Dear K-Swiss,

I’m a big fan of your products — I have numerous pairs of K-Swiss shoes and my triathlon team (TN Multisports) receives a nice discount on some K-Swiss merchandise. However, I’ve got a bit of a bone to pick with you. Last August I was in Penticton to race Ironman Canada, and while I was there I saw a K-Swiss display that featured a number of pairs of K-Ona S shoes. One of the pairs featured a glorious design incorporating the Korean flag. They were pretty awesome, but you already know that because why else would you turn a less-than-awesome design into a shoe? That would be crazy talk, which would lead to someone getting their ass fired (maybe that’s why Kenny Powers is in charge now).

Unfortunately, since my mind was focused on the race at hand, I didn’t buy them at the time, a decision I ended up regretting because I can’t find these effers anywhere — not on your site, not on the Internet…it’s as if they never existed. But I know they exist because I took a picture of them:

They're real, and they're spectacular

I want these shoes on my feet, damnit.

I tried to fill the void by buying a different pair of K-Ona S shoes (these bad boys), but my royal blues are no match for that glorious Korean flag. Being half Korean, I gotta represent out there with my stumpy Asian legs and supreme crappiness in the water. I really want a pair of the K-Swiss K-Ona S Korean flag shoes. You guys have Australia, Japan, Germany, USA, and Brazil, but like Christopher Walken and his cowbell, I gotta have my Korean kicks. Are they available at all? If so, can you hook a half Asian sista up with a pair (women’s size 8.5)?

Thank you,
Rebecca Kelley (aka the “Mediocre Athlete”)

P.S. Why don’t you offer awesome Korean swag like this in women’s sizes? I love this shirt but would look absurd in a men’s size small. Show Koreans some love, damnit!

…until the FedEx dude knocked on my door today and dropped off a package for me. Oh right, my free shoes! Yaay, free shoes free shoes free shoes. Who doesn’t love getting a new pair of kicks? I unwrapped the package, opened the box…and my brow furrowed. What’s this thingy in the back of the shoe? Is that Velcro? What happens when I — HOLY SHIT THIS SHOE IS INSANE.

Here’s a video of a low-level Bond villain explaining how they work, plus some pics of my shoes:

A bit shinier than I would prefer

Velcro/adjustment strap

The hatchback of the shoe world

The gist of it is that you can pull the entire back of the shoe away from the rest and slip your foot in quickly, then pull the back strap up to tighten it into place and secure it with Velcro. It’s odd, to say the least. I gotta admit though, as weird as these shoes are, they’re actually pretty comfy. The T2 was designed to be super light and come with a few drainage holes and a forefoot strike design. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually race in these (I’ve run into a plethora of running injuries lately and don’t want to risk another one), nor am I sure about how fast you can actually get into them (I’d probably get bungled up trying to tighten them, plus I always thought the Zoot racing flats were plenty fast to get into), but they seem fine for spectating or just hanging around. Plus they were free, so suck it.

The first one I bought had some B.S. problem where some hole wasn’t drilled properly, forcing Jason to hammer the screw in all janky-like. You’d think shelling out a few hundred bones for a pricey hunk of metal meant it would be engineered properly, but I guess that’s not the case. Despite the minor setback, I was pretty stoked to finally be rollin’ on a “grown up” trainer, and a whisper quiet one at that!

…or so I thought. About six months after using the trainer, one day I hopped on my bike for a spin and my Kinetic promptly sounded as if the Inception buzzy noise had personified, gotten stuck behind my wheel, and was being slowly and tortuously ground to death. I tried to ignore it at first, but this stupid noise got louder and louder to the point where I was blasting Teen Mom 2 at full volume in a futile effort to hear whiny girls and their baby daddy drama over the honking whir of my trainer (yes, I watch Teen Mom — it’s part of a Scared Straight program for my uterus so it doesn’t try any funny business).

Eventually I gave up and hauled the bright green abomination back to whence it came so I could swap it out (REI, you mofos have the best return policy ever). Thankfully, the apathetic customer service rep was fine with me exchanging the nearly year-old trainer, so I grabbed a brand spankin’ new one and brought it home. Jas offered to help me set up Kinetic 2: Electric Boogaloo, but when he unpacked it and began assembling it, he noticed something wrong.

