I’ve got my first real injury of the past three years of training. My left knee has been achy/sore and painful when running the past two weeks, so I’ve been taking things very easy. My guess is that I changed my gait to compensate for the bruise on my right foot’s big toe, and in so either twisted my knee or aggravated my ITB or something. It’s a bit of a weird situation – my mind says push harder, but I know that isn’t really helpful. Injury isn’t something you can take a giant hammer to. It’s a sign to take a bit of time to ease up on the running a little until I’m better.

Other things that have been bugging me: Before Eagleman (and before the TT before that), my legs just felt heavy and deadish. Just no power underneath, especially on the bike. Don’t know if it’s the heat or improper nutrition or what. Same thing happened this weekend doing hill repeats (3.8 miles at 6.5%). Felt like puking on the second one, so I bagged it after that. I’d show the data, but Garmin’s Edge 500 is a piece of shit and keeps eating my workouts (first Eagleman, and now the climbing repeats. Sent a pissed off email to Garmin. We’ll see what kind of lame response (“Please read the owner’s manual,” “We’re aware of this problem and working on a fix”, “We’ll look into it”) they send.

THIS REPORT IS LONG. SO WAS THE RACE. THIS REPORT IS MUCH COOLER THOUGH.

I tried to prepare myself for the heat by camping out the night before. My tent turned into a miniature rain forest, with small squalls of rain developing by my feet. I slept outside of my sleeping bag the whole night, and slept restlessly at best (interestingly, I had been talking to my friend in El Salvador about how she was managing to sleep in the heat and humidity there, and she said eventually you just accept being uncomfortable and go to sleep). That’s what happened to me. I eventually just accepted things, and slept fitfully throughout the night (which is to be expected the night before a race, no matter how warm, cold, comfortable, uncomfortable you are). Woke up at 4:15, rolled out of my tent and got my breakfast on (wheat thins and gatorade). Broke camp and changed into my gear for the day, organized my gear bag (including the unnecessary wetsuit) and headed over to the shuttle site. Shuttle ride over to transition was uneventful (as are most non-race things on race day… or at least they seem to be for me, knock on wood), and consisted of me trying to remember the route so I could get home later in the day.

As I rolled into transition, I heard the “no wetsuits today, the water is 79º” (or whatever it was) call. I was surprised a bit, but that’s life. I wasn’t really phased by that. I had been swimming well at the pool the last couple of weeks, so I figured maybe I would lose 3 to 4 minutes from a decent 1.2 mile time (for me, that’s like 32-33 minutes). Lots of waiting around, doing diddly-poo, waiting for the start. In hindsight, I should have had some water to drink. Of course, transition was closed so I couldn’t grab any water from in there, and I didn’t even think to look whether they were handing out water.

I thought I was swimming decently well. Front middle of the pack, which I guess it was (35 out of ~90). Started running into a lot of traffic on the second leg, and the current kept pushing my south of the buoys there. Turning for home, I had problems sighting the red finish kite (and the portapotties in the vicinity), and having seen the buoys for the home leg off line earlier in the day, it seemed necessary to sight off of those. I think, though, that they had corrected the buoys by that point so I could have saved a few seconds by sighting off of those instead of searching for the red flags (and swimming a bit too far east). As I neared shore, my hips started to get a bit tight, but it wasn’t anything worth drowning over. Got out of the water, wasn’t sure what my time was. Didn’t really care (I typically don’t know what my swim time is, so I always figure I’ll wait until I get finished with the day. Turns out I swam a 40:something.

T1 is T1. Uneventful. Bike mount was a bit hectic (almost ran into the first W25-29 as we left transition).

