This first photo is actually from July - in the six weeks since it was taken, he has grown approximately two feet.

So after not racing (or, at least, not finishing) either of the two races I alluded to when we last spoke, it was off to Home Depot, Office Max, and the grocery store for a few last-minute supplies for Star Island, where Steph and I led the Senior High youth group.

For the second year in a row we did human powered waterskiing, pretty much the best activity in the history of ever.  Our youths built waterskis out of plywood (thanks, Home Depot!):

And then, with a combination of brains and brute strength, hove each other several hundred feet up to the swimming beach.  I want to reiterate that this actually worked, and I cannot recommend it highly enough, both for its entertainment value and the sense of accomplishment it brings:

We also played an amazing variant of speed scrabble (shout out to Sarah Day, if you ever read this, thank you for teaching me this game) - Steph decided we could play human speed scrabble.  Imagine fifty people running around with letters on their heads, trying to form themselves into a crossword.  We also played scandal jeopardy (”This depression-era scandal was short and stout.”), and had The Mother Of All Scavenger Hunts.  This last item deserves revisiting, another time.

Stephanie and I also got engaged during polar bear (that is, dawn) swimming on Monday morning.  Truly I never thought I would have the following conversation:

“Will you marry me?”

“Are you bullshitting me?”

But it turned out for the best, as she did, after the initial shock, say yes!  Sorry, Steph, for catching you so off guard.  Actually, I take that back, I’m not sorry at all, it was awesome.

Naturally, all of that excitement left me with a prodigious apetite, so I tried to eat her head. NOM NOM NOM.

And now it’s fall, we’re back home and working.  I am deep in to my preparations for the Hawaii Ironman now, but I will try to update a little more often!

This summer, I’m signed up for both of those races again!  But instead of several weeks of solid training underneath me, I have three desperate weeks of post-ironman recovery.  The first two weeks felt fine, surprisingly, but this past week has been awful.  I’d heard that the post-IM fatigue was going to hit pretty hard eventually, and it sure did.  But I dragged myself through a lackluster training week and I’m now ready to have a go at my hometown half ironman.

Also, because I’m not really ready to let go of the cool stuff that’s been happening since IMLP - here’s a photo of a newspaper vending machine in downtown Lake Placid the Monday after the race.  Yep, that’s me on the ground.

And, the fine folks at slowtwitch.com interviewed me as part of their series on pro athlete interviews! You can read the interview here.

So. I went to the lake fifteen minutes ahead of the start time and warmed up. At some races, you cannot tell when they give the start signal. Someone yells “go”, or presses the “siren” button on their toy-store megaphone, and all the athletes in the water kind of look at each other. This is not an issue in Lake Placid, where they detonate an army surplus bomb to signal the race start. I started hard, and then ramped that up to quite hard for the first 500 meters. I was with Hilary Biscay’s group, which I figured was awesome since she is a way faster swimer than I am. Then she (or someone) surged at the first turn buoy and me and two others were gapped. We held the gap at about ten seconds, but we could not catch them. Anyway, I couldn’t catch them. After the fastest 1900 meter swim of my life, I ran around the dock for another lap. It was nice to have my buddy in the green cap just ahead of me on the second lap, since we went through some huge groups of swimmers from the AG wave I had a much easier time spotting him while trying to weave my way through without getting dropped. (SIDE NOTE to the dude who was swimming breaststroke in the middle of a tight pack and kicked me squarely in the hip, I will pay $25 toward a private swim lesson for you, provided it focuses on your learning to swim freestyle).

Out of the water in 52:15, a 1 minute PR, not sure of my official time. T1 took less than an hour.

The bike was cold and rainy at first, especially downhill in to Keene the first time. After that, though, I got onto my race watts and figured it would warm me up. It did. A pile of people passed me on lap 1, and I went up the hill back to LP looking for the fabled “three bears”. I counted at least 19 bears, but I kept my watts steady and eventually made it to the top of the hill. At the beginning of lap 2, two more guys passed me, but then they slowed way down, so I passed them back. That was the last time that anyone passed me all day. On lap two, I rode downhill into Keene at around 900 MPH and then back onto the race watts. I rode 2:30 and some seconds the first lap, and I think six guys went by me. On the second lap, I rode 2:30 and some seconds and passed them all back. My average power was 223 watts.

