“A hard-fought PR.”

 If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your long-lost pal.

Closed out the first half of 2007 with a pair of huge races for me. First was a tough, hot, non-wetsuit day at the 5430 half ironman in Boulder. Steph came out to watch, and so did Paulo, so I was extra motivated to do as well as I could. Steph was a little nervous that she was “bad luck” after witnessing my disastrous performances in Arizona last year and at Boulder Peak in July.

But the race went quite well: I was out of the water in 12th or so, again a non-wetsuit swim, and I had a very good bike ride of 2 hours and 10 minutes for a 25.8 mile per hour average speed (!) to arrive in transition in 8th place, three minutes behind fifth. It took me until 3k to go before I moved into seventh, and 400 meters to go before I moved into sixth. I ended up crossing the line in sixth place, an excellent result for me but about 20 seconds short of fifth place and thus just out of the money. Them’s the breaks. It was still my best performance of the year so far.

After the race, I had the toughest taper week of my life as I tried to get ready for Star Island, recover from a quadricep-rending last 3k at the previous weekend’s race, and taper for the Timberman 70.3. So Steph and I flew to Boston, did some last minute shopping and with Dan’s help we made a pair of waterskis and bought over forty pounds of candy.

Then everyone else went out to Star, and I drove up to Gilford to continue the quest. They had helpfully printed everyone’s first name on the race numbers for this year’s race, but I hadn’t made it onto the pro start list in time. So in lieu of a pro number, I would get #1288, previously belonging to “Jenny”, who wouldn’t be able to make it. That was OK – my bike was racked with the women’s 35-39 age group, and they turned out to be a lot more mellow pre-race than the pro men typically are. So that was nice.

Then a decent swim had me out of the water in the second pack, and a solid bike ride brought me briefly into the top 10 before being passed by perennial bike/run ass-kicker Mike Caiazzo. I tried to stay with him, as I thought I might be able to run with him if I could just get to transition with him, but it was not to be. I ran well too, faster than I ever have on that course, to move into sixth across the line. Again one place out of the money. Then, just because not enough things have been oh-so-close, the top age grouper posted a time that would bump me back to seventh. He is a friend of mine though and I look forward to racing with him in the pro field next season.

THEN – you didn’t think that would be it, did you? – I had to get myself to Rye, NH to catch the Star ferry. I’d already missed the whole first day of the conference and I was not about to miss any more. So I pleaded with the police officer directing traffic on the bike course, and drove clear across New Hampshire without so much as stopping to change out of my disgusting race clothes. I made it in the nick of time, and managed to wash myself off in Rye harbor before catching a much-needed nap on the floor of the boat, the only extra sleep I’d be likely to get in the next seven days.

So two very good races on consecutive weekends, but the thing I am proudest of is that, after all that, I made it to the ferry on time. You have to have priorities, you know?

Oh, you’d be surprised the amount of wear and tear that goes on out there in the field.

Not so quick with the race report when the race goes badly, are we? But not every hit can be a home run, and this race had its good points too.

Since the race was in town, I got to stay home in my own room. And since my wave didn’t start until 9 am, I got to sleep in until 6. While I was making my coffee, I felt a bit bad for the poor souls who were getting the starting gun at that moment. When they were done before I had even started, well, I felt a bit less bad for them.

So after a bagel and a cup of coffee Steph and I cruised over to the race, a whopping seven minute drive. I had a nice warmup, zipped into my not-technically-a-wetsuit, and lined up with the largest men’s pro field it has ever been my pleasure to share a starting line with. They announced all the race favorites, and then at the last minute, they announced my name too, because my friend Tanya Kensley asked them nicely. Cool!

As I’ve mentioned before, when you start in the pro wave you commit to starting hard. For me, this means giving everything I have in the first 250 meters or so to get with a good group. If the group surges at 400 meters, I am not likely to be able to respond. If it waits until 600 or 700 meters, then maybe. But the group I was trying to hold on to surged again at 400 and I lost them. I tried to limit my losses by holding a strong, steady pace, and I mostly succeeded. I got out of the water about 45 seconds behind them and maybe 2 1/2 minutes down to the leaders. Very good for me in a non-wetsuit swim.

