So I am sitting in the Sacramento airport waiting for a flight back to Portland, Oregon. I work as a facilitator for RESOLVE (www.resolv.org), and we provide mediation and facilitation process expertise to policy level discussions, negotiations, and consensus building efforts around primarily natural resource and health-related issues. I flew down for the day for a project interview and figure this is as good a time as any to provide another update….especially since I had an interesting weekend.

The Mudslinger is a mountain bike race in Blodgett, Oregon - a small town in the Oregon Coast Range about an hour and forty-five minutes south and west of Portland, and just west of Corvallis, the home of Oregon State University. Since it is early April, it is generally a safe bet to count on some serious mud. A few years ago this race was my first mountain bike race, but it was dry and this suited my climbing ability and didn't make my lack of technical skills too much of a liability; but it was not dry this year.

On Friday evening I had driven down to Erica's place in Corvallis with Kurt, a buddy from my cycling team Veloce/Felt. When we arrived the front door was wide open and the smoke was still clearing from the house. It turns out that the cooking fiasco was not really Erica's fault, it just so happened that the chicken and vegetables that were cooking in the big clay pot had dripped out and mixed with a few previous oven encounters to create quite a reaction. She had almost gotten away with it because the smoke had almost cleared and the dinner was delicious, but it was still an interesting greeting.

Following dinner we crashed out since we had to be at the pool at 8:00am. Before heading out to Blodgett to pre-ride the mountain bike course, we had signed up for a small triathlon clinic at the Osborne Aquatic Center. Though I had been swimming for some time I had yet to see myself filmed under water. Though it was a bit of a free-for-all getting thirty triathletes into a pool and filming them, the task was accomplished and everyone was captured on film. Before heading out for the swim and run portion, Erica, Kurt and I wanted to view the tape to make sure we had the footage we needed to identify some drills and tangible aspects of our stroke that we could focus on over the next few weeks.

I am generally considered a relatively strong swimmer as I covered the 2.4 miles of the Ironman distance swim in an hour. It has long been a question of mine if I should spend a good deal of time focusing on my stroke technique to whittle down 5 minutes, or if that time would be better spend on my ride and run eliminating even more time. Since I consider training for triathlon part of the journey itself, being a well-rounded athlete is one of my goals, and working on my swim stroke is likely something that I will be working on for a long time into the future.

Based on the multitude of bubbles I saw there were a number of inefficiencies where I could focus my effort. In order to keep things simple I determined that my keys for the next month would be to (1) limit the strength of my kick, (2) focus on better body rotation originating from my hips, (3) work on side balance kicking drills with fins, and (4) improve my distance per stroke. In all it was good to have a visual picture of what I was doing in the water, and it is nice to have many months before August 27 when it really matters.

Following this swim session we completed the triathlon clinic with an hour ride that took us up and over the Lewisburg Saddle, and along through the Soap Creek Watershed. Though the road was chip sealed a number of years ago and is no longer buttery smooth, it is still one of my favorites. Once you cross over the Lewisburg Saddle it feels like a different world. Farm houses and a few cattle dot the idyllic rural landscape and a historic school house makes you wonder in what decade you find yourself. The road itself is a cyclist's dream as it winds and rolls over small hills making you feel as though you were riding a rollercoaster. I had purchased a new 2006 Felt B2 time trial bicycle and knew that it was one of the fastest, lightest TT bikes on the market, and though this was only approximately my fifth ride, I was finally starting to feel really comfortable and strong. Granted this was only 20 miles, not 112, but it was a good start.

We did a quick transition to a short run just to get that feeling in our legs, but we had to move to get together our things for the afternoon pre-ride of the Mudslinger mountain bike race. While Kurt and I put our things together, Erica treated us to one of her specialties….an Australian steak sandwich. She grills steak, sautés mushrooms and onions, fries and egg and throws this in toasted, buttered bread with ketchup, mustard, beets, lettuce, and a few other things we are forgetting I am sure. Wash this down with a beer and you have one strange but incredibly tasty pre-mountain bike ride meal that you can only do if you have spent your morning in a triathlon clinic.

Just to make sure we did not fall into an afternoon coma, we fueled up on coffee as we hit the road. A few miles west of Corvallis takes you to the town of Blodgett, and a couple gravel roads in we found Jesse, Steve, Dan, and Rich ready to get muddy. Muddy it was indeed….and it was the type of water soaked clay that seems to get everywhere and clings for weeks. Luckily the trails and roads were in generally good shape, and the forest had one of those distinctive post rain moist smells that I hesitate to try and describe, but I seem to smell it as I sit here at the computer.

The loop was to be around 20 miles and during the race we would do it twice, but once was to be enough for today. Unfortunately I did not quite make it that far. A good way into the course we were bombing a rather technically simple descent that was a decently wide forest road that was a little slick and had a few embedded rocks here and there, but appeared generally straightforward…..that is until I got a bit of a speed wobble at around 30 - 35 mph, hit a rock, lost control, went flying off the bike Superman style and proceeded to rip a hole in my elbow and tear up my new Veloce kit that I was silly enough to wear on a mountain bike ride. After a few minutes of pacing around to try and control the pain I realized there was nothing to do but get up and ride out. The bike was generally ok, and except for my elbow I thought I was as well.

It turned out I only had one functioning gear on the rear cassette, but it was about in the middle anyway, and I could alternate between the middle and little front ring. Unfortunately this meant shifting with my busted up left arm. For the next hour we climbed our way out and down to our starting point with me trying to pretend I was Tyler Hamilton (minus the blood doping) climbing with a broken collarbone. I cradled my left arm and held the bars with my right hand and just tried to turn the pedals. We finally came to the last technical portion of single track and the rest of the group turned left to pre-ride this section while Kurt accompanied me out on the forest road. As luck would have it a big truck came rolling along and the guy inside offered me a ride. I forgot his name (I will blame it on shock), but it turns out that he built many of the trails in the forest when his kids were getting into mountain biking and he maintains the course particularly for the Mudslinger and ask how the special wooden bridge he constructed was holding up. (It was in fine shape, by the way.)

I was glad to finally get to the car and when we got back into cell phone range I called up Erica to see if she would be willing to take me into the vet clinic and close the hole in my elbow, which was mercifully not pouring out blood at the time. She said that she wanted to reserve judgment until she saw it in person, and when she did it was directly to the emergency room for me.

Fortunately it was the first weekend of Spring Break so the place was like a ghost town and they saw me right away. (We were speculating as to what the emergency rooms must be looking like in Hawaii and Mexico at the moment.) In a bit of an ironic twist, the doctor that sewed me up (14 stitches, 7 internal and 7 external), had attended the triathlon clinic with us so the hour or so was spent talking about triathlon and surfing in exotic places that I had only heard about.

I was contemplating my good fortune that with a fall as dramatic as that I escaped with no broken wrist, collarbone, elbow, etc. I am sure that I will get frustrated by my immobility soon enough, but for now I was lucky. They were worried about the wound infiltrating the bursa, but we would have to wait and see how that played out over time.

Speaking of time, it better heal quickly since the Beaver Freezer Triathlon is around the corner on Saturday, April 8. This little sprint triathlon (500 yard swim, ~ 13 mile bike, and 5 kilometer run) was the first triathlon I ever did, and I have completed it every year since except one year that I was in Santa Barbara and the last year while I was hit with the "mysterious leg injury" previously chronicled. I was bound and determined not to miss it again this year and have a couple weeks to get ready. We'll see how it goes.