4:51:53
3532 days ago4:51:53
it is sort of like a full-body hangover. i don’t know how else to describe this – i mean, i have felt worse. i’ve had the flu and appendicitis, i’ve fallen off my bike at 40 mph, and i once got hit by a car while i had bronchitis. but somehow this is completely different. i have to walk real slow, because my legs are stiff; i need to use my arms to help me stand up and sit down, because my back is so sore; i can’t hang my head down because i have a huge crick in my neck; i did something to the bottom of my left foot so that walking, except barefoot, causes excruciating pain; my right big toenail is coming off in such a way that walking, except in open-toed sandals, causes excruciating pain; the cold that i was getting over is back with a vengeance, so i can’t breathe deeply because it sends me into a violent coughing fit, which depletes my already-low energy reserves so much that i have to stop what i am doing and hold my head between my knees for a few minutes; and i have such pervasive chafe that it is painful to wear briefs or boxers. i am also drowsy from time to time.
and you are right: it is safe to infer that it was a pretty crazy party that netted me such a powerful hangover. even better than that, because of the particular nature of this party, is that i remember every last detail.
harvest moon half ironman race report
aurora, co
i set two alarm clocks this time. that was my biggest fear, that i would sleep through the start. but this time i woke up ust before either one of them went off, an hour and forty minutes before sunrise at five am. i even had time to stop at a gas station and buy some of those special issue gas-station vitamins on the way out. same deal as last time: i went through the little blister pack and threw away anything i wasn’t sure about. with or without whatever was in those other pills, i wasn’t going to do well enough to be drug-tested. but you race clean. you just do. Vitamin B12 is okay; human growth hormone is not. i’ll grant that grey areas exist, but they exist elsewhere. not at my level of racing. up the ladder, a few rungs up the ladder maybe. anyhow the transition area was half-full when i arrived, which was early enough to set up but not early enough to warm up at all. waited in a nerve-wrackingly long line for the bathroom, struggled into my wetsuit (seven pounds above race weight and five pounds above what the wetsuit is rated for – it was fairly snug) and jogged down to the beach.
ready? no! i mean, go!
i actually felt alright once i got moving. it was a little weird to be back in the water but i was somewhere near the front third of the pack and things were going, well, swimmingly. then, i don’t know what happened. i tried to keep a sight of where we were going, which was already less than clear to me, but it was straight into the sun. so mostly i glued myself to this dude’s hip and figured we’d eventually get out of the water. which we did. eventually. running up the beach back to the bike racks, he tells me he’s never in his life swum slower than thirty one minutes for a half ironman swim. i tell him until today, because we didnt get out of the water until more than forty-two minutes into the race. so for the benefit of anyone who didn’t think i could hit my goal time because of swimming, you were right, but for the wrong reason. anyhow i hit the beach at 42:00 and was out on my bike at 46 minutes flat. yes, a crappy transition time but it also includes a minute or so running up the beach.
go, speed racer, go
the bike was a different story altogether. at a turnaround point nine miles in, i figured i was in about 30th place out of the people who started in my wave. i also figured it was pretty safe to assume that most but probably not all of the front end of the field would come from my wave. so i went to work, nice and relaxed, and rode the first forty miles in an hour and thirty-six minutes, some of it downhill and much of it with a quartering tailwind. this let me build a buffer of about three minutes on my goal of a 2:20 bike time. but the last sixteen miles of the bike course is rolling but mostly UPhill, and with a quartering headwind. took five miles to completely use up my three minute buffer and even though i eventually lost six more minutes to that 2:20 goal time, i held it together to pass a couple other people in the last couple of miles. if i remember right, a total of three people passed me on the bike, all of them from the wave after me. the last one went by around mile forty, and that was the last time anyone passed me for the rest of the day. the last sixteen miles of the bike were tough though, mentally and physically. i got into transition, just glad that i could get off my bike. i thought about looking for a bathroom, while i was changing my shoes, but decided i had pulled myself back into the game enough to warrant real racing tactics. so i peed in my shorts while i was siting there tying my shoes and trucked out on to the run course, feeling proud of myself and extremely disgusting.
