Newport Beach Sprint Triathlon
800m swim / 13 mile bike / 3.1 mile run
Newport Beach, CA
May 23, 2004
This author thing comes with frightening responsibilities, I now realize. Sometime right around the end of April, Indigo called up to tell me that Slow Fat Triathlete had inspired her friend Dorli to sign them both up for the Newport Beach Triathlon, though Dorli had never even contemplated a triathlon before. "Oh, that's great!" I enthused, flattered that my prose had stirred at least one documented person to action. "Wanna come do it with us? It'll be Dorli's birthday," Indigo asked. "Um, sure!" I decided in a split second, still smarting from the disappointing realization that I was going to miss racing at Wildflower due to a rather heart-wrenching scheduling conflict. "And can we have Slow Fat Triathlete T-shirts? We want to be Team Slow Fat Triathlete." Having proclaimed in print that being a Slow Fat Triathlete is a state of mind, I was in no position to argue that neither Indi nor Dorli was remotely near being fat, nor did I expect them to be particularly slow.
I was still also a little fried on road-tripping from my Vegas adventure, but I knew that Indi and Dorli would take great care of me if I could just get down to Orange County. Dorli is an artist in ceramics, a kickboxer, and supermom of two adorable girls, and her husband Owen, a professional juggler (www.passingzone.com), is a consummate facilitator of fun. They have a house with more games and toys than you can count on your fingers and toes, and a "spool" in the backyard, an imaginatively sculpted spa-pool hybrid that feels like a luxury resort and is perfect for soaking out any post-triathlon aches. And Indigo is more fun than a crate full of sock monkeys.
Tim declined the opportunity to spend another couple of days in the car, even for the pleasures of Southern California beach towns and Owen and Dorli's spool, so I planned a solo gig and embarked late Friday morning with my bike on the roof, a stack of CD's on the front seat, and a couple of Slow Fat Triathlete T-shirts in the trunk. I watched my mirrors anxiously all the way down I-5 and kept the needle 75 or under the whole way, fearful of a second ticket in four weeks. Until I got to around Mulholland, when Friday afternoon rush hour kicked in, I was making good time. Then it took me another three hours to get down to the O.C., during which time I became aware that my sheepskin seat cover was in need of deep cleaning. My sweaty back and legs were combining with the well-seasoned fleece to produce this alarmingly sheep-y odor.
I was deeply relieved to get to Indigo's cozy pad, shower the sheep smell off me, and head out immediately for a huge dinner at the Pasta Connection. This place is my favorite place in California to eat pasta, even though (or because) it's a weird little Argentinian-Italian neighborhood place in Costa Mesa, housed in a darkly-panelled former Alpine chalet or Swedish smorgasbord. The sign out front features a photograph of a baby who has apparently just dumped an entire plate of spaghetti bolognese over his head. Kind of an odd way to entice customers, but it doesn't matter because the pasta is fresh and light and tasty in a way that I thought only happened in Italy. It comes in enormous portions, which can be a problem after you've been dipping airy Argentinian-influenced bread rolls into spicy, garlic-laden chimichurri sauce. The people are friendly and the prices are embarrassingly low. I'm sure there are lots of great places to eat in Orange County, but I rarely get to any of them. I'm just addicted to Pasta Connection.
When we arrived at the Resort, aka Owen and Dorli's, the spool was warmed up and Owen was chilling the ingredients for Bushwhackers, highly alcoholic milkshake type drinks for which he acquired a penchant while juggling on cruise ships. The girls were packed off to bed, and race weekend was well under way.