I had a fairly brilliant transition, for me, and tore out onto the bike course. I’d pre ridden the course about a dozen times leading up to the race, and had an exact plan of how to mete out my effort. Out of transition, there is a false flat for about six miles, then about a mile and a half of climbing. I commited to riding as strong as I possibly could to the top of the climb, taking the subsequent descent to recover. That went well – I averaged about 310 watts from transition to the top of the hill, and the radar camera on the downhill flashed 50 MPH at me as I went by. So far so good.

I tried to hang on for the second section that I’d identified as a “key effort”. The last ten miles are gently rolling, and I thought I could muscle through them as well. It turns out that although I’ve made significant improvement, I’m still pretty bad at pacing myself over gentle rollers. I still rolled in with an excellent bike time, for me, of 1:02:33.

So I rolled in to transition around 11th or 12th, pretty confident in the way I was racing so far. And then I proceeded to run slower than I have run in any race except ironman since mid 2005. So that was weird, I gave up a few places on the run and crashed across the line in fifteenth place. It does not feel good to hurt that much on the run!

Anyway, as I said, I finished fifteenth (nineteenth counting four AGers that went quicker, which is not 100% fair in this race, but them’s the breaks) in 2:04:58. Which is actually a little faster than I went two years ago. Hmm.

And I just want to mention about that picture above … check out my calf!  Whew!

So the other day I raced at the Thursday evening “stroke and stride” race out at the Boulder reservoir. I had a decent race: after a lousy start (what was I thinking starting in the second row? note to self: if you want to swim in the first group, don’t start in the second row) I swam quite well, for me, and was out of the water third.

Then I had the worst transition in the history of ever, and then ran an OK 5k. I was passed by 1 person in transition and passed 1 person on the run to finish third, which was pretty good. I was seventeen seconds behind the winner at the end, and his transition was exactly seventeen seconds faster than mine. Ah well, it was a good way to learn that I need more practice.

The kicker was this: after the race, a guy comes up to me.
“How old are you?” he asks me.
“Twenty-eight”
“Oh, good. I saw you pass me on the run, and when I saw your gray hair, I thought you might be in my age group,” he said.
“Really,” I say, “what age group is that?”
“Fifty to fifty-four.”

(And results are here)

Jonnyo calls an experience like this “a huge confidence” which is a phrase I like. Confidence is a Thing you can Have; you cannot quantify it but you can have a lot or a little of it. When you have A Confidence you keep it until something takes it away, which could be soon or not for a while. I had a Huge Confidence at the Lone Star races, but I spent it trying to get healthy in April and May. When I got to Boston I tested my fitness and health by running – and winning! – races on consecutive days, made the more challenging by having the recovery period between those two races consist of falling asleep at 2 am on the ground with my head on an old, charred campfire log. This was a good confidence for me; the 30 hour training week that followed was testing but also a confidence of its own. It helped during my taper last week when my workouts went progressively better but I felt more or less awful at all other times.But during that taper I knocked out repeat miles in five minutes flat and had life best 1 minute power on my bike and 1500 LCM swim. Those were soft PRs, easy to break, but a PR makes me feel awesome and I wanted to practice feeling awesome. I read Golf is not a Game of Perfect, which made me decide that choosing my mental state wasn’t enough, and that I would have to practice it. So I structured my workouts in such a way to help me practice feeling awesome, to have the confidence going into the race that I would be able to feel awesome.

My Mom and I drove to Maryland on Friday, which took three hundred hours. Saturday morning we went to registration and met George Altieri the pro coordinator and Rob Vigorito the race director, who were both awesome and helpful. Mom took the opportunity to see if I still embarrass as easily as I did when I was 14 by bragging to them about what a Swell Young Man I am turning out to be. Then I took a couple of easy workouts, fussed over my race numbers, mixed a couple of water bottles, and turned in early. The last think I did before bed was try one of those Nuun tablets Khai St. Khai told me about at camp. Suddenly I had a wild party, right there in my mouth. They are supposed to be dissolved in water, it turns out. I slept well, quietly burping up lime Nuun every couple of hours.