Arrived in T2 in ninth place, T2 took less than an hour.

I ran for a little while, and then near mile 1 a crazy man was shouting at me. He knew my name, and he was telling me all sorts of crazy shit like “Those guys are just ahead of you! You need to catch them NOW!!! Come on Ronco!!” etc. I ran past him four times, and every time it was the same stuff. Kurt, it was nice to meet you after the race and I appreciate your putting the fear of god in me. FYI, I did catch one of the two guys who were just ahead at mile 1, but I did not catch Petr Vabrousek. Sorry.

The run was really, really hard. No, I take that back. The run was actually kind of mellow for the first eighteen miles. I just ran at a “normal” running pace, which (thank you, sea level!!) was around 6:45 per mile. I started drinking coke around mile eight and I guess I slowed down gradually until mile eighteen. At mile eighteen, I had to start drinking quite a lot of coke but I stayed on 3 hour pace. At mile 22, there started to be - who knew? - these huge hills. I ran up the hills by the ski jumps pretty hard, then back past The Crazy Guy Who Turned Out To Be Truckweaz, then back in to town I passed Paulo and Jodi at the bottom of The Really, Really Steep Hill. Paulo was shitting a brick. I think he must have then tied it to my back, because although I ran up that hill as hard as I possibly could, it took about a week.

I kept running on that ragged edge of “oh-crap-I-am-going-to-black-out” until I saw that I had a good half mile on the guy behind me. This gave me time to think to myself “holy crap! i am going to finish fifth!” as I entered the oval. It was raining and I was laughing, I slapped a bunch of peoples hands, screamed, jumped up and down. I crossed the line and turned around to scream again, fell over. When I got up, I think I tried to hug Mike Reilly. He asked me some questions, but I do not know what they were. I saw Paulo and Jodi, and went over and hugged them. I am pretty sure I made a giant fool of myself in the finish chute, but it was worth it.

This morning, my picture was on the front of the local paper. I bought eleven copies.

In summary, WHOA, big breakthrough race! If you did not catch it in all of my verbage, I was FIFTH! And I am GOING TO KONA!

I learned a few things: CSS is pretty hard, I have at least an idea of what I want my blog to look like, and I do not have time to write a blog and design a blog at the same time. It still needs polish, a few spacing adjustments, and to have its margins fixed in internet explorer, but all in all I am quite pleased with myself.

Aside from that, it’s been a long winter! I had a great vacation, hernia surgery, and am now full-tilt back in to training. I am racing for a NEW TEAM this season! The Craft / Cervelo / Karhu multisport team, with support (ie. wetsuits!) from BlueSeventy. I am very excited about this, there are two other guys on the team and I am hoping that we can make a bit of noise this season.

Finally, to atone for not posting for the past six months … here is a video of my nephew munching on some french fries.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
All of my base
Are belong to you

After a few weeks of not being able to go into a store without hearing someone’s horrible interpretation of a Christmas album, I can’t be the only one ready to not hear any more of it for a little while.

Enter a new kind of Christmas music: the best christmas song ever written.

I wrote an Apple Dashboard Widget the other day. It’s pretty neat. You get two little programs: one that you use to note whether your baby is asleep or awake, and one that you send to friends that automatically updates itself to show whether your baby is asleep or awake. The way it works is, you click a button (”Awake”, for instance) on yours, and it sends a message to theirs (”Francis is Awake”) automatically. So they don’t call and accidentally wake the baby up while he is napping.

I’m selling it for six dollars, which I think is an eminently reasonable price. Actually, I’m giving it away for free, it just costs six dollars to get a “channel code”, which is the part that lets you send the messages. The channel code is valid for six months and can be extended after that if you like.

Anyway - I uploaded it to Apple.com’s Dashboard section - and this morning it is on the front page!! So that is pretty cool.

You should check it out. It would make a great gift, hint hint :-).

