Kennett Peterson is on a mission
Pro domestic cyclist Kennett Peterson recently raced in only his second triathlon and finished 9th overall. St. George 70.3 was his first race and he earned a pro card with a top age group finish, and then at Boulder 70.3 he was 9th as a pro in a competitive field. We talked to him about the transition from road cyclist to triathlete, doping, careless drivers, an awful accident and more.
Slowtwitch: Thank you for your time Kennett.
Kennett Peterson: The honor’s all mine.
ST: 70.3 Boulder was your first pro race and you ended up in 9th place. Was that about where you think you might be able to finish?
Kennett: No, I assumed I’d do quite a bit better actually. Maybe it was conceited of me to think it, but I was planning on a top five. I spend a lot of time online looking at pace calculators getting my numbers nerd on. I thought I could do sub 3:50 for Boulder since it’s a flat course. Ha! I’ve got a ways to go before that. Also, I really have no clue who my competition is, which might be a good thing as it probably keeps me from being overly intimidated. I’m learning the names now. People with the first name of Ben, Tim, and Matt seem to be quite fast. I need to be on the lookout for people with short names.
ST: Callum?
Kennett: Yeah that one too.
ST: On your blog you described yourself as being very nervous the night before, more nervous than in 9 years of bike racing.
Kennett: Yeah I had a lot of trouble falling asleep the night before. I’ve been bike racing so long now that it takes quite a bit to make me nervous. I still get excited before big races but I don’t get butterflies…unless I magically got called up to do the world championship road race.
ST: Your swim split was the weakest among the top 10 finishers, and that seems to be your Achilles heel. What is your goal in terms of swim speed?
Kennett: Well my first goal is to learn freestyle. I was using the side stroke at Boulder. Haha, just kidding. Yeah I need to lop off about five minutes on the swim. I train with my wife Adelaide, who’s a very good swimmer, so she pushes me even during her easy workouts. After Ironman St. George I also got a personal coach—Geoff Hawksworth, owner and director of Mountain Swim Series. Unlike running or riding, swimming comes down mainly to technique. I’ve had six or seven sessions with Geoff and he’s done miracle work with my stroke this past month. In fact the week before Boulder, Adelaide and I averaged 1:28/100m for 4600 meters at the Boulder Reservoir, which is twice as long and quite a bit faster than the swim I did at Boulder 70.3. So I don’t know what happened during the race. I should have been a lot faster. Maybe I spent too much time eating during the swim?
ST: Eating what?
Kennett: The other guys’ dust. I ate my fill.
ST: Your bike split of 2:05:26 was very solid and bested only by a few folks. But I think you did not have the power you had hoped.
Kennett: The bike leg was a real letdown. It’s funny, I’m a cyclist but cycling in triathlon doesn’t seem to be my strong suit. For one thing, I know I need to spend a lot more time assuming the position. I’ve always hated riding the TT bike and because of that I’ve been a terrible time trialist. Riding TT bikes is painful and boring so I’ve always avoided it. I guess I can’t anymore.
ST: Well, you also swam 5 minutes longer than the other pros. That surely did not help.
Kennett: I read somewhere that swimming is a good recovery activity for cycling because it’s low impact and helps with circulation. I was just getting extra recovery before the bike leg, that’s all.
ST: What bike were you using?
Kennett: Felt’s DA. My cycling team is lucky to be sponsored by a company that has such an amazing TT bike. The DA is UCI-legal, as opposed to their IA. I’d love to get my hands on a triathlon-specific bike but for now the DA packs some very good speed.
ST: I think you thought about not finishing the race as you began the run.
Kennett: Doesn’t everyone? It was hot and I was out of breath after the transition. I’m pretty sure I held my breath from concentrating too hard, and yeah, running sucks. Running is super hard. For one thing you can’t coast at all. And you go so slow despite trying so hard. It’s really a miserable activity.
ST: The sub 1:20 run however gave you that top ten finish. And that included a pit stop too.
Kennett: I don’t know how I went that fast considering I only run about 20 minutes a week. I have incredibly frail cyclist’s bones, joints, and ligaments that just don’t hold out well to the demands of running. So at this point I can only handle one short training run a week. I’m building up though.
It’s true that I did have some fire in me during the race, that’s for sure. And I don’t mean desire. There were some digestion issues. The “butterflies” were escaping. My gut was in turmoil. Something truly rotten was brewing within. If you don’t get it by now, I had massive, uncontrollable diarrhea. It was only mile four and I’d just passed a guy so I didn’t want to stop and get re-passed. I actually considered just shitting my pants. I opted for the porta potty instead. A wise choice in the long run. No pun intended.
