Amy and I went to Portland, OR on Friday after I got in the track workout. Now it was a bit cold here in SF but jeez Portland was like unbelievably cold and rainy. Lovely, can't wait to swim and run. On Friday night I found a great restaurant (
Higgins) and we were able to get in on short notice and we had a great dinner so I could load up for my Saturday workout.
I found a 25 yard indoor pool at the
Riverplace Athletic Club to swim in so I was able to crank out a 2,650 yard workout. The Hilton where we stayed had an indoor pool but it was 18 yards? Um yeah and I discovered that there weren't many indoor 25 yard pools downtown. Either it was find a normal 25 yard lap pool or get dizzy having to turn around so much. This was a tough swim workout and Coach Sedonia is putting the hammer to us with intervals in the pool which will make us faster swimmer. The workout was:
Warmup 300
Drills: Kick on back 3x25 150
Catchup 3x25 150
Scull 3x25 150
3x50 Build L4-L6 150
100 L7 100
400 Steady L5 400
3x50 Build L4-L6 150
100 L7 100
3x50 Build L4-L6 150
100 L7 100
400 Steady L5 400
3x50 Build L4-L6 150
100 L7 100
Cooldown 100The builds weren't that bad. But doing a hard 100 at L7 exertion after the builds your heart feels like it is going to explode and your arms are very tired and then what--a steady 400? Great. I was wiped out this workout and my upper body was feeling it. The swimming is, I dare say, is starting to change my upper body. Hmm is the s _ _ y phase coming? I don't want to peak too early! Amy told me on the plane on Friday that I was getting more muscular in my upper body (well I only had one way to go and that was up so woohoo).
Quick presto chango and onto the road for a run. After a 10 minute warmup I cruised a 6 mile run along the Willamette River crossing a couple bridges. I love running in Portland. The weather is great and its the place where I ran my fastest marathon in 2004.
Sunday turned into a rest day as we got back too late from Portland and had to take care of Bics.
Week 10 is here already? Yep, sneaks up on you but we've been training for 2 and 1/2 months now. I'm actually enjoying the swimming--who woulda thunk? My running is improving as well as my VDOT improved already and I feel very strong on the run workouts. The biking has maintained where I was and we'll start to get into some longer rides soon which I really enjoy. It's a matter of putting them all together that is the next big challenge. We have the Louie Bompua Memorial Tri on January 24th. An Olympic Distance--.92M swim, 20 or so mile bike and about a 10k run. First time to practice dong transitions and seeing how you put them all together as well as swimming for the longest distance I've ever swam continously--about 66 laps.
Training has been great but even better is that I've gotten some generous donations from a bunch of wonderful people and just crossed over the $4K mark on my way to $10K. Week 10 Honoree: Jon Withrington. Jon was a participant on my DeathRide team and this week he'll be my inspiration for training. Jon was in my ride group for most of the season and is an amazing rider with the argyle socks :). On March 30, 2009 the following article was in the SF Chronicle:
Couples battles cancer with biking runningMarch 30, 2009By Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff WriterIt's just two months since his last chemo treatment, but cancer patient Jon Withrington is already in training for an insanely ambitious cycling epic in July. The Tour of the California Alps, better known as "The Death Ride," takes place July 11 in Alpine County.
It's a 129-mile grind that starts at 5,000 feet, crosses five mountain passes and demands 15,000 feet of climbing. The Web site, www.deathride.com, shows the logo: a scowling skull and crossbones.
"I think 60 percent of all the people who enter the event actually finish," says Withrington, 37, a design manager for the integrated-circuits group at Proteus Biomedical in Redwood City. "The people I've met on the team -
'crazy' is a good way to describe them."
"He's a bit like Lance Armstrong," says Withrington's wife, Catherine. "He's just crazy on a bike. ... He's obsessed." Before his diagnosis, Jon says, "I went out every weekend and rode from home about 55 miles with 3,500 feet of climbing. On Friday nights I'd go out mountain biking with friends after work."
