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The Kamari to Perissa Run in 8.1 * 10^-14 Parsecs: Getting half-way there

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Part 1 can be found here. 

To make this story a little bit more comprehensible, let me share this map of my journey…

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Swimming from Kamari to Perissa began uneventfully enough.

My cousin and his two sons showed up at the beach

ready to support me on my adventure. The presence of fish bait, fish nets, and hooks worried me a little bit. So I told my wife that if Kostis showed up with a fish that had hair to be very suspicious of its provenance…

Kostis just smiled…

Standing at the edge of the beach, staring at the distance in front of me

I pondered this moment…

Before we started this adventure, I told Kostis that we would call it a day if I was swimming after 45 minutes and I still wasn’t in sight of Perissa. After all, something horribly wrong would have happened if it took me more than 45 minutes to swim less than 1400 meters.

The first three minutes until panic point were going to be a desperate attempt to keep my adrenaline level down. I needed to go slowly and methodically. Keep my breathing under control and pace in line with what I needed. So with a throaty cheer and a salute to Poseidon,

I jumped into the water.

And swam.

 

After about three minutes, I crossed panic point,

paused for a moment, and then started my real swim.

Off in the distance of this picture, you’ll notice a point in the water. And from this angle it would appear that once you got there, you reached the turn for Perissa, but no, you would be mistaken. Like many false peaks, this point was also a false finish…

One my personal daemons is that swimming in the water is nerve-racking. If you looked to the left all you saw was the open sea

and if you looked in the water all you could see was the unchanging blue water.

And so I started to swim, remembering that this wasn’t so bad, it was after all only 1400 meters…

For the next 30 or so minutes, I would just swim, and the distance I covered increased. And yet, the progress seemed so marginal. One piece of rock

 

looked indistinguishable from another piece of rock.

All I could do is swim, and swim and swim.

While I was swimming we passed a gentleman fishing on the rocks. And he saw my cousin’s boat moving slowly, and he was cross because the boat was disturbing his fish. And then when he saw me he was startled, his eyes bugged out. As for me, I just noticed him breaking the endlessly monotony of the rocks.

After about 15 minutes, I took a break. Without a GPS, without a map, and with no visual clues, I had no idea how far I had gone. All I could hope and pray was that my swimming was moving me at the pace I was accustomed to…

My original plan called for me to swim pretty far from the mountain cliff, both for safety reasons, and to avoid the cross current the waves caused when they bounced off the mountains and to minimize the distance. Once I started swimming, the foreboding deep blue waters caused me to swim a lot closer to the cliffs.

I don’t really know how to describe what it felt like to swim in the deep blue waters. The waters are not that deep, but the color is a very dark deep blue. The isolation and quiet is very disturbing for a child of the 20th century. You feel like a speck of life suspended in space, only one terrible accident away from death. There is a perfect stillness and perfect fear. Every stroke you make in the waters propels you forward, or so you hope because there is so little to indicate progress. The rocks don’t change that fast. And the water is an endless void.

Swimming in that blue water, in that perfect stillness was too intimidating and so I hugged the cliffs desperately to avoid that feeling of isolation …

Even seeing an infrequent fish was a pleasant reminder that I was not alone…

At some point, I finally made it past that edge of the mountain I had seen from the beach …

And then I moved into true open water. The cliff edge of the mountain ended, and shot straight down into the sea, and I was now swimming in the dark blue expanse or the section I call The Deep Blue after the Luc Besson film…

At first I panicked. This was scary. I wanted to call out to Kostis and beg him to pick me up, but then humiliation and fear and stupidity took over. I wasn’t going to quit now…

So I embraced the moment, I let myself go and swam.

The thing about this part of the swim is that the water was different. For the first time in my life I was swimming in true open water. I wasn’t swimming in water that was sheltered by some mountains, or so shallow that you could see the bottom or in a bay. These were waves and currents that started in Crete creating powerful, deep, mystical movements. And my body felt so powerless and connected to the sea in that moment.

That portion of the swim was a moment of pure serenity. When I need to find my center, my sense of peace, I go back to that moment in the water.

Every stroke, every motion was both pointless and full of meaning. I couldn’t see any progress being made, I couldn’t feel myself moving, and yet I knew I was moving.

I was a small speck of life in the cosmos, alone and yet part of everything…

For about 19 minutes straight I just swam…

And then reality set in… At around the 35th minute, I was kind of like – d*n, this was supposed to be over like 10 minutes ago…

Somewhere in the middle of The Deep Blue section of water, I ground to a halt.

