Time flies...

Seriously, why am I slightly freaked out by Ironman Wales being less than six months away now?

Still, I'm building up the training and have started doing a weekly trail run with the local tri club. Apparently I'm going to be leading a brick* in a few weeks too... All told I'm averaging about six hours of training a week and as the weather improves I'll find it much easier to get my time on the bike in.

There's still plenty to work on (and around) as the training ramps up. I've signed up for an intensive swim clinic with a former olympic coach who has a real technical focus. I'm going to be investigating the use of clip-on aerobars. Mornings are difficult too, so I'm going to be setting an alarm for early bedtime from now on. Randomly staying up past midnight is not treating me well... If I can get up more easily then morning workouts will really help me get my training done while keeping a semblance of a normal life.

To work around, well, I may (possibly) have a trip to Japan coming up. If that actually happens then I'll need to adjust my training plan for two weeks. Also I'm going to be working my swim schedule around eye appointments -- pool water isn't particularly clean, and after eye injections it's good to take several days out of the water. There's also a strong possibility of a second cataract surgery this year. That'll knock out more training time (and quite frankly, I don't relish more eye surgery).

Still, it's going to happen and I'm happy with my early season progress. At some point I'm going to have to start doing some proper fundraising though... this race isn't just for me. It's for all of us who suffer through distorted vision, an assault of therapies (immunosuppressants, corticosteroids, etc.), the threat of blindness, premature cataracts, glaucoma brought on by the treatment of our "incurable" disease - Uveitis.


Happy training, or whatever you choose to pursue!
*brick = bike then run (for non-tri types)

Swim February

Even though this February was longer than usual, I still failed to find time to write an update... anyway, here it is. My focus in February was on my swim, so I signed up for a stroke clinic at the local pool.

Now, I've been to a couple of stroke correction sessions before, but this was two 45min sessions a week, for most of February. The other sessions I've done have been individual half hour sessions. It's nice to have the extra time to really work on things, come back, get feedback on how you've improved (or not).

So what did I learn? The main things were,
1. My head position was too low.
2. My left arm had a slightly shorter stroke than my right.
3. Flip turns. I learned to tumble turn. Flip turn. Whatever you call it, I can now do it. Bearing in mind that I passed my lifeguard exams back in '95, then surf lifeguard exams in '04, it seems quite odd that I wouldn't know how.

A bit more about these, because they have interesting ramifications:
1. I thought I was supposed to have my head all the way down. Thing is, my head was low and so was my gaze. Apparently it was pushing  my shoulders lower into the water and increasing my drag. Fine. The interesting thing was that when I went to breathe, my low head position meant I had to lift my head slightly to get to the air; slightly lifting the head drops the shoulder further into the water, increasing drag. I think that just looking a little further forward when I swim (not consciously raising my head) has made me a second or two faster per 100. Free speed!
2. This surprised me too, since my right shoulder has suffered some nasty injuries in the past, and as such was my "weak shoulder" in the pool. After seeing this on video I have been able to think more about my reach and work on keeping it even. Catch-up drills should be fast becoming my new best friend, but...
3. The thing is, I didn't learn front crawl when I was a little kid. I learned breaststroke, backstroke and sidestroke. Front crawl I sort of picked up, but "learned" it "properly" in '94/'95, so I could take my lifeguard exams. I learned butterfly in '06 (I think). So I've been a strong swimmer, though not the fastest or most graceful. The thing is, I'd tried to teach myself to turn. I'd asked friends. I watched videos. Coach Scott taught me a decent flip turn in 10 minutes! Now I still think it's cheating a bit, since I get more of a push off the wall each turn, but I feel like my turns are now more connected to swimming than before; I have to think more about where I am in my stroke, my breathing and my streamlining. Flip turns are making me a better swimmer, not just better at turns.

Swim goals for March: keep working on my skills; nail my turns; build volume. Without improving my form I think I was looking at a 1hr25 Ironman swim. There may yet be hope that I can bring that down to 1hr10 through efficiency improvements. There's a 2-day intensive clinic at the end of the month (nearby, not in town) that I should sign up for.

I'll be evaluating my bike and run goals shortly (or writing about them, anyway).

My charities

As I mentioned in my first blog entry, I'm doing an Ironman triathlon and one of my aims is to raise money for a cause very close to my heart. Uveitis research. I can't even begin to imagine how terrifying uveitis, both symptoms and treatments, must be for children and the many people more squeamish than me. Usually I'm accepting of my disease and the treatments necessary, but it's not always easy.

To the point -- I expect that people reading this blog are mostly from one of two places. The UK (where I'm from) or the USA (my new home, at least for now). If you're from somewhere else, please consider the charities I'm supporting and if you know of one in your home country, I encourage you to support them too.

