Privateer Racing Syndicate

A hearty helping of humble pie

2011-04-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

Photo courtesy of the Ventura County Star

One of the last things I did in California was race in the Armed Forces Triathlon Championship. It was at Pt. Mugu near Oxnard. I wasn't on the official Air Force team, but was invited to race in the open division. I did okay...didn't drown, didn't wreck and finished. There were some fast folks there. I finished about 20 minutes after the overall winner. There is some some media coverage of the event here and here and some video coverage from YouTube. (I have a brief cameo on the bike at about 4:40 - I'm the AF guy coming around to take a pull.) The guy on the red bike with me in the video caught me on the run and pushed me hard to the finish line where we crossed at the exact same time - thanks Mike for not running right past me. He had only been back from Iraq for about two weeks and put up a great result.

The AF had the overall male and female winners and also had the best team result. I did absolutely nothing to contribute to that, but it's kind of like playing baseball on the farm team of an organization that wins the World Series...only I'll never get called up.

All in all it was a fun day, and reminded me I'll never be able to pay the bills by racing. I went home dog tired, packed (with extensive assistance from my wife), and started driving across the country the next day.*

*This is a poor way to recover from a race. Don't ever do it.

Impressive Finish

2011-01-31T14:37:00.000-08:00

This is Ginet, not Zach. Apparently I'm not cool enough to be an invited contributor to this blog. Is it because I don't ride? Or my split times are too slow? Or I don't wear enough spandex? What does a girl have to do to get an invite around here? I do some pretty mean step aerobics is that good enough?

Anyway, I had to hijack Zach's account to give him some props. He finished third in a pretty tough race this weekend...on a broken bike! Here's a write up a fellow teammate wrote about him on their cycling club blog:

"The real story of this race was the phenomenal effort and determination of Zach Owen. Zach had a cable failure to his rear derailer before the start of the race which locked his rear cog in the 11-tooth position. He was able to shift the front cog between the 39 and 53 tooth position but only needed the 39 for the "wall". The rest of the time, he was cruising in the 53/11. This guy is a stud! The race started quickly and spread the field out a bit so that we were able to maneuver into the front. Aaron and Dave gave us some pre-race intel about the nature of the ride and suggested we stay within the top 10. Occasionally we were rotated to the front for short quick pulls to appease the peeps around us but we stayed smart and didn't press the pace too much on the way out. At the turnaround there was some shuffling and a couple of people went down while trying to cut it too close to the cone. There were many surges on the way back and one of the junior riders lost his concentration and wobbled into a few of the riders around us, but everyone recovered and complained loudly. It was nice to ride with teammate Zach as long as I could, and we were able to cover and maintain contact with the main group to the base of Zaca (that was my main goal for this race!). I hung on going over the top, but Zach was already gone with the leaders. I had to chase and ride hard to bridge the gap to the main group and worked with a guy named Doug to reestablish our position. Unfortunately, there was a major crash about 3/4 of a mile from the finish. The peleton had to be careful as we passed by while the paramedics tended to the victims. Once we were clear of the accident, the leaders were gone and the acceleration was on to the finish. Zach rode very intelligently and secured a seemingly easy third place, bicycle issues and all!"

A snap shot at the start of the race:

Way to represent, Zach!

Twisted Ankle Marathon

2010-12-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

Can't think of a better way to celebrate my birthday next year.

http://www.rungeorgiatrails.com/twisted.html

Course Map...

Elevation Profile...

Learning to make a video

2010-11-25T22:58:00.000-08:00

About a month ago I got to do a 24 hour mountain bike race with some buds. It was the 24 Hours of Halloween. We did it last year and had a good time so figured we might as well do it again. It's a good time. There was a pro road rider (Rashaan Bahati - coming in for an exchange at about 2:45) there turning some fast laps. I managed to turn one lap faster than him. I'll take that with me to my grave. (The fact that he did more laps and they were on average much faster is...well...just a small detail.)

Looking forward to a 12 hour race in Temecula in January. Might try to do a better video. It seems sometimes the picture was clear, but other times it wasn't. Might need to fool with some settings. I'm open to tips and tricks if they are out there.

Ragnar Relay Tennessee 2010

2010-11-18T12:02:00.001-08:00

My first Ragnar Relay is in the books. A few weekends ago my team, Southern Discomfort, and we finished the 195.5 mile course in 30:29:21. I think we signed up for a 10:00 plus pace. Well we blew that out of the water coming in with a average team pace of 9:21 min/mile. Nice work team!

In the first van, and running in this order were Me, Angela, Ashley, Tristan, Zach, and Heidi. In the second van was Daryl, Amy, Matt, Barry, Erin, and Amber.

I can say that was pretty prepared for the running part of it. What was really tough was running on little to no sleep. Right before my last and final leg I was able to squeeze in about an hour or two of sleep because they let us into the gym of an elementary school. It was a hard floor, but at least I could stretch out. And I was so stressed that I'd oversleep and miss my exchange with Amber that I had a hard time sleeping. It was also very cold that weekend. I was running my last leg at about 4 am and it was 26 degrees outside. As long as I have good gloves I'm usually ok. My face went numb, but that was fine, I could still breathe.

It must not have been that bad though, I've already signed up for another one in January down in Florida. This should be a little easier than Tennessee because there are no hills and it will be in the 50s. My legs are a lot longer, but smooth terrain will make then very doable.

