Ethan Brown: Professional Triathlete

My 2009 season officially ended on a bittersweet note at the Paris Grand Prix on August 30th. The race certainly didn’t go well, but it wasn’t a total disaster. A foot to the head about halfway through the swim knocked me a bit senseless for a few seconds, but I was able to regain my composure and come out of the water in the main group. Sitting towards the back of the main pack on the bike, I had bad positioning going into t2. There were about 60 guys in the pack, and I was able to chase down roughly half. I was the top finisher for team St. Jean du Monts, but narrowly missed out on a top-30 finish (34th) which would’ve secured me a 250 Euro bonus. Our team finished dead last and will be relegated to Division II for next year. I’m still deciding on whether or not I’ll do the whole French Grand Prix experience thing next year.

I realize I haven’t blogged for a while, so I’ll recap the performances and main events of the past couple months.

Me leading the Marlboro Tri.

• I won the Marlboro Triathlon on July 26th. The bike and run courses were hilly and technical. I exited the water in the lead and lead for 2 out of the 3 bike laps until Dean Phillips passed me. It took me a mile or so to run myself back into 1st place and then it was cruise control from there on out.

Dean Phillips: My main compeition in Marlboro

the W

Photos courtesy of Derkacs Photography

Photos courtesy of Derkacs Photography

• The following weekend I headed down to New Bedford to run a 5k. There was a tiny bit of prize money, so I knew the race would be competitive. When the gun went off I took the early lead but was just pulling a pack of about 6 or so, so I backed off and settled in on someone’s shoulder. About a mile into the race our pack dwindled to 4, and after I pushed the pace up a tiny incline we were down to 3. One of these guys was East African, and I honestly couldn’t tell if he was just jogging or actually racing us (he was jogging). After the 2nd mile we began to go downhill and dropped the other member of our pack, so it was just down to me and the Kenyan. He pulled away over that last mile – I struggled to hang on but was absolutely redlining at that point. I finished 2nd place in 15:03. A solid effort – it won me $150 in cash!

• On August 9th I won the Gloucester triathlon. This was one of the most competitive local races I’ve ever done. It was a ton of fun but very painful. Like Marlboro I lead out of the water. The swim and run courses were very short relative to the bike, so the odds were stacked towards the stronger cyclists. This time it only took Dean Phillips 5 miles to catch me – much sooner than I expected! To my surprise, Belgian super-cyclist Tony Delogne went by me shortly after Dean. I knew I had no shot at keeping up with Dean, but I picked up the pace and was able to stay within striking distance of Tony. On the run I slowly began to pull away from Tony, but I couldn’t even see Dean up ahead. I was getting worried – every time I turned a corner I’d look up ahead for Dean but never saw him. It wasn’t until less than a mile to go that I finally began to reel him in and eventually made the pass. Tony also nipped Dean in the end. The 3 of us finished within a minute – I’m not used to that kind of pressure on the local scene! I was able to pull out the victory, but I certainly wouldn’t describe it as easy.

Photos courtesy of Derkacs Photography

• Next up was two weeks of heat acclimation training in Ft. Myers, FL to get ready for elite nationals in Tuscaloosa, AL. Along with the heat came daily thunderstorms, which I wasn’t expecting. That made for long waits at the pool (for the storms to pass) and caused me to cut several rides short. On race day Tuscaloosa didn’t turn out to be the inferno that I was expecting – it was quite comfortable. The race got underway and I found myself in the lead pack. There was a small breakaway of Dustin McLarty and Brian Fleischman up ahead. I exited the water in good position and headed out onto the bike course with a group that included O’Donnell, Collington, Chrabot, and Leto. I had a little trouble getting my foot in my shoe and let a little gap open up, but Kyle Leto and I quickly worked to close it down. We got back in the group at the base of the first big hill. We started ascending and I was the first guy to get dropped. My legs burnt and I just didn’t have the power those other guys did. I knew I was still ahead of Matt Reed, so I didn’t panic too much. A couple minutes later Reed and Fretta came by, and I got on their wheels. The pace they were setting was brutal (they ended up bridging up to the front group), and I just couldn’t hold on. I was dropped from that group, too. I was so demoralized at that point that – I knew that, for all practical purposes, I was out of the race. Things had played out perfectly for me – I had an awesome front-pack swim (and my run training was going very well at the time), but I just didn’t have the cycling fitness to back it up. After another group came by me I ended up dropping out. Never a good feeling, but it was the kick-in-the-butt I needed to motivate myself to get back to work and train harder than I ever have before…