My arm started to hurt from the waves slapping against them – boy did the water sting. I was tired. And the far edge of the blue section did not seem to be coming any closer. And the serenity I was feeling was starting to retreat …

Floating in the water, I wondered about what to do next, to go forward? To stop? To quit?

I looked at Kostis, who was  looking at me with a worried expression on his face. Something had gone wrong, something had gone wrong with my plan… Was the current worse than I had anticipated? Was I somehow going slower than I expected? What the hell was going on?

Turns out I was a little bit off on the distance…

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Because of the depth of the water, and my decision to hug the coast line, the distance turned out to be 2500 meters, not less than 1500. 2500 meters was going to take about 1 hour not 30 minutes. At the 35 minute, I was a little bit more than half way done.

This was a bit of a problem. I hadn’t eaten enough for an hour-long swim, nor had I prepared myself mentally for an hour-long swim. My body was ready to stop…

Off in the distance, at the edge of The Deep Blue, I saw two rocks framing a window… And I said, I wasn’t going to stop until I went through that window, even if I had to stop every two to three minutes …

Part 1 can be found here.

The rest in part 3.

 

 

The Kamari to Perissa Run in 8.1 * 10^-14 Parsecs: Preludes and Nocturnes

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One of the coolest parts of my life has been that I am from Santorini.

And one of the most amazing accidents of my life is that my grandfather decided to buy a house on the beach.

That house,

right next to the mountain that separates Kamari from Perissa, is one of the anchors of my life.

And that mountain has always stood there as a forbidding barrier. And ever since I ever walked on the beach staring at the mountain, I swore I would find a way across it.

As a teenager, I took a boat around the mountain to Perissa.

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After college, when I lost a lot of weight and got into shape, I walked over the mountain to Perissa.

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Later on in life, my wife and I biked from Kamari to Perissa.

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Now at 40, all that remained was to swim around this mountain and I would have conquered it. This fearsome obstacle would be just another pile of rocks that stood between me and where I wanted to go…

Now swimming around the mountain is a challenge for three reasons.

  1. The distance is non-trivial
  2. For a small but significant section you are swimming in truly open water
  3. The weather had to cooperate

And of the three reasons, the first was what stood in my way all these years.

But thanks to my recent efforts to get into shape for a triathlon, and soon to be half-ironman and perhaps later ironman, my ability to swim long distances has improved significantly.

And so just before I did my first Olympic Tri, I decided to map out the distance and discovered it was less than 1500 meters …

Convinced the time had come, I plotted and planned to swim around the mountain to Perissa.

Arriving in Santorini, my one main obstacle was a support crew. Although the distance seemed short enough, I was worried about other boats, and random bad luck turning an adventure into a tragedy. Fortunately my cousin Kostis and his two sons Vassilis and Dimos

came to the rescue. Kostis has a small inflatable craft that he offered to navigate next to me while I was swimming providing support during my swim.

The day before my historic swim, I tried to swim out around the point visible in the picture of my house. And 10 feet from the point, I had a panic attack. I realized that for so many years this seemed like the edge of the known world, and that swimming beyond the edge of the known world was damn scary.

And then I remembered how scary the dark blue water of the Aegean is, and panicked some more.

And then I wondered what the hell was I doing. But the plans had been set in motion, and the swim had to begin…

After all Kostis and his two sons planned to show up at 8:30 in the morning for what was going to be a 30 minute, 1500 meter open water swim…

Part 2 can be found here.

 

Week 30-31 Blistering Heat

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After finishing my triathlon, my family and I went to Greece for our annual pilgrimage to my family’s ancestral home in Santorini Greece.
 
The only downside to this vacation is that I find myself having to continue my training to prepare for the marathon’s I intend to run in the fall.  And the reason training is a downside is the damned heat.
 
Running in 27 degree Celsius or 80 Fahrenheit heat is hard. If you’re fat like me, your ability to dissipate heat reduces your speed significantly. And man does it make me admire folks who do Kona even more… Running a marathon in that kind of heat with humidity just sounds awe inspiringly painful.
 
