5:00 AM – Get on the bus to go from the hotel to the triathlon course.

5:30 AM – Set up transition area (where we will change from wetsuit to bike gear, and then from bike gear to running gear). Review the transition exit & entrance, bike mount & dismount lines.

6:50 AM – New Balance Half Ironman 2009 – Race Begins (Swim 1.2 miles, Bike 54 miles, Run 12.4 miles)

8:00 AM – Swim course closes. We will finish the swim before 8:00 AM.

12:00 PM – Bike course closes. We will finish the bike before 12 noon.

3:00 PM – Run course closes. April and I will be crossing the finish line before 3:00 PM.

3:30 or so – Back to the hotel.

6:00 PM – Celebration party!

April (center) with our team captain and friends from TNT at a recent practice triathlon

Our Washington chapter Team In Training Victoria half ironman group, ready for a practice swim in lake Washington

Mark (3rd from left) at the Issaquah Triathlon with friends from Team In Training

I participated in my first triathlon race in Issaquah, Washington, on May 30, 2009. It was a blast. The best part was having all my Team In Training friends there, some watching, most participating. April was away with friends Karen, Allison and Jeannie from out of state. But fortunately I was able to hand off Keir, Oz and Bowie to our good friends Bob and Rebecca for a sleep-over so that I could get up at 4:30 to get ready and head off to Issaquah.

I learned a lot at this first triathlon, like the fact that you don’t need to eat during the event like you do during a half ironman because Issaquah is a sprint tri. It only lasted an hour and 19 minutes! I tried to simulate what it will be like in Victoria by eating a Nutella and white bread sandwich on the bike, and I nearly choked and crashed! I won’t be using that bread again soon.

I also learned that swimming in a wetsuit is pretty darn fun! You float so much better than you do without a wetsuit, and the suit is so smooth on the outside, it must increase your speed by 10-20 percent – or at least that’s what I’m telling myself!

This is a journal entry from a co-worker of someone who works for Team In Training about her experience with TNT (she started as a participant on the marathon teams).

“A good friend of mine, my age, was diagnosed with Leukemia. I watched her and tried to help her through two years of battling, bone marrow transplant, and finally her last days at home. She is the mother of two young girls 12 & 13, close friends of my girls, and same ages, who lost their mother at a vital time in a young lady’s life. When she passed away the girls moved to their dads in California, so we lost all 3 of them.

When I first started training with Team In Training I was sad. I would cry during my runs. Soon it turned to anger, I felt like by running I was “getting revenge” on Leukemia. The closer it got to the Marathon I started feeling hope. I have hope that soon there will be a cure for all cancers. When I ran my first marathon, last June in San Diego (which was amazing by the way!), I went through all the emotions all over again. I am prepared to go through them again during the Seattle Marathon. The pain is not gone, but the hope is what keeps me motivated. My coaches were, and are, there for me throughout all of these emotions and I truly hold them dearly in my heart.

Team in Training has helped me in many ways. They have helped me get in better shape, but mostly helped me heal. I am doing this for my friend and all those who can’t, but wish they could”.

Thank you to everyone who participated. We had an AWESOME group of volunteers helping us. We could not have done it without them. And we had a phenomenal selection of art work, crafts, goods and services donated by friends and family – and the West Seattle business community. Thank you so much to all of you. And finally, thank you to all who came and purchased from us.

But, with that said (and after having a conniption fit with Mark this afternoon), I think I can still complete the deed if I decide to keep my head cool and just do what they tell me. The trick, for me, is not to think about it too much. The numbers freak me out so much so that I convince myself it’s not possible to: ride my bike for 50 miles or run for 9 or swim for 1…

But, I have done the swimming leg of it regularly, now, for a month or so (1.2 miles); I have ridden 35 miles; I have run 8 miles.

Our old swimming coach from last year used to say, “If we could only unscrew that thing on top of your neck, we’d be able to do a LOT more than we ever thought possible…” Julie is right on that score.

Which is the perfect marriage for helping to raise awareness and $$ for LLS – the folks they are attending to are on their very own endurance competition, and one they didn’t have the absolute luxury to choose. Jonelle Horn, our Honorary Teammate, says that in order for her to get through her treatment, she just put one foot in front of the other, every minute, every hour, every day. She tried not to look too far down the road, but just continued with that very AA concept of doing it one day/step at a time.

Yep. That’s what I need to do. Thanks, Mark, for the reminder.

- April

April has also been contacting folks to let them know of our upcoming fundraiser: an arts and crafts sale and brunch at our house in West Seattle that will take place from 10:00 AM to 3:00 on April 26th. More on that in the next post.

April sent our fundraiser announcement email to the Seattle Homeschooler Group listserv and heard back from one of the members of that group whose husband recently passed away from Myeloma, which is one of the diseases whose research and treatment is funded by Team In Training and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

While we are healthy and able to do so, April and I are glad to support cancer research and treatment. Cancer affects those stricken directly, and it affects family and friends in ways that are sometimes hard to articulate or even recognize. Research and treatment funded by Team In Training often has a direct positive impact on those suffering from blood cancer. One good example is the experience of our friend and honorary TNT teammate Johnelle Horn. And this has a ripple effect. Not only does it bring prolonged and improved quality of life to the patient, but it also brings the happiness and joy of their successful treatment to family and friends, as well. We think about this a lot as we do our training – and then get to hang out with our sons when we’re done. Good health, family and friends. Nothing matters more.

The New Balance Triathlon is part of the Subaru West Coast Triathlon Series, which has a very snappy web site. So there’s that.

