The Engineer’s Lament

Before you read any further on this, there are two separate articles that serve as a sort of adjunct or prelude. The first is Malcolm Gladwell’s article in “The New Yorker,” from which I borrowed the title. It’s a good read without too much of Malcolm’s signature “Gotcha!” style, which I love but also hate. The main topic that it delves into is how engineers tend to see things. If you start with the joke about the priest, the doctor, and the engineer playing golf and read through the line about Toyota’s engineers saying, “play at night.” that’s probably enough. But the whole thing is a good read. 

The second read is a bit more philosophical, though I happen to think the engineering mentality is very philosophical. It’s Heather Wurtele’s post about her race, which unfortunately ended quite prematurely due to an unfixable (on-course anyway) technical issue. I had sort of made my peace with what happened on Saturday, but after reading Heather’s report, I felt more than just as sense of closure; I felt a much greater sense of accomplishment.

One of the most common questions for professional triathletes, one that I’m lucky to not be asked much anymore and which I am very lucky that my parents never asked me in the first place, is, “when are you going to get a real job?” A slight variation on this – the one that I often like to ask other pros – is, “what do you think you’d be doing if you weren’t doing this?” I’ve been doing this long enough now that I find it hard to imagine doing anything else. But for a while, my answer was that I’d like to work for the NTSB. The NTSB is responsible for figuring out why things go wrong when big things go wrong in civilian transportation. Plane crashes are the big things it does, but it has other responsibilities. But at its core, the NTSB’s job is to figure out why when “shit happens” involving airplanes falling out of the sky. “Shit happens” is not an acceptable reason for an NTSB engineer. I’ve said before that there are two basic types of engineers. There are the creative types. And there are the debuggers. The creative types make stuff. And the debuggers figure out how that stuff will break. I’m a debugger. I’m a little bit creative, but mostly I’m a pessimist. I manage to travel with fewer spares and fewer tools to races now than I once did, but I still walk a fine line between paranoid and preparedness. I have had engineering-type shit happen at races and, rarely, during races, but I’ve never had it really affect the outcome of the race. At least not until Saturday.

During the swim, my primary goal was, “do not lose the race.” I continue to work on becoming a better swimmer, but once race day comes, my primary goal is simply to get out of the water with a manageable gap to the front of the race and without too much fatigue. I’m a relatively terrestrial triathlete. I win races on the bike and run. But I can definitely lose races on the swim, a la Kona 2012. My goal was to not do that. I wanted to exit the water within four minutes of the lead group, which I did. It wasn’t my best swim, the sort of swim that sets you up for a breakthrough performance, but it was good enough. My goal was to finish in the top-10, and I believed it was still possible. Boris Stein of Germany, who finished 10th, was the only person to not swim in the front pack or off-the-front who made the top-10, but so what. He did it. So it was doable.

I paced the early part of the bike fairly well, and I was starting to see the effects of the typically crazy early pacing, which I consciously avoided, when I felt my saddle shift underneath me. This was about 20mi (30km) into the ride, or about 45min. At first I thought my seat post clamp had slipped, which is odd because I epoxy it in place because I know that seat post clamps do slip when people hit bumps or potholes or anything else. But then I reached down under the saddle and felt around and felt a crack. My first thought was that the shell had cracked where the metal rail inserts into the plastic shell. This was odd because I was, quite literally, “just riding along” (known as “JRA;” there’s a joke in the bike industry that all catastrophic accidents happen while people are JRA. “I was just riding along when [insert catastrophe here]…”). The saddle was neither new nor what I would consider old. I had about two years and probably 8,000 miles on this saddle, which about eight months and 3,000 of those miles with this saddle clamped in this seat post. I had a new bike for the race, but I just moved my whole seat post assembly over from my old bike to the new one. 

What had actually happened was one of the saddle’s rails had snapped. I was able to manage it by sliding back a bit (as opposed to nose riding as I prefer to do) and sort of putting my weight more on the saddle as opposed to torquing it sitting on the front. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t terrible. But the more I rode, the worse it got, as without the support of a structurally sound rail assembly, the other rails kept snapping until I had broken the rails in four places. Each of the saddles two rails had snapped, both in front of and behind the clamping mechanism. By the time I was climbing to Hawi, my saddle shell was basically floating around on the top of the seat post, held on by a mix of gravity and concavity. I ended up essentially sitting on the side of the seat, which was now the top of the seat, and standing relatively regular to sort of shift the saddle back into place and also to stretch my legs since my saddle was also now quite a bit lower than it was supposed to be by virtue of no longer actually being attached to anything. I tried not to stand too much, worried that was going to recreate the dark humor of my all-time favorite Cy & H strip (see above), which is incredibly crude and irreverent but also very funny. At least if you ride your bike alone a lot and have weird thoughts occupy your brain for countless hours…

At that point, I thought I had three options. The first was the simple one. I stop. I call it a day. I go race Arizona. The second was that I keep riding, try to keep the saddle on as best as I can, and just essentially stand for most of the ride. This seemed like it would be doable, but there was probably no way I could run afterwards. The third was to try to get a new saddle. But how? Would neutral support have a spare saddle? I thought they’d probably at least be able to get one. Maybe.