And if the run involves 800ish feet of climbing, then the net effect is one of pain and misery and despair.
Last year when I was doing long runs as part of the Hal Higdon Marathon Training plan, I almost died out on my long runs. Since I was not using heart rate or time but distance alone, I found myself dehydrated, delirious and puking along the roads of Santorini. After one long run, I showed up at our home exhausted, and some nice woman asked me: How do you feel? And I replied: Tin poutsisame… which translates roughly into: I am so f*** up. Turns out the nice woman was  my sister’s soon to be mother-in-law… Thankfully the wedding was not cancelled.
 
This year, I was determined to not have any repeats of that performance. So using my heart rate monitor as a gauge of effort in the heat and over hills, I moved at a much slower pace than I am used to. Net effect is that although the runs were annoying I didn’t puke or make a complete ass of myself to any charming ladies…
 
After my first couple of slow runs, I woke up early in the morning and had some nice cool weather. And all of sudden, my speed picked up significantly as I ran in cooler weather. Which was a relief. I was convinced that all of the fine eating in Santorini had blimped me out sooo much that I was going slow because of my weight.
 
Now I am looking forward to a nice cool south bay run, and a nice cool marathon in San Jose… And I am not looking forward to a private meeting with my scale…
 

Action shots

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The folks who did the pictures ran into some glitches with smugmug … And because they ran into some glitches, I only got my pictures today…

So here are some of my favorites.

Here you can see me exiting the water wondering where the f*** my 450$ garmin disappeared to…

And here you see my superlative biking performance. Such style, such grace, such speed…

And here’s the final mad dash to the finish line. Behind me is the guy whom I wished good luck, and to my right is the guy who had wished me good luck earlier.

Looking at the pictures carefully, I wonder how much of my catching up to #79 had to do with the fact that I wasn’t positioning my finger over the stop button to ensure maximum accuracy of measurement with my garmin…

On vacation

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There has been a brief hiatus in posting because I have been on vacation. Not from training, mind you, but from writing lots and lots of posts 🙂

I plan to return with some of the adventures in training on Santorini…

Race Report: My first Olympic Triathlon the Use the Force Edition

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8 months of training finally came to this, 1500 meters of swimming, 40km of biking and 10km of running.

And I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

The race started at 8:05, and I was in Santa Cruz at 6:30 so that I would have all the time in the world to prepare. And boy did I.

First there was the obligatory laying out of the equipment for transition in a desperate attempt to put things just so…

After trying to figure out how to balance my helmet on my conventional handle bars, I now know why triathletes have aero bars. It is not to go faster, it is for faster transition times. I had to clip my helmet to my bike, they can just place their helmet on their aero bars.

The equipment placed, just so, I turned to the fetish suit.

Once again, I had to do my best impersonation of a character from Downton Abbey, and get help to put on my fetish suit because apparently I can’t seem to get the zipper up…

Dressed, and with no where to go, I started to wonder around… Folks recognized that noob look and told me that everything was going to be fine… Realizing that there is so much noobness I can tolerate, the fetish suit and I moved to the beach.

At the beach the noobs were busy doing their warm ups.I know they were the noobs because they were folks I met from the transition clinic… I mean, seriously, we were there 45 minutes before the race started getting our suits wet, and our bodies warmed up… Anxious, a little..

The race started in waves. First were the pro’s who carefully lined up against the starting line and ran to the sea as fast as their lithe and superbly trained bodies could take them. Then there was the under 40 crowd which anxiously waited for the starting signal to begin, desperate to get a good line into the water… And they looked fit and young and great. And then finally the over 40 set, which did not look fit and lithe but older and fatter … and we all stood as far away from the starting line as possible, hoping someone else would set the pace so we could draft…

Meanwhile …

The night before the race my coach had given me all sorts of information about how fast and how hard I should go. And I had memorized all these details about pace, heart rate, etc… Carefully, and very deliberately I set my Garmin GPS 910xt up, verified it was secure on my arm, and hit go when the race began…

And we were off to the races. Good thing I had done my warm up because I was able to go into a steady rhythm to begin with. Unfortunately it took me about the 700m before I felt my body was moving as well as I would like in the water.

In the first 700m, I had the usual triathlon experience of kicks to the arms, kicks to the head, swats to my legs, fortunately no full on submersion… but I was ready for it, and able to power through.

