Jocelyn Wong's Blog

Coach will be proud.

Today I turned 28 years old and it has been about 6 months since I turned pro back in May.  I decided it was time to take the next step if I want to be serious about becoming a successful professional triathlete.  Some of the hard-core folks buy treadmills for their winters at home.  I got something even better.

For my birthday, I bought myself a swimming pool.

Wongstar's birthday gift to herself

It is a 2-lane 50m outdoor pool, with a pace clock on each end and the water temperature is rather cold (about 75F or 24C), just the way I like it.  Cold enough that it makes me swim extra hard and not want to take any rest!

There wasn’t enough room in our backyard for such a long swimming pool, so the Prime Time Athletic Club in Burlingame (a 15-min drive away) offered to keep it for me.  Kind of like how you can board a horse at a horse stable.

fancy fancy fancy!

I had been bouncing around every single public pool within a 25-mile radius.  South San Francisco, Brisbane, St. Ignatius, Joinville-San Mateo, Menlo Park, Burlingame… and was mostly unhappy with the very limited hours.  Some were too warm, some were too crowded, some were just too far away.  Cleanliness of the locker rooms varied but I could deal with a questionable one if I was able to swim whenever I wanted…however, on the weekends, most were only open for 2 hours, if there wasn’t a swim meet going on! I realized if I kept paying $5 to $7 every time I needed to swim, I might as well buy my own private swimming pool.  It’s a very good investment in myself.

Since my swimming pool is now at this very swanky fitness club, I get to enjoy everything else the club has to offer:

Carpeted locker rooms and towel service…

suuuper posh for someone used to slumming it

…a billion treadmills with no time limit and no waiting time…

sweatfest! good thing they provide the towels!

I could take spinning classes too but I’d only get on these if I can switch out the saddle to an ISM Adamo.  There’s just no comparison.  No anatomical cut-out = very unhappy girl parts.

just looking at these saddles makes me cringe.

Free wifi so I can do some blogging, wreak a little havoc in Slowtwitch-land, and email the Boss…

OMG there is even a Starbucks in here!

And a private jacuzzi in one of the women’s locker rooms!

I can enjoy the spa without having a gross hairy guy try to hit on me!

This means I could even pretend I’m in a Korean spa and just hang out in the jacuzzi in my birthday suit.

The best part is that they are open 5:30am-11pm on the weekdays and 8am-8pm on the weekends.  And I can use my pool whenever they are open!

All the other swimmers have to use this pool.

There is actually another swimming pool too, 6 lanes and 25 yards.  Maybe it’s a little warmer too, because nobody else really uses my swimming pool.  It’s all mine!

I’m very happy now; I finally feel like I have a home swimming pool when I am at home.  And it’s soooo nice.  It makes me want to swim every day!  Maybe even twice a day!

Look out world, I am going to become a swim monster over winter break.  There is no off season.

Just another day in the office: this morning I charged up the ipod, strapped on the Camelbak, put some money in the running sticks, pulled on the SLS3 compression socks, stepped into my Avia Avi-Rhythms and headed out the door for another 4-hour jaunt.  It’s amazing how easy a 4-hour run becomes when you do one practically every other day.  “Well gosh,” you might be thinking, “Don’t you get bored?  What the heck do you think about during a 4-hour run?”

No actually, I can’t say I ever get bored.  I really love my long monster runs as running was my first love since my geeky teenage years.  But since you asked, there are many many things to think about actually…

• You think about this week’s training, and your upcoming races.
• You think about all your teammates who are racing in Kona this weekend and how you witnessed how hard they trained every day and know they will do fantastic.
• You think about how hard you’ve been training yourself and how much progress you’ve made just this past year.
• In fact, you think about how you have already almost accomplished everything you ever wanted to do in triathlon–according to that list of goals you wrote up for Coach when you first started talking to him 2 years (and 20 pounds) ago.
• You start thinking about a new list of goals.
• You think about how Coach always said he believed that anyone with two arms and two legs could break 5 hours on the bike and 3 hours on the run without taking drugs.
• You chuckle and think about some of the “challenged” athletes who don’t have two arms and two legs and how one of these days they’ll go that fast too…if they haven’t already.
• You think about Rudy Garcia-Tolson and how you met him years ago when he was barely a teenager at one of your first sprint triathlons in Southern California, how he inspired you to go to prosthetics school, how he went on to become a multiple gold medalist at the Paralympics, and how he is now 21 years old and attempting his first Ironman in Kona this weekend.

