inauspicio.us

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.