Good health and fitness were constants in his life. But in late August, on the way home from England, where both he and Catherine were born and reared, Withrington felt a pain in his side.
"He thought he'd pulled a muscle in his stomach from picking up some luggage," Catherine, 35, remembers. It turned out that Jon's spleen was enlarged - "the size of a brick, 10 times its normal size," he recalled. The spleen was removed Sept. 19 at Stanford Medical Center. Subsequent tests discovered a rare case of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Another family might have panicked. The Withrington's son, Oscar, was 2 and hadn't started preschool. Their baby, Rosie, was 4 months. But Jon and Catherine - who met 14 years ago when they both were working in Hong Kong, and moved to California in 2000 - didn't waste time. They researched, gathered their resources and started a proactive regimen that kept them focused, upbeat and panic-free.
"Jon must have read absolutely everything on the disease," Catherine said on a rainy morning at the couple's two-bedroom home on a cul-de-sac near the Mission District. "Book after book after book." Online, he discovered the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and joined the organization's First Connection program, which pairs newly diagnosed patients with someone who survived the same cancer.
"They'll give you a call and you can talk to them about what you're going to be in for for the next few months," Jon said. "It was really good, 'cause my odds were looking pretty poor at the time. The guy I spoke to was in a worse state than I was and seven years later he's still cancer-free."
"That program was brilliant," Catherine, said. "It just really gave John hope."
On Oct. 7 at the Palo Alto Medical Center, Jon was given the first of six cycles of R-CHOP, a combination of drugs that includes rituximab. It's the current standard chemotherapy regimen against aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphomas. The cycles were administered at three-week intervals, and by the end of the second, a PET/CT scan showed that he was cancer-free.
"I think the oncologist was very impressed with how I was responding - going from Stage IV to that (so quickly)," Jon said. "What I had going for me was the fact that I'm relatively young and fit." The four remaining cycles were necessary, he says, to minimize the possibility of a relapse.
From the onset, Jon approached the threat and challenge of cancer like an athlete. In a Sept. 25 e-mail to friends and family he described the treatments he was about to endure and ended the letter with a cheeky, macho "Bring it on!"
"If you met Jon you'd realize he doesn't worry about anything," Catherine said. "He never once moaned about his situation or complained or felt sorry for himself. He never said, 'Oh, I just feel terrible.' "
It helped that Jon's parents flew in from Italy, cutting short a Mediterranean sailing vacation to be with their son. They arrived in September in time for the spleen-removal surgery. They stayed through Jan. 21, two days after the last chemotherapy cycle.
At home, Jon set up a bicycle trainer and exercised up to 45 minutes per day the first two months. Later, when the remaining chemo sessions left him extremely fatigued, he still managed five minutes per day on the bicycle trainer. "He was just pretty much in bed," Catherine said. "He didn't have any energy to deal with the children or anything like that."
Catherine, who has worked as an interior designer and a high school art teacher, found her own way of addressing the crisis. She volunteered for Team in Training, a nationwide sports program that raises funds for the lymphoma society through marathons, half marathons, triathlons, bike rides and other sports challenges.
On Feb. 1 Catherine ran the Kaiser Half-Marathon (13.1 miles), which loops through Golden Gate Park, Ocean Beach and along The Great Highway, in two hours and 10 minutes. She raised an unusually high $12,300 in pledges.
"Typically LLS wants you to reach the target minimum, which for Cathie was about $2,000," Jon said.
Catherine's father, Graham, 61, flew in from England to run with her. On his Facebook page Jon wrote: "Oscar was there shouting, 'Go! Mommy Go!' as Cathie ran past mile 12."
"I'm one of those people who needs exercise to just keep going, to keep my mind healthy if nothing else," Catherine said. "And I thought, 'Well, this is such a good opportunity, because it's going to be a very stressful, nasty time ahead.' And it worked. I mean, it was fantastic."
