Hello

Hello everyone.  Since this is my first blog post I am going to introduce myself and what I am going to talk about in this blog.  I have never blogged before so this could be interesting.

My name is Russ and I have been racing in different sports for the past 17 years.  I started out as a swimmer on a local pool’s summer league.  Then, I join my high school swim team and started coaching the team where I got my start swimming competitively.  During my junior year of high school, I got more serious and joined one of the local club swim teams and got considerably faster.  After my last high school swim season was over, I felt kind of lost and started looking for a new sport.  Triathlons were on the up swing, and still are, in Oklahoma, so I signed up for my first one that summer at the pool where my high school team practiced.  This is when my obsession with bicycles started.  I raced triathlons throughout college and started the triathlon club at my university.  After college, I found myself in almost the same situation as when I was in high school, the major difference was I could still race triathlons.  So, I started looking at my options for just bicycle races and running.  

I have become more comfortable with all three; triathlons, bicycling and running.  Triathlons, bicycling and running is what this blog is going to be about.

Just to get this clear, I am not some guy that just decided one day that I am going to race and was instantly good at it, though my little brother would say otherwise.  I have worked hard and I have had to overcome many obstacles.

The first major obstacle was transferring from being an athlete that just raced for fun in the summer and was pretty good for that small league to moving into the big world of high school swimming.  My high school team had 8 lanes to practice.  Lane one was the fastest and lane eight was the slowest, I was in lane seven.  I worked hard that year and was one of two guys on the team willing to swim the 500 yard freestyle.  By the end of the year, I moved up to lane six.  That summer, I went back to my summer league and was unbeatable.  The following high school season I realized the only way I could go faster was to drop some weight.  When I say some, I mean 70 pounds in total.  I started out weighing 210 pounds, a pretty dang heavy swimmer.  I made myself an exercise regiment to lose the weight.  It consisted of push-ups, crunches and running stairs before school, then swim practice during school, and running and weight lifting after school.  This totaled to around 4 hours of exercise a day.  In a three month period, I lost the 70 pounds and was down to 140 pound, pretty light for a guy who is 5’10”.  My new body felt amazing!  I had more energy and I felt like my limbs were feathers.  This really helped me to drop a considerable amount of time in my races.

Then I got the bright idea that I wanted to be a body builder.  I started lifting weights more and got up to 170 pounds.  At first, this also helped my swimming because I had more power behind my shoulders and was able to move more water with each stroke.  Then, I started to get to bulky and started to plateau.  This was about my senior year of high school.  So, to counter the plateau I join the local club team known for making anyone faster.  With this team, I practiced twice a day on top of training after practice myself.  I had one practice before school and one practice after school.  Both practices pushed me so much harder then I had ever expected.  I was getting cramps so bad in my legs that it took one person to hold me down and another person to straighten out my leg.

About half way through my senior year, my orthodontist informed me that my lower jaw was too big and I needed surgery to correct it.  I was given the option by my parents to wait until the summer, the summer between high school and college, or have the surgery during Christmas break, middle of swim season.  Most of my family and friend thought I would choose to wait till summer, but I chose the Christmas break option.  I was out for 3 weeks; it was supposed to be 4 to 5.  I lost a record of 20 pounds from this surgery because it was so painful to eat and I have 4 plates and 20 screws in my jaws.    As you can guess, I felt totally different when I got back in the pool.  I lost all my body fat and some muscle, but more importantly, I could not dive into the pool off the blocks because of jaw.  I had to totally change my event mid-season. I started training for back stroke and ended the season 1/100th of a second off of state cut for Oklahoma.

At this point, I started to think about triathlons.  I am by no means a runner and, at this point, I absolutely hated it but I saw the benefits in it.  I had always enjoyed bike riding for fun.  So, I went out to the local bike shop and financed the cheapest road bike I could get.  That was all I needed to get hooked.  I started training everyday and with my experience as a swimmer I took second in my age group at my first race.  

It was in this same summer that Oklahoma City had their first premier triathlon that is now held annually  It is the Redman and they offer half iron distance and iron distance every year.  I watched as the racers were out on the course for hours long past when the sun was going down.  I decided that day that I was going to complete the Redman.  I have now done 5 half iron distance races and one full iron distance race.

During high school and college, I had several job relating to racing.  I was the coach of the summer swim team where I got my start and  one other summer league team.  During my senior year of high school, I started to help coach my high school team.  While in college, I did some private coaching on the side for the triathletes on my college club team and for some swimmers on my old high school team. My senior year of college, I was hired on at the local bike shop as the resident triathlon expert.  I was trained in how to fit bicycles and I gave advice to the customers on how to get faster in their races.  I loved working with bicycles and racers every day, but I found out that I am not the best at selling things because I have trouble trying to get people to spend more money than I believe they should spend.

Now I have graduated from college and moved to New Mexico.  I started getting a little burned out just doing triathlons and I have started looking around at what other endurance races I can do.  I have now done a half marathon (found out I am still not a runner), a century bicycle race, and started competing in cyclocross.  I am also helping coach the local high school swim team.