Kinetic, you’ve screwed me again. The new trainer came with a screw that was, inexplicably, too short to fit through the one hole it was designed for. You’re kidding me! This shit is worse than Ikea — I expect some discrepancies when I’m buying hard-packed sawdust passing as furniture for a fraction of the cost, but when I’m plunking down hundreds of bucks for a hefty piece of machinery, I (foolishly) figure that all the pieces are manufactured properly.

Rather than have an entire department in REI hate my guts, I opted to go to Lowe’s and shell out 15 cents for a replacement screw. Afterwards, Jas was able to get my trainer working properly and I’m once again riding in relative quiet…that is, until it borks again (which, considering my luck, I fully expect it to do). Of course, Jason’s trainer has given him zero problems while I’m on my third one. Oh well, the best I can do is cross my fingers and hope that the Kinetic plays nice so I can ride and watch my crappy action movies and trashy TV in peace.

First, my coaches Teresa and Mark bought me a pair of Lululemon shorts for my birthday, thus popping my Lululemon cherry. (Hey, I’m a late bloomer.) Then a teammate of mine, Amanda, gave me another pair of Lululemon shorts she didn’t like. That’s 200% more Lululemon than I had before! Teresa then tricked me into buying a Lululemon tank top by saying she was going to print the TN Multisports logo onto them for Ironman Canada, so I shelled out the big bucks for my first Lululemon top. It all goes downhill from there.

I’ve since discovered that while I’m still not a Lululemon shopper (one of my teammates admitted to dropping five hundred dollars there in a single shopping trip, and when I balked at the price, other teammates were like, “Oh yeah, I’ve spent that much in one visit before” without batting an eye. Seriously, underground meth lab. It’s the only explanation), I am a Lululemon sale shopper. I’ve recently bought two tank tops and a short-sleeve performance shirt that were all on sale, plus a pair of running shorts and some socks that were marked down. Jason, on the other hand, has chugged the full-price Kool-aid and plunked down some cold hard cash for two pricey (but nice) t-shirts and some undies. (He did manage to get a pair of loungey shorts on sale, though.)

Capping off my wardrobe is a pair of Nike shorts and a run shirt handed down to me by Teresa. (She also hooked me up with roughly 80 pairs of summer shorts because they were too big for her. Yes, a slimmed down me = a big Teresa.) Maybe now I’ll be able to start phasing out my gross old $7 tank tops with the permanent underarm stains. Yee-haw!

To give you an idea of how perceptive my female teammates are (and how Lululemon-obsessed they are), when I debuted one of my new Lululemon tank tops at a track workout, I hadn’t made it more than four steps onto the track when several of my run buddies exclaimed, “Hey, new top!” They all noticed immediately and cooed over my fancy new digs. When I got home and told Jason, he laughed and asked if they all formed a circle around me and began chanting, “One of us! One of us! Goo-ble gob-ble, goo-ble gob-ble!”

I still can’t bring myself to buy something from Lululemon at full price (seriously, $120 for a sweatshirt?), but I do admit they make some nice crap. Plus, I’ve lost enough weight to feel less like a fat cow when I try on their clothes and more like a chubby platypus.

Lookin' good, stud

Three things:

1. I’m pretty sure this isn’t legal for races (along with water wings, flippers, and a river boat fan strapped to your back)
2. If you need this head snorkel device to swim, you probably shouldn’t be doing triathlons
3. I bet this dude swims faster than me

If I saw this dude in the water before the race, I’d smuggle some Nerds into the lake and dump them into the snorkel before the gun went off. That’ll teach him!…yeah, he’s definitely a faster swimmer than me. They all are.

Update: According to Jason, who was un-lazy enough to do 30 seconds’ worth of research, the USAT apparently does allow snorkels, although the Subaru series and Ironman Canada does not. You could feasibly use a snorkel at Ironman Tempe or Coeur d’Alene, although you’d look like a humongous dweeb (albeit a potentially slightly faster swimming dweeb).

By the way, let me interject by saying that after nearly three years of this sport, I’ve gotten seven flats and have ruined three tires (the first of which was for a bike that wasn’t even mine — I had borrowed it from a former coworker). Jason has had one flat that happened during a training ride, and he didn’t even have to change it because his dad did it for him. I call epic bullshit on this, which makes him mad because he’s convinced I’m jinxing him for the biggest bike fail ever when we race in Canada.

Anyway, back to the rear tire. There goes $40 right there. I also had to buy a new bike computer because my old one has been acting on the fritz lately and the cadence sensor stopped working. When you start training with a bike computer, you quickly become unnaturally attached to it. I mentioned before about how I almost forgot it before Boise 70.3 and went into a panic because I wasn’t going to know my cadence while racing. I replaced my bike computer with a new wireless one that cost $110. Pricey, but necessary in my opinion.

