New Plymouth New Plymouth is one of my favorite places and a pleasure to visit. I love the rolling hills, the rocky seaside, the coffee, the people, and the pace of life. I think I might be a kiwi at heart 😉 Much to everyone’s surprise, the water was a “20.2” non-wetsuit swim (20 degrees is the cutoff) on a …
I did similar posts for the 2014 and 2015 season, and it’s time for another edition. Its quite entertaining for me to look back on the year and reflect on some of my favorite parts and also laugh at some of the horrible/absurd things that happened. Here is the 2016 edition of my superlatives: Best moment – Winning Edmonton …
While speaking to the swim team at my high school alma mater recently, I was asked what my goals in high school swimming were. My primary goal was to win the 500 free at states. I fell short both years that I competed for my high school team and recalled being extremely disappointed by my performances, but I didn’t actually …
Tongyeong I loved racing in Tongyeong and I definitely plan to return. Tongyeong is a fishing village located about 90 minutes drive southwest of Busan. It’s just about as far south as you can go on mainland Korea. I loved the rolling green hills next to the sea and the track surface running path right along the water. Its a …
Most of my Latin American trip was pretty rough. I try to talk about the challenges of being a professional athlete not to be negative, but rather to show that you don’t really need all of your ducks in a row to put a quality race together. As a young athlete I often felt like things had to come together …
After my catastrophic race in Edmonton last year, I was convinced that I would never return. In May, Paulo mentioned that it would likely be a good opportunity given its timing after the Olympics, but I still didn’t want to come back. I wasn’t sold on racing Edmonton until I was forced to withdraw from Tiszy and Hamburg in July …
Striving for excellence brings out the best and the worst in people. Unfortunately as the Olympics approach, a segment of the media is focusing on how the quest for excellence brings out the worst in people, or promotes unhealthy or undesirable behaviors. Federations and training groups engaging in systematic doping; athletes getting busted for PEDs (Performance Enhancing Drugs) or stories about those …
Yokohama was my third WTS race and my second time on this course. I love Japan and I was excited to return to a place that I like and have the chance to redeem myself from my poor result last year. Here is my race in short: I got to the front on the choppy swim but couldn’t create any …
Ok, so it is actually the year of the monkey. But I like pandas and Chengdu is home to the largest panda reserve in the world… so we will go with the year of the panda. Actually, as far as I’m concerned its always the year of the panda 😉 Following my race in New Plymouth, I spent the next week …
Since my last post, I’ve raced twice down under. The first race was in Mooloolaba, on the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane in Queensland. The second was in New Plymouth, on the North Island of New Zealand. Mooloolaba Mooloolaba was not one of my better races. I didn’t respond well when the race started going poorly and things spiraled out of …
