Triathlon! Are you nuts?

Swami's State Beach with my son

I was on a ride early last summer with my buddies from Mira Mesa Cycling Club. After about 20 miles, we stopped at Swami's State Beach, which is a local favorite for cyclists taking a break during long rides. It's a beautiful stop along the Pacific Coast Highway, named because of the ashram that Swami Paramahansa Yogananda built there overlooking the Pacific Ocean back in 1937. It's also one of the world's most famous surfing beaches.


My buddy Manny said, "You know, I'm thinking of doing a sprint triathlon later this year." And I told him "great! I'll come out and cheer you on."


He said, "I was thinking you'd go in it with me"


I said, "Triathlon, are you nuts?"


It's a funny thing about peer pressure. When Manny first mentioned it, any type of triathlon was just about the most outrageously unattainable goal I could come up with. Over the next few months, as he worked on me, it seemed less and less silly. I started running, just in case... I started swimming, just in case...


Swimming to me was jumping into a pool with one of those swim-up bars and sipping a margarita. In the summer, my wife, who was a competitive swimmer back in the day, began to give me "real" swimming lessons for competition. I couldn't believe how complicated swimming turned out to be! The first lesson was eye-opening. I had to re-learn how to kick, how to stroke, how to hold my head down, how to breathe. The first few tries, I just sank like a rock. Kicking wasn't as easy as I thought; I went backwards. Then I had to put it all together. I was like one of those HDTV broadcasts where the video and audio are way out of sync. Over the course of the next few months, I bought swimming DVDs, even got a swim coach for a day and I made some progress. I was doing about 200m without stopping, then 300m and finally reached 1100m in one go. I was dreadfully slow, but I thought I was almost ready.


On my birthday in October, my wife invited some friends over to celebrate the start of the hockey season. One of our friends, Diane, is a serious triathlete, having competed in various ironman competitions. She recently completed a bike ride from San Francisco to San Diego. She suggested I try the Tinsel Triathlon in Hemet, California in early December. She was all excited about it, and she even said she would do it again with me if I went in it. It was her first triathlon and she said it was easy and a lot of fun. I turned to Manny and I said, I'll do it if you do it... And he agreed. So the crazy idea of a triathlon at 57 years old became a done deal. After the sangrias wore off, I thought I'd done just about the dumbest thing, agreeing to do a triathlon.


So I had to start training in earnest. It was only two months away! I ran 3x a week, swam 3x a week and rode 3x a week. Confident about the biking part, I was still a painfully slow runner and an even worse swimmer. A couple of weeks before the Tinsel Tri, I traveled to New Orleans. You know what happens there. You can't resist the food. Running there was really only to keep up with the calorie intake and minimize the damage. I didn't swim either because of the cold weather. Then I got sick. I'd recovered enough a few days before the Tri and I resolved to do it. However, Manny learned he had to have shoulder surgery and was advised by his doctor not to swim, so he had to pull out.

Feeling the pain!

The Tinsel Tri is a short reverse sprint distance triathlon. That means you run first, bike second and swim last. The run is a flat 3 mile course, followed by a mostly flat 12 mile bike ride and then a short 150m swim in a pool. On the morning of the tri, the temperature in Hemet was 28 degrees... Fahrenheit. By the time we got to the start line, it as a balmy 38. Our friend Diane was giving me all sorts of tips on how to set up my transition zone while I was still wondering what the hell I was doing there. At the start line, she went to the front of the pack and I reluctantly followed. I wanted to be in the back. When the gun went off, everyone shot out of there like they were desperate to go to the bathroom. The pace was about a 7-1/2 minute mile. And I stupidly kept up, but only at first. I knew there was no way I could sustain that pace. As the 3 miles wore on, I got slower and slower, finally wearing out the toes of my running shoes while I toe-dragged myself into the transition zone at a 13 minute per mile pace. I took my time at the transition... Didn't really matter anyway, right? 

Start of the bike stint

When I got on the bike, I realized I felt pretty good, and I decided to try and make up the time I lost on the run. I hammered the 12 miles. It was pretty windy but I was making headway; I recognized the people I passed because they all passed me on the run. When I got back into the transition zone, I saw Diane sitting there and asked her what happened. She had already finished! To encourage me she said she'd do the swim again with me. Jeez, how does someone have that speed and stamina?