My favorite is updating my resume on Monster though. They have a pretty detailed interface, so recruiters can see and download your latest resume, see when it was uploaded, et cetera. So it baffles me that close to one hundred percent of the many emails I receive contain the following, practically verbatim:

Dear Will Ronco,
I saw your resume on Monster.com. I think you may be a good fit for a (DBA/Analyst/CIO/Sales/Developer) position we have available. Please send me your resume.
Sincerely yours,
Yet Another Recruiter

I’ve highlighted the relevant parts. How much work experience do you think I have gained in the last 24 hours? I am going to start sending these people my racing resume. “Oh yeah, all that Oracle DBA stuff and multithreaded development in C# … yeah, that was my old resume. I do triathlons now. Same hourly rate.”

“A hard-fought PR.”

I want to place well, but I know that whatever happens I have already had the season of my life. With the love, help, and support of friends and family, I have accomplished things that were mere dreams a year ago. This race is yet another chance to achieve those dreams.

If you want to follow me on Saturday, the race starts at 6:50 AM Central time.

• You can sign up to receive text message updates of my position at this website. My race number is 104
• You can follow my progress online at http://www.ironmanlive.com. There will be video coverage, a live blog, and periodic position updates via the “Athlete Tracker”

If you are reading this, I thank you for being with me this season. I will leave you with a short video tribute to the inimitable Jonnyo, who will not be racing with us on Saturday due to a freak Curling injury.

 If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your long-lost pal.

Closed out the first half of 2007 with a pair of huge races for me. First was a tough, hot, non-wetsuit day at the 5430 half ironman in Boulder. Steph came out to watch, and so did Paulo, so I was extra motivated to do as well as I could. Steph was a little nervous that she was “bad luck” after witnessing my disastrous performances in Arizona last year and at Boulder Peak in July.

But the race went quite well: I was out of the water in 12th or so, again a non-wetsuit swim, and I had a very good bike ride of 2 hours and 10 minutes for a 25.8 mile per hour average speed (!) to arrive in transition in 8th place, three minutes behind fifth. It took me until 3k to go before I moved into seventh, and 400 meters to go before I moved into sixth. I ended up crossing the line in sixth place, an excellent result for me but about 20 seconds short of fifth place and thus just out of the money. Them’s the breaks. It was still my best performance of the year so far.

After the race, I had the toughest taper week of my life as I tried to get ready for Star Island, recover from a quadricep-rending last 3k at the previous weekend’s race, and taper for the Timberman 70.3. So Steph and I flew to Boston, did some last minute shopping and with Dan’s help we made a pair of waterskis and bought over forty pounds of candy.

Then everyone else went out to Star, and I drove up to Gilford to continue the quest. They had helpfully printed everyone’s first name on the race numbers for this year’s race, but I hadn’t made it onto the pro start list in time. So in lieu of a pro number, I would get #1288, previously belonging to “Jenny”, who wouldn’t be able to make it. That was OK - my bike was racked with the women’s 35-39 age group, and they turned out to be a lot more mellow pre-race than the pro men typically are. So that was nice.

Then a decent swim had me out of the water in the second pack, and a solid bike ride brought me briefly into the top 10 before being passed by perennial bike/run ass-kicker Mike Caiazzo. I tried to stay with him, as I thought I might be able to run with him if I could just get to transition with him, but it was not to be. I ran well too, faster than I ever have on that course, to move into sixth across the line. Again one place out of the money. Then, just because not enough things have been oh-so-close, the top age grouper posted a time that would bump me back to seventh. He is a friend of mine though and I look forward to racing with him in the pro field next season.

THEN - you didn’t think that would be it, did you? - I had to get myself to Rye, NH to catch the Star ferry. I’d already missed the whole first day of the conference and I was not about to miss any more. So I pleaded with the police officer directing traffic on the bike course, and drove clear across New Hampshire without so much as stopping to change out of my disgusting race clothes. I made it in the nick of time, and managed to wash myself off in Rye harbor before catching a much-needed nap on the floor of the boat, the only extra sleep I’d be likely to get in the next seven days.

So two very good races on consecutive weekends, but the thing I am proudest of is that, after all that, I made it to the ferry on time. You have to have priorities, you know?