ST: Someone will call you out that the one run a week sounds like bull.
Kennett: That’s actually completely true. In fact, I tried going out for a run today, six days after the race and I was only able to run for four minutes. It’ll be another week at least before I try again. My legs hurt that much after running. Even 25 minutes on the treadmill wrecks them. I’d love to be able to run three times a week but I’m not even close to being able to do that yet. The only run fitness I have is from being a good cyclist, ironically enough.
ST: 70.3 St. George was your very first triathlon, and also the place where you grabbed your pro card. Why triathlon?
Kennett: My wife Adelaide, then girlfriend, was hit by a car last October while training for a HITS full distance tri. The driver blew through a stop sign and she went through his side window and she literally severed her face clean off, which is termed “de-gloving.” I came upon the crash scene afterwards; luckily she’d been taken away in the ambulance by then. It took two surgeries and more are on the way to put her face back together. Almost every bone in her face had been shattered, and it required 700 stitches to sew her back up. She was in a coma for five days, breathing out of a tube, looking like a cute Frankenstein’s monster with all those stitches. I proposed to her that first night, and two or three times afterwards too. I didn’t want to live a life without her in it.
That fall and winter I hardly trained since I was taking care of Adelaide. Also, my motivation to ride had suddenly vanished. I was emotionally void of energy. I’m usually a very good trainer, oftentimes too good as in I overtrain like an idiot a lot. By the time the bike racing season came around, I was out of shape, getting dropped from races, and just needed a life change to bring me out of some quite serious depression, which I’m still dealing with. Bike racing was no longer enjoyable so I decided to broaden my horizon.
Another factor to switching to triathlon was that this way I can spend more time with Adelaide. Doing a full schedule of bike racing means you’re often gone two weeks out of every month, and those other weekends that you’re home you’re still racing. It’s a life that doesn’t allow much freedom, especially when you have a full time job. By switching sports, Adelaide and I can attend the same triathlons, we can train in the lake and pool together, and we can spend our free time arguing about which overpriced hydration system is the most aero on the market. Triathlon will let us share our lives together more than bike racing did. Our long-term goal is to one day be a sponsored husband/wife team and travel the country in a Sprinter van, living off the fat of the land—or preferably race winnings.
ST: So how is Adelaide doing right now?
Kennett: The first six months were very rough. We were both incredibly unhappy and are still to this day pretty messed up from the whole event. You don’t just get better and go about your life like nothing happened. The emotional turmoil is like nothing I could have imagined. But she, and I, have been doing much better these last two months, both emotionally and physically. She competed at St. George and came in 13th in her age group, which upset her a bit since before the crash that was slower than the pace she could go for a full distance. But given the circumstances, it was a fantastic and almost unbelievable performance. I mean, she had been in a coma five months prior. After her hospital stay was over she had barely been able to walk. Even toing the line at St. George was an accomplishment.
She has an amazing drive that sometimes gives her the ability to accomplish inhuman tasks. When we started dating she went from not being a cyclist at all to giving up her car, putting on and directing one of the best bike races in Colorado (Carter Lake), winning half a dozen races herself, and becoming a cat 3—all within half a year. Then she began training for triathlon on top of it all. She told me that she’d always wanted to be an elite athlete but had never had the know-how or push to get there. I provided the know-how and a bit of motivation and voila, she was well on her way to becoming an amazing triathlete. That was all taken away, temporarily anyways, when she was hit.
ST: What ever happened to that driver who ran the stop sign?
Kennett: A slap on the wrist. He never personally apologized to Adelaide and was given almost no punishment, just some community service and a $1,000 fine. But that’s the law. That was essentially the highest amount of punishment we could get. The guy doesn’t deserve to ever drive again, yet he’s out there being a menace to society. It’s truly messed up, especially since before hitting Adelaide he had 18 other major traffic violations just within the state of Colorado, which include causing four other car crashes, driving while being impaired, driving the wrong way down one-way streets, a huge stack of speeding tickets, and losing his license for a seven year stretch. The fact that we can’t revoke someone’s license permanently with that sort of rap sheet, someone who has shown gross negligence and recklessness behind the wheel for decades, shows just how messed up our legal system is when it comes to driving. Driving should be a privilege, not a right. But that’s not what our society views it. I have this immense hate for the guy and people like him. Drivers like him play with our lives and the lives with those we love every day when we’re out riding and where’s our protection from these maniacs? The law simply does not care. It keeps me up at night. On the plus side, the anger has caused us, mainly just Adelaide, to become a cycling-rights advocate. She’s spoken to the state legislature, to the transportation board, and to Boulder city council. She has already used her tragedy to make the world a slightly better place.
