michael quoc

Vineman Race Report (2011)

September 14, 2011 By michael quoc Leave a Comment

In August of this year, I did my first Ironman distance race, completing the 146.2-mile course in beautiful Guernesville, CA for the Vineman Full distance triathlon. Soreness and fear of stairs ensued for a week or two post-race, but that was more than offset by the great feeling of accomplishing a big, challenging goal. I’ve been meaning to sit down and do a race + training debrief and summary, and I’m finally getting to it – so here’s a summary of my experience training for and competing in a full Ironman.

The 4-month Ironman training program

I started training a bit late, approximately 4 months prior to the race. I have done triathlons before, including a half-Ironman at Big Kahuna in Santa Cruz, but doing a full distance was something of an unknown for me. My swimming was already good, I’d been swimming good distances regularly (usual routine is between 1,500 and 2,000 meters 3 to 4 times per week), but I hadn’t done much running or riding.

Typically riding is my strength and running is my weakest segment, with swimming in between. However, at this point both my running and riding were at a pretty bad state since I had barely done any of each over the winter. It was now mid-April, with the race at the end of August – so I had my work but out for me. I decided to train on a condensed schedule to rapidly improve my cycling and running, while doing enough swimming to retain my technique and fitness.

Swim training

Last year I changed my swim stroke to utilize what’s called Total Immersion – despite the gimmicky-sounding name, its a great technique for beginner swimmers to learn a more efficient freestyle swim stroke. I’ve never had much formal training for swimming, so my freestyle stroke was pretty, well, bad. TI (for short) is simply a technique for teaching the freestyle stroke which helps a novice swimmer focus on the right mechanics to achieve a more efficient stroke. I highly recommend it for any triathlete who is not already an accomplished swimmer – it really makes swimming easier, faster, and more fun. I did lessons with Shinji Takeuichi, who I recommend highly as a top TI coach.

My swim training schedule was just one swim per week, starting at 2,000 meters per workout, working up to 2,500 meter workouts in the pool and between 1 to 2 mile open water swims. Pool workouts consist either of 400 meter repeats or a 200-300-400-500-400-300-200 pyramid workout with some warmups / kicks mixed in.

Ride training

Riding is my strongest event, however this year I was starting from a point of low fitness, as I had not ridden much at all over the winter. In my training the previous summer I had done a fair amount of riding, but I sprained my ankle late in the training season which put me out of commission for a couple months.

For Vineman 2011, I decided to (finally) upgrade my bike from my old road bike to a full tri bike. I went to a few shops, and found that Pacific Bikes here in SF SOMA had the best selection of tri bikes. The guys there are really helpful, and so long as you go in when its not too busy you can get a lot of custom attention for test rides and custom fitting. I rode a few Cervelos, Scotts and Orbeas, and settled on a 2010 Orbea Ordu GLT that they had on sale. It just felt comfortable – amazing how one bike can suddenly feel “right” when you get on it compared to many others. I managed to haggle in a pair of Reynolds Assault carbon rims at 30% off marked price in exchange for the stock rims – so the bike looked (and rode) pretty sweet coming out of the shop.

Ride training over the summer averaged at 2 rides per week – one long weekend ride and one shorter weekday ride. I rode a lot with my buddies Chung and John, both of whom also did Vineman, and overall had a great season training up in Marin as well as down in the Canada Road / Woodside area. Average mileage started at approximately 50 miles per week at season start, and worked its way up to 80 to 110 miles per week at the end of the season. I didn’t manage to squeeze in any century rides – I caught a nasty flu mid-season which threw my schedule off – but I made it up with a peak ride consisting of a 2x repeat of the La Honda => Tunitas Creek => King’s Mountain loop, a gnarly 39 mile loop repeated to get to 78 miles and approximately 7,800 feet of climbing. They should give that double loop a name, because it definitely left an impression on me (not to mention a notable limp the next day).

