The Gabster

Mighty Hamptons Triathlon

17 Sep 07 @ 09:44 PM  category » sports

So, we did it. Alex arrived on Thursday evening and on Friday afternoon we drove up to the Barn. Alex got her ocean swim in before it got dark, although it wasn't as warm as I'd expected and it was a bit windy. We had an early night, what with her jetlag and all and lots to do on Saturday.

Problem was, it rained like a motherf***r on Friday night. Hard, driving and fast - and the sound of rain on the canvas of a yurt is really quite loud. I didn't sleep much...

We were a bit miserable on Saturday as it looked like it was going to rain all day. But luckily it cleared up by mid-afternoon. We did all our errands, and went to register and get Alex her suit and bike. Well, that proved complicated. Alex is so tiny they had to keep giving her a smaller wetsuit to try. Then they gave her one so small so got claustrophobia in the changing room. Difficult stuff.

So, the race itself: well, getting up at 4.30am for a race is uncivilised to say the least, and it is probably the reason I will never be a regular triathlete. Perhaps when I am much older I will take it more seriously - old people don't sleep as much. Aside: I've always thought that rather contrary. Old people usually have less to do with their day than younger people, so they should sleep more, and young people should sleep less. Who said "Youth is wasted on the young"? Francis Bacon, I think.

Anyway, grump aside, we got there and got set up. Not with much time to spare, and so, suddenly, we were off. I'll spare you the blow by blow details, god, how dull, but suffice to say the swim seemed much further than it needed to be, the bike was stunningly beautiful, and the run was, well, exhausting, but considering I hadn't thought I'd be able to run at all, I was just glad to be doing it.

And I finished just 3 or 4 minutes slower than my last tri, so - without much training, and with a dodgy toe - I think I acquitted myself adequately. Alex loved it, completely, and so I think we have a new convert. She'll have to come out and do one with me every year, and I'll do one in London with her too. I hear Windsor is lovely...

It is a great way to spend a Sunday, once you are awake.

Whiteout in Tahoe...

27 Feb 07 @ 10:16 AM  category » sports

This beats ice and slush on the east coast. The storm went on for 2 days. It got me stranded up in Tahoe when all my mates wanted to stay there through the storm and I had to get back to SF for meetings and to fly home. Luckily I ran into a friend from NY who gave me a ride back to SF. We set off at 2pm on Sunday; by 4.30pm we had gone 2 miles from Squaw towards Truckee. So we turned back, had dinner at Plumpjack, and then set off again at 10pm. This time we got through. At the gas station in Auburn at midnight, we met a guy who had been sitting in his truck since 11am that morning.

The snow is fabulous but the consequences are hell.

Flash cars in ugly places

01 Jun 06 @ 09:31 AM  category » sports

While walking down the street in Monaco last weekend, we passed a parking lot - nondescript, concrete, dingy...well, a parking lot - in which there were a fair number of fancy cars: Ferraris, Lamborghinis etc. But then Mark spotted this. Apparently this is the Maserati Corsa MC12, of which there are only 30 or so made in the world.

Since we were allowed nowhere near the cars, Mark bribed the parking attendant to take his camera closer for a decent shot of the car.

Mike over at Jalopnik was very happy.

On my To Do list

17 Jul 05 @ 02:14 PM  category » adventure | sports

Sports near NYC:

Skydive Long Island
Skywalk Kiteboarding Amagansett 212 433 0886
Espo's Surf and Sport, Easthampton.
Sag Harbor Sailing

Those Amazing Women

15 Jul 05 @ 05:41 PM  category » sports

I looked up the women triathletes that competed on Sunday with prosthetic limbs. I wanted to know their stories.

Amy Dodson (the one who overtook me) lost a leg and then a lung to cancer at 20.
Kelly Bruno runs on two prosthetic legs, having had problems as a young child.
Amy Winters
Tricia Downing is paralysed from the chest down after a bike accident in 2000.

I have nothing but enormous admiration for them all.

Results are in

13 Jul 05 @ 07:11 PM  category » sports

So the NYC Tri results are in. So I didn't quite make my goal of breaking 3:00 hrs. I did 3:07, courtesy of that damn awful swim. But I look at it positively this way: I broke 00:30 on the swim, I broke 01:30 on the bike, and I did the run in under 01:00. In fact, I seem to like 9s. Just need to work on those transitions and swim properly, and I might even do a decent time one day.

I came solidly in the middle of my age group pack. But I came 8th in the Athena division, which is a special category for big girls that weigh more than a certain amount. It's true, I am an Athena. Ordinarily I would never want to admit that I have heavy bones, but if it makes me 8th in my division, hell yeah!