So after the Paris Grand Prix I called it a season. Looking back on the year, I don’t think I met all the expectations I had for myself, but there were a lot of positives to take away: I got to race at the highest level. I got to go head-to-head with Brownlee and Gomez at ITU World Championship Series races and French Grand Prix races. At that level I’m a small fish in a big pond, but the good news is there’s no where to go but up! The experience I obtained this year was invaluable, and my perseverance is twice as strong after taking multiple beatings on the world circuit.

Me, wearing a v-neck t-shirt, and training partner Amanda

After taking three weeks off, I’ve begun laying down a base for next year. I’m currently working on my racing and training schedule for 2010. I’ll most likely go back to Chula Vista for a spring training camp, and I’m considering doing an early-season continental cup in South America to get a headstart on the ITU points race. I’m going to focus on the ITU WCS Series again next year, this time hopefully with more success! Thanks for reading and please check back for sporadic training updates throughout the fall/winter.

I’m Back

Where have I been?

Washington DC, Des Moines, Frankfurt, Munich, Kitzbuhel – Austria, Paris, St Jean du Monts – France, tours – France, Paris, Hamburg (briefly), Frankfurt, and now I’m back home.

How were the past few races?

Quite terrible for the most part, I don’t like to update when I have no good news to report, which is why I haven’t updated in a very long time… until now. My last European race, the French Grand Prix, finally went well.

How about some race reports?

Ok.

I. ITU World Championship Series Washington DC. I went into my first ever WCS race eager to test the waters of this level of competition. There was an interesting commotion leading up to the race due to rumors of poor water quality in the Potomac, which potentially could’ve turned the race into a duathlon. But on race day all was well. Well, it was almost all well. About 20 minutes before our race, a rainstorm came in and washed tons of debris (sticks, tree branches, garbage) out onto the swim course. The volunteers in kayaks did the best they could to move all of it out of the way, but a few minutes before the start it had all slowly drifted back onto the left side of the swim course. Since this was my first WCS race, I had a pretty bad ranking, which meant I would be one of the 10 or so guys to line up on the left side of the course – on a crash course with the debris pile. It sucked. I came out of the water near the very back of the back. I was one of the first guys to miss the giant chase pack that formed on the bike (there was a 5-man breakaway up ahead). I didn’t panic too much when I noticed Greg Bennett and Simon Whitfield were in my pack.

Me and Mr. Whitfield (Photo courtesy of Derkacs Photography)

However, after a couple laps, when it became apparent that we weren’t going to catch the main pack, Whitfield dropped out. A couple laps later, so did Bennett. So it was just me and a few other cyclists who certainly couldn’t match the firepower of Whitfield or Bennett. We lost tons of time to the main field. We weren’t even in the 5% ITU time cutoff. When we got to the run, I ran at tempo pace to get the workout in. My run split was 32:38 – encouraging given my effort level. I outran everybody from my pack, but finished a disappointing 28^th overall.

II. ITU HyVee World Cup. Next up was triathlon’s biggest money race in the sport’s history. $1,000,000 was up for grabs in Des Moines, IA. With the prize money rolling 75 places deep, nobody was about to let up until they crossed the finish line.

Epic Race. Someday I'll be able to tell my grandkids "several minutes after this sprint I crossed the finish line"

This time I had a good swim and made the front pack on the bike. However, being in the back of the bike pack for most of the 40k, I was forced to put out a huge effort every time our large, 40-man pack went around a 180 degree turn or technical section of the course. My 5 second max power was 940 watts! Doing this over and over for 8 laps began to really take a toll on my legs. Also, I was not prepared for the humid conditions that Iowa had in store for me – it’s been cold and rainy in Boston all summer! By the time I got to the run I was fried. I shuffled along for 10k, still trying to pick up some places/hold off the guys behind me. I finished a disappointing 34^th. I’m still scratching my head as to what happened here. If there was ever a time I wish my run was “on”, this was it. Even my tempo-effort run from DC would’ve moved me up about 20 spots. Still won $2000 though, which is pretty awesome. I’ll come back to this race as many years as I possibly can.

