One of the weirdest things about training is the asymmetry of technique.

First your entire technique is a mess. You’re doing everything wrong. And you’re too clueless to understand how wrong everything is.

Then you build up a certain amount of aerobic and technical base, and you become aware of flaws in your technique, so you start to work on improving them.

First you notice how you don’t breathe on your left side when you swim, so you work to fix that. And by the time you are done, you realize you breathe better on your left side than your right side, so you work on your right side and then you suddenly realize that your left side breathing is a mess… You’re like: woah I am out of balance, my head’s in the wrong position, my arm is flopping like a banana peel and…

So you start working on the left side again. And you know that you’ll be back to the right side.

And the same process holds true for both running and biking.

The net effect is that I am feeling like an awkward teenager with a body he has no control over that I am just barely able to move the way I want.

What’s really interesting in all of this process, is that every time I focus on improving technique on the offside, the offside overshoots the improvement. My theory is the following: At time T, because of my overall skill level I am able to affect an improvement of F, at time T+1, because of improvements in fitness and skill, I  am able to affect an improvement of 2F and as a result overshoot my desired improvement. I suspect at some point in time as my fitness level plateaus, my ability to get incremental improvements will diminish, but I am a long way from that point in time.

With a little bit over a month left to go before my first Olympic Triathlon, I decided that the time had come to buy the last bit of equipment.

1. The Wet Suit

When you see the wet suit on people, it feels like something cat woman would wear. Not something an athlete would wear. And yet it works, does it ever work well. I was actually shocked after I put it on, how much flexibility I had while wearing the suit. I was wearing an entry-level suit. Which makes me think that the high-end suits flexibility exceeds my flexibility…

One thing about the wet suit, you really need to have no shame wearing this thing because it does look like you escaped some rubber fetishist party.

2. The triathlon bib

One thing I love about triathletes is that they fail to explain some very basic pieces of information that are super critical. Kind of like what the hell the base is.

When you are doing an Olympic Triathlon distance you are not changing out of your clothes. Pretty important piece of information because it determines what you swim in and what you cycle in and what you run in.

And if you’re a fat middle-aged dude like myself, the most important piece of clothing is what you cycle in.

The problem with a bicycle if you are overweight is the painful seat. A well established solution to the painful seat is the chamois. The problem with the chamois is that the more chamois you have, the worse the clothing is for running and swimming.

For cycling shorts, this is not an issue, you’re not expected to run or swim in them. But in a triathlon you are expected to run and swim … And so the chamois is less cushy. In fact, you can get triathlon clothing that has no chamois – which I find an unbelievably painful thing to contemplate.

And here is where the ouchie arises. If you’ve trained your ass on a cushy chamois and then switch to the triathlon chamois, man does your ass hurt. Well at least mine did during my 2 hour bike ride.

Word to the wise – if you are training for a triathlon ditch the cushy chamois, and get several pairs of triathlon shorts and train your ass early.

One of the more interesting problems in any kind of training regime is controlling your weight. The problem with controlling your weight is that you are unbelievably hungry almost all of the time.

If your like Lance Armstrong, then maybe it’s about how much discipline you have.

If your like me, it’s a painful personal struggle.

With this triathlon training, I thought it would be relatively easy to lose weight, but it has not been. In fact, it’s been very, very, very difficult.

One of the challenges is figuring out why. For me personally, food is like an addiction. I will eat ungodly amounts of food and not even remember that I ate them. I can convince myself of all sorts of delusions and illusions that explain my weight none of which have any bearing on fact.

For example, I tend to weigh less at the end of the week rather than at the beginning. This is a surprising result, because I thought my weight control problems were related to my eating habits at work. Because the mental model I had been that I was eating a lot at work, not over the weekend, I explained away my weight variation in a variety of ways. My favorite was that my long bike ride on Sundays was impacting my digestion…

In fact, the idea that the problem was the bike ride was so embedded in my head that I worked really hard to deal with the issue, eating even less during the week to combat this bike digestive problem.

And what made this worse was that I lacked the personal discipline to enter my weight data in a computer on a daily basis so I could track things  more carefully.

So I bought a new scale (withings) that automatically uploads my weight data to the cloud. Big data to the weight loss rescue! 

And lo and behold, after two months it was clear that my weight increased on Friday and Saturday and started to decline on Monday. And it was a pretty consistent pattern …

Well if the problem was my biking then that did not explain the gain on Saturday and it certainly did not explain the gain on Friday  – a day I typically did a long run of about 1->2 hours.

Confronted with this data I was able to examine my eating patterns and realized I was doing a bunch of things that were making weight loss hard. The first was that I was snacking on a lot of bad things on the weekend. The second was that to deal with the excessive eating on the weekend I was eating too little during the week and as a result snacking even more on the weekend.

Now with the data, I can at least start to figure out how to stop the snacking, increase the midweek eating and continue to lose weight.

I’ve been doing a lot of training. A lot. And a lot of it happens on a bicycle hooked up to a trainer.

The green thing is the trainer, the orange thing is a power supply that I use to plug in my computer so I can watch some video or plug in the baby monitor when I bike while he is sleeping and the book is used to balance the bike.

Last week my wife found my son sitting on his tricycle and biking in place. She also noticed that he had moved the power supply close to him.

When asked what he was doing , he said: I am biking like daddy. When I cam home, he quickly started his work out again:

Later that evening, Nicholas took it to the next level.

First he worked to get the tricycle setup correctly in the trainer (notice the book). And then he went on his long bike ride.

The good news is that we got the bike training down pat, but I am a little bit concerned about his transitions…

Maybe next year we sign up for the Silicon Valley Kid Triathlon?

Two months before my first Olympic Triathlon, and almost 60 weeks before my first Iron Man, I thought it might be time for some reflections on progress towards my goals.

So if the goal is the summit of Everest.

I think I finally made it to SFO…

My flight has not yet left for  Nepal.

And have a long way to get to base camp…

Before I make it to the summit

So let’s look at the plan…

1. Bike 112 miles averaging more than 15 miles an hour… I have only been able to sustain a greater than 15 mile pace once in my life and that was for 1 hour… Today I can’t bike 10 miles an hour the day after my long runs…
2. Swim faster than I normally swim for longer than I have ever swam
3. Re-learn how to swim … My swimming technique is about 20+ years out of date.
4. Do a marathon after 1 and 2
5. Fix my cadence.
6. Lose a lot of weight because there is this calorie consumption problem…

And where are we now

1. Was able to finish 30 miles at a 16.5 mile an hour pace. Still not good enough, but tremendous progress. 
2. Well I was looking at my swimming splits before I started training, and I am now doing 2:20/100m vs 2:44/100m so definitely progress there.
3. I am killing it on my technique. Went from 16-17 strokes per length to 11-12 over 25 meters. Still a way to go…
4. Haven’t lost much speed.
5. Not quite there, but now was able to sustain 88 pedals per minute over 2:30
6. Have lost 13 of the many pounds I have to lose.