My second transition was about a minute quicker than my first. I had a couple of false starts because I forgot to take my socks off, then I forgot to take my helmet off. I was pretty delirious. I jumped into the pool, determined to use all my new swimming skills. Those all went out the window as I plowed head-first into someone's ass while my head was perfectly down in what I thought was pretty good freestyle form. Not wanting to stick my head in another person's butt again, my head came up, my legs dropped down and my swimming form went to hell. I could hear my wife on the sidelines yelling "What happened to your form? Head down! Arch your back!" and so on. Needless to say, that was the most exhausting 150m, having used more energy flailing away in the pool than propelling me forward. All the while thinking that about 900 sweaty people had jumped into the pool. I imagined that the pool had more sweat than water. After the swim, I spent more time showering off than I did in the pool.


In the end, I finished midway in the field. Apparently, although about 1,500 people signed up, only about 900 showed up and I finished solidly mid-pack in the mid 400s. My transition times were comical: My first transition was 3-1/2 minutes and my second was about 2-1/2 minutes. Compare that to the winner's times of 30 seconds and 17 seconds! It turned out to be a lot of fun though. Later on, Diane's husband Michael said to my wife, "You're now officially a triathlon widow." I don't know about that though. It was fun, but I'm not sure I want to beat myself up like that again. And this was supposed to be a super easy triathlon!

Below 200 and a size 34 waist.

One of two piles of discards

For the first time in more than 20 years, I weigh less than 200 pounds. The milestone actually passed a few days ago, but I didn't wanna celebrate until I knew it stuck.

I marked the occasion by going out and buying new pants and shirts and tossing out all my old fat clothes and donating them to charity. I got rid of nearly 200 shirts, about 50 pairs of pants and shorts, assorted sweaters, jackets, coats and sweatshirts. I discarded every bit of clothing I owned, even underwear! I have never seen my closet so empty. I can fit everything now in my closet into a small carry-on bag.

The best part was buying size 34 pants (down from a size 40) and size medium and some large shirts, down from 2XL and 3XL. At this point, the size 34s are a bit loose, but 32s are still a bit tight. Didn't think losing weight would be so expensive.

Fifteen more pounds to go...

Shedding the pounds, part 2

As mentioned in the previous post, I had to search for a more efficient way to track my caloric intake. I scoured the web for calorie counters and calorie trackers. I searched for smartphone apps that might work. Some websites or apps would track calories, but you had to figure out for yourself how many calories you were taking in. Others had very complicated ways of tracking your calories. Yet others had food databases where you could enter a meal or a portion and it would figure out your calories and track them. Most of these had limited food databases, of only one, ten or even twenty thousand food items. Trust me, that’s not enough.

Then I found My Plate on www.livestrong.com. It’s part of Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation and it has all sorts of tools that will help you live a healthier lifestyle. “My Plate” is essentially a calorie and nutrition tracker. The amazing thing is the scope of foods in the food database! I searched for sorts of weird Asian and Spanish foods and not only did the foods come up in the database, it even listed different brands! I didn't know there were so many varieties of Filipino lumpia. There have been very few foods that I couldn’t find in the database. It's really easy to track calories. What’s more, there is a companion app for a smartphone that ties in with the website so that you can track your calories even when your computer isn’t available. The iPhone app is not very reliable, though, it crashes a lot and sometimes will duplicate food entries willy-nilly. Sometimes it will also record a huge amount of calories for meals that you’ve created on the web site. 300 calories for a cup of coffee? An update of the mobile app is supposed to be on the way.


On the website, you can create meals and accurately track the calories in your recipe. For example, as you build a meal or create a recipe it will track how many calories each component in your recipe has and total up all those calories. Then it divides the total calories by the number of servings your recipe contains. You can even make up those little nutritional data summaries that they put on food containers for your recipes. There are also recipes available from the thousands, maybe millions of other My Plate users. What's fantastic are the results. I've just cracked below 215 pounds and feeling for the first time that I might actually get below 200 pounds again.