In the morning I had two cans of Red Bull and a bagel with more butter than my Mom eats in a fortnight. Changed into my race kit and the present tense. Racing in the Present is the other thing, along with feeling awesome, that I am learning how to do.

No bike warmup is allowed; in my opinion this is excessive micromanagement but I am not in charge of these things. It does leave me plenty of time for a relaxed run and swim warmup. Half the mens pro field borrows my bike pump and I get in the water for about 800 meters. Thanks to a solid overanalysis of several swim workouts, I have learned that when I swim As Hard As I Can I actually go slower than if I just focus on swimming strong and (you guessed it) feeling awesome. It would be nice to be able to make use of all of my fitness, but I am not a good enough swimmer. Yet. In the meantime I do manage to make the main chase group of swimmers. I am flummoxed to see 22:30 on the clock when I get out of the water but I take it as the awesome gift that it is and get to focus on getting out of my cursed wetsuit.

Onto the bike I am into my zone 3 power, which feels way too hard. I know I can maintain it though so I hold onto it and wait for my hips to stretch out a little bit. After ten miles or so I pass the women’s leader, Pip Taylor, an ITU racer who put all the long coursers to shame in the water. It takes me a 350 watt surge to get around her within the allotted 25 seconds but she – and every one of the other half-dozen or so people I saw during the whole bike ride – is riding very clean. The age-group race might have been too crowded for truly clean riding, but everyone I see is spaced out 20 or 30 meters at least. At one point I space out enough to yell to a bunny by the side of the road: “Bunny!”

Around mile 30 or 35 a widely spaced train with Mike Caiazzo and Pat Evoe goes roaring by me. I work my tail off to keep them in sight, but the gap goes from 50 to 100 meters to 500 meters to Quite A Lot. I start to feel Quite Tired and my thoughts drift to the run and possibly a drink of something other than Gatorade. I have to remind myself to come back into the moment by asking myself, “What are you doing now?” “I am riding my bike, as hard as I can. And I feel awesome. I have practiced feeling awesome while biking as fast as I can, and this is what it feels like.”

After about a year I reach T2. Socks, a cap, a little bag of salt pills, and sunglasses (well, you never know if it might get hot out or something, but in hindsight this was excessive. at least i didn’t stop for a sandwich or something. but the T2 needs work i know) and I am out on the road. Pat Evoe is eighteen seconds ahead of me. He stretches it out to thirty or forty in the first mile while I get my legs underneath me. I have five minutes over Andrew Hodges out of transition, which does not seem like enough. I have biked really hard, and I am not nearly the runner he is even on my best day. But I realize this is a negative thought. I decide that I am going to run 1:17, so he will need a 1:12 to catch me, and if he can run that fast then more power to him. I am running as fast as I can and I feel awesome. What he or anyone else does is not something I can control.

At the turnaround I count that I am in seventh place, with second through sixth pretty close together and not too far ahead. But I am already a bloc and going as fast as I can. I will either catch them or not, but they will have to run fast to stay ahead of me, because as I have mentioned I feel awesome. I have to remind myself of this a lot. Then at mile nine or ten I get some Coke. Actually what I get is some Coke in my mouth, some in my eyes, some up my nose, and some all over my fabulous blue singlet. But it makes me feel briefly like a superhero. I run from mile ten to eleven in 5:35 and then I start to feel like a superhero who has to take a dump real bad. So I run from eleven to twelve in the five thirties including a brief slow-down for a hearty clench. I realize I will probably not catch Pat up ahead of me, but I do not care. I am having the race of my life and I want to enjoy it. The last mile in the 5:30s, some hand slaps in the finish chute – including my Mom, who I am surprised to be able to pick out of the crowd in the confusion – and I am across the line 3:56:58. Andrew does not catch me (my run is actually a 1:16) but with the fastest run of the day he comes real close and is across next after me. In the meantime I fall on the ground in happiness. I am aware of voices above my head: “Is he okay?” “Yes, just happy.”