Results

8 Gabrielle Darbyshire 34 New York          
Swim 29:55 | T 7:35 | Bike 1:29:20 | T 1:12 | Run 59:39 | Total 3:07:39 

Committed to the Challenge

10 Jul 05 @ 11:55 PM  category » joys | sports

At 5am this morning, as I was wandering along Riverside Drive towards the swim start, surrounded by nervously excited chattering triathletes, I saw a remarkable sight. Three women ahead of me - tall, lean and extremely athletic - were walking along jauntily laughing amongst themselves.

But all of them had prosthetic legs. The contraptions attached at the thigh and displayed a variety of bionic shapes and sizes. One woman's lower leg was a simple curved bendy piece of metal like a scoop, with a flat part for the foot; another's seemed to have springs for the lower leg leading to a solid foot block. I was transfixed, walking behind them, for, had they not been wearing shorts and thus openly displaying these miracles of modern technology, I would never have noticed anything strange about their gait or demeanour. Then I noticed the others in wheelchairs: one man with no legs, another with a single arm, all dressed in their tri suits and raring to go.

I was myself too nervous to think more about them for a while. But as I finished up the last mile of my run, the woman with the scoop leg ran past me. I practically fell over in surprise (ok, not surprise, I was tired). She was moving. It inpsired me to run faster, despite wanting to stop and walk the rest of the way. And then I calculated the truth - the disabled atheletes had started some twenty or thirty minutes after I had, which meant that she was not only moving, she was a seriously elite athlete with a time to be proud of even as an able bodied competitor.

Which got me to thinking about the origin of her disability, and of the famous stories of people overcoming tragedy - like Lance Armstrong. Were these people serious athletes already, who had a bad accident, but would not let that deter them from their passion - like the paralysed skiers you see who bomb down the slopes strapped into their contraptions, who most likely injured themselves leaping off an enormous cliff or competing in the Olympics? Or were these non-competitive people who were born with a disability, or had an accident at some point later in life, and instead of wallowing in despair, decided at some point to become a champion athlete? I'm fascinated to understand the difference in motivation, and what it takes, if indeed you are one of the latter types, to go from nothing to elite from the sheer force of your willpower.

Don't get me wrong: I think Lance Armstrong is an amazing character. But he was already a professional sportsman before he was diagnosed with cancer, already had the competitive streak, the determination, the willpower. Getting cancer was a tragedy, but for someone like him with those characteristics already, it must have been somehow more a foregone conclusion in his own mind that he wouldn't let it beat him down. And so it proved to be the making of the man, or at least the making of the legend, if he was a man of measure to start with. But cancer, once cured, is gone and he has clearly regained the fitness he had before, and then some. A leg, on the other hand, once gone, is gone for ever. And if you were not already a sportman or woman, how do you not only get over the agony and despair of the accident, but then train yourself to compete at this level? What if you didn't have a competitive bone in your body beforehand? Does that mean you wouldn't try? Can you change?

So now I want to know about the life histories of those amazing men and women who completely kicked my ass in the Tri. My hat's off to you all. I have no excuse, no reason to complain that my muscles ache, and that I don't want to get up at 6am to swim train. In fact, I'm so inspired, that I am going to go volunteer at the Achilles Track Club, which enables people with disabilities to do athletics in Central Park every week.

NYC Triathlon

10 Jul 05 @ 10:58 PM  category » sports

Well, I did it. Not particularly fast, not particularly distinctively, but I managed to finish with a spurt of real energy, and think I was actually sprinting across the finish line (the joy of ending is a great motivator!).

The swim wasn't great. I must practice more in open water. My tri suit felt too tight so I couldn't breathe easily, I got kicked in the head, I kept touching things, that, in my over active imagination (having seen the evidence yesterday) I believed were dead rats, and then I drank what I believed was rat-water right afterwards. Those are the sorts of things that make you panic a bit, and swim badly. Then my goggles fogged up and I couldn't sight properly (which I don't do at the best of times anyway). The upshot? I spent a lot of the swim doing breaststroke!

The bike, on the other hand, was lovely. We got the northbound lane of the Henry Hudson Parkway all to ourselves, and at one point I hit 35 mph going downhill. Wheeeeeeeee! Cool breeze, empty road, early morning - lovely.

The run was more challenging - heavy legs, hot weather, cramp in my foot from those damn elastic laces (Racing 101, Lesson #1: don't try something new just before a race). But it wasn't too bad.

I wanted to break 3 hours - my goal was to be no slower than the last race I did 4 years ago. I did 3:07. The extra seven minutes were exactly due to having a crappy swim, that I should have done faster. But at least I know that next time I will be able to improve my time by at least 10-15 mins, if I train properly!