Along the way, as you track you daily caloric intake and burn, you can also track your weight loss. The web site gives you these encouraging messages from time to time. I've been religious in recording my food intake and workout calorie burns since I started tracking last March. I haven't missed a day yet. They say that statistically, if you can keep tracking for 90 days, you'll have a much better chance of achieving your weight goals. By the way, Livestrong My Plate isn't just for weight loss, you can track calories for when you need to put on weight too. I haven't tried that part out.. Yet.


The Livestrong websites are full of invaluable information, particularly for cancer victims, and also provides support and information for people suffering from diabetes, etc. They're the most useful, no bull websites you can visit. Thank you Lance Armstrong, for creating the Livestrong Foundation.

Finally! I'm shedding the pounds, part 1

Under 215 pounds!

When my wife suggested I write a book about my weight loss odyssey, I laughed and told her it would be the world's shortest book (besides, I'm not the only guy ever to lose weight). Because it turned out to be so easy. It’s one of those epiphanies that you get and think, “why the heck didn’t I think of this before?”


Here it is in a nutshell: It’s all about calories, stupid! I quickly discovered that although I was riding my bike a lot, I was also eating a whole ton of calories during and after my rides, in the misguided belief that because I was riding hard, I could pretty much eat what I wanted. I’ll tell you right now, if you read some of the road biking magazines, they’ll sometimes have these little side bars where they give you a ride distance and speed and tell you what the equivalent you can consume in beer or Snickers bars. Don’t even look at that, if you’re serious about shedding the pounds. ‘Cause you’ll end up eating those Snickers bars and wonder why you gained weight!

I went to see a nutritionist in March and she gave me all sorts of information about the types of foods that I needed to eat, the proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, etc. There were simple sugars and complex sugars. Some turned into glycogen, others didn't. It seemed way too complicated. So of course, that all went in one ear and out the other. The only thing that rattled around in my brain was when she said, for your weight, you need to eat a net 1,900 calories every day to lose two pounds a week. She gave me a whole list of foods on about six or seven pages with the calorie counts for different servings so that I could figure out how many calories I was taking in.

That's all well and good, but how accurate was it really? The foods listed were pretty general (is it a big apple or a medium apple?) and I wondered how accurate the list was. Also, what about my workouts? How could I factor those burned calories in? How did I even know how many calories I burned during a workout? There had to be a better way to quantify all those calories so that they made sense to me.


Using the lists from my nutritionist, I felt I could easily be as much as 500 calories off in my calculations. I felt I needed to accurately measure and quantify what I took in and burned every day with a relatively small margin of error. As it turns out, it very possible with today’s technology. The key is to first be able to accurately measure the calories going in, second, accurately measure the calories going out. As I mentioned, it’s very easy to do with today’s technology. 

I’ll digress here a little bit because I don’t want to give the impression that I totally ignored my doctor’s advice on the type of foods I was to eat and the proportions of carbs to proteins, etc. She was concerned about the possibility of diabetes setting in and aside from the weight loss aspect, she wanted to make sure I wasn’t going eat a lot of “crap”. I really wasn’t too worried about the type of food I was eating, because as the appointment with the doctor progressed, it turned out that my diet wasn’t so bad. I was more or less eating the correct foods, with some splurging here and there with foods I shouldn’t be eating. So I decided that I wasn’t going to worry too much about the type of foods I was taking in and worry only about my net calorie counts for the time being. I rarely eat white bread, for example, only whole grains. I rarely eat white rice. I eat a lot of nuts. I eat a lot of fruits and veggies. I never eat at fast food restaurants, and I don’t drink sodas. I always made sure that I had a lot of fiber in my diet. Believe me, when you’re in your 50s, fiber is all important! My main problem was that I simply ate too much for the level of activity in my life.

After muddling through a week after my appointment with the nutritionist, I realized that unless I knew with some degree of accuracy what was going in and out, it would never work. So I set out to find a way.

Another milestone: Vancouver to Whistler!

Epic Ride!

I spend a fair amount of time in Vancouver during the summer. It's a glorious city when the sun is shining. My folks live there and I grew up there. I decided at the beginning of this year that I was going to ride my bike from Vancouver to Whistler. My brother thought I'd lost my mind. I tipped the scales at 240+ pounds at the time.

