Well, I've been in California now for a little less than two full weeks. And, as a disclaimer, this update is long. I highly suggest grabbing you favorite beverage or snack before sitting down to digest this one (I prefer good Wisconsin beers or coffee myself!).



During those two weeks, I've gotten to live in two different places, start an internship that rocks, compete at a local and very popular race, do more than a little biking, and hang out with my summer roomies from Australia.



When I first got out to California, I stayed with Brad Culp and his girl friend, Jaime. These are the same two I stayed with back in March during spring break. For some reason, they have yet to tell me to stop showing up on their doorstep. The only downside to living with them for the first week I was out here is that they are located in La Jolla, which is a good 1:45 bike ride to the Zoot offices up in Vista, CA. That meant that for the first four days of work I was riding a total of nearly 4 hours a day plus a short, but quick, 30min run off the bike at the end of the day. Not the most conducive training for an ITU guy like myself, but, make do with what you have! Brad and Jaime took off over the weekend, so I had a chance to get caught up on sleep after a long week of traveling from Colorado and starting up the internship at Zoot. Kind of nice actually.



On Monday of last week we migrated me up to Cardiff, yet another beach town in California, where the house of Zoot CEO Brian is located. A pretty sweet deal for a college kind over the summer in California. The house is very large and in an upscale, luxury community; however, the house is completely unfurnished aside from a mattress in each bedroom (no bed frame, just a mattress on the floor...I have no lights in my bedroom even) and some patio furniture which is moved inside or outside depending on where you want to sit at that moment. Beyond that, there is nothing in the house. It's a little weird, but I'm not there aside from sleeping, eating dinner with the two roomies, or changing into different clothing so it really isn't that big of deal. Plus, with such a huge backyard to mess around in with basketball hoops and a mini soccer pitch, who needs furniture? And, there is a huge grill...that pretty much completed my summer.



Speaking of roomies...I am living with Luke Bell and his wife Lucy. Luke is a long-course triathlete, so he does distances like Ironman and Half Ironman racing. He's a full-time Professional Triathlete in the sense that he trains, watches TV, sleeps, and repeats. He's a super cool dude though, even if I do get a little confused by his thick Aussie accent sometimes. His wife Lucy is a physical therapist and a great cook as well! On Wednesday night she put together a little barbie (BBQ) for us and some of their locally living Aussie friends. It was a great time.



I've gotten quite a few questions about my internship with Zoot, so I'll try to answer most of them here. The internship is very educational so far. For me and for the people in charge. They have been bringing me in on a number of different meetings relating to the release of the Fall 2008 apparel line plus the development--starting with concept up to packaging and point of sale--for a whole new product. More on that in a later update :) I am also getting a true crash course in marketing while refreshing my website and Photoshop skills as I was tasked with doing some website updates and, low-and-behold, creating an interactive Facebook page for Zoot. So, I get to spend most of my time at a computer screen, on, of all things, Facebook and Blogspot. It's not exactly what I had expected, but it hasn't been bad either. I teach the old ones at Zoot (30's...so not that old I guess) how Facebook and Blogs work and they teach me how to run a corporate marketing campaign from start to finish.



As I mentioned before, my training hasn't been going as well as planned. There is the hassle of figuring out routes for running and cycling that allow you do the prescribed workout without hitting a traffic light every 50ft, and then managing running and swimming workouts around the work day which includes a 1hr ride on the bike each way (a somewhat hilly one for half of it too).



Given that I was a little leery about the race that I took part in this morning, the San Diego International Triathlon. I had a nearly free entry courtesy of Zoot, so I thought I would give it a shot and use it for a fitness gauge, and at the same time I was hoping for no more bad-luck incidents (heat, flat tires, wrong directions on the course from volunteers). Though, I did spend all of Saturday (8+ hours) working at the expo which Zoot helped put on, and not having a car, that meant I got to ride 2hrs each way to get there; however, I am training through this race.







Anyways, the race went pretty well. Luke, Lucy and I got over to the course at 5:30 as the start time was 6:40, so we were all up at 4:30am...yuck.



The swim was short, which was odd...at only 1k, so that meant right when you would normally start to get tired on the swim or just plain sick of it, it was over. The fact that we swam in the marina meant there were no waves, but it was still salt water, and I am still not a big fan of that as you tend to chafe the rest of the race. I came out of the swim right around the middle of the pack. It felt okay, though it wasn't quite where I wanted it to be.