For now, I just want to share with you the location of the triathlon start line on this nifty Google map. The triathlon begins with the swim, and the swim portion of the tri takes place in Elk/Beaver Lake in Victoria, BC. On the map, you’ll see the beach, which is called Hamsterly Beach. The swim starts and ends in nearly the same spot on Hamsterly Beach. If you set the map to “Satellite” view and zoom in real close, I think you can see the hamsters.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really care for the sound of “Hamsterly Beach” as the site for a triathlon swim. I was hoping for something like “Manly Beach” or maybe “Badass Beach”. Oh well!

Here’s a look at the bike course on MapMyRide.com. We go around this twice. New Balance Victoria Half Ironman 2009 bike course on MapMyRide.com.

For the run, we go around Elk/Beaver Lake. There’s a map of the run course below. You can download a copy if you care to take a closer look.

I’m sure we will see many Elk/Beavers along the way. See the photo below, with the human form inset for comparison. These are a majestic species of Humongous Beaver, native to Vancouver Island. The males have gigantic antlers, and, of course, very large, flat tails. Truly amazing!

Victoria Half Ironman 2009 Run Course - 2 laps

Here’s what that looked like over the Christmas holiday.

December snowfall at the McHichens home

The snow is making it very difficult to keep up our demanding cycling training schedule. [Editor's note: Mr. McLaren is given to both exaggeration and tongue-in-cheek remarks about his "demanding training schedule". More on that in a moment.] It’s not easy riding a road bike with smooth tires and wheels that are, like, 1/4″ wide on icy city streets. Fortunately, April got us an indoor stationary bike trainer so that I can put my (very nice, on loan from friend Steve U. – thanks, Steve!) bike on it and pedal like crazy in the living room for hours on end. I was riding the bike in the living room before without the stationary trainer and it was really a pain in the rear because I was having to get off and turn it around before I could even make one full rotation of the pedals. Going long distances was very time-consuming and it scared our cats. So things are much better now on the cycling training front.

In other news, I had a major revelation this week which I am pleased to share with you. It is the following: I am no longer 25 years old.

In fact, many people who know me were already aware of this, but somehow they failed to let me know about it. Sure, there were the birthday parties and cards and such, but who takes those seriously. That’s just so friends and parents can try to get you to go along with their own (very real) reality that’s telling them they are, indeed, getting older by the minute.

I, on the other hand, have – mentally, anyway – kept my twenty-five-year-old ability to punish my body with abandon and expect it to leap out of bed the next day ready for more. “Punish away!” my mind still says. And my body says, “Sure, go right ahead, goofball! Just don’t expect to be leaping out of bed – at all, ever again.” Hence [major revelation] it’s different than it used to be.

So I have revised my goals a bit for this fundraising effort.

The first goal is to raise the amount of money April and I have committed to raise. You all have helped and are helping us there. We can’t thank you enough! Believe me, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is doing great things with this money.

The second goal is to COMPLETE the New Balance Half Ironman Race in June ’09. I realized this week that it would be good to actually finish the race, rather than to train so hard that I would be incapacitated well before race time, or, even worse, that I would get injured during the race and have to stop because I had run myself ragged during training and never really gotten in the kind of shape it takes to finish a major endurance event.

Being a competitor can wait. First I want to be a “completer”, as April has mentioned before in this blog.

As I told April, I am going to be the best darn not-competing-too-hard guy ever! You will see. No one will be able to touch my not-competing-too-hard efforts. I will be crushing the competition when it comes to not competing too hard! Crushing! [See what I mean?]

With the exception of an odd little bout of vertigo (April) and the recent snow here in Seattle (today, Sunday 12/14), our training is going well. Mark is the competitor, I am the completer. He wants to win, I want to survive! He seems to derive an inordinate amount of pleasure from wearing his cycling/running tights, too, and nearly breaks out in song when he dashes out the door for his workouts. He is making great progress in all three sports.

I am really surprised and amazed at how easy it’s been to get back into the swing of things. I took the summer off after having completed the Olympic distance triathlon at the end of June, but taking the summer off just meant that I didn’t stick to a training regimen. I did, however, ride bikes with the boys, swim laps during their lessons and took a couple of runs on my old route. It wasn’t completely sedentary! I was under the assumption that I’d be starting at Square One at the start of this training, but it’s not been too bad yet.

We train for each sport twice a week, with three days spent with the team itself and the other three on our own. We’ve worked out a schedule of sorts, with the help of our great and kind friends here in Seattle, where we do the “big” training day together (and drop the kids off at said friends’ homes for the morning) on Saturdays. Typically we do the longer and usually more rigorous team workout on that day. We split the swim practices so that Mark goes one night and I attend another (we have two nights to choose from), and we take the boys along on the run night – it’s at an outdoor track – and they high-five all our TNT teammates as they pass with a “GO TEAM!!!”. Oz also prides himself in passing every teammate while running around the track.

Mark and I split the OYO (on your own) workouts with Mark doing the a.m. slot and my inhabiting the evening gig. We make the most of our membership at the YMCA, which is a couple of miles away, allowing us to either bike ride or jog there, if the weather and our desires permit. It’s dark early, these days, so I tend to drive, but come Spring I’ll jog there. We ride stationary bikes, do our strength training, and swim laps. Mark opts for the spinning classes, but after I he told me that the instructor yells at participants to get moving, I just do my own thing. I know things will become increasingly more time consuming and rigorous, but for now it’s all good. We have seven more months to go and by the end of it we’ll be running 15-20 miles, swimming a couple of miles and biking 60+ on any given workout. Crazy. What a weird thing to take up as a 47 year-old!

That’s it for now – thanks for stopping by! April