It's been about 7 months since I added the Vancouver to Whistler ride to my bucket list, and in the intervening months, I've seen the nutritionist, got really serious about weight loss and have had great success in shedding the tonnage. That story to come soon.

I was planning to enter the Vancouver to Whistler Gran Fondo in September, but it turns out that the event is so popular it sells out within days of the previous year's Gran Fondo. It was a huge disappointment not to be able to enter, tempered a bit by the thought of not having to pony up the expensive entry fee. It was the great motivator for shedding the pounds. Since I couldn't do the Gran Fondo, I decided to ride the route yesterday. One of my uncles was in town visiting from Sydney, Australia and my wife drove him up to Whistler for a tour while I rode up on my wife's bike (mine was in San Diego).

Although I felt I really should shed a few more pounds before attempting this mostly uphill, 70 mile ride, I decided to go for it. I now weigh about 212 pounds and with my mom's cooking in Vancouver, I had to do something to offset the food intake.

Along the way, waterfalls!

After a climb!

I decided to start the ride on Vancouver's North Shore, in West Vancouver, so I wouldn't have to battle the weekend traffic through downtown and the Lions Gate Bridge. I started out in a little community called Horseshoe Bay. After a couple of miles of easy riding, the fun began! The route was rolling, mostly uphill 5% to 6% grades with a few 9% and 10% grades thrown in for good measure. But the climbs were usually followed by short downhill stretches and the scenery was amazing. Between Horseshoe Bay and Squamish, you ride the Sea to Sky Highway along the waterfront, with beautiful views of the inlet and islands on the left. On the right it's forests as far as the eye can see. It was chilly in the morning and I wasn't dressed for it, so when I got to Squamish, I found a bike shop and bought an undershirt for warmth. Turns out the owner spends a lot of time riding in San Diego during the winter and knew some of the riders I knew. A good omen, I thought.

That's kilometers; only
25 miles to go!

After leaving Squamish, the ride still seemed relatively easy... For just a couple miles as it turned out. Then the fun began. The highway turned uphill, and although the gradients weren't huge, mostly 6% to 9%, they were relentless! There were a ton of cyclists on the road, too. There was a mountain bike race going on at Whistler and many riders were on their way to catch the races. About an hour into the ride after Squamish, my cell phone rang and it was my wife. She had just driven up a long, steep grade and got worried about me. So she called to warn me about it! By that time, I'd already climbed it and I was only about 10 miles behind her. By the time I got within a few miles of the Whistler Village, I was going so slow, I think I might have been going backwards! When I got to Whistler, my trusty Garmin GPS told me I burned about 3,000 calories on the way so I headed to the nearest White Spot and had the first burger and fries I've had in a long time. Life is good!

The ride took me about 5 hours to ride; it wasn't the entire 70 miles because I started closer to Whistler than I'd originally planned. It ended up closer to 45 miles and about 5,000 feet of climbing. My average moving speed, counting the downhills and uphills was a little bit below 12.9 mph. I thought that was pretty respectable for an old, overweight guy like me. More than anything, that ride gave me the confidence to tackle just about any hill. I'm already planning for the next item on my bucket list: Climbing Mt. Palomar in northern San Diego county. I know I need to get well under 200 lbs for that one!

"You're just a fat guy on a bike!"

A couple of months ago, my wife, my son and my friend Charlie and I were riding through Torrey Pines State Beach on a warm Sunday afternoon. It was one of those days when people get kind of silly looking for parking, which is always in short supply. The area is chock full of joggers, people walking their dogs, cyclists, surfers and a lot of cars are hunting around for a place to park. The frenzy to find a parking spot can get so intense... And the cyclists tend to suffer from it.

We were riding downhill on Carmel Valley Road from the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) along the designated bike lane. Suddenly a woman driving a Volvo station wagon thought she found a parking spot. She zoomed past us, swerved into the bike lane, and slammed on her brakes to get into what turned out to be a non-existent parking spot. Charlie came within an inch or two of smashing into the back of the woman's car. The rest of us learned how to panic stop a bicycle. The thing is, she had absolutely no remorse. Some people in this part of San Diego tend to have a sense of entitlement. This woman definitely did. The inevitable yelling match ensued, and as she drove away, she yelled out to me, "you're just a fat guy on a bike."