• You think about the social project proposal you’ve been working on this week and make some editorial changes in your head.
• You think about your family and how lucky you are to have them be so supportive, and how you promised your cousin’s daughter that you would be home for Halloween and would go trick-or-treating with her.
• You think about what you want to be for Halloween, and are leaning towards your favorite G.I. Joe chick, Lady Jaye, and how it’s bullshit that she didn’t make the new live-action G.I. Joe movie but Scarlett (your sister’s favorite) did.

• Despite that bullshit, you still hope you’ll get to watch the G.I. Joe movie on the flight home because they sure aren’t showing it here!
• You think about the cookies and iced coffee you will get at a convenience store somewhere at the halfway point in your run.  (You think about all the peanut butter you used to eat every day but don’t any more, and don’t regret it.  You end up getting peanut butter cookies.)
• You think about how this time last year you were at your first rookie camp with Coach and the rookie team, how you couldn’t run 15mins without your shins hurting, how Coach turned you into a heel-striking shuffler and how happy you were to leave that camp being able to run 2 hrs pain-free on the track.
• Sometimes an old song comes onto the ipod and you think back to where you were back when you first heard that song.
• You realize you are now running on the Jeju ironman run course and are surprised at how you thought it was so hilly 3 months (and 10 pounds) ago and now you barely even notice any hills.
• You wonder how much of your improvement is due to the amount of weight you’ve lost and how much it’s due to Doc’s coaching.  The two are correlated of course.
• You laugh because your coach and teammates thought you were pretty huge when they first met you (10-20 pounds ago) but what they don’t know is that you actually used to be MUCH BIGGER.  In fact, over 35 pounds bigger back in 2004 between your second and third ironmans.  And how that would make a great blog post, you even have the embarassing pictures to prove it.
• You toss around some blog ideas in your head.
• You seethe with jealousy over James’ latest blog showing all the free schwag the Kona teammates are getting, and how it’s like Christmas in Kona!  ***jealous jealous jealous!!!***

Well 4+ hours and all those random thoughts later I arrive back home and discover it is like Christmas in Jeju too!  I have two big boxes greeting me and even with the runners’ high, my spirits are lifted exponentially higher:

yippee I love mail!!!

Mom has sent me back the triathlon gear I thought I didn’t need!  When GreatMan was originally postponed, I had thrown my BlueSeventy wetsuit and other race necessities in with the dead warrior horse and shipped them home from Switzerland.  Anything to help avoid the evil excess baggage fees.  Then upon learning the race was still on but postponed, well hmm “Mom I need my stuff back!”

taking photos of yourself can be hard.

She even threw in what every triathlon superstar dreams of…a brand new Camelbak!!  Oh, best day ever!!  I am super excited to try this out in a couple days during my next monster run…it is a new model called the Annadel (the men’s/unisex model is called the Fairfax) and comes with it’s own sternum strap:

don't laugh, you would look tired too if you just ran 4 hours.

The two models I’ve had before (the Charm and the Hydrobak) didn’t have a chest strap so I had to rig my own, MacGyver-style, to minimize the bouncing on my back.  They managed to build in some bigger compartments for storing stuff like your keys and snacks (e.g. emergency cookies for a monster run), without adding very much bulk to it.

isn't it great how the one I just used is so salty??

It’s so pretty!  I love the periwinkle color, although when I do make it big and Camelbak fights amongst other hydration pack companies to sponsor me, it will come in a pink teamTBB color scheme. 

Anyway, thank you to Mom, Cousin Vicki who arranged the shipping to Ariel, and Ariel for sending it down here to me!

The other box came from my newest (and very own!) sponsor:  Yogavive, which makes all-natural organic apple chips.  They are called Yogachips and each one-bag serving is only 35 calories with no added sugar or preservatives.  They sent me a big box of 100 bags of apple chips (yeah the whole box is still only 3500 calories!!) in all five flavors: original, cinnamon, caramel, peach, and strawberry.

