Family time

For this week Mom, Dad and I have been having some great family time with my sister, her husband and their 2 year old daughter!



It's Setra's 2nd birthday and this is the first time she swam on her own, without any of us holding her up. She really enjoys it!



Now, I'm about to share with you my training secret to my racing success.....




This water park is it! This was a fun-filled day at an

Aquatic Center in Pendleton, Oregon. Its about an hour's drive from La Grande.

Its a bit of a strength workout riding this see-saw with a 30 pound kid on the other end.

They had two nice water slides, an open tube and a closed tube slide.

Oregon Trail:

We also drove to visit the historical Oregon Trail site. During the 1800's, over a 20 year span, about 50,000 emigrants traveled from Missouri to Oregon in wagons like this pulled by mules and oxen. It took them from 4 to 6 months to traverse the length of the trail.

There also was an interpretive site building that we were planning on visiting, but it was closed because the power went out due to lightning and thunder storms.

These wagon ruts are part of the original Oregon Trail created by thousands of wagons passing through the lands searching for an ideal place to start new lives. The original trail was about 2,000 miles long, but now only 300 miles of the original trail remains.

Setra, my sister Tarah, and me.

XTERRA Solstice triathlon

XTERRA Solstice was held in La Grande, Oregon. It was a 1000 meter swim in a lake, 16 mile mountain bike, and 6.2 mile trail run race. This is the last race for me for 4 weeks until XTERRA Beaver Creek in Avon, Colorado on July 17.

At the race venue before setting up my equipment I was attending to some very important matters when dad took this picture.

My sister, Tarah, her husband A.J, and their 2 year old daughter Setra came from Maui to visit us here in Oregon for a week. Quite chilly here compared to the Hawaiian islands.

This is how I usually set up my equipment in the transition area. This is the place where you can get free speed if you can get out of your wetsuit and put on your helmet and bike shoes and then get moving in less than 1 minute. The swim to bike transition is called T1 and the bike to run transition is called T2.
The swim leg was held in Morgan Lake. Due to the cold weather, no one was wanting to get into the water any sooner than they absolutely had to.

I had a nice swim, its like a bit of an intense warm up for the bike and run.

On to the bike! This course had some long climbs, narrow singletrack, and rock gardens plus long stretches of deep mud. It was a challenging, fun 16 mile ride.

Off the bike! The clock behind me is keeping track of total time, starting when the swim began.

Going out for the run. I paced myself much better than last week at XTERRA Farragut. I held back more on the bike on this course because I knew that it would be worth it to feel fresher on the run. And you can gain or lose a lot of time in 6 miles.

On the last half mile of the run. I felt good like I was able to run at the best of my ability for this kind of course that had us running downhill through elk country, around a loop, then back up the long, long hill. There was also foot-deep patches of mud throughout the run and I almost lost my shoes more than once!

The beautiful Morgan Lake behind me.

Finished in a total time of 2:33:34. Got 7th place overall out of 81 racers. It was a fun race!

My Niner mountain bike got pretty muddy and my chain got bent from a branch or rock hitting it so it was slipping a lot for the last half of the bike leg.

Giving my faithful steed a bath! Then we packed up and went for a nice big after-race lunch at an all you can eat chinese buffet. It was delicious by the way!

Amber Monforte

Most people already know that Conrad Stoltz and Amber Monforte are my coaches. However, there is a lot of information out there about Conrad, anyone who has been involved with triathlons has heard of him or knows a thing or two about him. I just wanted to write a little something about Conrad's fiancee, Amber, who has been primarily responsible for my training schedules and strategy since December 2009.

Amber and her dog, Kona whom she rescued from the pound.

Amber Monforte grew up around the Reno, Nevada and Truckee, California area and has done many different sports but tried triathlon in 2003 and loved it. She is also an avid XTERRA racer and raced pro in XTERRA for a few seasons before she chose to focus on a full-time job as a nurse in Reno. She still does some races whenever she can take time off her job. Just recently she won the women's 30-34 age group at the Honu 70.3 in Hawaii and received her slot to the Hawaii Ironman this October! But the Ironman will just be practice for the Ultraman in Hawaii which Amber is planning on doing this November. Hawaii will be her second Ultraman. Her first Ultraman was in Canada in August, 2009 which covered 320 miles total of swimming, biking and running.

Ultraman Canada was a tough 3 day race with 6.2 miles of swimming then a 90 mile bike ride on the first day, a 170 mile bike ride on the second, then a 52.4 mile (double marathon) run on the third and last day. Amber finished 4th place overall including the men, and won the women's race. Not only did she win the women's race with a total time of 25 hours, 36 minutes, and 49 seconds, she also broke the women's Ultraman Canada record by almost 4 hours and beat the women's world best time at the Ultraman distance set in 1989 by Tina Bischoff by about 9 minutes. I have no idea how she does it, but I can tell that she enjoys it. I once asked her what motivated her to do all the training and race Ultraman. She said that she likes to challenge herself and see what her limits are.