You’ll have to pardon my coarse language at this point: Holy SHIT. I have never realistically imagined that I might go this fast. Even with a swim that is a couple minutes fast and perfect conditions. I have learned to race happy and it feels awesome. I feel even better when I find a porta toilet a couple minutes later.

For the second time this season I have had the race of my life. I already knew that training works; now I know it works that much better when you learn to feel good. I already train because I love it, and it took me years to learn to suffer. But now I think about it a little differently. Training is not all in your muscles. For sure it is in your muscles, since all the positive thinking in the world won’t get you to the finish line without fitness. But, at least for me, it’s not about learning to love suffering; it’s that part of the suffering is learning to feel awesome when you are working as hard as you can.

A full race report is forthcoming on these pages, but in the meantime I have an observation to share:

When you lead a race wire to wire, the photographers have a ton of chances to take pictures of you. And they use them all. So, wow, lot of pictures of Will. Maybe I can send one to Amy’s friend from InKind.org, who gave me that awesome, hideous racing shirt.

The quick race report is, I ran a big PR of 1:16:05, which somehow made it into the official results as 1:16:46. There was a very exciting motorcycle escort. My mom and I were back at the church retreat well before lunch, and today I am still a bit sore. More later!

I cruised down to Falmouth on Saturday morning, having spent Friday unpacking and trying to re-route the rubber bands on my powermeter.  Good times.    Three days in a row with less than five hours of sleep left me feeling pretty ordinary, but I stopped on the road somewhere in southern massachusetts for two cans of red bull and some advil and pretty soon I felt halfway human again.

I got to the race early and had a mellow warmup.  I was feeling the pressure of having won this race in each of my last three attempts and really wanted to make it four.  So I had a bit of a reconnoiter, with a lap of the bike course and a lap of the run course.  The latter had changed since ‘05, when I ran something like 8:42 for the opening “2 miles”.  Then some water, since it was hot as hell, and a nice chat with Paul Miller who was racked next to me.  A very nice guy, he noted that he’d spent Friday moving and I figured we were more or less even on that score since I’d spent Thursday doing the same.  Then they delayed the start for half an hour, and we were off!

As I’ve mentioned before, the pacing strategies on display among age-group men are interesting and almost certainly suboptimal.  But we all race for fun, and it is for sure important to do what feels right pacingwise.  For optimum performance, it might be a good idea to try to make an even pace feel right, but I know that optimum performance doesn’t correlate perfectly with optimum fun, so “correct” pacing will be a little different for everyone.  Paul and I mopped up the early leaders a bit before the mile mark and then I took a small gap into T1.

I got a bit flummoxed leaving transition but otherwise had a decent time of it and even got my shoes velcroed pretty quickly.  Then – and this was a real weird experience for me – I built a huge lead on the bike.  Awesome!  I got into T2 with about a minute and a half lead and more or less held that to the finish.  The official results have me about 35 seconds slower than my actual time, for some reason, which I mention only because it would become something of a theme during my weekend.

After the awards ceremony my mom drove me up to Truro to meet the church youth group.  I got one of them to wear my pointy superhero helmet, but no pictures yet, sniff.  Colleen had me dog the lead group of boys on my fixed gear, which was a nice challenge, especially going downhill.  A great day, great race, and a great ride.  I stayed up with the yoots and their campfire until about 2am, and then crashed.  You know, because I had to get my beauty sleep for a race the next day.

Summary: Training works!

Since I have already subjected you to one and a half race reports this week, I’ll try to keep this pretty brief. But since this race was far and away the best race I’ve ever had in my entire life, a gigantic PR, the end of a long spell of not so great results, and I won, it might get a bit involved.

You’ve been warned.