Transition was really long, though us Pros ended up with the best real estate around. We had to run probably 10m maximum with our bikes both on the way in and on the way out. I had a very smooth T1 and the bike that followed went very well too. It was all uphill on the way out, and a good chunk of the climb was pretty steep. About my only complaint about the bike was that there were no officials, so that meant a group of 5 or 6 Pros at the front drafted the whole course. That tends to piss you off to see happening. Either way, I picked a number of guys off on the bike to move into 9th place coming into T2 which went the best I have ever had it go. I know I work for Zoot, but honestly, the shoes they have are the best there are for transitions, and they feel great. I had no problem slipping them on and going for it.



The run was a little less than what I would have liked it to be. I got caught pretty quickly by a team member f mine, Haven Barnes. I had hoped to stick on his shoulder for a ways, and as he told me later, so did he. But, I just didn't have any other gears. There was no pick-up or "pop" in my run. I had no problem cruising along, but I couldn't cover anything fast when Haven went by, and right near the end when two other guys went past together I didn't have kick to speak of that would let me stop them from going right on by. I did pass one guy though, which put me in 10th place.



Not too bad considering that I didn't let up leading into this and trained right through it. My next one will be another local one containing an international Pro field (like this one) called the Carlsbad Triathlon. I will follow that with a Half Ironman, the Vineman 70.3 Triathlon in northern California.



I'll send out another update after the Carlsbad triathlon. As always, check out the website at www.kamnetz.com . Until then, stay in touch, and enjoy the summer and this coming Holiday weekend!

Wow, two races in three days…that gives me a ton to talk about. Not to mention the fact that I am training in Colorado, so that leaves for some stories itself too!



I'll start with the Boulder Stroke and Stride that took place on Thursday the 12th of June.



I was warned that the water would be cold, but I wasn't ready for how cold it really was. It was the cold that makes your feet and hands go numb after about 20sec of being in the water. However, on the bright side, that meant you couldn't feel how cold they were. The real problem was when you hit the water with your face to swim. A stinging cold on your face for 20min of swimming is anything but fun. That said I had the 8th fastest swim on the day in a race of 140 athletes. I also ended up with the 9th fastest run on the day for a final place of 8th overall. That's not too bad considering the team went up with the single goal of getting loose for Saturday's race in Utah. I must say, even with freezing water, it was a really enjoyable event. I didn't expect to see that many people show and pay $20 just to do a swim and run on a Thursday night.



The next morning we were up at 4:30 and on the road before 5am on our way to Midway, Utah. The drive took a little over 8.5hrs in total with the couple gas stops we needed. When you are driving in three oversized SUVs through the mountains, you ended up using up a ton of gas quickly. The drive was worth it though. The scenery at this venue was spectacular. There were snow capped mountains all around us and huge open valleys that we raced in. The hotel we stayed at was great as well. It just happened to be the premier ski resort hotel in the area. After seeing the course and setting up transition, we headed to bed as the next morning was to be early yet again.



We were up and into the car for the drive over to transition by 4:30am…we woke up at 4am in order to make that happen. We had to be there early as T1 and T2 were in separate areas, so we needed to take a shuttle from T2 to T1 in the morning. This was a pain in the ass as they only had two busses making the 5mi drive and they wouldn't leave until it was completely full…so you ended up waiting forever and in the end, I ended up with very little warm-up time.



Now, I said the water in Boulder was cold…well, the water here made that swim look warm. I am not sure how we were able to swim in it, but we made it happen. It makes me think of Reno, NV where I did my first multi-sport race and they canceled the swim…the water in both cases was the same temperature. Yet, it seems that these cold swims do me well as I came out near the tail end of the lead pack. There was one problem though: I couldn't feel my hands or feet at all. My quads and hamstrings were just as numb. It was the oddest and most uncomfortable sensation I ever had short of Mexico, and I wasn't even done yet.



The numbness made it ridiculously hard to get my shoes on or shift gears for the bike. In fact, I almost lost one of my cycling shoes due to not being able to make my feet do what I wanted them to. But, the worst was about to come. At about the 3mi mark on the bike a USAT Official came up next to me and told me to "Stand-Down", which means stop. He proceeded to tell me I was in violation of the stagger rule. This is a rule that applies ONLY to PRO athletes in non-drafting races. I have included some diagrams to show you what this rule is. Diagram A is violation of the rule, while Diagram B is not. The rule states that if you can see the person immediately in front of you, you can not place yourself directly behind that person, no matter how far ahead of you they are. So, this would result in the athletes being staged as shown in Diagram B…he said I was doing what was shown in Diagram B, and that it was illegal. If that were true though, you would need to ride as shown in Diagram C…that would become impossible after about 10 athletes ended up on the road as the road would never be wide enough to hold every athlete.