Conrad running with Amber during Ultraman Canada. Ultramans are usually invitation only events and you bring your own crew for support to provide entertainment, food, and fluids. There are no aid stations like in "normal" triathlon races. I hope to be in Hawaii in November to cheer Amber on at the Ultraman!

Her coaching skills are very good, as she seems to know exactly how I am going to feel before and after a workout. Conrad and Amber know my goals for this year, and they're doing their best to give me the most effective training path to my goals and still make it enjoyable and fun. Since Amber is based in Reno and we're roving across the western states, we communicate by email and she writes up my workouts weekly which makes it exciting to see what I'll be doing. Sometimes scary too, as my dad calls her the "Torturer".

XTERRA Farragut

Yesterday I raced at Farragut State Park in northern Idaho. The day had perfect racing conditions. Beautiful and sunny weather, the trails were almost dry after all the rain showers. Everything was feeling good and I was just going in to have a fun day! About 60 people did the XTERRA race, which made it a bit low-key, but the competition was still high nonetheless!

The XTERRA race was hosted by Adventure Sports Week which was a full week of races such as swimming, running, mountain biking, and "Adventure Racing" which usually consists of kayaking, running, biking, rappelling and navigation.

This is the beach where we started the swim. Even though it was sunny outside they cut the 1 mile swim in half because the water was cold, about 53 degrees F due to 4 weeks of unusually cold, rainy weather and they were worried about health/safety issues for the people in the race.

The swim start was a mass start. I was on the far right, already swimming in this picture.

The swim was one 750 meter triangular loop from the beach, around two large orange buoys then back to the beach.

I was the 3rd swimmer out of the water.

It was a long run back up to transition from the beach, and all uphill!

Out of T1 (transition: getting out of my wetsuit then putting on my bike gear) and on to the bike.

This is one of the major hills on the beautiful 23 mile mountain bike race course of singletrack and doubletrack through meadows and pine and fir forests.

I was hammering it pretty good on the bike which left my legs a little cooked for the run.

Dad took all of the pictures of the race, he even got creative and climbed up a tree for this shot.

Off the bike and into T2 putting on my running shoes which isn't an overly easy task after riding hard for 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Out of T2 and heading out on my 10k run, the last leg of the race.

This gradual hill back to the finish seemed like it was about 20 miles long!

At the finish..... hungry, tired, thirsty, and happy to have put in an solid race effort. I finished in 10th place overall and I know that I did the best I could and am still improving!

I had a great family greeting at the end of my race, my great aunts and grandma from my mom's side came over from Seattle to watch and take in the triathlon racing atmosphere!

From left: Evelyn (great aunt), me, Elaina (grandma), and Eloise (great aunt).

Farragut State Park

We've been parked at Farragut State Park for 3 days now and will be here until Sunday, after the XTERRA race that is held right here on Saturday at noon. My Niner Air 9 29er mountain bike has been cleaned, tuned up and I switched my tires to a lighter and faster rolling tread for the singletrack and doubletrack course. The distances of this race are a one mile swim (which will be two laps of a half mile loop with a beach run in between) , 22 mile mountain bike (2 laps of a 11 mile loop) , and a 6.2 mile run on a technical course strewn with rocks and roots.

During World War II, this area that the State Park is on, used to be the Farragut Naval Training Station, a major training base for the U.S. Navy. Over 293,000 sailors received basic training at this facility throughout its 30 months of operation. It was also used as a POW camp for 900 Germans working as gardeners and maintenance men. Then in 1946 the facility was decommissioned and turned into a college until it closed down in 1949 because of financial problems. In 1964 it became a park and has been the site of several Boy and Girl Scout outings and Jamborees. This park is large, about 4,000 acres and has over 220 individual campsites and 45 miles of hiking, biking, horse and llama trails. However large and famous this park used to be, its pretty quiet here, we rarely saw other people out on the trails.

It has been raining on and off here for a few days, even occasionally small marble sized hail as shown above.

Behind me is Lake Pend Oreille, where the swim will be on Saturday.

We went exploring Farragut's trails and attempted to pre-ride the race course even though it has not been marked yet. It took us 3 hours and a lot of map studying on mom's part, to get some idea of what the course will be like. It'll be a fast ride on race day, a few hills but mostly rolling, a lot of twists and turns and a few mud patches because of the rain.


Mom and me riding through one of the meadows of Farragut! So far we have seen a couple deer and hundreds (not quite, but you get the idea) of squirrels and gophers.



Lake Pend Oreille, at 65 miles long, is Idaho's largest lake. It is also known as the 5th deepest lake in the U.S. In some places the bottom reaches 1,150 feet deep.

Even on a sunny day the lake water temperature hit 53 degrees F.