iSonrisas Para Guatemala!

Finals for the semester finished up this week with my last one being on Wednesday evening. After finishing up with that, I was up until 3:30am moving everything out of my apartment and into my car, then doing what I could of my cleaning check before crashing for the night. 6am hit and it was time to finish loading up the car and head to the Gerrard’s where they’re letting me stash it while I’m here in Guatemala for 10 days! Brad Gerrard took me to the airport on his way to work that morning and I’m almost thinking short nights like that are the way to go because the only part of the flights that I was ever awake for were the meals so almost next thing I know, we’ve landed in Guatemala City and after loading up the truck, we arrived at the hotel around 11pm and soon called it a night. We have a little over 20 dentists, a couple endodontists doing root canals, 4 oral surgeons doing the major extractions, and a bunch of volunteers to help out in areas of the clinic and humanitarian aid. In total our group numbers around 110 people and we’re scheduled to see nearly 1000 patients through the 6 days of clinic.

Friday morning we went to the church to set up the clinic and started seeing some patients around 11 and we continued on until about 8pm that night. Friday I was assigned to assist two different dentists as an assistant/translator and it has been a good experience to be able to get in the mouth with each doctor and also to be responsible for communication with the patient. It's awesome how once you get immersed in spanish, you eventually get back in the zone and it just starts flowing again. The first morning I was a bit rusty but things were a lot easier in the afternoon. We got back to the hotel and I went straight down to the pool and started swimming laps. I hit almost a mile in the pool before moving into the exercise room and getting 7 miles in on the treadmill before heading up to get ready for bed. I was a little worried about how this trip might affect my training in that I would be pretty busy and that there may not be the facilities to train or even that I could get sick while outside the country. So far they have taken excellent care of us and we’re staying in a really nice hotel with an amazing breakfast spread each morning, lunch is a make your own sandwich sort of deal, and dinner gets catered in to the clinic each night. While at the clinic, we actually have pretty decent facilities to use and at times you wouldn’t even know that you’re in Guatemala. Only on the bus ride from the hotel to the clinic and back, and on occasion when you see one of the two armed guards that circle the premises 24/7 do you remember that you’re in Guatemala.

Saturday we started seeing patients at 8am and I didn’t even get back to the hotel until 10:45 at night. It was a pretty long day as I had to take the afternoon doing my turn in sterilization for the oral surgery instruments which came through pretty much nonstop. The good part was that I got to practice the language with this 9 year old girl that was running clean trays back to the preparation room for us and so my spanish is rockin now cause she was talking with me nonstop the whole time.

In the morning and evening I did more of the assisting with patients and also spent some time taking radiographs in the diagnostics rotation. A lot of these kids are troopers as they travel from a different city and spend all day getting work done like usually 5 or 6 fillings, a root canal or two, then 3 or 4 extractions on top of all that, and maybe even a hygiene cleaning to top it off before traveling back home at the end of the day. I think the record so far was a kid that had 20 teeth with cavities to be filled and 6 teeth to be extracted.

For church today, we went out to a small town about an hour and a half from the city here, and after the service we did a “sub for santa” gift giving to all the members. We had quilts, baby bags, toys, balls, and even some candy that we distributed to them. One of the coolest things was that we also had a photo booth going where we took a picture for each family and printed/framed it right there so they could have one in their home. We then hopped on the busses back into the city for a devotional that had over 1000 youth and their leaders present. These are all the kids that live close by which we have seen/get to see over the next few days. I’ll try to update with more info and pictures as I have time during the trip.

Vegas Half Ironman!!!