Catherine started training in October, one week after Jon's first chemo cycle, and finished one week after Jon's last cycle. "You train with a team and you have coach runs every Saturday and go to different places in Marin on these gorgeous runs. Then you have track training Wednesday evenings at Kezar Stadium. You get a schedule every week. It's brilliantly organized."
"It was pretty crazy around here," she said. "Pretty busy. The only time I got any space at all, like my own space, was when I was running. That really helped me through it."
Catherine gives her in-laws full credit. "The only way I could do it was because my parents-in-law came out here and stayed for five months while Jon was getting better. And that meant that they could cook the meals and look after the kids. I hate cooking!"
Jon returned to work Feb. 17, a month earlier than his doctors had anticipated, and started training for the Death Ride the following weekend with a 25-mile bike ride through Mill Valley. The next week he twice cycled the 32 miles from San Francisco to his job in Redwood City - a ride that takes two hours - and went home on Caltrain.
Because of the weight and muscle mass he lost during the chemo treatments, Jon said, he was motivated to regain his fitness level as soon as possible.
According to Catherine, he had also read Lance Armstrong's book, "It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life," and found a cautionary tale therein.
"Lance Armstrong actually says that when he finished his chemo and was feeling better, he kind of went off the rails and started drinking a bit," Catherine said. "Because he didn't have that goal to aim for. So it's really great that Jon has got this goal of this 'Death Ride' to aim for and train toward."
Catherine, currently a stay-at-home mom, hopes to return to teaching art in just over a year, when Rosie starts preschool. I just got my green card through the mail today, so I can work without hassle. Hoorah!"
When her in-laws returned to England in late January, she said, she wasn't been able to run as much. "I miss it!" Two months later, Catherine was back in her fitness groove: "The evenings are lighter so I can run when Jon gets home from work," she said in an e-mail. "I'm running four times a week and training for the Bay to Breakers. I also swim once or twice a week."
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma facts What is it?Jon Withrington's form of cancer is known as T-cell/Histiocyte-rich B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma (T/HRBCL), an uncommon variant of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). According to Dr. Sandra J. Horning, oncologist at the Stanford Cancer Center and professor of medicine at Stanford School of Medicine, it is "a type of aggressive lymphoma with a distinct microscopic appearance in which the malignant B-cells are surrounded by non-malignant T-cells. This subtype is relatively rare but commonly presents with an enlarged spleen and bone marrow and liver involvement. The cause is unknown." Who gets it?Typically, patients are younger than those contracting other forms of DLBCL, says Dr. Priya Chakravarthi, medical oncologist at Palo Alto Medical Foundation. "[Patients are] very often in their early 40s. It also tends to be more common in men. For the other diffuse large B-cell lymphomas, there is no such sex predilection." Course of action? At the moment, T/HRBCL is treated like any other aggressive B-cell lymphoma with R-CHOP. CHOP is a combination of three chemotherapy agents and a steroid. More recently, rituximab (brand name Rituxan) was added, creating the acronym R-CHOP. "Rituximab is an antibody to a protein on the surface of the lymphoma cell," says Chakravarthi. "It works by binding to CD20, a molecule on the surface of almost all B-cell lymphomas and in normal B cells. It has been shown to be very effective in combination with chemotherapy, and has shown improved survival in patients with aggressive B-cell lymphoma." - Edward Guthmann
E-mail Edward Guthmann at
eguthmann@sfchronicle.com.
(C) San Francisco Chronicle 2009
I did the 1,500 yards in 28 minutes 48 seconds. My parents, my wife Amy and my kids were there to see me hammer this out and I could hear Lindsay and others cheering. Out of the water and onto the bike. I'm guessing my transition time was around 10 minutes. I slammed a V8 juice for sodium and pottasium and ate the rest of an energy bar and hopped on the bike. 