Yes, support Uveitis research!
In the UK please go to my Virgin Money Giving page (http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/drSteve). The charity I'm supporting is Olivia's Vision, please support them too.

In the USA (if you want your donation to be tax-deductible) please give to http://www.uveitis.org/. I don't have a FirstGiving page because 1) they take too much of your donation, and 2) the OIUF don't seem to have new fundraising enabled through FirstGiving. If you donate, please leave a comment here, on my Twitter or send me email. I'd love to keep track of how much is being raised.

If you're in neither country, please donate to Olivia's Vision through my fundraising page.

Thank you so much for reading this, and even more if you are considering donating to the cause. If you want to wait and see whether I make it around the course, that's fine, leave a comment and encourage me to train hard!
You could encourage me by setting an incentive scheme... for example: completion=$25 and an extra $10 for every hour under the 17hr cutoff. You could offer a bonus donation of $25 for getting under my 12hr target. So, if I finished in 13:40 that'd be $55; if I finished in 11:59 it'd be $100 to support uveitis research.

That's just an example, but any donations or pledges are welcome (large or small).

Back on the trail (w/ race schedule)

After my enforced week of rest I've had a week of exercise again!

I've been doing the bike commute to work all this week, and while it's not a long ride, it's good to get back out on the road. Since the days are still short and the roads are in lousy condition from the grit/ice/plough/repeat, I've mostly been riding the mountain bike. The extra weight and rolling resistance is good training, right?

The bike trainer has also seen an hour of use (first ride since surgery) and I even got out for a lunchtime 21 miler on the Boardman (including a rather embarrassing failure-to-unclip moment).

I got back to the pool on Thursday too. Rather than using the waterproof "Workouts in a Binder" book, me and my swim buddy made up our own main set:

6x100: DPS, Mod, N/S  -- RI:20

Ladder: 1x50, 1x100, 1x200, 1x300, 1x200, 1x100, 1x50. (~1:50 pace)  RI:20

The main set got cut 150m short, due to the pool closing. Still, I got 2km down, including my warm up.

I should really head there today too and see if I can sign up for the new stroke correction classes.

Running has been a slow starter this week. None actually happened, but I did think about it!

My core routine has been resumed too. I got myself a Swiss Ball and a workout mat before Christmas and I've been doing a short ball workout every morning: crunches, back raises, push-ups and squats. I'm slowly lengthening it and will be including some more exercises soon.

So I'm back on the Ironman trail and I'm ready to start lifting the training again. All I have to do now is set a race and training schedule. The race calendar so far...

March: Lake Havasu City Olympic Tri

April: TriTaos Reverse Sprint

May**: Santa Fe century (maybe)

June***: Tour de Los Alamos; Billy the Kid Tombstone Olympic Tri; Storrie Lake Olympic Tri

July: Splash'n'Dash series, DamitMan Sprint Tri, XTERRA Dread Mon Tri

August: Boulder 70.3 (maybe)

August: Los Alamos Sprint Tri

September: Ironman Wales

After that, who knows... maybe the HITS Lake Havasu Half in November. Maybe Austin 70.3 again...

** Might be in Japan for this!

*** Thinking about the sprint distance for one of these tris... 

Ghosts and Halos

It's now five days since my cataract surgery. I've had that uncomfortable "new glasses" feeling -- where your eyes and brain are working hard to adapt -- only I can't get relief by taking the glasses off. My new acrylic lens is built-in and will (hopefully) be there for the rest of my life. The vision in my right eye has drastically improved. I don't get blinding glare from the most meagre of light sources; I read the 20/20 line at the optometrists; the world is a brighter and sharper place.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows though. The new lens is set for distance vision, and unlike a natural lens can't give me focus at multiple distances. So my near vision is shot, permanently, in that eye. Still, I was damn near blind in that eye before the surgery so I am grateful that I can see again. I also have ghosts and halos in my vision, probably from my brain and eye getting used to a new lens that's still healing into place. Occasionally a partial halo from something bright will arc across my vision. Sometimes I can feel something dancing just out of my peripheral vision that vanishes when I try to work out what it is -- ghosts.

Regardless, it's a good thing to have done. My uveitis hasn't gone anywhere, and it kind of looks like my cystoid macular edema is coming back, but I'm set for better vision over the next 5 years than I've had over the last three. Just so long as there are no unexpected turns for the worse. So how was the experience of cataract surgery?

Almost everyone will get cataracts at some point, if we live long enough, so almost everyone knows someone whose life has been impacted by cataracts. Mostly these are older folks, but it can happen to anyone. For that reason I want to "review" my cataract surgery.

My surgery was done by Dr Ford, who runs the Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute. The consult was professional, informative and the consulting doctor was friendly and helpful. The techs did a good job and the office staff were great.