III. ITU World Championship Series Kitzbuhel Austria. Ah Kitzbuhel. What happened here? Oh yeah – bad swim, missed the front pack on the bike, it started pouring rain and was about 50F outside, I shivered the whole bike, there were crashes everywhere, I had visions of hypothermia in Vancouver, finally warmed up on the 2^nd lap of the run, ran pretty bad, finished a disappointing 41^st place.

Me in a small bike pack... freezing

At this point I was so demoralized that I decided to pull out of the WCS Hamburg race scheduled for July 25^th. I would just do the French Grand Prix and then come home to race the Marlboro Triathlon instead of taking another beating on the ITU WCS circuit. I flew to Paris and then took a 3 hour train ride to Nantes, I was then picked up by the team manager of the French club that I’m racing for: St. Jean du Monts, and he drove me to the city of St Jean du Monts where I would stay for the week. It was a pretty nice area on the coast of Western France. Being by myself in France for the week I had time to reflect on my past 3 performances and try to figure what kept going wrong for me. I didn’t train a whole lot, I ate an 800g jar of Nutella in 3 days, I bought a baguette everyday, and I randomly started drinking Coke, which I never do.

These French Grand Prix races are nearly just as competitive as the ITU WCS races, featuring big names like Gomez and Brownlee, but most are only half the distance (750m/20k/5k), so they are incredibly fast. We drove to Tours on Saturday and I met the rest of my team – a couple French guys, an Australian, a Spaniard, and a Hungarian. Everyone seemed eager to tell me how awful “the fight” was during the swim. 90 guys on a start line of a 750 meter swim – I didn’t even want to think about the mayhem. Anyway, I was told that our club just moved up from Division 2 to Division 1 this year. If they want to stay D1, then they have to not be in the bottom 3 (of 16) teams at the end of the season. At the first 2 races, which I did not compete in, they finished bottom 3, so it was getting down to the wire and we needed a good team performance.

IV. French Grand Prix – Tours, France. Since our team was basically ranked last in D1, we had the worst starting position. When we walked out onto the small pontoon, it began to sink. There were just too many guys and the pontoon was too small. I was about in waist deep water when I began to fall in. I quickly turned around and grabbed the other side of the pontoon (which looked like it was about to capsize). Just then the starting gun went off. My back was to the start line! I did a back flop into the water and just started swimming as hard as I could. There was a wall of bodies. At times I was literally fighting more than I was swimming, but I sensed that I had a decent position in all the madness. When the first buoy approached, I swam over it – along with about 15 other guys.

I believe that's me on the bottom of the screen in the yellow/dark blue suit just exiting the water behind my teammate, Alfred torok

I exited the water about 20 seconds down from the leader, had a quick t1, and just started hammering on the bike. A small breakaway with Gomez, Belaubre, and a few other fast swimmers had formed. I was in the giant chase pack. The bike course was 5 x 4k loops, it was technical and dangerous (lots of patches of gravel). I rode comfortably in this pack. It was intense with all the team managers screaming at their guys. Sensing that I was going farther and farther back in my big pack, I decided to make a move to the front. I threw in a little surge and kept very close to the front, frequently leading, for laps 3 and 4. One of the team manager guys started screaming: (imagine a French accent) “Recooperation RECOOPERATION” at me – in other words “stop doing all the work”. I backed off a little during the last lap, which was kind of a mistake because every second counts when it’s only a 5k run, and being halfway back in my pack I had some serious ground to make up after t2. I flew out of transition – the run was 2 laps of 2.6k. I flew by about 20 guys in that first lap and settled into about 16^th place. On the 2^nd lap I surged more and was able to move up into 13^th. Coming through the last kilometer a Russian was closing in on me. My team manager was running along side me screaming something in French. I loved the intensity. In a sprint finish I held off the Russian to take 13^th. Our club rarely ever has a guy in the top-30, so they were ecstatic with my performance. We finished a best-ever 9^th in the team race. I’ve never been kissed by so many French dudes in my life. They were thrilled with the team’s performance. I received a bonus of a few hundred Euro from my club, and they want to fly me back out to race in the Paris Grand Prix next month. It was a hectic but fun experience, so I think I’ll do it. I finally had a performance that I could be satisfied with! I split 16:06 for 5.2k, only 14 seconds slower then Mr. Gomez, who won the race.