The bike was pretty decent, although I don’t have any data on it because my Garmin Edge 500 decided that it didn’t want to save said data. Actually, scratch that. The bike was not decent. It, for me at least, was a struggle with a body that didn’t want to push very hard. I was never able to get my HR up to the levels I wanted, and the few times I could get my power up to the wattage I wanted, my legs would feel very heavy. As I started out on the bike, I vomited a bit in my mouth (I think from drinking the choptank) and my hips continued to be a bit tight. The ride was pretty uneventful – not much in the way of excitement, just kind of disgusting feeling. Lots of traffic on the course and a number of times where passing was difficult as you’d have a slower person in front of you making a pass of a slower person (and sometimes I was said slower people). Shortly before we got to the turn for Old Field Rd (which passes the Blackwater Visitor Center) there was a fellow rider on the side of the road asking for CO2. I gave him my CO2 and inflator (I had unthreaded, he needed threaded). Apparently, this is illegal according to WTC rules. If anyone would like to turn me into the RD, feel free to. I would (and will) do it again in a heartbeat. As we turned onto Egypt road I was trying to take in as many liquid calories and liquid liquid as possible, thinking I was either under-nutrited or under-hydrated. So that’s the bike, or as much as I care to discuss about it. It was what it was. 2:36:something.

T2 is T2. Almost ran over one of the aquavelo peeps who was just kindof standing in my path. Other than that, uneventful. Grabbed my water bottle and immediately started pouring water on my head. It was not cold. Tossed the water bottle as I passed the finish line.

As soon as I started the run, I removed my Garmin 305 and put it in my pocket. I decided I really didn’t want to see how slowly I was going and psyche myself out. I stepped off the curb around mile 1 and twisted my ankle, but no serious damage was done and although it would have been a good excuse to stop for the day, I kept going (and any excuse to stop for the day (yesterday) would leave me regretting it tomorrow (today) so I’m glad I didn’t. I walked probably 75% of the aid stations, making sure to grab 1 or 2 cups of ice along the way, and here’s where a 1 piece suit rocks. I’d pour the ice down my top and it would congregate at my crotch, which has some major arteries and bits and likes to not be 300º. Anyhow, I really credit the ice down the shorts/suit for helping me stay coolish. The rest of the course I ran, save for one point where I decided slamming my right foot into the front of my shoe was probably not a good thing and finally tightened my lock laces (I had been running with them loose, which is probably equivalent to running in shoes a half/full size too big). At one point I was passed by one of the W25-29 and realized that her pace was not only matchable but maintainable, so I would end up passing her in between aid stations and getting passed by her at aid stations. I’m not averse to getting chicked, but she was one of two people I saw all day who were running past me and having someone to pace off of is incredibly useful. (She would end up beating me to the finish by a few seconds, and seemed to have had a good day. So kudos to her.) Tried to cheer for every DC Tri person I saw on the course, even though I race incognito. Last couple of miles felt like they took forever, but I am pretty sure they didn’t, as I eventually finished them. Turns out I negative split the run (52:something out, 50:something in). Could I have gone faster? Perhaps/probably. But I had fun out there and aside from tingling sensations in both arms and the sun beating down relentlessly on my shoulders, face and calves, I was never in a spot of bother/danger. Run time: 1:42:something.

Al those somethings and transition times added up to give me a nice round finishing time of 5:04:00. Not my fastest day, but only 5 minutes off of NOLA 70.3 earlier this year, and in much more difficult conditions.

THE END.

Pre-race:

For reasons you’ll soon understand, I was not super excited about this race. Part of it is the normal pre-race/pre-travel jitters that I get (will my bike fit in the rental, will my hotel be decent, should i really be racing twice in two weeks). I’d waited until the week of the race to book my hotel room (at the La Quinta downtown in New Orleans, which ends up being a really nice hotel).

Packing the bike is typically not a big deal. Typically. I should have remembered how difficult it was to take off the pedals before IMC, because lo and behold, I couldn’t get the pedals off my bike again. They’d been wrenched on so hard that it took standing on the allen wrench with the bike upside down to get the threads moving. Time to figure that out? About an hour. Aside from that, packing was pretty uneventful.

Getting to and from BWI is a pain in the ass. It’s ~50 miles from NoVA, and at the right time of day is a 45 minute drive. 2:30PM on a Friday is not the right time of day, ever. I had figured it might take an hour and a half to get to the airport leaving me two hours to grab a decent meal and just in general have a calm day of travel. HAHAHAHAHA. What’s that they say about the best laid plans? That they’re typically shit when it comes to acting on them? Right. The drive ended up taking 2 hours and twenty minutes, and since I’d ended up leaving 15 minutes late, this meant I had about an hour to park, check the bike, get through security and maybe get some gummi candy (candy du jour lately has been sour patch kids), which are infinity times better when they are soft then when they have been sitting out for a while.