I wonder how long it would take for me to eat all this

My favorite flavors are the original and strawberry.  These apple chips are actually a perfect match for me as Coach has been calling me a “born-again” with regards to the changes I’ve made to my diet this past year, especially the last couple months.  Other than the massive amounts of Gatorade I drink when biking and running, and the monster run cookies, for the most part I’ve eliminated processed foods out of my regular diet.  I would go as far as to say over 90% of what I eat these days are whole unprocessed foods.  If I do eat anything processed, I’ve gotten particular about checking the list of ingredients and try to keep it to five ingredients or less, with names I recognize.  Obviously this is difficult in Korea when I can’t read the ingredients at all, so much easier to stick to things that don’t come with a nutrition label!  E.g. I’ve been eating sweet potatoes during my bike rides…boiled and sliced:

they're just like French Fries without all the fat

I know some of you are concerned I’m not eating enough with all this weight I’ve lost recently (that’s what happens when you get famous, first they say you’re too fat, then you’re too skinny, it never ends) but it’s funny…I think I may actually be eating more carbs than I ever have–they just come in the form of bananas, sweet potatoes, oats, and much more rice than I’ve eaten in the last few years. 

these like the Yogachips have the "Superstar Snack Seal of Approval"

I have to go to the store every other day to get more nanners and taters.  And yeah, I am being a really good Chinese girl now, using the rice cooker every day and making boatloads of rice!  Ok, that is enough preaching from this “born-again” but I have had some inquiries on how I’ve gotten so lean.  Not that I’m qualified to give out any nutrition advice as I have yet to prove that I can keep the weight off, but that’s my plan!  Let’s just say I have finally found what works for me and I’m sticking to it.  Clearly the chocolate croissant diet in France didn’t work. 

Well, too bad my teammates all left already, I guess I don’t have to share my apple chips! 

Thank you Yogavive!!

the feeling is mutual!

Well Jeju loves having us here, and I’m loving being here.

You see signs all over the island proclaiming their love for us!

they say it in Japanese and Chinese too

It started with Ariel from the Jeju tourism office greeting me at the airport with flowers…for the second time actually!  The first time was in July when I raced the ironman here.

I look like @ss from the travel but isn't Ariel cute?

We have welcome banners by the Blue Hill House and one in the swimming pool.

ok we can forgive them for putting Lance on our banner.

The pool is a really sweet 50-meter pool.  And by sweet I mean really painful.

big sports complex housing our pool

The roads have the best surfaces for riding on, not much traffic, and there’s always gorgeous scenery to keep your spirits high.

it's a pretty bike-friendly island

gorgeous roads with gorgeous scenery

lovely sights to see

Some of my favorite sessions are at the Marathon Center track.  I couldn’t believe they have both a big stadium with a main track, and another warm-up track right outside of it!  This was why I got confused on my first day–I knew there were two tracks, but didn’t see my teammates go inside the stadium.  I saw the warm-up track and thought “oh no…they are not here…they must be at the other track.  Wherever that is!”

the South Korean national flag flies next to the Jeju Self-Governing Province flag

We had a film crew follow us around for a mini documentary.  Because we are V.I.P. triathlon superstars here!

1-2-3, yell "Team TBB!"

They took us on a little shopping trip to the traditional market, where we got all kinds of special deals on fresh veggies.

hamming it up with the veggie ladies

The filming capped off with a team BBQ…Korean hospitality is pretty sweet!  And by sweet I mean delicious

not quite camera-ready

with Seulgi, the director/producer's interpreter, and Ariel

Needless to say I am enjoying being back on Jeju Island where I left with some very good memories back in July.  Every time I run by Jungmun beach, the water is beautiful but almost annoyingly flat.  No vomit-inducing waves like during race morning, so I’m sure my teammates think I am just a crap swimmer making stuff up.  Then again until I go under an hour I am just a crap swimmer, so no difference.

A lot of the roads we ride on are part of the ironman course, so that always makes me smile when I see the mile markers.  And we go by the World Cup stadium on the way to track workouts–where the finish line of my first triathlon win was!

