The second gunman on the grassy knoll? Maybe? Maybe not. Explore with me the facts of one professional’s humbling experience and come to your own conclusion about whether this group here had anything to do with it.

From left to right are super triathletes and TriScoopers Moonpie (I’m ripped), HolisticGuru (Is there quinoa in this drink?), Strouter (I’m not drunk, I used to be), Rambonie (I’m finding about my nature) and CindyJo (Yes, I have multiples of this grateful dead t-shirt, so back off).

To begin this story, let’s work our way back to July 19th when Desiree herself posted this on her blog:

Good morning everyone! I have been a little tardy with my journaling and I still have all the nasty details in my head from Ironman CDA so I will have to come back to that one….

I am about to go jump in the lake out here in Lake Placid, NY. It is the day before the race and I am optimistic that I will come back from the mistakes I made a few weeks ago and have a solid race. There is some great competition up here this weekend and the hilly course is a feat to conquer in itself. We have thunderstorms for the last two days so hopefully those will hold off for us until the run portion. A rain shower on the run always feels nice.

At that point Desiree was looking like this:

At some point between lunch and dinner our mild mannered TriScoopers were innocently day drinking at Charlie’s, a popular hangout on Main Street in Lake Placid, when in walked Desiree Ficker. According to witnesses, Desiree walked up to the host and asked to obtain food, fuel, sustenance and necessary nutrition for her upcoming race. Before Moonpie could jump up to invite her over to the table, the host had apparently ignored this professional triathlete’s pleas for food (Think Oliver holding his bowl out) and sent her on her way. Where she went, no one seems to know but as you can read from her blog entry above, she was still in a very fragile state of mind and the denial of food only contributed to her performance on race day. How poor was her performance you ask? Here is a quote from Ironman Live:

Desiree Ficker gets across the line
“She hasn’t had much luck at this race, has she. Desiree Ficker isn’t one to quit, though — she walked her way across the line here today, as she did three years ago.

Our spotters just told me that when they saw her she was shaking and her lips were blue at the turnaround.

It obviously wasn’t her day, but she certainly toughed this one out!”

In my mind, this couldn’t be any simpler. Charlie’s is directly responsible for Desiree’s poor performance. At the same time, the host was summarily dismissing her, our TriScoopers were being offered another round of drinks ON THE HOUSE. Why, you ask? Obviously to distract them from helping out this poor athlete.

By favoring the intoxicated TriScoopers over this professional athlete, they virtually guaranteed that Desiree would bonk during the marathon the following day. Did Moonpie bonk? NO! Did CindyJo bonk? NO! In fact, Nathan Miller (not pictured here) beat Desiree by fifteen minutes on the run and he clearly has the means to compensate the owners of Charlie’s to act like they didn’t know who she was. Didn’t know who she was? RIGHT! Please take a look at the picture above and tell me that you wouldn’t remember her face. So the question remains, did Charlie’s act on their own, or was there an outside influence that contributed to this unconscionable act?

I’m not saying that there was a conspiracy here but I think that the truth needs to come out. Desiree needs to be vindicated and at the least Charlie’s owes Desiree a pitcher of margueritas on the house.

You won’t be able to open any of your favorite blogs without seeing something about this weekend’s triathlon happenings. From death and jellyfish at the NYC Tri to the torrential downpours at IMLP, this was definitely a tri-weekend to remember in all of it’s glory, regret, elation and challenges. Here are a few things that I’ll throw up there that I thought about on my drive back to Westchester today, in no particular order:

• There really are tri-stalkers out there; keep this in mind before dating another triathlete that you may not spend the rest of your life with.
• You can drive from Albany all the way into Lake Placid with only 2nd and 4th gears.
• On race morning, I will wake up at 3:30am without an alarm.
• Quinoa porridge is best made in the dark while wearing headlamps.
• While wearing headlamps, etiquette suggests not looking directly at the person to whom you are talking, unless you want to blind them.
• Farrah or any of Farrah’s friends are not to be messed with unless you want to be publicly embarrassed in front of a national audience.
• It’s Bill, it’s wrapped in plastic; I’m not doing it.
• I’m not drunk, I used to be.
• Desiree Ficker got kicked out of a restaurant while Moonpie, CindyJo, Strouter, Rambonie and Guru were offered a round of drinks on the house.
• If you are going to flat with tubulars, do it in Jay in front of a house rented by eight triathlon coaches.
• Fix-a-flat for bike tires will get you about 4 more miles.
• Sherpas need sherpa stylists, given that while the athletes had two transitions and two special needs, the sherpas came back to the love shack four to five separate times.
• Laptops do not like to drink white wine.
• Mile 40 is a great place to begin puking on the bike.
• Jenwilltri must have been going crazy not being up in LP this weekend.
• Texting in the rain is a recipe for electronic failure.
• Apparently a floor in the men’s changing tent would have not been realistic enough, so mud wrestling was introduced as the fourth discipline in the sport.
• Rambo took over North America Sports and fired people during his volunteer post.
• You really can feel pouring rain while you are swimming, but only until you are kicked in the face.
• By the time you reach Ironman, you need to be able to a) swim in a straight line, and b) not have to breast stroke and c) not have to stand vertical to sight causing the swimmer behind your to swim up into your now raising heels.
• Phil never made it to the love shack, but we did leave the light on for him.
• Wearing a USC Trojan rain slicker attracts HACs.
• Many elite athletes leave their bikes in the transition area until the following morning.
• The Ironman cutoffs assume that you can swim the loop in two hours and do both loops of the bike in less than four hours each. Therefore, if you suck on the bike, you’d better get out of the water in under an hour.
• Bring two pairs of boxer shorts to an Ironman weekend.
• If there are tri-panties in the sleeves of my clean shirts, they are not mine.
• Javier, Rambonie, TriBoomer, Nathan, Kristine and the Goose all have vouchers for IM2009.
• Strouter, Jenwilltri, Michelle, ???, ???, ??? will all be looking at 2010 to make their Ironman debut.
• and lastly, peelers is just a glorified term for strippers and North America Sports could reduce the athlete fee by simply auctioning off the right to do this job. Why? Because Ironman weekend is like summer camp for adults. Maybe Race with Purpose should put together the first ever wetsuit peeler training class.