Run training

Running is my weakest event. Honestly, I hate running, but unfortunately, you can’t do a triathlon without doing it. The thought of running a marathon on its own made me a little sick, let alone doing it after 2.4 miles of swimming and 112 miles of biking. My run training was 1 or 2 runs per week – I tried to do one long run on the weekend (starting at about 8 miles, working up to 17 miles), along with one shorter run or a track workout during the week (didn’t always get to this). Most of my running was done on the Chrissy Field to Baker Beach to Land’s End route, which is mostly trail running. Hated most of this, but got through it, and my running improved significantly over the summer – by summer’s end, a 10 mile run didn’t seem very long, so long as I had 2 hours or so to run it

Race day @ Vineman

Getting mentally ready for my first Ironman distance was quite different from other races I’ve experienced. There’s something about knowing you’ll be going for 14 hours or so, and pushing your limits past where you’ve ever been before that makes you a little nervous. Luckily, my wife Liz and baby accompanied me to the race – it felt great to have them there with me, and really helped me relax and focus. We checked in early the previous day up in beautiful Sonoma – had a good pasta dinner in downtown San Rafael, came back to the hotel and got all my equipment ready, then hit the sack early.

Vineman swim

We arrived pretty early for the swim, which for me started at 6:40am – we got there around 5:45, but after parking and getting past the crowds and into my wetsuit, I had just a minute to spare for the swim start. The Vineman swim is in the American River – and is a relatively pleasant swim. Water temperature was around 70 degrees, and the river has little current. In some places the river is so shallow your hands scrape the bottom on each stroke, which is a little annoying. The swim was a solid leg for me, I was relaxed and swam a 1 hour 20 minute time for 2.4 miles – not fast but a good time and I felt good going into transition.

Vineman ride

The ride was a great leg for me – I felt a big difference riding the tri bike, and was able to stay relaxed for most of the ride. I rode a 6 hour and 11 minute 112 mile distance, averaging 18 mph. My goal was to beat 7 hours for the ride, and I think I expended a bit more on the ride than was ideal, but it was hard to calibrate the right speed. The Vineman bike course is fairly easy with few major hills and lots of easy rollers. The weather was kind to us and stayed cool for most of the day – things didn’t get hot until the early afternoon. Riding the tri bike made it much easier and more comfortable to stay in the aero position for long periods, and while it was pretty painful after mile 80 or so, it was markedly easier to stay at speed throughout the ride.

Nutritionally, I kept a lot going down, during the 112 mile ride I ate the equivalent of 2 bananas and 4 bars, and finished 6 large bottles of fluids (I was doing Hammer Perpetuem, which I was very happy with, made a noticeable difference in maintaining a high effort level over other drinks I’ve tried such as Gu2O, Accelerade and Cytomax.) My ride fitness was good and my legs felt good throughout the ride, my weak point were my gluts which were really tired at the end of the ride.

Vineman run

Hopping off the bike, I felt good to start the run. So good, in fact, that I forgot everything I was supposed to do in transition. I had a IT band strap that I had planned to put on to help with a sore knee during my run, plus I had planned to transition my sodium pills from my saddle pack to my run pocket. Both of these steps went out the door as I just laced up my shoes, donned my visor, and took off running. It wasn’t until I was about 200 meters into the run that I realized I had forgotten everything – the salt especially was a biggie, I knew I was already feeling some cramping and my muscles were not firing as efficiently as they should even at the start of the run. It was going to be (an even longer) run.

The Vineman run course is, well, cruel. Its 3 laps of an approximately 9 mile out-and-back course. There are two major hills on the course, meaning you climb 6 hills during this marathon. The weather was in the low 80s, not super hot, but hot enough to notice. The first lap was extremely difficult, partly because I had just gotten done with a 112 mile ride at high effort, and partly because mentally I knew I was just on the first of three of these bad boys.

For an Ironman distance, it really does come down to the run. This is where it all comes down, everything that is going to break down breaks down here, and all the pain happens somewhere during these 26.2 miles. For me, the lack of salt was the biggest pain point – I tried to put down a lot of pretzels, which was the saltiest food they provided at each refueling stop, along with lots of Gatorade – but at this point in a workout you really need a lot of salt. I felt it mostly in the lack of ability to get my legs to “wake up” and get active. The other major issue was blistering – during the swim segment, I had walked on the river bed a bit in some shallow sections and at the end of the swim – and that caused some minor blisters to start out on the bottoms of my toes. By the 10th mile or so into the run, 4 of my toes had opened up pretty badly, and it was pretty tough to run on them. I tried to keep my mind off them, and varied my gait to keep the pressure on one side of my feet or the other.

At the end, I ran a pretty dismal 6 hour and 11 minute marathon, which is a 14 minute mile average. I walked a lot on the course, and was never able to run at a good pace – so this time is about what I expected.

Ironman complete!

Overall, I completed my first Ironman distance race in 13 hours and 57 minutes – better than my goal of 14 hours, but definitely with lots of room to improve. Given the time commitment required to do this distance race, I’m not sure when my next one will be – but I’m definitely in a much better position now to prepare and compete more efficiently the next time around.