Well, I'm a couple of months into my calorie tracking, and I've dropped down to 210 pounds. 60 pounds gone so far. I may have been be fat then, but lady, I won't be fat for long, and you'll always be stupid.

The Gran Fondos, Tours and losin' it!

With my son at the Gran
Fondo in 2011. About
232 pounds.

My son and I rode in the Gran Fondo Colnago San Diego this year. A Gran Fondo means great endurance or something like that in Italian. They're organized bike rides (runs and cross country skiing, too) of about 100 miles or so that are kind of like pretend races. They tell you it's not a race, but they give you these timing chips to wear so that you can measure how fast you went. Also, some Gran Fondos give away prizes for King and Queen of the Mountain which go to the fastest male and female riders on a climbing segment. It's not a race, remember? They're kind of fun though and usually well attended by serious cyclists. In San Diego, the Gran Fondo is sponsored by the bike maker Colnago and it's an Italian affair with Alitalia even sending out really beautiful model types to chat it up with the (male) riders. Gotta love the Italians. They even have the local Ferrari club lead out the cyclists at the start in Little Italy.

We had entered the Gran Fondo in 2010, but it took us a week to finish... It was raining heavily in San Diego on the morning of the 2010 Gran Fondo. There we were out in the pouring rain waiting for Jimi Hendrix's rendition of the national anthem to end so we could get started. That national anthem seems like it takes about 20 minutes to run through and we were soaked and cold by the time we got started. After crossing over the Coronado Bay Bridge, we were battling high winds, driving rain and cold (for San Diego) temperatures. My son and I decided to take the ferry back to San Diego, go home, shower and come back to collect our finisher's medals. And have lunch. Hey, it's a pretend race, so we have pretend medals. We rode the entire route the following Sunday except for crossing the bridge, and it was just about as nice a day as you get here in America's finest city.

Old Pros Independence Day ride. That's me on the right. Down to
about 220 pounds. That's my buddy Charlie on the left. He thinks
 wearing that jersey and shorts is the same as wearing a flag.

This year we entered the Medio Fondo, which is a metric century or 60 miles. It may well be one of my last organized rides. Or should I say disorganized rides. Somehow the ride organizers underestimated the number of people signed up, because they ran out of water at a couple of the rest stops. They inexplicably situated the rest stops at very odd intervals. For the Medio Fondo riders, it was almost 30 miles between two of the stops. The course was kind of hilly and the convenience stores along the route made out like bandits! Riders needed hydration and nutrition in between the stops. I thought it was bad last year when they ran out of jerseys before the ride even started!

After the sugar water debacle in Palm Springs, I was souring on these giant organized rides. So far, only the Tour de Poway and the Old Pros ride in Scripps Ranch have been well organized and not overly crowded. I did the Poway in October of 2010 and the Old Pros ride just a few days ago on July 4th.

All that riding and I'm finally making progress. I'm down below 220 pounds. That's the story for another post or two... Stay tuned.

The Epiphany

During the holidays of 2010-2011, we had gone up to Vancouver to visit my folks and do some skiing. My sister and her husband flew out from New York to join us. We spent three days at Whistler Mountain. I discovered that despite being able to ride my bike for hours at a time, skiing really took it out of me. On the third day I only managed two or three runs. My more or less skinny, polo playing brother-in-law had no trouble skiing hard all three days. I began to reminisce about my high school days and skiing. Back then, I skied six out of seven days every week. Five nights a week (after homework, of course!) at Grouse Mountain, one of the now four local ski areas scattered around Vancouver. On Fridays we would drive to Whistler and spend Saturday and Sunday skiing. Now, I couldn’t put together three days of consecutive skiing. Granted it was almost forty years earlier, but I felt that I should still be able to ski at least five or six days without feeling completely spent.

Whenever I take a road trip I tend to analyze the route for its suitability for road biking. The drive to Whistler seemed like a monstrous seventy mile uphill pain fest. I could never do it. Then, I decided that I would try the ride the following summer, in September of 2011. There is an organized ride from Vancouver to Whistler called, can you guess? The Vancouver to Whistler Gran Fondo. It’s about seventy two miles from start to finish and you get to do it with a few thousand other riders in a more or less controlled environment. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police even close off intersections on the highway so that cyclists can go through without having to stop. Gotta love those Canadians, they do these Gran Fondos the right way! And so my next milestone began to form in my mind.