I had a blast last weekend down at the Rage in the Sage half-ironman distance triathlon. Dad, Robby, and Sam drove down to Provo on Thursday and then first thing Friday morning we all took off to Vegas where we met up with Trey and Mary at the hotel casino where we were staying next to Lake Mead. After moving all our gear into the hotel room, we got back in the car to head out and drive the bike course. That was definitely a good move as the entire thing was just up and down hills with very limited flat stuff. While driving the course and analyzing it and my recent training (or lack thereof), I started dropping my expectations of what sort of time it would take me to do the bike. I had originally planned for 3 hours but with the hills and possibly wind, I got to the point where I was almost thinking I’d be closer to 3:20. After heading back to Las Vegas for race registration, we met grabbed some dinner, packed the transition bags for the morning, then went down to contribute our $20 to the casino before bed.
It took forever for me to fall asleep that night so 4am came extremely early. I debated hitting the midnight special $.99 bacon and egg breakfast, but opted to stick with my protein and waxy maize shake. We got down to the transition area shortly after it first opened and Trey, Sam, Robby, and I were all had race numbers close to each other because of our age so were all able to set up next to each other. After getting everything laid out and dressed into our wetsuits, we had time for a picture and then off to the starting line. We walked into the chilly 59 degree water right as they finished describing the course over the loud speaker and then a minute later they blew the horn and we were off. I felt like I was doing all right in the swim until I looked up at one point and noticed I was off course and had to turn back toward the group. I finally made the last buoy and next thing I know, I was up walking out of the water and checked my watch to see an ugly 40 min on there. I walked up the long asphalt boat ramp to my transition area finally unlatched my wetsuit in back after struggling with it the whole walk up. Mary was there as I walked in and let me know that Sam, Robby, and Trey had already come out of the water and were out on the bike course.
After getting ready for the bike, I took off with the goal of catching up to those guys and I knew Robby was wearing one of our red jerseys so I took the approach of just picking off every red jersey that I saw. With every red jersey I passed, I was starting to wonder whether I’d ever catch up to them. Finally as I was .5 miles from the turnaround, I saw Sam and Robby together as they were headed the other direction. This gave me a little extra boost as I was knew that I wasn’t getting left in the dust by them so I kept pushing up every hill. A few miles later, I come up a hill and see Trey up there standing on the side of the road taking a pee so we road together until we got up to same with about 10 miles left in the bike and Robby a few hundred yards ahead of us. Trey made a move and booked it up to Robby and they took it up the 3 mile long hill together before the long descent into transition where I came in a minute later and Sam just after that. I checked my watch coming in and was pretty pumped to see that my bike split was at 3:00:50 for an average of 18.6mph; much faster than I had anticipated while driving the course the day before. This was most likely due to having to catch up because of a slow swim.
We each wrapped up our transition about the same time and left out on the run together minus Sam who forgot his race belt and number so he went back real quick for them. Robby and I ran together for pretty much the first 5 miles of the course. We were pretty much dressed the same and stride for stride we kept the same pace so every single aid station and even other competitors kept asking us if we were twins. Apparently they didn’t notice the ages on our calves…or the fact that Robby’s legs are twice as big and buff as mine.
Around 5 miles in, Robby decided to drop back and run with Sam who was only 50 yards behind us so I just kept my same pace and hit every aid station along the way for a bite of banana, a gulp of heed, a gulp of water, and a refreshing splash with the rest of the cup. I felt pretty decent on the run and was able to keep my pace all the way to the finish. My run time was in 2:08 which came out at like 9:47/mile. My official time came in at 6:00:25 which was right in the range that I had been hoping for going in. I'm pretty happy with how the race went and my nutrition during it, and I think all of us are making good progress toward being ready for Ironman CDA!

Catching Up

So I pretty much got as lazy with keeping up on my blog as I did with my training between races, and I can’t say that all the snow in late March and early April can be fully to blame. I had a few adventures along the way, the most notable of which was probably when I left on a bike ride and found a nice brown deer antler up the hill in a vacant lot that I was riding past. Of course I was stoked so I ran up the hillside in my biking gear to snag it and decided to turn around and head back home. Finding this antler was actually bad for my training in my opinion because I then always wanted to go hiking to find more antlers. One of my runs was just jogging back to that spot and walking around a little to look for more easy ones and then running home. I also went up hiking a few times after classes and on the weekend and found a few brown elk antlers.
In my swimming class I posted a final time of 10:47 which I was pretty happy with cause I showed good improvement throughout the semester there. I was able to get an A in both swimming and jogging, and I figure that’s a good thing because I spent more time outside of class for those areas than I did for classes like biomechanics or history. Anyway, final projects and papers started coming due as well so I pulled an all-nighter as I was getting sick and neither of those is fun the week before a race.