Filed Under: blog, cycling, swimming, triathlons

Martinis & patents

May 10, 2011 By michael quoc Leave a Comment

Although I’m not a big fan of a whole defensive patent game, I understand its a necessary part of business, and after going through several patent applications, I can appreciate the amount of work and analysis that goes into getting a patent submitted and approved. During my time in the Advanced Products Group at Yahoo! (later Brickhouse) I spent most of my time launching new products, and thus had the opportunity to file more than my fair share of patents – of which two have been approved so far (woohoo!)

These two patents were both created during our creation of Yahoo!’s first mobile social networking product, a service called Mix’d which allowed you to plan adhoc group events using SMS text messaging and MMS media messaging (this was back in 2006 – pre-iPhone – my how far we’ve come!). It had some novel features for auto-building a contact list based on the events or groups in which you participate, and allowing temporary groups which were created for a given event to persist across multiple events. One really cool part of Mix’d was that it seamlessly connected a mobile experience (text messaging and MMS media transfers) back to a social web experience so that you had a multimedia log of a given event – which sounds pedestrian today but was rather novel way back in ’06. Unfortunately the service did not survive the internal gauntlet at Yahoo!, so what we have surviving are some patents (hey, you gotta take what you can get!). The one which have been approved so far in the USPTO are “Employing matching of event characteristics to suggest another characteristic of an event” and “Contextual mobile local search based on social network vitality information.” My favorite part is in that first filing, we used “going out to drink” in most of our use case examples, so the filing language is:

824. Moreover, event A’s name of “Drinking” may match event names 840, 843, and 844: “Drinks” based on string matching or other information retrieval techniques. For example, the string “Drinking” may be canonicalized, capitalized, stemmed, stop word removed, or the like, before matching. “Drinking” may be stemmed to “Drink” and matched with “Drinks” based on a partial string match.

Time to go have a drink!

Filed Under: blog, innovation, making stuff, web development

Total immersion (TI) swimming for triathlons

May 6, 2011 By michael quoc Leave a Comment

I recently came across Total Immersion swimming and started training with Shinji Takeuchi, the head coach for TI in Japan (he also teaches in the Bay Area). My background in swimming is that I was a recreational swimmer who thought I knew how to swim (still mostly true). I mostly did lots of laps to train up for triathlons, and became an “expert” once I learned how to flip turn without veering into the neighboring lane.

Kidding aside, my entire approach to swimming has changed due to TI (I just wish it didn’t have such a gimmicky-sounding name). In my experience, in TI they beak down the swim stroke in reverse. For example, instead of trying to keep your head up, you are trying to keep your head down with TI. Instead of focusing on kicking to gain speed, you hardly kick at all. Instead of using a sweeping motion with your arm to thrust yourself forward, you don’t push your arm at all, you instead focus on the placement and motion of your forward (spearing) hand. Its all backwards – and for the first few times you try it, you may make lifeguards nervous because it sort of feels like you’re drowning.

Once you get the core parts of it down though, it starts to feel, as Borat would say, *very nice* – it feels smooth and not like you’re wrestling something to death while gasping for air after 150 meters. Its actually very relaxing to traverse the pool, and you can swim a lot without getting tired. I’ve gone down from 22 strokes to 14 strokes to get across a 25 meter length pool (on a good day).

I have yet to try TI in open water, but I can tell its going to help my swim, and my entire race, a lot. Less effort, faster swimming – can’t complain. I recommend checking out TI for any triathlete. Shinji is also an awesome coach for those in the Bay Area (he trains in Fremont).

Here’s his video so you can see what a TI stroke (is supposed to) look like:

Good thread on swim coaches in SF and more triathlon threads.

Filed Under: blog, swimming, triathlons

My Big Kahuna race report

September 9, 2008 By michael quoc 4 Comments

So yesterday I completed my first endurance event (which didn’t involve beer or Nintendo Wii) at the Big Kahuna Half-Ironman Triathlon. The race consisted of swimming for 1.2 miles, getting on your bike and riding 56 miles, then getting off your bike and running a half marathon (13.1 miles). It’s not usually how I’d envision spending a Sunday morning, to say the least.

