On Sunday Jason and I did the Mt. Rainier Duathlon in Enumclaw. A bunch of our TN Multisport buddies had signed up for the race and were urging us to do the same. We had heard daunting things about the mighty duathlon course hill, so last week we decided to ride the bike route and see how formidable the hill would be. Jason, his dad, Beth, Barb and I met in horse loving Enumclaw and rode our bikes to get a feel for the duathlon course. Beth told me that she wanted to make sure she could successfully get up the hill this year since last year she was unable to conquer it. It was a warm, sunny day and most of the roads were flat and fast with a few gradual inclines…and then we got to the hill. Even though I had heard gloriously awful things about it, the beast still caught me by surprise. The first part of the hill is the steepest — it’s mercifully short, but I’m told it’s a shitty 17% incline. When I hit it I was in the completely wrong gearing and frantically downshifted. Although I did make it to the top, I ran out of momentum and ended up keeling over and running into a guardrail (thankfully, much like a Weeble, I wobbled but did not fall down). When Beth caught up to me at the top of the hill, I asked her, “Was that the part you got stuck on last year?” She just laughed and said, “Oh no, it gets worse.” “Worse” is putting it lightly. This mofo is 2 miles long. While the rest of the hill isn’t as superbly steep as the beginning part, it’s a long, winding, never-ending piece of crap. Every time I rounded a corner and expected to be at the end, I’d see more hill to climb. I cursed, sweated, wheezed, dropped my chain, cursed again, stopped to put the chain back on my bike, burned my legs up trying to start climbing again mid-hill, sweated some more, wheezed a few more times, and finally made it to the top. Then we turned around, flew down the hill (well, they flew while I held my brakes in a nervous death grip) and climbed the bastard again. While I was in better gearing the second time around, my legs were tired and hating me for drowning them in lactic acid. Why the hell would I want to pay to bike up this hill? I just climbed it twice for free and hated every sweat-soaked minute of it! Our practice ride was last Sunday, and all week Jason and I contemplated signing up for the duathlon. Teresa initially wanted us to do the long course (which consisted of a 5.1 mile run, a 28.8 mile bike and a 3.7 mile run), meaning we’d have to do the bike loop (and that bullshit hill) twice, and once we rode the course we were like “Yeeeeeah, the short course seems more appropriate.” Several of our training buddies were doing the short course and a couple of folks were doing the long course. Confident that she could conquer the hill this year, Beth egged me on to sign up and race with her. Jason and I dragged our feet up until Saturday, at which point Jason put on his game face, hitched up his britches and decided to do the race. He set out his gear and clothes and I begrudgingly mimicked him like a disgruntled monkey. When the alarm started blaring at 5:15 am on Sunday morning, he bounced out of bed and said in a far-too-chipper...

Like the elite athletes we are, this morning Jason and I slept in until 11:30, stumbled downstairs, watched a movie while eating a scramble full of embarrassingly massive quantities of feta cheese, and then queued up the Ironman 70.3 Championships in Clearwater on NBC. We’ve grown increasingly obsessed with watching triathlons and have caught a crapload of Kona reruns on the Universal Sports channel, so we were pretty stoked to see the 2008 Clearwater race. Unfortunately, it sucked. Well, let me clarify. The race didn’t suck, but the coverage sure did. They really phoned it in this year. I’m surprised it took this long to air the coverage — given how crappily they half-assed it, they could have aired this thing the day after the actual race. First of all, they showed two “check out these athletes who have overcome adversity” profiles, one about a paraplegic motocross (or dirt bike, or something) racer and another about a dude who got in a horrible car accident and got a “second chance at life”/insert-hyperbolic-inspirational-schmaltz-here. I don’t mind athlete profiles, but I do mind when they show the exact same segment they aired for the Kona race. They didn’t even bother shooting anything new — they just queued up the existing footage and re-played it for Clearwater. That’s pretty lazy. Other disappointments: The narrator was underwhelming. He didn’t seem especially stoked to be covering Clearwater, and his lack of enthusiasm was kind of a buzzkill. They didn’t really do any elite athlete profiles other than the requisite 30 second “here’s who won last year” mention. I like how Kona does it — they talk about the elites more and interview them and check in on them more on an individual level. Not much mention of the course. I know that Clearwater is an “easy” course since it’s pretty much flat as a pancake, but how were the conditions (e.g., temperature, humidity)? Is there any elevation gain? They could have even talked about how flat it is and compared it to more challenging race courses, but no go. Not only did they recycle some athlete profiles and barely cover the elites, they did some super half-ass last-minute profiling, like the 5 second mention at the very end of the program of the lady who ran in sandals because of some condition she has (what? who? huh?). I’m sure there are more grievances to air, but the coverage was so unimpressive and disappointing that I’ve already forgotten most of what I saw. The one saving grace was getting to see Team Hoyt and finding out that this year they’ll log their 1,000th race. (I’ll post a separate entry about them this week.) Other than that, though, I must say that the coverage was pretty craptacular. Oh well — at least it motivated me and Jason to get off our unsatisfied asses and do a 10-13 mile...