Down hill both ways

2010-11-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

I did my third half-marathon (maybe 4th, not too sure) a couple of weekends ago. It was the Silver Comet Half that happens every Halloween weekend. I did it back in 2004, three years after the race was born. Back then I posted a 2:04 time. This year I did it 1 hour and 44 min. I attribute this to the flatness of the course. I'm doing the Tennessee Ragnar this weekend with fellow PRS contributor Zach, so I've been training. I usually run at work because I work 30 miles from my house and it is just easier to run during lunch for me. Well in Norcross, Ga (most of Ga that is) there are a lot of hills. So that is what I've become familiar with. While I was running the Half on the Silver Comet I honestly felt like I was going down hill the whole time. It was great. There is no way I could have pulled off a sub-8 min pace on a hillier course. Think I'll try to do this one every year.

Check back later for details on my first Ragnar.

Also thinking about doing Florida Keys Ragnar....

Of course, we could just be Nuts...

2010-10-14T16:35:00.000-07:00

What makes us "run, ride, race, suffer, etc?" Is it just the need for exercise to keep our human bodies healthy? I know plenty of people who do time in gyms exercising and they don't suffer in the same way we do. So I'm just curious. Why do we do it? Nurture, Nature, Birth Order, Personality Profile? Thrill Seekers? Explorers? -Only there's not much land left unexploered, so we explore the reaches of human endurance within the time allowed between day jobs, families, and more...common endeavors.

I know a guy who just finished his first century bike ride SOLO! Maybe there are more of those folks out there, but I don't think there are many. This Dad planned alone, trained alone, and rode alone for a completely unsupported 100 miles. -on a mountain bike even.

Maybe I'm making a bigger deal out of it than it is. Maybe I'm just jealous 'cause my racing season was non-existent. - But I need regular workout partners or I"m pretty much good for nothing. I say that, but then I trained for and ran my marathon solo... Maybe if you have enough "stuff" in your head that needs to be worked out, training alone isn't that bad. Or maybe, and I know this is true, some people just aren't that social. Incoherent babble after mile 10 can be more irritating than helpful. I get that. But since I'm not that, I don't really get that. And my first (and only, so far) century was supported, and thankfully, not completely solo.

Whatever the motivation, our friend just completed his first century ride, unsupported, solo, on a mountain bike. With his super loving family to cheer him as the only support he really needed or wanted, and the fire of determination within, he did it. Congratulations!

So, as founding members of the Privateer Racing Syndicate, our family took liberties, made him a race packet, gave him a Syndicate CD (slightly modified), and a race number. We also offer him membership on our little multisport crew. (Remind me to ask Zach permission to waive the qualification of competing in an event where you had to pay an entry fee. :) ) -I think he suffered enough.

And I mean suffered. The way we like it.

Giddyup

2010-09-27T21:19:00.000-07:00

Different things get me going to run, ride, race, suffer, etc. These two videos are some of the most recent. One for the trails and one for the roads. The music on both is excellent. (For those of you with clean ears there is an S-bomb in the Gentlemen's race video at about 3:58 and an F-bomb at 6:21. Otherwise perfect for viewing with the family.) Great quotes from the Gentlemen's race video at 4:15 and 7:46:

"A defect in the gentlemen's mind confuses pain with joy."

"Who can flourish with a daily routine of compliance?"

2010 NW Gentlemen's Race from RAPHA on Vimeo.

Race Across The Sky 2010 from Citizen Pictures on Vimeo.

What get's you going?

The spring...

2010-07-03T22:12:00.000-07:00

The Are You Tough Enough went well. There were some last minute shuffles to the team. Thankfully Tristan and Shonna have a ton of friends. We had a good result, conditions were nice and we managed to all be uh, er, mmm, at least self-mobile. Tristan aggravated a calf injury, Shonna took a pretty good tumble (she easily had the hardest legs - no pun intended) and I felt like the race wouldn't make my stress fracture any worse (I'm not sure I was right). They had a good spread at the end of the race. The race shirts were done by Pata-gucci, and very nice. The race apparently has a new quote each year. This year's quote was, “We're not here to earn God's love, we're here to spend it.” At first I was bothered by the quote, but after thinking about it, I really like it. We already have God's love - it's unconditional. We don't need to earn it. I feel like we spend it by doing things for other folks.

Ragnar Ralay SoCal also went well. We had a great team and an excellent captain (Ginet). We managed a decent result there too, and if you look at the website we took second in the ultra category. This is a dastardly untruth, but we haven't gotten around to letting the organizers know. I promise if they send us some sort of award or prize we'll come clean. Ginet posted some pics on FB. She tagged me in some of them, but its not actually me, it's my stunt double. Tristan's calf hadn't fully healed by this event so he did the brilliant thing and pushed through the pain, and........tore his calf. Atta boy. He's pretty tough – eats broken glass for breakfast and washes it down with gasoline. My foot was still not 100%, but I don't think I made it any worse. Shonna easily had the toughest legs (again, are you noticing a pattern), but she did stay upright this time.

I took the month of May off from running on hard surfaces. I tried to maintain some running fitness by running in the pool. What I may have preserved in fitness, I may have lost in sanity. Pool running is only slightly more boring than watching paint dry, with your eyes closed. Did one more race recently. I'll recap that one later