Now, if you don't want to read details, you should probably skip the rest of this post...
(1 line summary: short process; no real discomfort; eye is doing well)


...


Still with me? Okay. So the surgery prep started with being given a numbing eye drop, and a dilating eye drop. I was also given a giant tablet to manage my ocular pressure post-op. There was some allegedly foul-tasting liquid on offer to reduce anxiety, but I declined. Finally some electrodes were stuck on the backs of my hands.
The next step was the anaesthesia - PCLI use a technqiue called "retro-bulbar block", which involves insertion of a needle into the muscles behind the eyeball, before injecting a lidocaine mixture. There was a little pain on the needle entering the muscles, but it quickly disappeared and it was only a couple of minutes before half of my head went numb. To be honest, the numbness was the most disconcerting part of the whole thing for me.

Once that was done I was hooked up to a machine to monitor my blood pressure, heart rate and blood oxygen saturation. The latter two are done with just a clip that goes on your fingertip, so nothing to fret over there.

I can't report anything about the surgery, as all I felt was occasional water running down my cheek (from the nurse irrigating the eye) and a slight pressure on my forehead (from the surgeon's hand?). I couldn't see anything and mostly I distracted myself listening to the musical tones made by the suction machine. Apparently the level of suction is indicated by the pitch!

The whole thing felt like it took less than five minutes, and then I was led out to the waiting room by a nurse who took my blood pressure. Now, as the youngest patient that day (by a good 25 years) I wasn't expecting to need to be helped anywhere by a nurse -- I must confess though, my knees weren't as steady as usual after the surgery. A feeling that passed in a minute or two.

After about three hours I tried removing the tape that was keeping my eyelid closed, since I could feel the eye trying to open and I could sort of blink. Apparently that was too early! I could see fine through my refurbished eye, it's just that everything was tilted by about 30 degrees. With both eyes open that made for crazy double vision, so I had the eye re-taped. I eventually untaped the eye and could see without double vision nearly 6 hours after the surgery. Since then, I've been on a regimen of three sets of eye-drops, four times a day.

PCLI get a big thumbs up from me for their awesome staff and for the successful surgery. One more thing: I was given a complimentary DVD of my surgery, "through the microscope". I have not watched it yet.

Welcome to 2012!

A bit late, I know, but I've had a lot on. So far this year I've had a new implant in my left eye, and I've had a consult with the cataract surgeon to see what improvement in vision I might get and whether I need a Toric lens. I've taken my favourite bike out for a winter ride and I've done a couple of rides on the trainer. I've even done a little running and swimming.

My next swim won't be for over a week. On Tuesday I have surgery to replace the lens in my right eye. The surgery starts with a small incision (apparently it won't need stitches, which is great because I can't figure out how you'd stitch an eyeball) and is followed by 'phaco-emulsification' - that means liquefaction of the lens in my eye - and insertion of the new lens. No cycling for at least two days; no running, swimming or anything strenuous for at least a week. I'll be keeping fingers crossed for a successful surgery.

So what will I do while I can't train? Given my tentative race schedule this year I should be in a base phase at the moment, so time on the trainer at low HR will be all I'm allowed and thankfully, a good thing for my training plan. Of course, I don't really have a proper training plan...

My training plan for Ironman Austin 70.3 consisted of riding whenever I wanted all year, then 10 weeks beforehand I started swimming and running intermittently. After about 5 swims I did my first ever triathlon - a sprint distance. Then I carried on with my haphazard training until about 6 weeks out, when I read some training plans online and combined them with my schedule and some advice from Joe Friel and Gordo Byrne's book "Going Long"... I wrote my plan down on the back of an envelope (seriously) and almost managed to follow it. My results were good enough to make me happy - I mean, I finished and just about hit my target time, even though I flatted on the bike course. Of course, I felt like death on the run, but there's a lesson in that!

This year will be more organised than that. I will not rely on half-baked scribbles on the back of an envelope. I have stocked up on books (Going Long; Be Iron Fit; and Ironman Start to Finish) along with some books to address my technique limiter, swimming. I will be working to make a fully fleshed out training plan that fits around my work commitments and I will try to stick to it. My nutrition will be better thought out. I will work on technique and strength a little more. More than all that, I'll be working on a positive mental attitude; it's far too easy to let my vision problems bring me down and that is destructive thinking that I will not allow.

The story so far...

So where did this all start?

I remember sitting on a friends balcony overlooking Newcastle Harbour (Australia) and talking with friends about what we wanted to accomplish in the next few years. Being a fairly active bunch, someone said they wanted to run a marathon. I said I'd love to do that, but having been a middle distance runner as a teenager I thought I'd push too hard and hurt myself - I'd had to stop running competitvely at age 16 due to a knee condition. At the time I was volunteering as a surf lifesaver at my local beach and was doing some ocean swims. The only running I did then was beach sprints. Bike? My mountain biking had pretty  much dried up since leaving the UK and I had a rusty old thing I used to ride to work sometimes, but mostly to the beach.