Where’d the rest of my money go? Frickin’ fuel. I’m starting to spend more on training fuel than on actual groceries. You’d be surprised by how many stupid gels we consume in a week. This crap never seems to last very long. I shelled out a dumb amount of money for drink mix, Rocktane, and Hammer gels. One time someone mentioned to me how he doesn’t understand why I need to refuel with calorie drinks and gels during workouts because he never does and he seems to do fine. I had to remind him that exercising for 1-2 hours at an easy to moderate pace isn’t the same as a four or five hour workout and trying to prep your body to be able to carry you through a several hour-long race. It’s easy to forget that the general public isn’t as insane as us endurance athletes.

So just like that, I dropped nearly three hundred bones in a short amount of time. You’d think that’d be the end of the spending, but I still need to get a new helmet, replace my sad, pathetic bike trainer, and hopefully spring for a new pair of sunglasses and recovery tights sometime this season, not to mention the perpetual wave of team gear that Teresa seems to always be ordering. *shakes fist* I actually have most of my receipts from each season, so maybe if I’m feeling especially depressed, I can add them up to see how much I spend annually on this sport. I’ll save that for a future post…in the meantime, I’m accepting donations for a real grocery store trip because I don’t think Jason would appreciate a dinner of pineapple Roctane and watermelon sport beans.

The fashion doesn’t end with those two though. I think most of my teammates with two X chromosomes are sponsored by Lulu Lemon. No joke, freaking every female athlete I know has virtually their entire spring collection. One time I ducked into the store so I could emulate the cool kids, and not only could I not fit my massive stump quad into a pair of shorts (the sizing there is suicide-inducing), the clothes are so expensive that I suspect my female teammates are operating a secret meth lab in order to afford this lavish wardrobe.

Admittedly, my workout clothes collection is pretty sad. It mostly consists of a too-big finisher’s shirt from a previous race and a cheapo pair of shorts. Every once in a while I’ll even bust out a couple of sad cotton tank tops I bought at Target about five years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have cute plaid and pink and pastel tops that wick sweat and auto-spray perfume on me to counteract any funky odor my body is unleashing, but I can’t a) afford said wondrous clothing, or b) wear any of these tops without sporting a massive sausage roll around my midsection.

It seems that a lot of stars need to align before I can improve the gear; namely, continuing Operation De-Chunkify and possibly winning the lottery. Until then, look for the tired girl in the ill-fitting Rock ‘n Roll Marathon finisher’s shirt and bunched up shorts and tell her she looks good. ;)

Well, 2009 rolled around and my training group, TN Multisports, secured a sweet sponsorship deal from Zoot. My trainer’s boyfriend, Mark, convinced me to get an uber-hardcore Zoot suit, the Zenith 2. It’s a seriously bad ass suit, with extra padded areas on the torso and legs and a thinner material on the arms and shoulders for better range of motion. The extra padding and streamlines make the suit look like the Batsuit or a superhero suit, only without the stylish cape and handy utility belt. (Note the $650 price tag — holy hell, that is an expensive wetsuit. Thankfully, I received a nice team discount.)

I finally got off my lazy ass and picked up my suit yesterday. I had to try it on to make sure it fit well, and once I squeezed my flabby body into it I wanted to take some pictures but my camera battery was dead. I ended up lounging around the house and reading crap on my laptop for 30 minutes while sweating in my wetsuit until my battery was charged enough to snap a couple photos. At one point Jason shouted from upstairs, “Do you still have your wetsuit on?!” I said, “Um…”, and he came downstairs, saw me, and burst out laughing.

Anyway, for your viewing pleasure:

I tried going for a cool superhero pose but ended up looking mentally disabled

This is exactly what I look like when I run to the transition area from the swim

The only time you’ll see me smiling and swimming at the same time

I’m looking forward to trying this bad boy out in the open water and seeing if it makes any sort of difference in my swim. I expect it to turn me into Dara Torres — I have the technology to be bigger, faster, strongerrrrrr. Or at least post a sub-50 minute 1.2 mile swim…

Wrong. They cost an ass cheek, which is why for our first tri season Jason and I were like “Eff this, we’ll borrow some bikes.” We then proceeded to remain the laughingstock of our training group until about November 2008. For about nine months I rocked out on my coworker Christine’s aluminum Giant, which was built for teeny people but weighed a ton (adding to the weight were mountain bike pedals that I was too lazy to change). The bike was too small for me (Christine’s 5′1″ and I’m 5′5″ — even with my stumpy legs, that’s a considerable size difference) and I never got a proper adjustment, so I rode on a bike that didn’t fit me for an entire season.