Pre-race:
I actually felt fine after the sprint race on Saturday morning. It felt a bit strange to get back to the hotel having finished a triathlon before the breakfast buffet was even over, but who could complain about it? I tucked in, then went upstairs to rest for a bit. Checked in without incident, got my bike out of transition and sloshed it across the wet parking lot back to my room. Clearly the main task would be getting things dry before Sunday morning. I laid everything out on the floor so there’d be plenty of space, then went to meet Sophie, Dave, and some other ST’ers for lunch. After lunch Dave and Sophie came back to my hotel. Dave and I had a little swim workout, and then Sophie (who is an ART therapist) worked on my sore back. This was an absolute lifesaver. Thank you, Sophie!

I went grocery shopping for some dinner and passed the evening re-taping and re-pinning race numbers while the weather channel droned in the background. Dinner on Saturday night was a much more organized affair than Friday night’s powerbar feast: I had a starbucks sandwich, a piece of lemon pound cake, and a bagel with way too much just the right amount of butter. And a little chocolate that someone inexplicably brought by my room around 7:30pm. What’s up with that? I was afraid I was going to be too nervous to sleep, but the fatigue from getting up at 5am and racing that morning turned out to be a blessing.

All three of my alarms went off at 5. Ugh. Two cans of red bull, a couple of bagels, a tiny bit of Gatorade. Put my still-wet race clothes on and dragged my now quite sore self down to the transition area. I had been hoping that I wouldn’t be sore, especially since I hadn’t felt too sore after the race Saturday, but it wasn’t to be. Got on my bike for a quick warmup. My powermeter battery was of course still dead, and I was royally PO’d at myself for forgetting the charger. All the effort I’d gone to last week to make absolutely sure I could race with a power meter that wouldn’t crap out in the rain, and I’d brought one with a dead battery.

There was a time when this would have more or less broken me. But as I said I’ve worked really, really hard on the mental side of competition this spring. I realized that there was no point stressing about it; the only productive thing I could do would be to come up with an alternate plan, quick. So I did. The new plan: get out of the water near the leaders and bike my way into the lead as quickly as possible. A risky strategy, but I told myself this: “Will, if you want to win this race, you have to take the lead sometime.” This kind of bravado is not the self-talk I usually go in for, but as I mentioned I really wanted to win. So I put on my wetsuit and went down to the water for a good solid swim warmup, which I was going to need.

Swim: 1900 meters in 27:34
My normal strategy of taking the first 500 meters hard and then settling onto a pair of feet backfired dramatically. The initial surge that is so crucial when racing in the pros is useless in a group of 100 35-39 year old men. Both groups start out at a pretty ambitious pace: the pros then settle in to something challenging but doable; the testosterone-crazed agegroup men come to a more or less complete stop. Ah well. I swam it in steadily and alone, veering off course only a few dozen times in the process. Even with all that, it was a solid time for me and I was out of the water only about 90 seconds down on the leaders. As I mentioned before, I absolutely rule at putting on my shoes so I was out on the bike with a pretty good flying cyclocross mount just lickety-damn-split.

Bike: 56 miles in 2:18
If you look at the official results, you’ll see 2:20 for me, but that includes T1. My actual bike time was 2:18:45, and I only mention this because it was a PR. Whoo! I could see the lead car in the distance and I started chasing. The outbound leg had a stiff headwind and I shard pace with a kid from my wave. By my calculations we were barely making 20mph, but I couldn’t drop him so I bided my time 50 meters back and formulated some new strategy. I wanted to just pace off him the whole way to save the mental energy, but I knew there was a big tailwind section coming up that I could use to my advantage. Riding with a tailwind is an interesting value proposition: wind resistance is significantly decreased, so an extra 40 or 50 watts gives a much larger increase in speed than those same 40 or 50 watts applied into the wind. So when we got to the turnaround I had some gatorade, dropped the chain into my 50×11, and rode what must have been about a 32 mph average back to the turnaround. Excellent, except for one thing. I had lost another minute and a half to the leader. Crap. Now I was alone in second place, too far back to see the pace car and with no one to pace with. Again: “Will, if you want to win this race, you have to catch that guy.” So I went off after him.