Sometimes when people stare and whisper at me, surely they are saying “hey isn’t that the girl that won the ironman here??”  Well either that or “that girl has really cool hair.  and she’s super tall.”  OK maybe I am getting a big head, but at the track a week ago I was actually greeted as “Hello, Jeju ironman champion!”  Turns out it was local pro triathlete Cho, who had been also raced in July and won it the previous year.

Then we went to a team dinner last weekend at a restaurant and the owner exclaimed to me “oh welcome back!  Long time no see!”  He remembered me from the race too!

I also found out I have a picture in one of the national sports magazines here–it’s the Korean Sports Promotion Foundation’s monthly publication and there’s a nice write-up on the Jeju ironman, the “toughest day in sports” as they call it.

not just a tri magazine but a national sports publication!

there I am!

To add to my fame and superstardom here, we raced at the Beautiful Jeju International Marathon today.  I got put in the marathon of course…and actually won it!  With a new huge PR of 3:15!  I’ll save the details for my next blog but a bunch of local athletes also recognized me from the ironman race and they wanted photos with me AND autographs.  Of course being such a ham I thoroughly enjoyed it! 

In fact I am loving Jeju so much, I decided to stay here for another 3 weeks.  The GreatMan ironman race that was originally cancelled has now been postponed to October 25th.  I am training very well here and really love it here, so why not cap off a great training camp in Jeju with another great result at GreatMan?  That’s the plan and as I am in the best shape of my life, I can’t wait to smash my PR from Ironman China–that 11:08 is going down!  I am even starting to get a real six-pack and am not leaving Korea without one. 

THANK YOU JEJU FOR HAVING US HERE! 

The end of August and thus the end of Swiss training camp approaches.  All of my roommates–Bean, LC, and recently Manny–have abandoned me to clean out the Swiss penthouse to Swiss standards.  A very daunting task and I’m not sure if I am up to it!  I tossed out the half jar of Nutella one of them left as I am learning to think more like a champion, a nice side effect from hanging out with Coco.  Which means I need to eat more like a champion.  And champions don’t eat Nutella.  Or chocolate croissants.  Or chocolate cereal.  Or chocolate cookies.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a guy or one of them skinny-ass vegetarian girls!

I land in Korea for our September training camp on Friday, and with just 2 weeks out from my next ironman race, the GreatMan in central Korea, learned that the race has been cancelled.  The official reason is the H1N1 flu hype–my initial reaction was “but I’ve already had swine flu and it wasn’t that bad!”  But now rumors have been circulating that my competition (both the pro women AND men) heard I was racing and were totally scared off.  Apparently I was ready to whack the living daylights out of them after training and racing for 6 weeks in the Swiss and French Alps.  Who knew the Wongstar was so damn intimidating?

Well, I like nothing better to vent out my disappointment than a monster marathon run on the track.  No teammates and no Coach would be there; just me, my Avias, the two Camelbaks, a fully-charged ipod, and the Swiss Alps surrounding me.  I decided that this would be my own championship race.  The Swiss track marathon championships!  Nobody to whack the living crap out of except for myself.  Because it is what you do when nobody is watching that makes the difference.

where champions are made

My support crew consisted of Fall Out Boy, Linkin Park, Katy Perry, Good Charlotte, ATB, the Killers, Kelly Clarkson and even some Avril and Britney.  This new playlist was only 3hr 37min long, so of course I had to finish before the last song ended.  3:39 was my fastest track marathon over 4 months ago in Subic, and 3:33 was my best marathon ever at Embrun 2 weeks ago.  Maybe now I could go under 3.5 hours!

The night before I made the dinner of champions:  a big liver and onion salad.  Most people find eating liver to be really gross but being Chinese I don’t find it unusual and actually…like it.  I finally figured out how to cook it myself after Bean left.  It is also chock full of all kinds of magical nutritional goodness, and bonus, it’s also the cheapest meat here  Don’t tell my competition, but eating liver is going to make me faster than them!

food for champions, bon appetit!

I also filled up my Camelbaks and put them in the fridge so I could roll out of bed and get an early start.  Below is a picture from my Jeju race; see, I really did use Starbucks!  I couldn’t find a Starbucks or even bottled Starbucks here in Leysin, so I used the local iced coffee: 3 servings with 80mg of caffeine in each.  Is that a lot?  I also threw in 3 tabs of Kona Cola Nuun for electrolytes, before realizing each tab also has 20mg of caffeine.  So 300mg of caffeine for someone who rarely has any…now that’s rocket fuel.