ST: Your current road team is GS Ciao and previously you raced for various other squads including Hagens Berman. Are you planning to hang all that up or will you play on both playgrounds?
Kennett: I love bike racing and it will always be there waiting for me in the future if I decide to go back. But I plan on going full tri geek in the coming years. It’s a hard sport. Much harder than I always assumed. That’s part of the intrigue for me. It’ll be an awesome challenge to get out of my comfort zone. Plus if you’re fast, it pays better than domestic bike racing.
ST: Are you kidding, or is the domestic bike racing earning potential really that lame?
Kennett: There are guys who make a decent living, though the majority of the domestic pros make $10,000 or less. As in zero. The money is all in Europe. The guys in the pro tour aren’t hurting for cash, but that’s the top end of the sport.
ST: You were very outspoken about Chris Horner’s return to bike racing. Talk to us about your thoughts regarding Horner and other folks in that boat.
Kennett: He sucks, and apparently I’m one of the few who isn’t afraid to say it publicly. Dopers aren’t worth the chairs they sit in. Lance said that I think. He’s my hero. Umm, yes I was pissed to see Horner return to the States to race. The pro tour is filled with cheaters and we don’t need the dirty ones coming back to drag out the twilight years of their disgraced careers on the NRC (National Racing Calendar), such as Francisco Mancebo, Floyd Landis, Horner, Rock Racing, and others. Don’t get me wrong, the domestic peloton has plenty of doped up guys fighting tooth and nail for a six-grand paycheck (or less). It’s just harder to be angry with them because I don’t necessarily know who they are. With that said, a clean cyclist can be successful in the US and even in Europe, though to a much lesser degree.
ST: Lance is your hero?
Kennett: Oh for sure. The guy walked on the moon. He’s a national treasure.
ST: Triathlon also seems to have an apparent allure to former doping banned pro road cyclists. Do you think you carry some of that burden too? As in people wondering who you are and hearing ”former pro cyclist”?
Kennett: Yes I don’t see why not. While I don’t quite stack up against any of those names mentioned in that article, everyone should still treat me with skepticism. Similarly, I’d be wary of some random pro triathlete bursting onto the cycling scene and doing well right away too. You can never prove your innocence in sport so there’s no reason to be up in arms about people being skeptical about you. It’s healthy, skepticism that is, and in all realms of life, not just sport.
If there’s a cure for the doping disease, it’s to instill lifetime bans, use the biological passport to its fullest extent, and perform more out of competition tests, even in the middle of the night to catch the micro dopers. Also, since Ironman and Challenge Family are branded and not part of some federation, they could easily implement a lifetime ban for dopers, including doping violations outside of triathlon. That would keep the doped cyclists like you mentioned out.
I’m not sure how rampant doping is within triathlon, but I’ve recently heard bad rumors of certain pros already. Doping rumors aren’t always true, obviously. Though often times they are. The clean athletes who have real knowledge of their fellow competitors participating in doping need to stick their necks out at some point and blow the whistle. Fear of repercussions be damned. Defamation lawsuit? Please. Loss of sponsors? Come on, that shouldn’t be an issue, because chances are you’re already losing plenty of sponsors to dopers as it is, at least in cycling. There are too many scared, small-minded people who don’t see the big picture, that cowardice is rarely a good option for humanity. With cheaters ruling sport, business, politics, etc., there will never be change. Honest people will never stand a chance.
ST: Do you think you have been screwed by dopers?
Kennett: I know that I have. Every clean athlete has. I have a lot more hatred for distracted and reckless drivers though.
ST: So what is next for you?
Kennett: A couple long pulls of whiskey and some angry muttering to myself while drawing devil mustaches on my old George Hincapie posters. And then after that, Timberman, Silverman, Los Cabos, Austin, and the HITS series championship 70.3 in Palm Springs. I have some bike racing thrown in there too, as well as a bunch of hand-shaking at Interbike scrounging for sponsors. Oh, and learning how to swim.
You can follow Kennett Peterson on Twitter via @kennettpeterson or on his blog with very lengthy entries.