The second lap was the same as the first, except I managed to hold the leader at 3:15 ahead of me. My heart rate crept up a little, but nothing alarming. In T2 I took the time to put socks on, because I knew I wanted them and I decided the race was not going to be decided by 5 seconds. I was either going to catch the guy or not, and the only way I could affect the outcome was to run my race and stay on top of the nutrition.

The Run: 13.1 miles in 1:18:25
I thought I had a pretty even pace going but I ran the first four miles in 22 minutes flat. This was a pretty ambitious pace – one I knew I couldn’t hold – but my only option was to run as fast as I could to catch the leader. When I finished the first lap in 38 minutes flat I knew I had the makings of either a massive PR or a spectacular blowup on my hands, but I had no time to ruminate on this because Sophie was screaming at me, “he’s only a minute up the road and he’s dying!”

I thought about surging at this point but I didn’t really have any surge in my legs at this point. Once again I realized that however close it was, I was eithr going to catch him or not. I was already running as hard as I could, and catching him wasn’t going to do any good anyway if I didn’t make it to the finish. So I ran my race and ever so gradually caught up to him. We exchanged pleasantries and I soldiered on. Of course I was petrified that he would catch me or that he and a horde of others would run me down, but I told myself there was nothing I could do about other peoples’ paces and I kept running as hard as I could.

The mile and a half between 10.5 and 12 was a low point. I lost at least a minute here and probably a bit more. I remember hitting an aid station and being asked, “water, gatorade, coke, gu?” and replying “anything.” I got coke and that got me to the finish line. With 200 meters to go I knew I had it, and I ran across the finish line with a huge grin on my face and fell over, ecstatic. Someone caught me.

“Are you OK?”
“I’m fantastic. I just won!”
“Sure you did dear, you know, everyone is a winner today.”
“No, I just won the race! Where’s the guy in red? Where is he?”
“Why don’t you just lie down for a minute, and I’ll get you some water.”

The announcer hadn’t noticed me go by, so for a few minutes no one would believe me. Later I learned that they’d been briefed before the race that a lot of people would be delirious and they’d chalked my ramblings up to the heat. When we finally got everything straightened out, they made me go back out on the course and run the last 100 meters again, so they could take a picture of me breaking the tape – which is why the time in my finish photo is 2 1/2 minutes slower than my actual finishing time.

So the race went awesome. My official time of 4:07:03 was a PR by over ten minutes, and it was the first long course race where I’ve had a good swim, bike, and run. It turned out that there were fewer than 500 participants at the end of the day, which made me extra glad that I’d decided to race the sprint on Saturday. I am ecstatic with the way things went for me this past weekend, and if you have heard me talk about races before, you know I don’t say things like that lightly.

I also want to thank everyone who has helped me this past winter and spring – I’m looking forward to sharing a whole bunch more positive race reports with you this season!

Go hard, then go home.

The idea of going over my entire weekend in one post is too daunting; I’m going to instead post separate reports for the two races. This one will be short(er), because the race was so hard and intense I barely remember any of it. That said, it will still be really self involved, so if that kind of thing turns you off … well, what the hell are you reading my blog for? It’s always like that.

The theme of this race report, the next day’s race report, and this entire season so far has been staying positive. I have worked really hard on doing my best to control things that I can control, and not worrying about things I can’t control.

Pre-race
I flew to Houston straight from Colorado Springs on Friday afternoon. The flight was a bit delayed
and I eventually got to the race site around 9pm. Went for a run and decided I felt awesome. Built my bike (with my snazzy awesome new SRM powermeter, more on this later) and decided I would ride it in the morning. Too late to go out looking for dinner. Ate five powerbars, went to sleep.

Race morning
I set the hotel room alarm clock, my cell phone alarm clock, and had a wake up call all at 5am. Just to be sure. There is no coffee to be found in the hotel so I drove out looking for a Starbucks, but they were all closed, so I slipped in to what I thought was a 24 hour grocery store to buy some red bull and a bagel. After five minutes of wandering around looking for a cashier, decided I didn’t have time to wait. I left way too much money to pay for two cans of red bull and a couple bagels, along with a note, and drove back to the race site with plenty of time still to warm up.