A couple of good friends from the surf club were trying their hand at triathlon and suggested that I should do the sprint triathlon. I politely declined, saying that I could be persuaded to be part of a relay. My swimming was strong enough, but I wasn't a competitive speed. My bike skills were good, but just riding fast on the road? Where was the fun? And running, well, I was good over the shorter distances, but I hadn't done any competitive running for nearly 15 years! I carried on with my beach sprints and my ocean swims, but racing 18 year-olds when you're 29 is tough on a 60m sprint. So I moved to the 2km beach run. Then I did my first 10km road race since the 1980s!

Then, sadly, my time in Australia was over. I said goodbye to my friends and moved to the southwest of the USA. It didn't take long for a colleague to sell me a road bike (a beautiful 1994 Eddy Merckx) and I found out that not only did I still love cycling, but that road biking was awesome! In the first year road biking I rode my first century and won my age group in my first road race. Several centuries later, I entered a local duathlon (10km run, 40km bike, 5km run), just for the challenge. With too little run training and a snowy race day (the bike course was cut to 30km for safety reasons) I pushed myself to a time that I didn't expect. Sure, it wasn't a brilliant time. I didn't win. That wasn't why I was there. But it was fun! And it gave me something to focus on, to concentrate on getting to know myself and my limits.

While all that was happening I had noticed a blurry spot appear in my left eye. When it didn't go away after a couple of weeks (stupid, I know) I saw an optometrist who referred me to a macular specialist. Cystoid macular edema, they said, with some other guesses at the cause. After a short while I flew to Dallas to see a uveitis specialist, who confirmed idiopathic uveitis. Idiopathic = unknown cause. Great. Steroid treatments for the swelling in my retina had given me cataracts and secondary glaucoma. So my doctors changed to a less effective, but safer treatment. The glaucoma went away, but the swelling remained. And now I have implants of a different kind of steroid in my eyes, to slowly release the medicine. And since my edema is recurrent, I've been put on immuno-suppressants as uveitis is typically an auto-immune disease.

August 2011: Nearly three years after that evening on the balcony at Newcastle Harbour, I did my first triathlon. Sprint distance (B:20km/S:400m/R:5km) and finished in 1hr10min. 20th overall and 2nd in my age group. The only person to finish in less than one hour was Viktor Zyemtsev, a professional triathlete and 9-time Ironman champion!

October 2011: Ironman Austin 70.3. My second ever triathlon, and with a target time of 6 hours I was happy to get 6hr7min. The swim was fantastic, and probably one of my fastest open water swims. The bike leg was on some terrible roads and I stopped twice to fix a leaky rear tyre. First time I checked for obvious holes and just re-inflated the tube. Second time I had to change the tube. I counted about 12 minutes lost, in total, for the flat. The run was three laps, and I really hurt on lap 2 - the heat was intense and I was putting all my energy into a positive attitude. The feeling of finishing was amazing, and I really have to thank my girl for being there, supporting me and cheering me on. In fact, I have to thank all the random strangers, both off and on the course, for being so amazing and supportive. The atmosphere at Austin was unbelievable and really made the day!

After Austin I started planning my assault on the full Ironman distance. Since running appeared to be my current weakness, I entered a half-marathon. At high altitude (7500ft), with significant hills. Training between Austin and early December was mostly running. I wanted 1hr45. No-one was more surprised than me when I managed a 1hr36! So now I'm paid up for Ironman Wales, and I know I can do it. It's supposed to be a hard course (yes, it's Ironman, they're all hard), but having family there will make it the easiest course possible.

Why Ironman? Because it's there, and I want to prove I can do it. Finishing is a must, but finishing in daylight would be awesome. That gives me about 12 hours to do it. To hit the top 10 in my age group I'd need about 10hr20, based on last year's results. Is it possible? I'm not looking to win, or qualify for Kona, but I will go as hard as I can while ensuring that I finish. And I will not waste the opportunity - I may be fighting to keep my vision, and training while taking immuno-suppressants - I will tell anyone who will listen that uveitis is a leading cause of preventable blindness, but that too few doctors are trained in ocular immunology. That makes diagnosis difficult and makes it hard to get proper treatment in time. It also means that resources for research into this (currently) incurable disease are limited.

My hopes for this year are long-term remission of my uveitis and macular edema, a sub-12 hour time at Ironman Wales and increased awareness and support for uveitis sufferers. I will be starting some fundraising in the new year, for charities in my home country, and in my current home. Watch this space.