First off, I have to give a big shout out to Team in Training – I joined the SF / Marin chapter of this great organization that provides triathlon training, education, and support, while raising money for leukemia and lymphoma research. I’ve discovered that Team in Training has raised in the neighborhood of $800 million for cancer research since its founding in 1998. After spending the summer training with the people who are involved, I can certainly see why this organization has been so successful – it’s an amazing group of people – some of the most supportive, team-spirited, and big-hearted I’ve met! I also need to thank Chung-man for getting me into the whole triathlon thing in the first place and introducing me to Team in Training.

What’s up with the bright Red Mango suit?

Red Mango is a new chain of yogurt shops opening up all around the country. If you’ve tried Pink Berry, you gotta try Red Mango – it’s the original healthy organic frozen yogurt which has been very successful in Korea and is expanding here in the States. Yul Kwon, who many of you know as the winner of Survivor: Cook Islands, is a close friend of mine, and along with partners Mark Young and Richard Choo, are partnering with Red Mango to open up their Northern California stores. Yul generously offered to sponsor me for my triathlon in Red Mango’s name, so Red Mango will be a corporate sponsor of Team in Training in Spring 2009 in support of blood cancer research.

So on to the race – here are the highlights:

Day before the race

Willow Harrington, my Team in Training mentor, completely saved my ass the night before the race. At the hotel, I discovered that my custom Red Mango tri-suit did not come manufactured with pockets – a critical oversight given I had planned to carry 6 hours worth of energy gel in them. Willow, who has a magical ability to come through in the clutch, happened to have an extra Bento Box (bike carrying case) which was exactly what I needed to not die during the race. Thanks Willow!

At the starting line, before the swim

My parents somehow managed to find me at the starting line amidst the crowd of wet-suit clad competitors. We got a few photos and Mom gave a pep talk and offered some advice about “breathing deeply” and “staying relaxed” to all the nearby triathletes. It was quite embarrassing, but you gotta love moms! Then we then proceed to line up, the gun went off, and we jump into Pacific for a swim around the pier at the Boardwalk.

The swim

Uneventful. I’m not a fast swimmer, so I was getting passed left and right. But I felt relaxed, and was mostly concentrating on trying not to get kicked in the face too much.

Transition to the bike

It was a great feeling to come out of the water, run up the beach to a big crowd of people cheering. My Team in Training buddies (thanks Katie and Colleen!) had my shoes waiting at the beach so I could wear them for the short run to the transition area. Willow caught up to me in transition, despite starting her swim 10 minutes after me! She even managed to spray some sunscreen on me amidst her crazy transition routine, further testament to her dedication as a mentor!

The bike

There’s usually a lot of wind on this bike course, which heads up and down Highway 1 along the ocean. On race day, it was relatively calm, and the ride was smooth and uneventful. 56 miles is just a long time to sit in the saddle, and you find yourself talking to yourself sometimes. Wait, did I just say that out loud?

Transition to the run

Coming back into the transition area on the bike was definitely one of the highlights – hearing all the cowbells ringing (you can always use more) and people cheering as I passed by was a rush! My mini-cheering section of Jenni, Yeong-sae, and Christine (and Rockie) were all there to cheer me on and even brought signs printed with motivational messages.

The run

Running sucks for me. So the thought of doing a half marathon after all that other stuff was pretty horrific. I ran with a fellow Team in Training teammate Thomas for most of the run – it was really great to run together with a teammate. The only thing was that Thomas was cramping up the whole time but kept pushing through it – I just wished there was some way I could help him. I could only imagine the pain of running all those miles with a bad cramp.

The worst part about the run was the halfway turnaround point that never came. It was supposed to come at 6.55 miles, but I swear it felt like 7.5 miles! Everytime we came around a corner of the trail expecting to see the turnaround, we’d see people continuing to run off into the distance, no turnaround in sight.

It was a truly joyful experience to finally be able to see a big roller coaster on the Boardwalk on the way back. Almost there! At this point it was all about just trying to keep one foot going past the other.

The finish

The Big Kahuna course designers had the cruel sense of humour to end this long-ass race by having us run through the sand. Holy heavy feet. But it was so awesome to get to the finish to meet your cheering teammates, family members, and finally being able to plop youself down on the sand.

The post-party

Oops, I passed out before dinner.

In retrospect

I still think it’s somewhat crazy to subject one’s body to the type of abuse that comes with triathloning, but after being through it, I can really appreciate why people do it. The combination of exhilaration, hard work, comraderie, getting your ass in great shape, pain, friendships, and achievement make for a truly memorable and meaningful experience. In terms of when I’ll do the next one, ask me in a few days after I can walk again

Filed Under: blog, life, triathlons