Well folks, Sunday was the Big Climb and I conquered the Columbia Tower (and by “conquered” I mean “trudged up a ton of steps in a mediocre time”). The morning of the Climb I awoke to the alarm and begrudgingly rolled out of bed. I had considered blowing it off and sleeping in, but I made a big fuss about it and bugged a ton of people to donate money, so I felt shamed into going through with it. Teresa wanted me to get in a 20 minute warmup before doing the Climb, so I decided to run to the Columbia Tower (it took a groggy, trotting me 14 minutes to go nearly 2 miles — yaay for running downhill!). Once I got to the Climb I met up with my team of coworkers and my friend Matt. Team Flabalanche’s captain, Mike, gave me my race envelope. I tore it open and pinned on my bib and affixed the timing chip to my wrist. Matt and I then waited around a bit to start at the “racer” stairwell (the non-racers did the climb on an opposite stairwell). Can I take a minute to talk about how horrible I look in any and all race photos? That picture is the one Matt got — the one they took of me starting is even worse. I’m lumbering forward with a half-asleep “Eff my life” look on my face, and my head looks so bald and shiny it could blind and bring down an airplane. Ugh. Anyway, when it was my turn to start, I jogged up the steps like an excited idiot. That pace lasted me about seven flights of stairs before I started wheezing and huffing like a lifelong smoker. I started to get an annoying tickle in my throat and kept doing the annoying “Unghhhhh” throat clearing noise. After a ridiculously long time (17 minutes, 2 minutes slower than the posted “average racer time” — God, I suck), I emerged at the top to the Rocky theme song blasting from cheap speakers. The top floor was a clogged mess of sweaty, stinky racers who were all coughing and hacking and sucking down bottles of water. I took a whiff of the poorly ventilated space and mentally thanked Mike for setting us up with an early morning race time — I can’t imagine what the floor would smell like at 2:30 pm. Matt and I waited for our non-racers to finish, and in between coughs and sniffles I glanced down at Matt’s bib and saw that he had specified a shirt size ‘small’. Not remembering what I had filled out when I registered for the race months ago, I looked down at my own bib and noticed that I had requested a size medium. “That’s weird,” I thought, “Why would I want that size?” I then noticed that my posted start time on the bib said 2:45. Finally, I checked the name and realized that I had raced the Big Climb as Abraham Kellogg. Whoops. It looks like the organizers stuffed the wrong bib into my envelope. I made the most of the situation and encouraged my teammates to call me Abe (“Abraham” is so formal, you know?). Thankfully, the race organizers must have noticed the mix up because the online results are displaying our correct times (I wish they hadn’t — Abe flew up those steps way faster than I did). After the Climb, my team and I drove over to Salty’s and rewarded our good efforts with a ridiculous brunch buffet. I felt a bit guilty about stuffing my face with copious amounts of brunch items after having...

My coworker Mike put together a team to do Seattle’s annual Big Climb event (this year it’s on March 22), and I am one of his easily winded participants (go Team Flabalanche!). What is the Big Climb? Well, every year the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society organizes a race to raise money for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma research. The race consists of climbing 69 flights of stairs up the Columbia Center in downtown Seattle. That’s right, your favorite mediocre athlete is going to try and run up 69 flights of stairs. Me, aka the person incapable of running along a flat sidewalk without tripping. (This actually happened to me–I was running along 19th and looked down to skip a song on my iPod at the exact moment I came across a raised sidewalk groove. Before I knew it, I was flying forward and skidding my knee and hands on the hot, gritty concrete. I immediately snapped up and looked around to see if anyone noticed my blunder, and sure enough, there was a group of people staring at me from across the street with their mouths agape, silently mouthing (“silently” because OK Go was still blaring in my ears) “Are you OH-KAY?” I squeaked out a falsely cheerful and overly loud “YEAH! I’M FINE!” before scampering away as fast as I could, blood running down my leg.) So yeah, jogging up a butt-ton of stairs can’t possibly lead to disaster for the clumsiest person in the Pacific Northwest… Anyway, I pledged to try and raise $500, so I’d really appreciate some donations (think of it as a tip for serving up awesomely mediocre blog content). Check out my donation page at http://www.llswa.org/goto/rebeccakelley and donate some money if you like me, if you hate me but like science research, if you like me and hate leukemia, or if you hate me and want me to leave you alone. If you donate money, I promise to write an especially amusing and self-deprecating recap post about the Big Climb once I haul my ass out of bed and do the race on Sunday, March 22. I imagine the post will consist of about 30% race details and 70% post-race brunch recap. Please donate! I also have a team page (we’re actually not Team Flabalanche, though I wish that were our name) in case you’re feeling especially charitable and want to donate more moolah, but at the very least I’d really appreciate anything you can...