Saturday we bade farewell to Owen, who was going hang-gliding up in the San Gabriels, and drove off up our race packets at Niketown in Costa Mesa at the inexplicably named Triangle Square. Well, which is it? Huh? Huh? There we examined the highly expensive and attractive clothes and shoes, and aggressively promoted my book with T-shirts and schmoozing. We headed over to scout out the course and transition area at the Newport Dunes resort, but the guys in the trucks were just getting the bike racks out, so there wasn't too much to scout. Helen and Hannah scouted the water's edge and found it satisfactory, and we ambled around in the sand while H and H also scouted out some good climbing trees, seashells, the restrooms, and the bridge across the Back Bay. The swim looked flat and calm, in this sheltered backwater far from the open ocean. Kayaks and dinghies glided across the water.
Our busy schedule of fun told us it was time for lunch. We were near the road that leads over to Balboa Island and the ferry out to Balboa beach, so the consensus among my local guides was that we needed to head over to the beach and eat at Ruby's tiny but famous diner at the end of the pier. I said I should like it of all things, and we got on the tiny three-car ferry with no wait. We even found a parking place over at the beach, and the wait at Ruby's was only about 15 minutes. A real 15 minutes, not restaurant-hostess 15 minutes. Another waistline-expanding episode, this time a burger on grilled sourdough with avocado, swiss cheese and enough mayo to make the whole thing completely frictionless.
And then of course we napped. We waited till we got back to the house, but just barely, and I don't think Indigo did wait. By the time I woke up it was almost time to go to bed again. Well, not quite. There was time to play Bimini ring, a low-tech pirates' pastime which Owen predictably dominated, and time to watch basketball, and eat chips and salsa and chicken burritos. We eschewed the spool and the Bushwhackers in a nod to pre-race preparation, and so to bed.
Now I have something to confess. When I was talking to Indigo on the phone about this race, she said something like, "We're going to just do this for fun, and I told Dorli that I'd stay with her the whole way. But you take this way more seriously, so you shouldn't wait around for us." I felt awful. Here I am, the self-proclaimed Slow Fat Triathlete, writing about how it's all for fun and not to take yourself too seriously, and I've been pegged by someone who knows me well as taking it "way more seriously." Busted. So then I said, no, no, I'll come down and just do this strictly for fun - I'll hang with both of you, and we'll all do this together. But then I worried about my ability to actually have fun while doing that. I pictured myself fretting in transition, fussing on the bike, and then of course getting outrun on the 5k. The thing is that for me the fun is not just the pageantry and camaraderie of the event, and the ridiculousness of getting up in the dark to get to it - it's going as fast as I can and making the most out of the many hours I've put into training. And I admit, I now have a little ego invested in this thing. Slow as I am, I have a history, and it would bother me to look at my race results and see that I hung out for five minutes in transition, or took an hour to ride thirteen relatively flat miles. So should I disqualify myself from being a Slow Fat Triathlete?
Fortunately Indi freed my from my dilemma on Saturday by implying that Dorli would be more comfortable if I just went off and did my own race, so she wouldn't feel pressured to go faster than she wanted to go. I was secretly relieved. And I was still thinking that those guys would probably swim as fast as me, bike maybe a little slower, and then come cruising by me on the run. Which would be great if it happened - I would be proud of them, and cheer them along.
Anyhow, I struggled to digest my burrito and go to sleep, and the four-thirty wake up call came all too soon. We wanted to make sure that we got there in plenty of time to see what the transition looked like when it was all set up. We had all our gear together, we had our breakfast of bananas and Clif bars, and our bikes were already loaded on to the car. We were so prepared. Except we forgot that the parking at the Newport Dunes resort costs $8 and none of us brought any money at all. Ooop. And it's not like there's parking anywhere even remotely nearby. We sweet-talked our way in by promising that Owen and the girls would meet us later with cash. We hoped.
When the sky grew lighter, we could see that it was covered with what the SoCal folks call "marine layer" and the rest of us call "clouds." Not too cold, though, not much wind. Very pleasant. We went to look at the lagoon. Oooh! The tide was out, way out. And the receding waters had uncovered a stretch of mud that looked particularly oozy, all festooned with a seaweed crust. Nice.
