Last gap completed - a long, sordid tale.

[Bob S.]

Filled the last empty slot of the 16 LWT and HWT short and medium pieces today for 90-99. Phat Bob now has 6 of HWTs and Skinny has the 8 LWTs. Not too shabby for a lazy, non-competitive old faht. The other 2, the 5k and 6k HWT are held by Berkeley Johnson, done at Santa Rosa, CA. He has the disadvantage of being a year older than me, but maybe the altitude compensates to some extent. In any case, I won’t be going after those any time soon. I don’t have much motivation to do it and today I picked up the perfect excuse.

I got off to a good start today, getting up on time and getting into town with all the necessary items early enough to have a little time to spare. I parked quite near the Crossfit Gym, picked up my bag, got out, locked the car and headed for the gym. I took a half dozen steps or so and – zowie – I stubbed my toe on the curb and went down hard on the sidewalk. The bag was in my right hand and my left hand tried to crack the sidewalk with a karate chop to stop the fall. My left knee also got in some of the action. What to do?? Sneak home with my tail between my legs or be stupid and stick it out?? Well, what the heck, let’s give the 10’ warm up a try and see how it goes. After all, I am just here to fill an empty slot; there is no pressure to even make 6k. The knee pain subsided fairly rapidly, but the hand hurt enough that I had some concern that there might be a break. Well, I had plenty of precedent to go for it. As recently as the recent C-Bs, I had a long chat with my old USIRTeam mate, Jim Castellan, the night before the competition, about him planning to go ahead with his race even with a spiral fracture of one of his leg bones. Then I had a front row seat watching Paul Buchanan grit his way through his race with obvious intense pain from stomach cramps.

Well, the major problem with the hand was trying to undo buttons. I already had my rowing kit on, but had my pants and shirt on over them. The warm up went smoothly enough, a couple of minutes each at 12/15/18/20 and 24spm. At least that was what it was supposed to be, but I guess I was distracted by the hand pain and found myself doing 15 instead of 12 for the first 2 minutes. Well – OK - it is just a warm up and there is no increase in pain, just a low level, maybe a 2 or 3, in the side of my hand, but no problem with the hooks. (Tonight it is a different story. Puffed up like a balloon, fiery red on the back of the hand and dark bruises in the palm. Typing this message is a real chore, trying to do it without increasing the pain.) In the last 2 minutes, at 24spm I was at race level holding my planned rate and getting close to a second faster than the planned race pace. OK, I can do it for 2 minutes, what about 30’?

I thought that I was careful in setting up the erg, but I realized afterwards that I forgot to check the drag factor of all things. The monitor had a slight screen flaw, some extraneous black pixels on the left hand side, but I didn’t want to drag the erg all the way back to the storage rack at the other end of a long room and then try out another that might not be much better. I can’t complain; the ergs there are in pretty good shape in general – old (PM3s) – but in a lot better shape than most gym ergs.

I started off the piece rather cautiously. The steady, low level pain was a constant reminder that there just might be a bone break hiding in there. On looking at the spreadsheet printout now, I see that, for the first 12’, I was running 1-3 seconds slower than the average of the 30’ piece I did as Skinny Bob 3 months ago. Not a problem really, that first 30’ was also at slow pace early on. During the piece, I didn’t really look at the pace very much. My attention was more on the predicted final distance. By the halfway point, I was satisfied that I could finish it out unless my hand had a sudden change for the worst. The pace improved in the last half of the race and I could see that 6300+ was a possibility. My mind was playing tricks with me at that point. I had brought a printout of the spreadsheet for the earlier 30’ TT, but with the distraction of my injured hand, I failed do make a final check of it. I was remembering it as 6350m and figured that there was no point in trying to beat that, so I settled on getting as far past 6300 as I could. I had plenty of steam left for the last 5 minutes, staying at 24 spm at 2:20.1/2:20.1/2:19.5 for 3’, then kicking it 1’ at 28spm and 2:16.9, with the last one at 39spm and 2:05.5

The final result was 6315 (2:22.5). When I finally checked out Skinny Bob’s result, I realized that it was only 6301 (2:22.8), so Phat Bob beat it by 14m. My guess is that I had picked up the 6350 notion from my 60’ row, which netted 12350m.

When I finally got around to going to the ER about 4 hours later, the x-ray didn’t show any breaks. It was about this time that the dark blotches began to show in my left palm. I made the mistake of admitting to the ER attending doctor that I had gone ahead with the time trial after the fall and he looked at me as if I were something that crawled out from under a flat rock.I now have strict orders – no ergng for at least a week. Obviously there is no chance to stay tuned up to do the 5k and 6k properly, so I can postpone those indefinitely.

The HWT 30’ TT is not in the record list yet. The folks at C2 told me that it should get listed in about a week,

Bob S.

[Citroen]

Bob, you're as mad as a box of frogs.