Anyway, it was fun. Various folks came to meet me at the end (only long-suffering partners or fellow fanatics would get up with you at 4am and come out to watch the start at 6.00am) and we went for brunch at Tavern on the Green, which was a first for all of us. Very fancy, very definitely a place to take your parents when visiting, but also quite delicious and charming in the garden. Pix below.

Not heartening

24 Jun 05 @ 12:27 PM  category » sports

This, from a good friend in London, does NOT fill me with warm fuzzy feelings. He's in good shape, much more so than me. Now I am getting a bit worried. I really, really, don't do heat.

I had a bit of a nasty wake up call last weekend. Was doing my big triathlon in Windsor - training all gone well, feeling fit etc. It was super duper hot, we were the last wave in, and, to cut a long story very short, I collapsed after crossing the line with heat exhaustion. I came to in the first aid tent with drips in my arms and was soon put in an ambulance and carted off to Reading Hospital. There were two nearer hospitals, but they were already full with dried out triathletes. There were apparently about 50 who needed first aid - of whom about 20 who needed ambulances, and 4 needed air ambulances! It was like a scene from Mash I'm told.

Why not to Kite Surf...

20 Jul 04 @ 04:37 PM  category » adventure | sports

A perfectly reasonable explanation from David Galbraith on why he wonn't be taking up kite surfing any time soon (via email). I, of course, will ignore him.

1. It looks too difficult.
2. I would inevitably 'catch some air', fly off the beach and through the plate glass windows of the second floor of someone's beachside bungalow.
3. It looks way too difficult and requires 3 square miles of uninterrupted beach front per person.
4. Flying a kite is not supposed to be an extreme sport, but something safe, quixotic and romantic that makes chicks think you are a sensitive type that may be worth sleeping with.
5. Why would I expend energy failing miserably at something that requires a huge amount of effort to get laid, when there is a lazy, safe, cheap alternative?
6. I already have a 2 foot kite of the quixotic genre; but am willing to watch other people do it with the same relish that watching Formula 1 with the specific unspoken aim of seeing crashes provides.

Skating in the Park

14 Jan 03 @ 11:47 AM  category » new york | sports

It had to be done.  Standard winter fare in the city.  A bit shaky at first, and damn uncomfortable in those nasty boots, but fun nonetheless.  My trick, as with ski boots, is to grit my teeth until my feet go numb, and then I can cope with anything as long as I don't take my boots off.  Once I stop and relax for half an hour, it is well-nigh impossible to get going again.  But it is nice to know that years can go by and it will still come back to you.

Yet it really is a strange past-time if you think about it - going round in fairly small circles, lemming-like, trying to avoid being run over by kamikaze kids cutting milimetres in front of you as you, wobbling, try to retain your balance and composure, all the while trying to keep a smile on your face.  And the worst damn kamikaze kid was wearing a staff jacket!  He couldn't have been more than 10 years old.  Probably got the job as management decided it was easier to have him with them than against them.  I don't think it made any difference, frankly.  I was wondering if I would get chucked out if I picked him up by the scruff of his neck as he whizzed by and told him to chill out.  In the end, it wasn't the chucking out prospect that stopped me - it was the inevitable humiliation I would suffer as I collapsed in a heap on the ice, arms flailing wildly as I failed to keep hold of my prey.

Surfing Newbie

20 Jul 02 @ 10:26 PM  category » sports

Have just got back from surfing down in Pacifica.  Hmm.  In theory I love this surfing lark, but in practice I have been spoilt by doing most of my (limited) surfing in Hawai'i.  Damn the SF weather.  It was so cold on the beach that the water was actually preferable, but so windy that swimming out past the break drained me of pretty much all my strength before I even managed to get to the point of failing dismally to stand up.  It just kind of takes away the thrill of learning something to have to struggle to even be bad at it.  But I will persevere, because I still have this vision of one day catching a decent wave, leaping with great agility to my feet and actually staying up for more than a nanosecond.  I'm just not sure this is likely to happen round these 'ere parts.  And the sand, the sand.  Pesky stuff, that.  Especially in cahoots with the wind.  Has no respect for personal space or privacy.  Couldn't lie down to read without an earful, mouthful and eyeful of the stuff, and sitting carried its own attendant problems, producing a Twister-esque result as we tried to keep a hold of every movable object in sight.  Took a while to rediscover the towels as we were leaving, completely buried under the sand. 

So, at the rate I'm going (surfing about once every 6 months) I reckon I should be able to turn on a wave by the time I'm...50.  Something to aspire to, then.