There is a reason they look like IV bags...they provide a constant drip of hydration and electrolytes! and caffeine in the 2nd one!

Well I biked down to the track Sunday morning, an early start meant brr was it cold.  Not yet September and already getting cold in Switzerland!  I wore my Scody one-piece racing kit, it’s always good to practice training in what you race in.  At least the sun was out and I would warm up soon enough.  Off I went; it always takes me a couple miles to settle in and soon I was comfortably shuffling along.  A few guys were out for their regular Sunday stroll around the track.  One of them was speedwalking in Lane 1, but always moved aside when I approached and would call out “Bravo!” to me.  His technique reminded me to go heel-toe, heel-toe.  My legs and feet are finally starting to cooperate after Coach said this was the only way to get under 3:20.  No more silly toe-running, I want to go under 3:20!

The miles began to fly by almost effortlessly and my legs seemed to go into auto-pilot.  Is this “the zone?” because I think I’m “in the zone!”  Track marathons are not for the mentally weak.  Before I knew it, I had hit halfway and switched to the iced coffee rocket fuel.  Delicious!  Cappuccino flavor.  Not sure if anybody else drinks coffee during their marathons, but you are all missing out.  :)  I went back to holding pace and soon the legs told me they wanted to go faster.  Well, ok legs, but don’t go crazy, keep it under control, ok?!

With 10k to go I granted full permission to flog myself and brought the mile splits down further…7:20…7:16…  Nothing like a good negative split to finish off a track marathon!  Wow that seemed to go by a lot quicker than the last time…  oh, because I did actually go a lot quicker than last time…faster than I ever have before!  I didn’t see my final marathon time until I hit “stop”:

a little bit salty despite my electrolyte drips

3:26:04, a new marathon PR!

I relaxed, rehydrated, and refueled, then headed back up the mountain on Blue Steel.  The hardest part about biking home was actually swinging my leg over the top tube…a little bit sore!  I don’t see why anybody would pay 13 francs to take the train up when you have a perfectly working bike with a full set of gears.  ;)

Champions don’t take the easy way home.

Rumor has it that a bike monster in the making, code name Wongstar, has been going up and down the mountains of Switzerland on a fixed gear bike.  Well technically this is not true as on a true fixed gear bike, you can’t coast; if the wheels are spinning, the pedals are spinning.  Oh boy would that suck going down these hills.  It is true that Khan the Somewhat Revived Warrior Horse has been locked into a single speed configuration.  39-19 which I’m told is the same as 53-25.  This morning was Khan’s last ride, I went up the mountain (or more a hill by now) for the tenth time in the faux fixed gear.

And true that by the fifth time I went up, the big hill going home was less of a mountain.  For the past 2 weeks this is the only biking I’ve done.  What will it be today, Coach?  Will I go up the hill once, twice, or three times today?  Because this gear ratio is really only good for going up and down steep hills–it is when the road flattens out that I get stuck, spinning out of gears quickly.

This weekend is Embrunman, what I like to call a “bonus ironman” because the bike is 188km instead of 180km, with over 5000 meters of climbing.  They tell me this is where boys become men and girls become women.  Just in time I got my new old frameset back, and really I am grateful to finally have more than one gear option!  I won’t be picky.  Two would be nice…how about the 53-19 and 39-19?

After the type of biking I’ve done over the last 2 weeks I’m thinking that going up any mountain with a full set of gears on my bike is going to feel…well…simply AMAZING!

As for our dear friend Khan, if I ever go back to track racing on the velodrome, you may see him as a true fixie without any brakes.  Here are some old photos of me in my track cycling days back in 2006.  The “Superdrome” in Frisco, Texas was a true velodrome with the steep 44-degree banked corners.  Not like some of those wussy shallow velodromes.  My track cycling career was short-lived as this was just a minor distraction from Ironman racing:

Superfun at the Superdrome

getting chicked is tough for the male ego. bwahaha

whatever you do, don't stop pedaling or you'll fall

look Ma no brakes!