training in isolation, race report
3123 days agotraining in isolation, race report
so for some reason i’ve been able to smack the volume really hard since getting back from maryland. for many years i’ve wondered about the benefits of training in isolation, that is, really removing myself from my normal day to day existence, sealing myself off, and having an unfettered go at training right up against the limits of what my body will handle.
three weeks after returning home from maryland i realized i had done just that. without leaving town, missing any work, or missing any play rehearsals, i had somehow managed to not do anything except train. you might not think so much of this, but i’ve been wondering about it for going on six years now, what would it be like to really not d anything except train? would my body even stand for it? would i go completely insane? and more importantly, would it actually do me any good?
the short answer to that question is: yes. the long answer to that question is:
despite a healthy case of pre-race nerves, i was too tired to be kept up late worrying about this race. plus it was only three miles down the road, over at the boulder reservoir, so i could fool myself into thinking it was just a small local race. and heck, i do just fine in small local races (cf. june 22 in grelley and may 24 in boston, both of which, cough, i won). the trouble with a small local race in boulder is that the locals who turn up are often among the finest triathletes in the sport. but i fell asleep anyway: that’s what you do at night, competition or not.
my first alarm clock went off at 5, the second at 5:01. i might have set a third but i don’t think so. half a cup of coffee, a whole bowl of oatmeal (with vitamin-fortified honey. sadly, i was out of vitamin-fortified toilet paper, but so long as you are getting your vitamins somehow, that’s what’s important, right?) and i was out the door at 6:05 and in the parking lot of hte race course at 6:12. i was practically the last person to arrive.
while i have the space, i should say that again: practically the last person to arrive. anyone who has ever come to a race with me knows of my pathological need to arrive at a race far in advance of the start time to dress, warm up, stretch, act nervous, re-pin my number several times, etc. so it was a minor victory over race-day nerves to arrive with far too little time for reconnaisance or even a cursory warm-up. by the time the race started, my warm-up had consisted of three hundred meters of easy swimming and a slow walk across the beach. i may rethink this strategy slightly for upcoming competitions.
swim: 1.2 miles in 30:49
the first 800 meters of the swim were no trouble at all: there was the usual thrashing around at the start, and after about 200 meters all the people who had gone out way too fast had blown up and i had worked my way from 80th place up into about 13th. i stayed there until we approached the beach, which caught me a little bit by surprise because it came so early. “wow”, i thought, “i must be swimming awesome today. that felt like half the distance it normally does.”
care to guess the reason it felt like half the distance? when it finally occured to me to look up, i noticed the people in front of me running up the beach – not up towards the bike racks, but across the beach, and back into the water. to swim another loop. yep. almost exactly half as far as usual, will, you dumbass. this was the first psychologically crushing blow i suffered, less than fifteen minutes after the race even began. but i did my best to collect myself and soldiered on through another lap in the water, losing only one or two positions in the process. all things considered, it wasn’t too bad. ran up the hill into transition, took way too long to struggle out of my wetsuit, and hopped – squish, wearing wet bike shorts – onto my bike.
bike: 56 miles in 2:24:03
i took the advice of my friend, idol, and sometime training partner gordo byrn and took the bike out slow. painfully slow, slow to the point of boredom that made me think seriously of stopping to take a nap. it’s said that hardly anyone ever finishes a half-ironman wishing they had gone harder at the beginning of the bike, but i think i might be that person. fifteen people passed me in the first eighteen miles of the bike, and i didn’t pass (or even re-pass) anyone until mile 20. there i made a decisive move that pegged my heart rate to 135, and fifteen miles later i had taken back all the positions i had lost save one. at this point i decided to stop being such a lazy ass and rode much faster on the way back home. for the pacing-minded, i rode out in 1:16 and back in 1:08, with a net uphill on the way back. so it may be possible that i started too slow. yes, it’s pretty hard to screw up by starting too slow, and i didn’t do any terrible damage to my race because of it, but in retrospect i probably did.
arrived back in the transition area in 12th, feeling fresh as a daisy except for the fact that i had peed in my shorts no fewer than three times during the ride, and promptly dropped my bike on the ground. fortunately, no one saw except the few hundred specators standing around, who sucked in their breath discreetly but in unison at my lack of coordination.
run: 13.1 miles in 1:34
i have this to say in defense of my laughably slow run split: it was the sixth-fastest of the day. and i stopped to walk four times. after four miles i was so hot that i was convinced i would explode from it. i had picked off four people, a fact that had completely failed to register in my heat-addled brain, and was lying somewhere around eighth. i think. what eventually brought me back from the edge was grabbing a dixie cup filled with ice cubes and pouring it down my shorts. it was as painful as it sounds, but it worked, and here’s why:
remember, in boy scouts, when you learned about how to stop the bleeding on someone who’s cut an artery in their leg? you press right against the side of their groin, because the main artery that goes to the leg goes right near the surface there. so the ice, in addition to cryogenically freezing my unborn children, also cooled off the blood that was furiously coursing through my legs. unfortunately not every aid station had ice (or, anyway, i was too out of it to remember to ask every time), so i was reduced to a walking, whimpering mess a few more times along the way, but i managed to pull myself together and close with a six minute mile and then a 5:45.
i crossed the line in what i later learned was seventh place, fifth amateur an owner of a finish to be proud of. the reason i didn’t learn until later is that when you cross the finish line and they ask you how you’re doing, they expect a verbal answer rather than an expression of your glee demonstrated by pitching forward into the arms of the person nearest you. so i spent some quality time with the medical team, a fine group of people who were nice enough to stick an IV in my arm and listen to me babble incomprehensibly at length about nothing in particular. all told, it was a great day.
and then in the afternoon, after a bath, i skipped the awards ceremony and went up to the theater, where i had a cheeseburger and watched another brilliant performance of Anastasia, the thrilling true story of a love affair between a con man’s nine year old sidekick and an effervescent french maid. i could have, maybe even should have, gone to the awards ceremony. i even would have known some people there for the first time in a really long time, and it might have been a blast. but i’ve taken a good lesson away from the past six weeks, and that is that training in isolation is fine as far as it goes, but the satisfaction, success, and joy that comes out of it are best enjoyed with your friends.