just hang on till the finish
i was pretty happy to be off my bike. actually, happy doesn’t really do it justice. once i was off the bike my whole outlook changed. the first guy i caught on the run was a victim of my relentless cheer. i slowed down and chatted with him for a while, eventually speeding back up when he stopped to walk at an aid station. i actually considered waiting for him because it would have been nice to have someone to run with, but decided against it because he was a heavy breather and thus not much for conversation. i soldiered on at about 6:45 pace, catching people, slowing to chat, speeding back up as i realized there was a race going on. wash, rinse, repeat. fine until the six mile mark, when i started to get tired. the fatigue was actually more mental at this point than physical: you can see the turnaround point from more than a mile away. it’s on this big aqueduct, straight and flat and depressing. and the worse of that is, the run course is on this loop that goes around the reservoir. but the loop is only eight miles long. so you run almost all the way around the reservoir, far enough that you can see the finish line from the turnaround, but instead of running towards it you have to turn and go all the way back the way you came. i slowed to seven minutes a mile and stopped chatting. eight miles to go, seven miles to go, i managed a feeble wave at people coming the opposite direction while each one made me think more and more “oh god, i’m a sitting duck. i have no kick. they’ll all go by me in the last mile. i downed an orange-tangerine powergel (“double caffeine”) with six miles to go and started walking for one minute at each aid station, conveniently placed about every mile. soon i was chatty again, and pretty soon i was way too chatty again. i picked off another guy and talked with him for a while, but i have no idea what we talked about. at four miles to go, i thought to myself, “four miles, thats twenty-eight minutes at this pace. you can always run four miles.” and then, for some reason, i thought “no, wait. seven minutes a mile, thats forty-nine minutes. oh god, i’m going to be out here for ever.” but because it was hot and there was no shade anywhere but inside the porta-potties, i kept running.
around three to go, i picked off another guy, then this woman who wasn’t wearing a number. slowed to jog with her. what was she doing, i asked, getting my hopes up like that? all this energy to catch her and she wasn’t racing. she told me, in what i took to be a conspiratorial tone but probably wasn’t, that the guy behind was her boyfriend, and she was going up to take pictures and help him in to the finish. i mulled this over for what could only have been way too long and then told her, using a harsh stage whisper, that he was going to “kick my ass six ways to sunday”. i actualy used those words. unless, i added, it came down to the last four hundred meters, in which case i would out lean him.
she faded back pretty soon after that. unless i was hallucinating her the whole time, in which case she faded back into my subconscious pretty soon after that. i got through mile twelve okay, through to one mile to go when my running background kicked in. go faster, it said. it’s the end, you can use all your energy now. it did not know that i already had used all my energy. it did not know that some of my energy was still back on star island, some of it was back in the lake and a large pile of it was out on the bike course, particularly the headwind sections. it was in charge of speeding up to about 5:30 pace, a pace i was able to maintain for nearly a full minute before everything grayed out and i had to stop to walk. two well-timed walk/jog breaks in the last mile got me to the finish line ahead of the guy i had threatened to outkick (ps what was i thinking? i have never outkicked anyone in any race ever. suddenly now i can sprint? i must have been imagining the whole thing), coherent enough to smile for the camera (i hope) and ask nicely for medical help.
so it was a good day all told: i was tenth overall and, i think, the eighth amateur. the guy who won has done an ironman in 8:11. i did miss my time goal, unless you give me some credit for the swim. it was still a PR by seventeen minutes, and it will still go into my PR list at 4:51:53, but this race definitely left me feeling confident that i could turn a 4:45 no problem.
no problem being, of course, a strictly relative phrase.
swim: 42
t1: 4
bike: 2:26
t2: 3
run: 1:36
final time: 4:51:53