We set up our transitions, we millled, we stretched, we peed, we got our wetsuits on and headed for the water. "Let's go in and get warmed up," I suggested. This was met with reluctant acquiescence. We squished through the mud and into the surprisingly warm water for a few splashes. Indigo got about chest-deep into the water and started bouncing up and down and giggling as she sank further and further into the mud with each bounce. "It feels good!" she proclaimed. Indigo is not a blasé sort of person. Dorli was amazingly calm considering this was her first race. I've never seen anyone so serene.
A few minutes behind schedule, the various age-group waves started to line up for departure. We shivered a little in the breeze as we applauded each group in turn, and we started to notice that the hundreds of swimmers before us had churned the waterline mud to such an extent that each successive group of triathletes was having increasing difficulty actually getting from the sandy beach to the water. People were sinking in past their knees, falling over, having to pull their legs out of the mud, getting covered with black sticky slime. This was great! We were having a hard time stifling our laughter. When it was time for us to line up for our start, we could hardly walk, both because of the mud and the mud-induced hilarity. I chose the Navy SEAL approach, dropping to my belly and crawling until I reached water deep enough that I could crouch in it without sinking down through the bottom. I observed to a fellow competitor that we would probably pay $130 or so to go to a fancy day spa and have very similar mud slathered on our bodies. "I'm never having a mud wrap again after being in this stuff!" she responded.
The starting bell finally rang, and we all splashed gratefully into the water, which seemed comparatively clear and pure after the mud episode. My shoulder, which had been bothering me for a couple of months, was finally feeling strong, and I had recently had some sort of epiphany with my swim stroke that was shaving a few seconds off each 100 meters. So I was happy to be swimming along, racing again. The swim was pretty uneventful - the usual sounds of my own walrus breathing, the attempts to draft off the feet of others, the struggle not to get pushed off my line by swimmers with poorer navigational skills than mine.
I got through the mud at the swim finish without too much embarrassment, and thanked the race staff who power-hosed my feet as I dashed through the parking lot. I slithered out of my wetsuit, wobbled into my bike shoes, and got ready to head out, when I saw Dorli cruising up behind me. "You rock!" "No, YOU rock!" we exchanged greetings. And just as I was grabbing my bike, Indigo rolled into T1. "You rock!" we all shouted. And I was off again, jogging my bike out over the timing mat and getting ready to pedal.
The first part of the bike course went along Jamboree, a major O.C. artery that was blocked off just for us. (It's named for the giant national Boy Scouts Jamboree, held somewhere in Anaheim, I think.) A rather steep little rise brought us up to the entrance to Fashion Island, where we were going to ride three loops. Yes, that's right. Our bike course was a shopping mall. Or some hybrid of shopping mall and office park. I saw signs for Macy's and Bloomingdale's, but there also seemed to be other types of establishments and corporate things. A lot of groomed lawns and parking lots.
I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the surroundings, though. I was trying to navigate the twists and turns of the course and the rather anarchic crowd of cyclists, many of whom appeared never to have heard of the "ride on the right, pass on the left" rule that is supposed to govern USA Triathlon-sanctioned races. I could tell that some people were inexperienced and quite probably didn't know better (even though the race website was well-provided with rules and tips for first-timers), but what was kind of chapping my hide was the guys on fancy bikes who clearly knew the rules but were zooming up left, right and center, passing pretty much anywhere, and creating a risky bike situation. Basically, they were riding the way they drive. The course was also really wide at some points and very narrow at others, so that it was extremely tempting to take the shortest line on the wide parts, even if it was on the right, and even if it landed you in a bad position to come around the turns and into the narrows. And I didn't see any race officials anywhere. Usually you see folks in striped referee shirts with notebooks, either riding on the back of motorcycles or, on a tight, multi-lap course like this one, standing at key points taking numbers and assessing penalities. This helps to put the fear of God into the cheaters and the guys whose personal triathlon ambitions override any vestigial common sense they may possess.