Anyways, that meant I would need to stand there for a two-minute time period. I tried to tell him that he was enforcing the rule incorrectly, but this resulted in me being issued yet another 2min penalty for arguing. Apparently I needed to have both feet on the ground, not just one. He told me this after about 30-45sec, and said since both feet were not on the ground, he had not started the timer. This wouldn't be the end of my troubles on the bike though.



At around the 15mi mark, a volunteer, well, a police officer to be exact, directed me to go left down a road. Roughly 3min later the same officer drove up next me and shouted that he had told me to go the wrong way and I should turn around now. Ouch.



By this point I was pretty demoralized and very ticked off. When I finally got to T2 I was near the very back of the PRO field, yet my feet and hands were still numb, so it took me forever, or what seemed forever to get my running shoes on. Once that was done, I took off for the run course, only to come to a fork in the road, with two other athletes. It was un-marked as to which way we needed to go. We basically chanced it after asking each other if anyone knew the way. It was, luckily, the correct way.



I ended up finishing in 25th overall after it was all said and done, about 20min back from the leader, and about 12min out of the money. That hurt to se those numbers. Still, I found out that other people had tons of trouble finding the right path on the run and lots of people had gone off course. It was a run in these foot hills…think high school cross-country through slightly mowed grass and dirt paths. Had it not been for the amazing views, this would have made it to the number 1 spot on my list of worst planned races.



To add to the whole weekend of fiascos, I ended up with a speeding ticket for going 9mph over the speed limit on the interstate while driving home…9mph? I thought the cops were bad in my home town, but they have nothing on the Wyoming police. We finally got home just before 10pm on Saturday night, making it one long, long day.



I did make up for it all with one of the most amazing rides I have ever been on. Today, I went out and did what is known as the Peak to Peak ride. It is an intense mountain ride of a little over 80mi in total. It took a good solid 5 hours to do, with the vast majority of time spent climbing as the descents were an average speed of 45mph with a max speed of a little over 66mph, while the climbs up saw average speeds of about 10mph. Check my website for some pictures I managed to snap along the way.



All in all, it was quite the weekend, and with one more day here in Colorado before I head to California for the next five weeks, who knows what could happen.



I'll be sending out another update sometime after the 22nd, at which point I'll be completely settled into my place in California. But, so you all have an idea of what I'll be up to the rest of this summer…



June 17th until July 24th will find me in California doing a marketing internship for Zoot Sports (www.zootsports.com) and racing in a number of local cycling and running races.



On July 20th I'll be in northern California for the Vineman 70.3 Triathlon (This is a half-Ironman distance race).



On the 24th of July I'll head to Wales, the United Kingdom, to race in a triathlon that British Triathlon Federation has invited me to race at. They will be covering all expenses.



I will return on the 27th of July to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs to attend an invite only training camp.



I will return home from the Olympic Training Center on August 6th to Madison.



Talk to you all again soon. Stay in touch, and stay well!

 Well, the summer adventure has officially begun!

I left Madison yesterday, Wednesday, at 7:05pm and then had one lay-over in Chicago. Apparently, when there is bad weather in Iowa, it affects the take-off of planes in O’Hare so badly that we got to sit on the runway for over 2hours after being delayed in the airport from boarding for 45min…it was a mess. In the end I didn’t get into Denver until well after midnight and I still had a 45min drive to my place for the next 6 days.

I am now in Golden, CO staying with my coach and getting ready for the BAM Triathlon in Midway, Utah on Saturday. It’s a pretty fast course, but it is in the mountains and that means the lake is freezing cold (something like 50 degrees was the last reading). So, at least I will not have to worry about another Mexico type heat-stroke J There are a total of 14 PROs registered last time I checked, so the first wave, which we are in, will be pretty small. However, as is common among PROs, many athletes that are planning to race in the PRO ranks will not sign up until the last possible minute.

Tonight will be the first of what looks to be many summer races. It isn’t a triathlon, but rather a Stroke and Stride, or more aptly, a swim and run. The swim is 1500m long and the run was a quick 5K right out of the water. Seeing as the race is in Boulder, CO it is hard to say what the field will look like. Boulder is home to many professional athletes of all disciplines from triathlon to cycling to running. It could be a low-key race or one containing 20+ PROs looking to blow the evening’s race wide open. Either way, it should be a fun way to kick off the summer of traveling and racing.

Well, I’ll keep this one short as we getting ready to drive up to Boulder and then we’ll be on the road to Utah at 5am tomorrow. I’ll be sending out a race-report on Sunday sometime to fill everyone in on the Triathlon and the Stroke and Stride.

Enjoy and stay in touch!