Lake San Antonio Training Weekend Recap

The IronTeam's three day training weekend at Lake San Antonio in Monterey County was a fun and excellent experience that included camping, upclose wildlife (but no wild pigs), completing my first half ironman distance triathlon (70.3 miles!), bonding with teammates and slaying a few more mental demons.

Friday morning at 10:30am, I picked up my ol' marathon buddy and tentmate Danette. My SUV was packed full with our camping & triathlon gear. The ride to Lake San Antonio takes 3.5 hours from our area. Within 30 minutes of driving I was already hungry and thinking about where to stop for lunch. I thought about stopping at Santana Row in San Jose for a nice lunch but knew it was best to drive at least halfway otherwise we might never get to Lake San Antonio. We stopped to eat lunch at Black Bear Diner in Gilroy and afterwards took a photo with the bears in front.

For the last hour of our drive traveling South Hwy 101, my windshield was being pelted by swarms of large flying insects resulting in large 2-inch yellow-orange splatters on the window. At 80mph, we couldn't tell what kind of swarms we were driving directly into and worried that the camp was also going to be swarming with these large bugs. When we got to the campsite and I looked at my SUV's grill, I realized that we had drove head onto the northerly Spring migration of the monarch butterflies. Very sad. I counted over 50 splatters of the beautiful monarch on my car.

Arriving at the campsite, the temperature was an unexpected 80F and I was relieved about this because that will help warm up the lake water. We found a level spot and set up our tent. Danette stayed up to midnight the night before creating the decorations for our tent. The paint, lettering and stars on her signs glowed in the dark. She won the tent decorating contest and received a gift certificate to a spa which she plans to raffle off for her fundraiser.








After we finished setting up our tents, it was time to start dinner and then go to our respective team meetings where Coach Dave gave the IronTeam an overview of the Saturday race route. Friday night, I got no sleep at all and stayed up listening to my iPOD.

By 4am, I decided I should just get up and go for a walk to calm my nerves. It was dark and foggy and I could only see a few feet with my headlamp. Thought it best not to walk too far from camp and get lost so I headed back to start boiling water to make breakfast. At 4:47am, Coach Dave woke the IronTeam camp up with Scotland's National Anthem followed with the theme from Rocky.

By 6:15am, we drove down to the Transition Area, set up our gear and put on our wetsuits. Swim start was at 7am. I was still very nervous. This would be my first swim where I didn't have a coach swimming next to me, but I was reassured that four kayakers would be out in the water keeping an eye on everyone. I headed down to the beach and got into the water to warm up. Coach Alex suggested to me the night before that I just swim back and forth along the dock to just get use to the environment before the start. The water temp wasn't freezing like Lake Del Valle or SF Bay and was actually tolerable. My breathing didn't get rapid in the first 5 minutes and I realized I was going to be fine.

When the swim started, all the fast people took off and became further and further away. I told myself not to think about the others. I sighted the first red buoy in the distance. My goal was to just reach the first buoy. I broke my swim down even further by just counting my strokes to 20, which is approximately the # of strokes it takes me to get across the pool. When I hit 20 strokes, I evaluated the distance of the buoy and tried to make a game of it to figure out how many laps I had left and repeated the 20 stoke count again. The buoy became closer and closer. After reaching the 2nd buoy, my left calf kept cramping up and made it difficult to kick. I told myself to stop thinking about my leg, because the pain always became sharp when I thought about the area that was cramping. I distracted my mind by continuing to count stokes. By the time I was near the 3rd buoy, the faster swimmers were heading back. Teammates shouted out encouragement to me that I was doing great. Finally, I hit the 4th buoy and was ready to head back.

By the fourth buoy, I felt really confident in my swim. On my way back, I spent my time concentrating on my form - reaching with full extended strokes, strong pull, exhaling completing in the water and alternating sides to breath. I heard Coach Nancy's voice in my head. The 1.2 miles took me exactly 1 hour to complete. Looking at my training log, it was about 12 minutes slower than what it would take me in the swimming pool. I think I did an excellent job swimming straight to each buoy and was not off course.

Transition took me 23 minutes, including the walk from the beach. I didn't feel like running. Coach Nancy said that my leg was cramping because I didn't have enough electrolytes in my body and said to be sure to take electrolytes before I left on my bike. I took my time in transition to refuel, take electrolytes, dry off and change.

Immediately when I started out on my 56-mile bike ride, I heard a clicking sound. Another cyclist next to me said that my cadence sensor was hitting my spokes. I pulled over, tightened the screws and continued on. It came lose again, so I had to repeat shortly after. I usually check all screws on my bike after the bike gets rattled up a bit on a long car ride, but I forgot to do this on Friday afternoon and during Transition set-up. Lesson learned. The ride was exactly how Claire described in my previous post. My Garmin reflects an elevation gain of 5,338 feet. My total moving time was 4:32 with total stopping time of 31 minutes (time includes fixing my bike, stopping at 2 water stops and 3 port-o-potties). Temperature was 50.4F, which was a little chilly when I started out wet, but comfortable as I dried off. The "Nasty Grade" was a long, steep and nasty, but I'm proud that I never had to get off my bike and walk up the hill.

When I arrived back at Transition, I asked if I had time left to do the run and they all laughed and said that I had plenty of time. Transition 2 took 7 minutes to use the restroom, change into my running gear and eat a little bit.

The run was also exactly how Claire described it. The first part was like a hike where I mostly walked the trail in the steepest grades up and down since I didn't want chance slipping on the loose gravel and spraining my ankle (which I have a history of doing). I thought that I couldn't spend so much time walking and needed to try to run. So I counted how many steps I was able to run before being out of breath and that's how many steps I was going to take to walk before running again. I repeated that method and found that my count was getting longer and longer. My moving time was 3:02 and stopped time was 14 minutes (stopped at 3 waterstops and then another two times to figure out if I was still on the right trail.) This was the most beautiful and challenging half marathon course I've ever run. My time was 45 minutes longer than the San Francisco Nike Half Marathon course.

Overall, my total time was 9hrs 46minutes to complete the 70.3 miles. I added another notch in my open water swimming confidence. I learned places where I can improve my time. I experienced another beautiful part of California that I would never have seen if I didn't come here this weekend. And I was reminded that camping isn't so bad (probably because there were no mosquitoes). Saturday night we encountered lots of wind and rain, but I was sound asleep and didn't hear a thing. Sunday morning when we woke up, the skies were clear and the coaches and staff made a spectacular breakfast for us. Thank you Team in Training and my coaches for putting together a great training weekend.