However, even though I have finished my first century and I'm riding a lot, sometimes 200 miles in a week, I wasn’t losing any weight. Sure, sometimes I’d drop to about 235 but my weight was hovering at around 240. I knew that there was no possibility that I would be able to ride the Whistler Gran Fondo weighing 240 pounds and expect to finish before winter set in. I had been frustrated by my inability to get firmly below 240 pounds and I really didn’t know what to do about it. I knew I didn’t want to get into any fad or special diets, because I was certain that as soon as I got off the diet at whatever my goal weight was, I’d just put the pounds back on. My cousin Miguel, an opera singer, had done it and he kept the pounds off (today, he still keeps the pounds off). There had to be a reason why he was dropping pounds permanently and I wasn’t, even though we were both more or less doing the same thing: Regular and relatively intense workouts. He ran and I rode.

In early March, I was at Scripps Clinic for a routine blood test to check my PSA levels, and I noticed a little poster asking for volunteers for a weight loss study. I called and asked for information. They told me that they were testing a weight loss supplement and that half of the participants would take a placebo and the other half would take the supplement. They also said that I could not change my eating habits during the study, and most importantly, I couldn’t be under the guidance of a nutritionist with the aim of losing weight. Wait a minute... Nutritionists do that? Hmmm, I called my primary care doc, and asked his office to refer me to a nutritionist. At the end of March, 2011, I walked into the doctor’s office for my first “weight loss” appointment, and this is where it all began. The crazy notion of riding my bike from Vancouver to Whistler.

My first century! And I'm still stuck

The holidays of 2010 came around and I weighed 240 pounds. Then January of 2011 came around and I weighed 240 pounds. I suppose I should be glad I didn't gain any weight over the holidays. I signed up for the Tour of Palm Springs again in February and this time, my son talked me into riding the century. The century! Holy crap! “Do you really expect me to ride 100 miles plus in one shot?” He said “Yeah, you should be able to do it, no sweat.” So we went up to Palm Springs again and I did the century.

But not without incident. In 2011 I’m told nearly 9,000 riders had signed up for the Tour of Palm Springs in 2011. When my son and I reached the first rest stop, we loaded up on the energy drink being given away at each stop. We did the same at the second stop right around mile 35. By the time mile 55 rolled around, I started to cramp up. Interesting, I thought, because I’d already ridden a bunch of 60 milers with no incident. I had to stop nearly every couple of miles to stretch out because the cramps were quite painful. I finally rolled into the 70 mile rest stop and found my son stretched out on the grass, with stomach distress. He’d been there for about half an hour and could barely move, except to run to the porta-potties. Curious, because he had already done centuries with no problems.

That’s when I discovered that the free so-called energy drink was really just sugar and water in fancy packaging. No electrolytes. We dumped our water bottles and re-filled them with plain water and started drinking as much as we could and try and flush out bad stuff. After a couple of hours, my son and I felt well enough to continue. Within a quarter mile I started cramping up again. I told my son to go on, and I called my wife (who had done the 55 mile ride and was finished) to come an get me. As I pedaled back to the rest stop, I felt so disappointed! This was one of my milestones and I really wanted to finish it. So I called her back and told her to go back to the finish line. I was determined to complete my first century. I still had to stop every couple of miles to stretch out the cramps, but I finally made it. My son had been running over to the finish line wondering where I was. I guess he was a bit worried that it had gotten dark and I still was nowhere to be found. I finished ninth from last and in the dark, but the kids cheering the riders at the finish line were still there, and it was unbelievable. I had done it. And at the time I never wanted to do it again. As we were driving back to San Diego, trying to keeps stretched out to prevent the cramps from recurring, I told my wife exactly that. It was so difficult because of the constant cramping and I felt like I had been run over by all 8,999 of the other riders out on the course. The next day, after analyzing my ride, I realized that I did one very wrong thing: I should never have tried a new drink in the middle of a ride. Had I stuck to my normal hydration routine, the ride would not have been too difficult. By the end of the day, I was telling my wife I wanted to do another century.

When I weighed myself a few days later, I still weighed 240 pounds.