Well that’s about it for now. I’ll come back with more fun stuff. In the meanwhile check out the blogs from other members of our party in the right-hand navigator, except for Strouter’s because she’s still waiting for her laptop to dry out.

So the 2008 Escape from NYC is completed and in the books. Congratulations to Eugene Koenig who is this year’s successful Escapee. For his efforts he received a one of a kind winners certificate that Christine painstakingly created and since we couldn’t afford to give him a car, we got him a card, a $10 Starbucks card to be exact, along with a bottle of Ethos water because we couldn’t resist promoting their brand slogan of “Helping children get clean.” Okay, so it’s actually “Helping children get clean water” but given how nasty and ripe we all were after this run, we liked our version better.

With 66% of the participants not completing the event, this may go down as the toughest marathon ever. Our percent of finishers was lower than Chicago’s in 2007 and they had 90 degree weather and 90% humidity. Okay, so there were only three people that ran our race and two of us came down with injuries that precluded us from finishing but even Eugene, the ultimate champion and Sole Surviving Escapee, arrived in Scarsdale beat up and heavily fatigued from the ordeal. He especially liked the four rolling climbs and valleys that concluded the race over the final five miles. When Michelle and I rode this off a few weeks ago, her quote was, “the runners are going to hate you for the finish to this race”.

The one thing that we all agreed was that you don’t need to spend $70- $130 for a great marathon experience. This marathon is the only race that includes Grand Central Terminal, Times Square, the Westside Greenway, the Little Red Lighthouse, the George Washington Bridge, instances of domestic violence, bathrooms, police support, crack dealers slinging on corners, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, a cab driver named Jim, snowmen spectators, views of the Palisades, cheering spectators and aid stations set up by community churches and it all cost nada, nothing, bupkus except a few hours of time. No matter where you live, if you are a runner, you probably already know the best places to run, so map it out, invite some friends and have at it. Sites like 140dot6.com are great resources for creating your own self supported races.

We’ll post an entire report complete with pictures and audio on this event later but the reason why I bring it up here is because it represents a validation that there is no way that I am ready to compete in the Los Angeles Marathon next weekend. This flu beat me up in so many ways and today was validation that my muscles and my supportive structures are in full on melt down leaving me entirely exposed. Specifically, I ran fairly easily for fourteen miles and then my left knee tightened up and the left ITB fired and that was all she wrote. I ran/walked/skipped/stretched/limped for another three miles trying to work it out and then I simply called it a day. I walked with Christine who as having back issues of her own until the 23-mile mark just to put time in and then we hopped into a cab to take us to the finish area at the Starbucks in Scarsdale. Over the past four weeks, I have run three times and cycled five times. To those who think, what an idiot, how would he think he could just show up and throw up a marathon with such little training, please understand that up until I got sick, I had one heck of a base going with multi-hour rides and 18 to 30 mile runs as the norm. And these runs weren’t survival runs but, hey let’s pop off a 23-miler and the go teach a Spinning class afterwards, runs. Additionally, I wasn’t looking to compete in this Escape, simply to complete it and let’s be honest, if I can’t complete 26 miles in some combination of running, walking or crawling, I’ve got a long way to go to get back.

So Los Angeles is officially off the list and in the crapper and more importantly, I lost probably two months of training, a month of being sick and a month to make up for all of the gains made in January that I no longer have. With 146 days until IMLP, I now am faced with returning to base when I really should be starting to build. What’s worse is that as crappy as I have been in getting in runs and rides, I’ve been even worse with my weakest link, the swim. Because I had that lovely upper respiratory thing going on, I have been really gun shy about heading back into the pool, which I desperately need to do.

Getting back on track isn’t rocket science, just revising the plan and expectations a bit, getting back to frequency and consistency over performance. Hopefully next week will be my first full week of training where I am “healthy” and it would certainly be great to do something as simple as get in three rides, three runs and three swims without winding up back in bed with a thermometer in my mouth.

As Erin says, here’s to Better Days Ahead.