Despite this rather grumpy-sounding tirade, I was actually having a fair amount of fun. I do pretty well on technical courses, and I was delighting in gaining time on people around the turns and on the short downhills. I was working pretty hard over the rolling terrain, and I had trouble figuring out the U-turn after my first lap, but I was having a good time. Owen had brought the girls out to watch and wave, and I saw Indigo and hollered "whooo hoooo!" I battled one girl in an LA Tri Club uniform the whole way, passing her around the exit to the parking garage, and being passed by her on the uphill halfway through the loop.
Finally I was out of the suburban maze and back onto Jamboree, where I tucked myself as low as I could go and sped down the hill with my nose in my aerobars, giving myself some much needed time to bring my heart rate down a little before setting off on the run. The run followed the Back Bay bike trail through wetlands and sandy cliffs. It was winding enough to maintain visual interest, and it was mercifully rather flat. I downed a gel and jogged along, feeling pretty good. The more I practice running off the bike, both in training and races, the more I realize that I prefer it to just running. My legs are warmed up, my heart rate's already up, and it seems easy to keep my running cadence high. On the other hand, there is a certain amount of creeping fatigue in a race situation, and I wasn't able to go quite as "fast" as I thought maybe I could.
But the turnaround arrived right on schedule, and I started looking for Indigo and Dorli, figuring they would not be far behind me. I know Indigo's a pretty good runner, and Dorli, though she claims that she doesn't run and that running's hard for her, is a natural athlete who's also in great shape from kickboxing. When I did catch sight of their colorful bike jerseys and smiling faces, there was another round of whoo-hoo's and high fives, and then it was back down to business - the final 1.1 miles. We were mostly pretty spread out by this time, but I could still see a couple of targets to catch up to, and I worked on keeping my feet turning over at 92 right-foot-strikes per minute. With about a half mile to go, a woman with "42" on her calf passed me gradually, and I tried to make it my mission in life to stay with her. She didn't seem to be going that much faster than me, so I clung valiantly to her heels, but it was too much. With about 300 yards to the finish, I just went over the red line and had to back it off, gasping. And then the last stretch to the line was UPHILL! Oooh, I hate that. But I gathered enough oomph for a final burst across the line before slumping over in a daze.
No time to collapse though - I wanted to get back out on the course to see the girls finish, maybe even jog in the last hundred yards with them. I grabbed my recovery drink and a dry t-shirt and headed back out. Before too long I spotted them, but I had already wandered back to that 300 yards to go point. They were looking very cool, hardly sweating, very cheerful, and it was all I could do to run along with them. I was so proud of them though! When the line came in sight, they were like, "Shall we sprint?" "OK!" I was like, "Um, yeah, you're on your own..." cause there was no way I was sprinting. They took off like young gazelles, and I jogged over to the finish chute to catch them on their way out.
We milled around some more, ate bananas, visited the restrooms, and hung out to await the awards ceremony, where I had been promised I could take a few seconds to plug my book. I wandered over to the results board and my name just leapt out at me. There was a "2" in front of it. I had never seen such a thing, so it took me a while to fully comprehend that I had come in second in the Athena division. So now we really had to stick around for the awards. The sun was starting to peek through the clouds, and we were happy, kind of slow, some of us fatter than others, but all triathletes. Dorli was understandably delighted with how much fun she had, and she and Indigo were already talking about another race up in Ventura.
The awards ceremony was low-key, and of course the Athenas were almost the very last group to get mentioned, so by the time I got to plug the book, almost everyone was gone. I didn't care in the least, though. It had been a delightful morning, and we had plans for even more fun. It was Dorli's birthday, so she had presents to open; we were going to see "Shrek 2" even though Helen and Hannah had already seen it on Friday, and the spool was waiting. We ended up having so much fun that we didn't even have time for the traditional post-race nap. That's how much fun we had.