Race day! The biggest race of the year with the exception of the Olympics and possibly Kona.
Kristi and I had a nice breakfast down on Mission Beach and are getting ready to head down to the race site for a quick bike course preview, a warm up swim, athlete call downs and and the race start at 2:06PM!
Last night, there was part of a famous speech I remembered, it fits this event perfectly for Kristi:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
Good luck Kristi. For the rest of your life, you will always know you had the courage to take your place on the start line at the biggest race of your day on American soil.
After talking on the phone with Kristi, we decided to take the slot- this is the biggest triathlon in 2012 short of the Olympics! The event, which starts on Friday at 2PM PST is the USA Triathlon Olympic Trials event for triathlon! For just about any triathlete in the world, making it onto this start list would be the highlight of their career short of actually making it to the Olympic games! Kristi is the first triathlete from Arizona to have ever made the start list for the triathlon Olympic trials, which is quite an honor!
race suit for the athlete photo shoot!
program that would be a national powerhouse under the guidance of a nationally respected coach. To understand the magnitude of this task, you would have to fully understand the history of the ASU Cycling and Triathlon (CTC) club over the past few years. In general, I was told the “team” was not much of a “team,” it was a bunch of individuals that simply did what they wanted with no real guidance or structure. Last year, at this same race, the ASU team ended their season ranked 56th in the nation, with the male team ranked as 45th and the female team unranked. With this as the starting point, I gladly accepted the challenge jumping in with both feet.
The second part was to build a “team” atmosphere where no one person was bigger than the program; that all of the athletes needed to support their teammates, regardless of their ability. All of this was accomplished with a rather straightforward Code of Conduct, which every team member had to read and sign. As it may be, it is the same code of conduct that I use with my Youth and Junior USA Triathlon High Performance Team and Development Program. The general gist of the code: do the right thing and don’t be an idiot- pretty straightforward right?
Monday 
For Kristi’s taper, that is exactly what we did for the last 2 weeks leading up to Buffalo. We utilized workouts such as 1 km and 2 km running repeats and a lot of intervals at threshold on the bike.
That being said, here’s a short recap of the first five months of Kristi’s 2011 season: I started working with Kristi at the end of January 2011, the same day the she finished her last treatment from a serious illness. Over the next 3 months, Kristi would suffer an injured calf muscle, severe case of bronchitis, and to top it off, three cracked ribs and a bruised lung in the first 50 meters of an ITU race in Mazatlan. She was healthy enough to start training in early May, with less than a month to prepare for 4-5 races across the country in May and June. It was clear that she was not going to be able to get any real training while driving across the country, so we used that time to simply get in as much training as we could, making the best use of what we had available.
Confidence was my biggest challenge with Kristi, especially at the beginning. She was used to training 20-30 hours a week; I initially limited her to 12-15 hours, eventually working our way up to around 20 hours per week. She was used to hours and hours of riding and then miles and miles of running… super high volume with intensity being added in as she felt. This is NOT how I operate as a coach- aerobic training has a limit, especially for higher caliber athletes. Our initial goal was to develop a decent aerobic base (aerobic endurance) and then started on muscular endurance. The first race Kristi was set for was the Lake Havasu triathlon in March with the first big event being the Continental Cup race in Mazatlan, Mexico. We used a combination of output:input calculations and fatigue rates to determine when to add in the more sports-specific training.
The end result: Kristi earned her pro card in Buffalo, finishing third in a field full of females that were there for the elite development race and a full age group field. In Buffalo, she got off the bike in 4th place, behind three elite development girls; afterwards, she said she never had a doubt she would run them down. With four miles to go on the run, another elite development girl was starting to close the gap on Kristi. Instead of freaking out, she said she was able to relax and fall into a solid pace that not only held that girl off, but ultimately extended her lead by over a minute. Not only did her motivation, dedication and training pay off, the confidence she had built up since July is what made all the difference.
As I mentioned above, the antiquated approach to periodization was the first thing that had to be changed. From there, we worked diligently to understand topics such as recovery, pacing, fatigue, tapering and training/racing intensity. Kristi questioned me every step of the way and picked up on it quickly, realizing that each workout and the subsequent recovery created a single brick.