Bend, Oregon

We have been in Bend, Oregon for about one week now and have been loving every day here! Bend has an abundance of trail systems for hiking, horseback riding, running, and mountain biking that I have not seen anywhere else. The weather here has been sunny the whole time, and a bit chilly at night because its a high desert terrain with pine forests and sagebrush.

On my birthday on August 17, I went to a masters swimming session to put in a workout before a videotaping and stroke analysis with head coach Bob Bruce.

I haven't swam the butterfly for over a year, and I forgot how much of a core workout it is!

Bob Bruce is on the pool deck with his videotaping camera attached to a rod that is submerged to tape me underwater. All it took was 75 yards of sprinting for him to get enough footage.

Now its stroke analyzing time! Bob played the video in slow motion and explained to me what I already had down, and what I had to work on. My stroke was already well developed, but I needed to enter my hands in the water deeper, and have my elbows higher before I started the pull phase to be able to displace more water. And to put my head down lower. I have been able to swim 3 times after this and for sure it feels awkward, I was more used to gliding and the new style feels like I'm swimming to the bottom of the pool! But now its getting more "normal" for me, and I can tell that it's much better!

Then that night we went to a free running clinic hosted by FootZone.

We had to run a few times with our shoes on, then barefoot. Teague Hatfield, the host of the clinic videotaped us then did form analyzing for us too. I liked how he taught the clinic, very simple and straightforward!

The next day my dad and I went for a 4 hour mountain bike ride with one of my coaches the "Caveman" Conrad Stoltz. Bend is one of Conrad's favorite training spots for the summer!

The waterfall in the picture is Tumalo Falls.

Taking a quick blog picture break at the Tumalo Falls overlook.

Again, Conrad's biking skills never cease to amaze both me and my dad. He disappears within 30 seconds whenever he goes downhill without braking on the corners, and sometimes disappears even uphill too! As a coach, Conrad was very helpful, has a wealth of information and gave me many tips on how to become a faster mountain biker. But, I couldn't help feeling a little intimidated and like I have a lot of work to do to become even half as fast as Conrad. This is none of Conrad's fault, its my mind getting the best of me. Self-doubts are what I struggle with the most and it has gotten a grip on me sometimes (Okay I admit, more than sometimes!). So, after a couple of good eating-the-dirt crashes, I decided to just chill out and not focus on the negative and look at the positive. Some of the stuff I was riding I wouldn't have been able to ride a few months ago. When I overthink things, its never enough or those things hold no satisfication for me anymore. Its very important to me that I enjoy what I am doing, so I'm working on being in the moment as much as possible!

Dad and I went riding a couple days after our ride with Conrad and I made myself relax and ride the bike and direct it where I wanted it to go instead of a little habit of mine of going too fast to control which always ends up with me thundering down the rocky stretch, reacting at the last instant to brake hard at every turn, nearly missing the tree or the drop off....

I immersed myself in that training ride and enjoyed every moment of it! I even feel like I have improved a little more!

On one of our long runs, we went running on the Deschutes River trail besides the pristine Deschutes River with green trees all around and black lava on the river banks.

Currently we're still in Bend, we're gonna squeeze in a few more trail adventures in two more days before leaving for Portland where we'll be parking our RV before staying with relatives in Seattle for 3 weeks.

Snowbasin, Utah

On our way to Bend, Oregon, then Portland and Seattle we stayed at Huntsville, an old and small town in Utah near Snowbasin Ski Resort. We wanted to ride and run the race course of the XTERRA USA Championship that will be held on September 25. We were here for 4 days and really enjoyed it here. Its a beautiful valley with the pristine Pineview Reservoir at the bottom, surrounded by green mountains. I'm on a solid 6 week training block so XTERRA USA will be my next race!





I went for a nice open-water swim in Pineview Reservoir. This reservoir is large enough for swimming, boating, jetskiing, windsurfing and other water activities.

The first part of the bike course went through a beautiful canyon called Wheeler Creek Canyon.

This course includes a lot of climbing as you go from the reservoir to the ski resort.

Behind me is the mountain of the Snowbasin ski resort where the bike course leads to and where T2 will be. T1 will be next to Pineview reservoir.

Dad and I went a couple miles off-course and did a bit more climbing than was needed, but we were rewarded for our mistake with this view of the valley.

I'm pretty sure that this part is a section of the race course!

The course had a couple of tricky sections, like this one in the picture and a bridge with stair steps that you have to go down at a sharp curve.

