inauspicio.us

Ironman Arizona 2006

best support team ever.

i promised an Ironman Arizona race report, and even though this is my second consecutive race that went badly, i’ve got some good things to say about it. can’t go around writing depressing crap all the time.

i recovered well from the head cold i had at oceanside, and had a week or so of solid training in Boulder during Steph’s spring break, and back in Colorado Springs afterward. then, with my new bike all tuned up, i packed carefully and prayed that the baggage gorillas wouldn’t have a chance to destroy my bike again. i also tucked my brand new wetsuit (thanks, mom!) into my duffel bag. this one has long sleeves, so i will never again have to worry about being quite as cold as i was in oceanside.

thursday i picked up my number (my coach paulo said, “yeah i have no idea why they gave you number 9. i hope you don’t have a different colored cap or something”) and hid in the back or the pro meeting. good news, the higher-ups in the sport of triathlon are gradually working out a set of bike rules that are easy enough to understand and are still safe and fair. kudos to them. in the evening i went back to the airport to pick up steph, my mom, and my brother dan. this is the first time i have had so much family support at a race, and it was really nice. usually i just sit in my hotel room alone and marinate in my own nervousness, so it was really nice to be able to spread it among the four of us. huge thanks to all three of you, you were really helpful to me.

race morning i switched to the present tense. i go to the start early, finish setting up my transition, and chill out with my awesome support crew for a few minutes. i get in the water with plenty of time to warm up, so when the gun goes off i have no trouble getting a strong start and settling in with a group of other swimmers. just as paulo said, the pace cools off after a minute or two and i have a chance to look around. the pace feels easy, and i can see sergio out of the corner of my eye. i get out of the water with a big group in 53:37, nearly four minutes faster than i swam in florida. can i just mention that again?
fifty-three thirty-seven, cough. i am ecstatic, and surprised, with that result. a few pictures from that moment show my mouth wide open while i process the information.
my heart rate is low, and even though i am a little confused by the wetsuit peelers i manage a reasonable transition to get out onto the bike around 56:30. already i am minutes ahead of my best-case scenario.

an awesome bike ride goeth before the fall.

out onto the bike ride i feel fine and my heart rate is only a little elevated. paulo has cautioned against riding to a predetermined wattage number, but i need something for the first couple of hours. if i ride by feel at the very beginning, i will crash and burn later on, so i start out at what ought to be a very reasonable 240 watts. as it turns out, this pace is perfect. two-thirds of the way into the bike ride, i realize that i will ride right around 4:50 at my current pace. even though i feel like i could go faster, i decide that this is more than fast enough, so i stay on 240 watts and save myself for the run. this strategy, and a policy of coasting when i got above 32 mph, saw me into transition in 4:48, the fastest ride of my life. for those who care about these things, my average power was 226 watts, normalized power was 228 watts.

the transition people cocoon me in sunscreen while i take a hit from my inhaler, and i stumble out onto the run course with the clock reading 5:46. it is pretty shocking to be running this early in the day, but i feel OK and after a stop in the porta-potties i get through 5 miles in 34 minutes and ten miles in 1:08. and then … wait for it … everything slowly goes to crap. i am eating and drinking but it doesn’t help. i walk a few aid stations and try coke for the very first time in my life at the mile fourteen aid station. it tastes horrible, but i dredge up a couple of eight minute miles before the wheels come off completely. my friend shaun is at the mile 23 aid station and convinces me that i will not die. at the mile 24 aid station, i take a cup of what i think is water, and when it turns out to be coke i stop, turn around, and hand it back to the man who handed it to me.

what i am getting at here, returning to the past tense, is that the run got real ugly. what had looked like a comparably comfortable 2:58 became a very, very hard 4:02. evidently, according to people who know a lot more about this stuff than i do, that’s what happens sometimes. i finished in 9:48 for something like 46th place. i have mixed feelings about this. it was a bad result, but i am very, very happy about the swim and bike. i’ll be having another go at the distance this fall, but in the meantime look for me at shorter races :)