This photo was taken by my teammate Kathleen Jones at the Lake Stevens Olympic distance triathlon over the weekend: Three things: I’m pretty sure this isn’t legal for races (along with water wings, flippers, and a river boat fan strapped to your back) If you need this head snorkel device to swim, you probably shouldn’t be doing triathlons 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...

This is a tapir: This is a taper: Not the most traditional taper, but it’s how Jas and I roll. We’re less than two weeks away from Ironman Canada and have finally started to scale down our workouts. It couldn’t have come a moment too soon — I’m getting burned out on exercising and just want to get this pesky Ironman over with already. The taper’s timing was pretty crucial for us — we had a Portland wedding to go to and the Lake Stevens 70.3 race to spectate, so even though we didn’t have as many training hours, we still had to cram in a bunch of stuff...

Recently Jason and a number of my triathlon teammates raced Ironman Lake Stevens 70.3. I had been training for the race but decided at the last minute not to do it because I had traveled to San Francisco, Napa Valley and San Jose the week before and had too much booze and horrible food sloshing around my system to feel prepared to tackle a half Ironman. Nonetheless, I watched the race anyway to cheer on my friends and the BFG. A word of advice to any triathletes out there reading this: if you’re thinking of racing Ironman Lake Stevens, don’t. First of all, Lake Stevens sucks. If Washington...