As I neared the top of the Hawi climb, I finally saw the neutral support car (the motos have only wheels), and I flagged them down. I rolled through the turnaround and pulled over next to the car, where the SRAM NRS (Neutral Race Support) guys were waiting with a front wheel and a back wheel, certain that I had flatted. Because that’s the normal thing that happens during races. As I stopped and dismounted, I said, “I need a saddle.” I think I probably said this at least one more time, because this is not a normal thing to need, but once I did, the guys pulled a bike off the roof (I think it was the personal bike of one of the guys helping), pulled his saddle off, loosened my saddle clamp and pulled out the two rails that were still stuck in there without a shell attached, and got the saddle mounted. Unfortunately, because it’s a somewhat normal thing for seat posts and saddle hardware to slip, I have everything glued in place. It’s no big deal when traveling, because of how the Dimond breaks down. But what it means is that the saddle height and, critically, saddle pitch are fixed for the saddle that I ride. The height was not a big deal. Saddle height is relatively easy to work around and even a few centimeters of differences is manageable. Pitch, on the other hand is a big deal. I run my saddles at between 0.0 and -0.3 degrees of pitch. Essentially, my saddle is perfectly level. And I’m neurotic about this. The new saddle, measured post race, was pitched at +6.0 degrees. On the bright side, I could actually sit on it because it wasn’t broken. On the not so bright side, sitting on it meant either sitting on the very tip pointed up and driving into my prostate or sitting back on it with my pelvis posteriorly (rather than anteriorly) rotated in the way that you might ride a mountain bike to keep traction on the rear wheel and keep the front wheel light for rolling over obstacles. But neither of this is really how you should ride a TT bike. Certainly not a course like the one in Hawaii. 

The worst part of this was the descent from Hawi. That typically requires high cadence riding because of the high speeds, and generally power is low. My forearms and shoulders and upper back were screaming because I basically had to put all my weight on them. When you ride, your weight is distributed between your arms (or hands on a road bike), your saddle, and your feet. The harder you ride, the more weight goes to your feet, because of Newton’s Third Law. This is why TT bikes are great when you are racing but are not so great for riding to the coffee shop at a leisurely pace. I was pretty sure I could finish the ride, and given that your arms aren’t too necessary for running, I thought I might be okay for the marathon, though the tension in my upper back and neck was a bit of an issue. Once I got down from Hawi and back onto the Queen K, I sort of found a manageable rhythm of sitting on the tip, sitting on the back, and then standing. I continued to focus mostly on nutrition and hydration, at least because it was something else to think about. I was pretty sure my plan for a top-10 was done. But I thought that I could still finish the race, and that was important to me. Really important. The feeling of not finishing in 2013 still haunts me. That emptiness from IMAZ 2011, Kona 2013, and IMTX 2015 – my three Ironman DNFs – was awful. Especially Kona. I knew I wanted to finish. In 2012, when I finished 13th, I so buried myself that I don’t really remembering anything from the race. I don’t remember Ali’i, or crossing the finish, or much of anything. At the very least, I wanted a happy memory of Ali’i, and simply finishing after all this was going to be something to celebrate.

I managed to keep my power reasonably high – which helped with the discomfort by shifting weight to my feet – but I had to sit up and stand a lot. And on the Queen K that’s a killer. I lost virtually all the time I lost from Hawi back to Kona. I basically stayed even, pace-wise, with the leaders to Hawi. On the way back, I lost 12 or so minutes just on the return trip. Most of that was fighting the bike. I was stopped for less than three minutes swapping on the new saddle. The major time losses were when I was riding. I got some relief around the West Hawaii Veterans Cemetery, when the headwind picked up. With the wind pushing into me and giving me steady resistance, I was able to actually push decent power which made things much more tolerable as way more weight was on my feet. I passed quite a few people struggling – a reminder as to the penalty of mis-pacing – on the way in, and I started to be a bit optimistic. I thought maybe riding easier than I had expected would mean fresh legs and a ripping fast run. I know I can run sub-2:50, and that would have been a great way to finish. 

Getting off the bike, I came into T2 with Matt Trautman and Lionel Sanders, both of whom are among the best runners in the sport. It was good company to be in if I wanted to run fast. But unfortunately, the reality of riding 150 of 180km with either a broken seat or a wonky seat had pretty well wrecked my legs. I had a lot of pain my left achilles and both of my glutes were seriously angry after doing extra work in the my big-slam-esque position and both of my hamstrings were unhappy about the extra work they had to do when I was sitting in my on-the-point-of-the-needle position. Sub-2:50 quickly changed to 2:55 quickly changed to sub-3 quickly changed to just-keep-running-and-don’t-injure-yourself-and-leave-something-in-the-tank-for-IMAZ. And that’s pretty much what I did. I never walked. I just ran the pace that was comfortable, whatever that was. I was diligent about fueling and hydrating at the aid stations. And I mostly just treated it like a longest ever training day. I mean, if Jens Voigt could ride a kid’s bike to a stage finish in the TdF, I could do this.