience. That man, that catalyst, dare I say it was none other than Hunter Dixon. The extent of our radio experience prior to this had been recording tapes of us reading X-Men comics and various low-brow skits. Hunter and I entered the booth and things went immediately to LUDICROUS SPEED. The first few of these shows were lost into the ether, but soon we realized our own genius and we began taping our 90 minute shows. The rest is history…

So, sit back, relax, and enjoy Episode 1 of a 5 episode series.

Finally, I will say this before you even listen: Who do you think you are, judging me?*

Hunter & Ben’s Radio Fun-time, Episode 1, November 1997

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* Seriously, I was 19 or 20 and thought no one could hear me. What did you think I was going to do? Play it clean like Bob Newhart in the 60s? Oh no, not at all. I didn’t even know Bob Newhart did stand-up in the 60s until well into the 2000s. Also, Hunter is the potty mouth, he made me do most of that stuff. Total Svengali sorta thing. As an upside, he did keep the show running pretty well, so instead of me just groaning ‘uuuuhhhhhh’ into the mic, we actually played music.

Gnoam Chompskee represents!

Well, the 2008 Muncie Endurathon triathlon is in the bag, and boy was it a doozie! By far the largest triathlon event Kelly or I had ever participated in. Also very well run and in a great location (the Prairie Creek Reservoir in southeast Muncie). For those of you who are blinking your eyes and wonder “what is a triathlon?” let me explain (after the jump)

(more…)

I didn’t learn to ride a two-wheeled bike until I was 8 – but it was all downhill after that.

Ran into a car backing out of a driveway when I was 10 or 11, knocked me for a loop.

That same bumper-sticker covered bike was stolen a few months later off of our front stoop.

I felt violated.

Learned to bunny-hop a few years after that. Made ramps out of stolen street-signs.

Saw my brother crack his noggin on the driveway in the rain on his bike.

Did my first 60 mile ride when I was 13 or 14 in the Boy Scouts.

Never went farther than that until this year.

I enjoy the speed and the silence and thrumming sound of wheels on the road or trail. Alive and in-motion. Hope I can keep it up.

(inspired by gwadzilla)

Update: Check out my 2008 Muncie Endurathon Wrap-Up race report!

This weekend, Kelly and I will be heading up to Muncie, Indiana – and not for a soaring event like the NATS! Shocking! (I am going to the NATS for only one day this year) But back to the event at hand – the Muncie Endurathon, a half-Ironman distance race that Kelly is using as a tune-up for the full-sized Louisville Ironman. Me? I’m doing the little, tiny, itty-bitty “sprint” distance triathlon. Let’s compare, shall we?

       Half Ironman   Sprint

Swim   1.2 mi         0.3 mi

Bike  56.0 mi        12.3 mi

Run   13.1 mi         3.1 mi

Total 70.3 mi        15.7 mi

So, as you can see… Kelly is both stronger and crazier than me.

The good news is that I’ve been doing most of my swim training for an 800 meter distance (which is what the E.P. Tom Sawyer Sprint triathlon demands), and even stretching those workouts to 1600 meters.  Couple that with me actually training for the bike this year on a *real* road bike that fits me. I actually rode the bike distance yesterday and averaged well over 17 MPH for the entire course, which included Dog Hill, Hogan’s Fountain and the Seneca Golf Course hill in Cherokee Park. Feelin’ good about that. And the run? Uh… well, yeah I haven’t put on my running shoes in a couple of months. I’ll be OK, though. I can do 3 miles.

The last event I did like this was last year’s E.P. Tom Sawyer triathlon, in which I placed 12th out of 13 in my age group. I did the 800m swim/14 mi bike/5k run in 1:47. The bike I did in 51 minutes or so – and it nearly killed me, adding some 3 1/2 minutes to my 5k time. That works out to be some 11 MPH average or something horrible. I should do better this time round. Also, it helps that at least at EP that the 30-34 age group is slower than the 25-29 age group. Yay.

Check out my results from last year’s EP Tom Sawyer at Headfirst Performance. (Search for Ben Wilson)

Hopefully some photos and junk this weekend!

While you’re at it, go and read Kelly’s triathlon training blog, Wanna Tri Some?. The last few posts have been really great.