Wildflower Redux

Truth in Advertising

Wildflower Triathlon. We'll take the first part first. They've got lupines, what looks like a Mariposa lily, California poppies, black mustard, and a flower that looks to be in the mint family. (It's hard to tell when you're conducting a floral review at 55 miles an hour). And they've got a purple thing.

We've got honeysuckles now in bloom, along with monkeyflowers, lilac, black sage, and mountain mahogany. We've got blue and white wild radishes and black mustard mixed in with our annual grasses: a two-foot-high field of color and light. And we've got that purple thing down here, too.

Wildflower? Empty boast. Triathlon? It's the biggest multisport weekend in the world. So they're half-right.

Blackwater, USA

On paper, this race was destined for failure. You can't get to it, for one thing. Next to Easter Island, it is the hardest place to get to from any other place. "You can't get there from here" is the truest thing you can say about Lake San Antonio. This race is hours away from you even if you're a local.

What's more, once you get there, there's no there there. At least nearby Lake Nacimiento has some thin-leafed gray pines. Lake San Antonio has live oaks and, OK, a lake. That's it.

World-class pros get the luxury suites: threadbare bedding in tilt-up modular trailers that look like gray wooden freight containers. The rest of us fight over "prime camping spots." Once I asked the late Bill Smith, Spencer's father, if he'd like to come camping with JulieAnne and me. "What? Sleep in a bag? On the ground? You've got to be out of your mind, mate." But that's what we all can't wait to do at Lake San Antonio the first weekend in May.

No way does this race pencil, theoretically. That's the irony of triathlon, we guess. Six thousand athletes here, with another thousand turned away. College students from nearby Cal Poly San Luis Obispo fighting to volunteer, 1,500 of them camped nearby in "Beach City." (Organizers are so concerned about older predatory males they've got guards at Beach City's entrances checking wrist badges. I know precisely whom they're worried about. While I'm not telling, the guards are a good idea.)

Counting racers, volunteers, husbands, wives, kids, officials, cops, expo-booth staff, you've got 15,000 souls all told sitting in a big, dusty bowl at one time. Burning Man meets Bay-to-Breakers. This is the only triathlon I've ever been to where you go the entire weekend without running into most of the people you expect to see.

This used to be the Wildflower Festival. And oh, yeah, there was a triathlon. Now the Festival is pretty much history. No room for it.

Cam Widoff

He flatted. And then rode the flat for ten or 20 miles before he just up and changed it. That's why his bike split was so slow, as it turned out. Then he charged into fourth place on the run, with something like a 1:13 half-marathon.

Rush Hour

Jurgen Zack and I rode the short-course ride during that race, one day after Zack was a close second in the long-course race. You know that overhead shot of the peleton in the Tour de France? Imagine a five-mile long peleton. Riders to the left of you, to the right, in front, behind. City commuters would have an unfair advantage in the race, what with their dodging tactics honed on a daily basis. Marshals? Hah! The only rule left to enforce was to stop people crossing the double yellow. One girl crossed it, and, splat(!), into the oncoming media van. (Not to worry; she's fine. I checked the next day. No life-threatening or overly serious injuries at all, in fact.)

I asked Terry Davis, the race director, what he’d do differently next year. "No changes to the long course, it went perfect. But we’ll re-do the short course transition ingress/egress so that we can spread the waves further apart." That was my thought as well. Twenty-eight-hundred in the short course is too much without at least five-minute gaps in each wave.

Speaking of the short course, this was the first time I saw a race that was less a race and more of a cultural happening like the mass-entrant footraces around the country. As usual, the females had a ball and took it in stride while the males ferociously tried to keep up on the uphills—not simply trying to keep contact, but literally trying to stay upright—yet were transformed into screaming banshees on the descents.

Leaving town

Leaving is harder than arriving, I found out. I was growling at people who four-wheeled it on the dirt-road shortcuts to the park exit, cutting an hour off their exit time. For 30 minutes I growled and considered hurling obscenities at the cowardly, selfish bastards. Then I saw my chance—a low berm—and skipped over the hump, onto the dirt, and on to freedom...