This is the very top of the bike leg and the top of the last long climb.

Without the bike and rider blocking your view, you can see Pineview Reservoir at the bottom of the valley where we started our ride!

I'm running on part of the run course. The run course is a very scenic one, it makes a loop on the side of the mountain and is mainly singletrack with short sections of snowcat roads.

I've been racing for every month of the spring and summer, although I'm not the least bit tired of racing I'm still happy to put in some good training hours to prepare for Snowbasin, and then the XTERRA World Championships in Maui.

My first Half-Ironman

This morning at Boulder, Andy Potts of USA and Julie Dibens won the men and women overall titles at the inaugural Ironman 70.3 Boulder race! In 1.2 miles of swimming, 56 miles of biking and 13.1 miles of running, Andy Potts' overall time was 3:46:50, leading 2nd place Tyler Butterfield by over 2 minutes. Potts got 9th in the 2009 Ironman World Championship and won the Ironman 70.3 World Championship in 2007 too.

Andy Potts, kicking it up in the run.

Great Britain's Julie Dibens' (she also trains in Boulder part of the year) overall time was 4:19:49. This was enough to be in front of the 2nd place lady by almost 3 minutes. Julie is also an XTERRA pro, she has won the last 3 XTERRA World Championships in Maui in a row!

She is planning on going to Kona for her first Ironman World Championship this October.

We had to get up before the crack of dawn. 3 a.m. to be precise, to be able to drive to the race site and prepare before the 6:30 am race start.

A beautiful sunrise over the Boulder Reservoir just starting!

I'm in the green shirt, getting my transition area set up before heading out to the swim.

I'm spraying on a wetsuit lubricant called Suit Juice, to help my wetsuit to slip on and off easily.

Before the swim start, 4 skydivers jumped out of a plane and parachuted with flags and streamers behind them while a man sang the national anthem.

With 1,750 racers, the beach of the Boulder Reservoir was full!

The swim was started in waves about 5 minutes apart. The pro men and women were in the first wave, 50+ year old ladies age group in the 2nd, womens' 45-49 age group in the 3rd, and then the 4th wave was for the mens' 50-55 age group and men and womens' 18-24 age group.

Our wave getting ready for the swim!

The water temperature was around 75 degrees F, which is still wetsuit-legal until 78 degrees F. I wore my wetsuit even though it's a little warm just because its faster with the buoyancy of the wetsuit. Almost all of the age groupers wore their wetsuits. The pros aren't allowed to wear wetsuits when the water is over 68 degrees F.

The swim went well for me, a lot of zig-zagging though, because I had to pass a lot of people in the 2 groups that started ahead of me.

The start of a 56 mile bike ride.

Just to give you an idea of how many people were in this race, here's one of the long lines of bikers!

Finished my 1st lap with 28 more miles to go.

Done with the bike ride! In shorter distance races such as Olympic distance triathlons which consist of only 25 miles of biking, I'm usually able to push hard on the bike and then hold on during the run. But in this race, it was more than twice the distance of the bike and run of an olympic distance race, so I held back a little on the bike. I just didn't know what to expect because I had never run 13.1 miles before. As it turned out, my pacing was perfect for me and I was able to do my run well.

T2, ditching the bike and helmet and putting on my running shoes.

At this point I was thinking "This isn't too bad, only 13 miles and 900 feet to go..."

My sister got a new race suit for me and we had Deaf Athlete embroidered on the back. Much better than crude permanent marker scribbling!

This is the end of my 1st lap of two 6 and over a half mile laps. The first 10 miles weren't too mentally challenging, until after 10 and a half miles, then I had to put some willpower into the last 2.5 miles! No wonder why they say that a full Ironman is something like 10 percent physical and 90 percent mental!

The clock is recording time since the first wave start, I started 18 minutes later. It felt so good to be done!

I'm sitting in the shade and happy to finish my first half ironman in 4:54:59, accomplishing my goal of under 5 hours. I'm not sure that I want to do a full ironman anytime soon!

My ice bath after a tough day of racing.

I placed 4th in my 18-24 age group of 31 men!

This was one of the hardest races that I have done so far other than the XTERRA World Championship just because of the length of the race. Thanks to my coaches, Amber Monforte and Conrad Stoltz, I was able to go into this race well prepared and I was able to enjoy it! I'm happy to have this experience under my belt and now I know what to expect when I go into more 70.3 racing next year.