At some point, I got clear of most of my group. I was reasonably convinced the reason was that I had been dropped. After all I am a slow person, and had every expectation to get dropped. There was a plan, however, and after the Napa Marathon, I was sticking to the plan. The plan called for me to go at a comfortable pace, and I was going at a comfortable pace. And I knew from my experience in the pool, that my comfortable pace was good enough to get a reasonable time…

During the swim I started to catch up to some of the stragglers of the under 40 crowd. Now before I sound too impressed with myself, that group included some folks who were doing the breast stroke…

Finally after what felt like an eternity, I reached the end of the swim. As I climbed out of the water, I reached to tap my Garmin and touched air.

WHAT THE ….

Turns out that the kicking and pushing had caused the Garmin to dislodge from the quick release position and to get lost in the water.

Now here I was, with a plan, and no way to measure success or failure. Fortunately, I had my backup watch because I am that geek…

Calmly, and somewhat annoyed, I ran to transition, again fully expecting to see rows of empty racks and discovered that all the bikes were there. It turns out I had done a pretty fast time coming in 56 out of a field of 201… In my age group, my time for the swim was third best. Still very confused, and wondering if I had forgotten to do a lap, I changed into the bike gear and got going.

Well, not exactly. More like got on my bike and fell down because I am that triathlete.

It was a hill.

The nice volunteers helped me back on my bike, and sent me on my merry way… And merry it was: 4 loops of approximately 6 miles to finish the 40km bike ride.

With no way to measure progress but a watch, no way to measure cadence, no heart rate monitor, nada, I started out biking. My thoughts were, well if Thomas Voeckler could win a stage with nothing but his body, then I could do okay in a bike ride…

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Actually what I really thought was that the spirit of Laurent Jalabert had decided that I was too infatuated with technology and needed to rely on my instincts… Laurent had won two Combatitivity awards  on the tour, and he always impressed me with his devil may care attitude. I was convince that Laurent, being French, had decided to teach me a lesson about the need to attack the race without hiding behind machines… Now why he had to teach me a lesson and cost me a shit-load of money to replace my GPS… well he’s French I reasoned…

Except that’s not true either. What really happened was the Star Wars geek in me was thinking he is Luke Skywalker in the Death Star trench, hearing Obi-Wan to trust his feelings.

But because George Lucas destroyed the Franchise,

my brain re-enacted the story with characters that were less likely to offend… That would make Laurent – Obi-Wan Laurent, and Thomas – Yoda Thomas… And I guess it would make my coach General Jan Dodonna (the guy who gave the commands for the attack on the Death Star)

Hanging out with Princess Leia after Luke announces that he has disarmed the tracking system…

With no GPS, no heart rate monitor, no cadence monitor, I pushed on. And man did I push. After my first loop I was going at a 20mph pace which is astonishing given that I have never gone that fast. My thinking was that I would probably slow down after the second lap. But I didn’t. And then the third, and I didn’t again. And then it was going to be the fourth, the fourth was when I would slow down… but no… So the run, the run was where I was going to pay for all of my Combativity…

So why did I go so fast? Part of it was just listening to my body instead of a stupid piece of electronics. Another part was posture. Unable to stare at the little gadget in front of me, I stretched out onto the bike and just pedaled fast and that helped.

During the bike ride, many, many people passed me. And unlike cyclists who feel compelled to make you feel like dirt when they pass you on the road, triathletes were so nice telling me good job, and congratulating me on my effort… Not sure which I find more irritating. I’ll go with the cyclists and assume the triathletes are sincere… Given my background in cycling, it took me a while to master the sincere good job as you passed someone…

As the bike ride ran to its final conclusion, the 10k run loomed ahead. And here was where I was going to pay for my crimes … I knew I was going to go slow… And it was frustrating because I was at that point in time on a great pace and could finish under three hours if my run was just OKAY.

But Obi-Wan Laurent and Yoda Thomas weren’t done with me quite yet. No they were not. Attack said Obi-Wan Laurent, so I attacked. And before I knew it, I was on a great pace. Checking in infrequently, at the 2.5km mark and the 5km mark my pace was really good. I was running at about 10 minute miles. And then Obi-Wan Laurent said, we attack. And so I did. Whereas the first 5km took me 30 minutes (~6 mph), the next 5km took me 27 minutes (~7 mph). In fact, my pace was so good, that towards the end I chilled out realizing that I had set my own personal best and I was unlikely to beat anyone at the finish line…

And that is where my Jedi Masters took over…

Yoda Thomas: Can your body handle another sprint?

Me:  Well the gadgets tell me otherwise…

Yoda Thomas: Kostadis there is no try…

My: The gadgets…

Obi-Wan Laurent: Merde, can you just trust your feelings – this stupid re-enactment of classic film is offending me… What did I do to get stuck in your stupid fantasy, eh?