What’s the plan now?

The plan now is to start training hard again for Nationals on Aug 22^nd. In the meantime, I’m going to race a bunch of local triathlons and running races and really try to sharpen my racing form. I may go down to Florida a couple weeks before nationals to get used to the heat that I’ll have to deal with in Tuscaloosa. At any rate, hopefully I got all my bad races for the year out of the way and updates to my blog will be frequent from this point on.

I’m 3 hours away from racing HyVee, a bit nervous but nice and cool in my hotel room. Terrible race last week – 28th in DC and I’m looking for redemption. Will be a tough 64 man race with a one million dollar prize purse. Triathlon needs more of these. Wish me luck

Hi all, sorry for not posting this sooner – here is the link to my latest race report from the ITU Austin Continental Cup. The race  did not go my way, and I came away with a 6th place finish after being ranked 3rd going into the event. It could’ve been much worse though – there was a nasty bike pileup right next to me with a few K to go that took out a few of my good friends and former teammates. I expended too much energy on the bike and found that my legs were zapped by the time I got onto the run. I went into damage control mode as I shuffled along trying to salvage ITU points and hold off a few athletes who were closing in on me. Like I said, it could’ve been worse, so I can’t be too disappointed. Last year at this time I hadn’t even finished an ITU race because of mechanical problems in Mazatlan and then getting hypothermia at Worlds.

I’m now back home in Lowell, MA and have begun an intense training block leading up to the Washington DC and HyVee ITU races. This will probably be my toughest block of training in the whole year. After this I’ll be racing quite frequently, traveling to Europe for most of July, and most likely preparing to race at the ITU Grand Final in Gold Coast, Australia. I’m sure the next 3 months will be an adventurous blur as I travel and race all over the world!

Sooo I’m happy to report that my foot is almost completely better and I’ve been able to log consistent, pain-free miles outside for 2 weeks now. However, because I’ve lost so much ground being injured, I do not think that my running is where it needs to be in order to be competitive in the Ishigaki World Cup and Tongyeong WCS race – two races with very stiff competition.  Becuase of this, I’ve withdrawn my name from those start lists. I think this is the best choice because I can spend those two weeks 1) not wasting energy traveling in Asia 2) continuing to develop my running and 3) racing closer to home. So that’s what I’ve decided to do. I’m going to race St Anthony’s on April 26th instead. This will be a very competitive race, but since my swimming and biking are far better than my runing at the moment, a non-draft race seems like my best opportunity to maximize success. I haven’t ruled out doing the continental cup race in Mazatlan, but I’m leaning strongly towards St. Anthony’s. It’s one of those classic races that I feel every triathlete should do at some point. So that’s that. No Japan for now

The Olympic Training Center is strapped for cash at the moment and coming up with all these energy/$$ saving measures. Their latest experiment, however, is not a popular one among the athletes. The maintenance crew installed these low-flow shower heads on all my building’s showers, and to say that they’re less than satisfactory is an understatement. We originally thought that someone was playing a joke on us, but when we asked about it at the front desk we were told it was permenant. We can no longer say “I’m taking a shower”, instead, it’s “I’m taking a mist”, because that’s what the water pressure feels like. The MOST unsatisfying showers ever! The water always feels like it’s cold because it’s more of a fine spray than anything. We’ve been complaining non-stop about it (triathletes are good at that), and our complaints have been noted… but disregarded…

On the training front things have been going quite well. I’ve been averaging about 25k/wk in the pool and 10 hours/wk on the bike with lots of intensity. Swimming and biking are feeling stronger than they’ve ever been, just hope the running comes around as I continue to build. The other day I had a 3 hour ride with 3×20 min hill climbs up Honey Springs. After my first one I began descending back down to the bottom when I noticed my back wheel fishtailing – a flat. I stopped, began to change it, got out my spare tube, and realized that it had a broken valve – I was stranded! I called my lifeline (Sexton), and luckily he answered. He agreed to come out and rescue me in his Audi. A few minutes later anothe rider came by and asked if everything was ok. I explained the situation, and he offered me a spare tube. I was back in business! I finished the workout with only about a 10 minute delay and notified Sexton that he didn’t have to come get me. That’s the first time I’ve flatted out here (and hopefully the last).