A bit of a run, with strides, and a bit of a bike ride. A few minutes into the bike ride, the battery in my new SRM died (remember how I said there would be more on this later? here it is. emphasis on moron). Damn. I have grown somewhat utterly dependant on my power meter as a pacing tool over the past two years. So I decided, with what felt like my new superpower of positive thinking, that it wouldn’t be a problem since the race was so short. Onward. Slithered into my wetsuit for the first time in six months and jogged over to the start area to warm up. Only … they wouldn’t let us in the water. Again, I really depend on having a good swim warmup. But rather than freak out – what could I possibly do about it? – I decided that stretching and arm swings were plenty and that I would do just fine.

Finally: the actual race.
I was in the third wave, so I had some chance to see how the start unfolded. They got us into the water and started us with a toy siren so we could get down to the important business of beating the crap out of each other for the first few hundred meters. I haven’t experienced this much since turning pro (that could be because the pros are a little less testosterone-crazed at the beginning of a race, or also because I just can’t keep up) so it was nice to be back in the mix. No one hit me all that hard, but people were swimming a range of erratic directions and paces which made it an interesting time in the water. I was out of the water in eight or nine minutes, or something, just about fifth in my wave. I had a decent transition and scored a great opportunity to do a flying cyclocross mount out of the transition area, passing two people in the process. The bike was uneventful but very hard. I threw up in my mouth a little near the four mile mark but managed to pass one more person. I got within striking distance of the guy who I was pretty sure was first from our wave, but couldn’t get any closer. He beat me into transition by a little more than twenty seconds.

I am awesome at changing my shoes and I made up three seconds in transition.

The run was agony. I felt like I was running as hard as I possibly could, but who knows these things? These shorter races are contested in a pace band which is no longer familiar. I do know I could not possibly have gone any faster right then, and that’s what matters for the race. I split the three miles in a shade over sixteen minutes, which, if it was accurate, was good but not great for me. I also got within nine seconds of my rabbit but could not reel him in.

Post Race
More or less immediately after I finished it began to pour rain. There had been big, ominous clouds overhead all morning, and a few minutes after I finished they dropped all of their rain all at once. I got back to my hotel room as fast as I could and got warm and dry, feeling pretty bad for the 500+ people who were still out on the course.

It eventually turned out – once the wave times had been sorted out – that the guy who I couldn’t reel in was the overall winner and I was second, nine seconds back. He won the race on the swim, where he put 21 seconds into me. I brought back a handful of seconds on the bike and another handful on the run. I was ecstatic to have finished second, since my only goal for the race was to be in the top eight so I could requalify for my pro license, but finishing second is a strangely bitter pill to swallow. You hear about it and you read about it. You think it doesn’t make any sense, they should be happy to have done so well, you certainly won’t feel that way if it ever happens to you, etc etc etc. But then it does, and you do, and you feel like an idiot for feeling that way, but there it is. 90% of me feels happy about the race and excited to have done so well, and 10% of me wonders if I could have worked a little harder, gone a little faster, been a little quicker.

OK, now what?
I had another race to get ready for! A longer, tougher, hopefully drier race that I decided I really wanted to win.

If you do something dumb, and it turns out way better than you could have possibly imagined, that doesn’t retroactively make it a smart choice. But it sure feels good!

I will write a full race report later tonight or tomorrow once I collect myself a bit more. The executive summary, though, is that it went pretty much perfectly.

There’s even an article in the Galveston newspaper mentioning how lucky I was.

Here’s the quick summary: On Saturday I was 2nd overall in the sprint race. On Sunday I won the half ironman race in a huge personal best time of 4:07:03. That’s an improvement of over ten minutes over my previous best, on a tough, windy day. It’s also the first time I have won a triathlon more than an hour long. I employed the time-honored pacing strategy of going absolutely as hard as you possibly can for the entire day, and it paid off! Whoo!  I was so excited I sent Stephanie the following text message right afterward: “Holy F***ing S*** I won!”

You can see the results of the sprint race and the results of the half online if you want. And I’ll write more, lots of gory detail, Real Soon Now.