Here’s a picture of me and Christine’s bike after the Victoria Half Ironman:

Notice how it’s sportin’ the aero bars. Putting aero bars on that heavy mofo is kind of like ordering a Diet Coke with your triple quarter pounder with cheese, but I did stick aero bars on it (mostly so I could drink without having to wobbily reach down and grab a bottle from my cage — I’ve since gotten better at doing that). I also put new tires on the bike after I tore the rear one during my first sprint triathlon (I’ll get to that in a future post). While I had made some modifications to the bike, it never felt like mine, and after I decided that I liked racing, it was time to go shopping for a bike I could call my own.

Jason, meanwhile, was tearin’ it up on his dad’s old, old, old bike. Here’s a picture of it:

Haha, just kidding. The bike isn’t that old. Jason’s dad has a Klein that’s about 20 years old and has the shifters down on the frame. Now that’s old school. My racing buddy borrowed the bike the whole season and stubbornly raced with it amongst the fancy Cervelos, Scotts, Felts, Gurus, and Quintana Roos.

You can sort of see the Klein in the above pic where Jason is in T1 at the Victoria Half Ironman. Though it ain’t much to look at, the bike did get Jason through a half dozen races this year (and he passed his fair share of athletes on fancy $3,000 time trial bikes. Suck it, losers!). Jason made some much needed upgrades to the bike as well — the front derailleur needed replacing and he also swapped out the seat. Much like me, however, Jason didn’t have a bike of his own and wanted to join his fellow athletes in the 21st century with upgraded, lighter technology.

So, at the end of the 2008 season Jason and I started keeping an eye on various bike and tri shops to see if we could score a deal on a 2008 bike as the stores made room for their ‘09 inventory. We were both unsure as to whether we’d buy time trial or road bikes, but I was instructed by Teresa to at least check out the Felt B12 and the Cervelo P2C in my size. Jason headed over to Speedy Reedy with me so I could shop around…and the bastard ended up buying a bike before I did.

Basically, it turns out that Speedy Reedy was out of virtually every time trial bike that would fit me. Teresa figured I’d be a 48 since she and I are about the same height and we are both cursed with the same affliction of having long arms and torsos but no legs. (The guys over at Triumph Multisport now know me as “All Torso, No Legs.” Not the best nickname…) The only bike they had in my size was this godawful looking white and pink Scott (no offense to any of you who like pink, but it’s not an ideal color for me).

You know what size they DID have the ‘08 Felt B12 and the Cervelo P2C in? Jason’s. That’s right, apparently clearance time is the only time of the year where it pays to be a 6′4″, 250 lb beast of a human being. They had tons of 58s in stock, so he happily scheduled some test rides and took the bikes out for a spin.

Here’s what he ended up buying:

It’s a beaut, isn’t it? Jason bought an ‘08 Cervelo P2C with Ultegra components and Look Keo pedals. The guys at Speedy Reedy gave him fantastic customer service and were nice enough to switch out the handlebars and brakes after he said he didn’t like how they felt. He got a good deal on the bike but ended up spending a small fortune on accessories. You know how it is…

Naturally, I griped to Jason about how he “stole” my bike, so the following weekend we went hunting around for something that I could buy. We ended up at Sammamish Cycle, where they had a couple of Cervelos in stock. I took one for a test ride and tried to barter down the sales guy to no avail. I ended up begrudgingly buying a bike and spending about $500 more than I wanted to (though I did get a free bike fit…which didn’t seem accurate, so I may need to get another one).

My bike is oh so fancy. It’s also an ‘08 Cervelo P2C, but the extra $500 that I didn’t want to spend went towards Dura Ace components, so technically my bike is better than Jason’s. Ha ha, suck it, Jason. Teresa also hooked me up with a pair of titanium Speedplay pedals that she had, so no more mountain bike pedals for me! Wahoo!

Jas and I tried swapping bikes and quickly found out that sharing wasn’t gonna work:

Kind of a Goldilocks situation we got going on there. Thankfully, our bikes are juuuuuuust right for their proper owners…even though they did cost us each an ass cheek’s worth of money.