And so I attacked with a blistering sprint … If I was a cyclist, I would say that I dropped the dude that was running with me and beat some other dude at the finish line who had dropped me earlier. I suppose the triathlete in me should say: There was this nice guy that I was chatting with over the last mile, who suggested we sprint to the finish, so I wished him good luck, and then took off, and in the process caught up to another athlete who had wished me good luck earlier…

Done with the race, I looked at my watch and was stunned to see what I had accomplished. I had finished my first Olympic Triathlon in 2:48. My bike ride was the fastest I had ever been on two wheels in my life. My run was not the fastest run I had ever done, but certainly the fastest I had ever done after that much exercise, and the first time I had ever had a negative split!

And yes, the first person I told was my coach, and then my wife…

What my wife and I were both surprised with was how effective the training was. Having watched me self train for the Athens Marathon, and train for the death ride, there was a low expectation on what training could do for me. After all, I am the guy who finishes in the bottom 5% of any sporting event. Heck if there were only four people in a race, I still would finish in the bottom 5%… We both were very confused about what all of this training was hoping to accomplish…

And yet this training had pushed me all the way into the median performer across all age groups and in 12th out of 20 for my age group! And my time, was … well … cough-cough… respectable…

And so as I stand in shock about my accomplishment, I am reminded of Obi-Wan Laurent, who said: Merde, I am not doing this stupid imaginary movie re-enactment… This is beyond silly…

Um… maybe not Obi-Wan Laurent, maybe Obi-Wan Kenobi who said: May the Force be with you always!

One final addendum…

And the timings were:

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no live blogging

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image

wish me luck

edit: here’s the race report which clearly shows all that luck paid off in weird ways…

Week 28 – A summary

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On Sunday I am doing my first Olympic Triathlon, and my first triathlon period. And I thought this a good moment to stop and take stock of what I have done over the last year.

I’ve biked for 72 hours, swam for 36, and run for 87. In other words, I have exercised non-stop for more than one week.

Or put differently:

  • I’ve covered more than half the distance to Chicago from San Francisco (1040 of the 1857 miles)
  • I’ve swam a quarter of the distance from Athens to Santorini
  • And I’ve ran to tahoe and back.

In terms of improvements in fitness

  • I’ve gone from being able to barely bike for an hour at 11 miles an hour to biking for 2+ hours at 15+ miles an hour
  • I’ve gone from being barely able to bike with my son in his carrier at 11 miles an hour for an hour, to biking at 12+ miles an hour a much larger child for an hour and 15 minutes…
  • And in terms of swimming I’ve gone from doing 500 yards in 10:30 seconds, in a full on sprint to being able to do 1500 yards, where each 500 yards was less than 10:30…

And in terms of body size, I’ve dropped 20 pounds of fat and put on five pounds of lean muscle mass.

And all of that visually got me from here:

To here… 225410_10151585873235337_1529140840_n

Pretty Crazy Transformation?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Week 27 – Done with the training…

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After what feels like an eternity, I am done with my last heavy week of training.

One light week, then taper crazies, and then the race.

To celebrate I am drinking some rum and coke – dark koloa rum from kauai, lemon juice from the lemons in my front yard, and coke from mexico – the stuff with sugar not the high fructose crap…

Because there is nothing like saying Cuba Libra after finishing your last 2 hour bike ride on a trainer late at night…

 

Week 26 – I love my wetsuit

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Last week I swam in the cold waters of Santa Cruz in my new wet suit.2013-07-25_0821

And boy was that fun.

One of the core challenges in swimming is keeping your posture correct. In particular, keeping those damn legs above your chest.

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If the legs are below your chest, then they act as a water break.

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So we have the endless drills where you push the buoy (your chest) down and try to keep those legs up…

But with the wet suit you get automatic correct posture. The buoyancy of the suit keeps your legs up, and your body floating on the top of the water… just right. And all you have to do is roll and pull…

And maybe it’s just the posture, but it feels like with every pull your body is moving faster than it ever did before…

In fact it’s so easy that I almost red-lined in the swim drill because I was pushing so hard…

Then later in the week I did my 2200 yard swim. And while I was dragging my sorry fat ass through the last 500 yards, I kept thing that this is sooooo much easier with a wet suit. And man, I want my wet suit. And can I please have my wet suit?