Pre-race registration was only odd in that my line to check-in was super long. Typically they group something like V-Z in one line, but at NOLA, it was ST-V. Which means the line was significantly longer. Saw Chris “Macca” McCormack on the way to registration. For some reason I always thought he was like 5’7 or 5’8, but it turns out he’s 5’11, so I was surprised at how big he was.

Bike check-in went as expected. Got in a short check-ride on the bike, a short check-run in on the shoes (still going with the Mizuno Wave Mushas as I have not been thrilled with the Asics DS Racer 9). Shoe aside: The DS Racer is a solid solid training shoe I think. But the Wave Musha feels faster and seems to fit my feet a bit better. Got to look at Lake Ponchartrain. It’s enormous. Not what I expected, but then again, I didn’t have any expectations. Lake P, being the lake that it was, was flat as glass.

—–

I met up for dinner with my buddy Jeff from Princeton. Ended up at The Gumbo Shop. Had some Abita beer, jambalaya, red beans and rice and I can’t remember what the last part of the meal was. Nice to catch up with a friend outside of reunions. Got back to the hotel, tried to go to sleep. As before most races, I probably got a total of 3-4 hours of sleep, which was oft interrupted by the drunk/louad/obnoxious college students in the hotel room next door or the hallway. Woke up at 4 AM. Go downstairs, wait for my car to get pulled around, and witnessed two very drunk incidents: one guy, after fighting with his cabbie, tries to go in through the automatic door, which just so happened to be locked. He stands there, waving his arms at the door, getting angrier and more frustrated, shoving away the cabbie when he tries to show him that the other door would work. This went on for three minutes or so. Other incident? Girl meets boy, girl and boy get hammered, boy and girl get in a fight, girl storms off mad and kicks over newspaper console and then punches a road sign. Awesome.

Get into transition, have some wheat thins (breakfast of champions), some Gatorade, set up my area for the day and use the portopotties. 4 times (oddly enough, before starting triathlon, I had NEVER used a portopotty. My hand to god. After it gets sanitized first though). Transition closed at 6:45, but my wave didn’t go off until 8:20 (last wave, yes!). Anyhow, I had to do my business again, so I snuck back into transition to use the potty again. While I was putting my wetsuit on, I found my goggles from IMC in my sleeve. Left them on the levee as I couldn’t figure out where to put them. I was hoping I could go back after the race and get them, but it was not to be.

The swim:
At NOLA, it’s a beach start which ends up being waist deep water for about the first 100 yards. I was hoping to get on the feet of someone fast, but the beach start kind of ruined it. In fact, I felt that by the time we got to the turn buoy (~200 yards) I was already at the back of the pack. Not only that, but the glass-flat Lake P from Saturday had turned into a washing machine on a runaway spin cycle. This was like nothing I had swum in before (but tasted better than either the Potomac or the Hudson). Anyhow, I didn’t feel like I was going fast, but I didn’t feel like I was going slowly. I just didn’t ever get in a good rythym and didn’t get comfortable. I think it was a good learning experience, but I’m really disappointed in the swim. Never thought I’d swim a 38:42. That’s my slowest open water swim, ever. 10 minutes slower than my slowest IM swim.

Time: 38:42 (2:00/100M). 530 OA/57 AG

T1:

I had trouble getting my wetsuit unzipped after getting out of the water. I was waved over by some wetsuit strippers (not strippers wearing wetsuits) and despite a small snag in getting my left foot out of the wetsuit, they did a good job. Ran to my rack (opposite side of transition from the swim exit) and got to my bike. Instead of putting my bike shoes on and running to bike out, I left them on the bars and ran barefoot to bike out. Only snag was forgetting that my sunglasses were in my bike shoes and having them fall out on the run over. Maybe lost 10-15 seconds there. I can’t reiterate enough: If you’ve got a long way to run in transition and you aren’t doing a flying start, run with your bike shoes in your hands or on the bars. You’ll run much faster and you can put them on at the edge of transition (usually there’s a fence you lean your bike against).

Time: 2:28 32 AG

Bike:

Goal here was to take it relatively easy. Max sustained watts should be 200, but I didn’t want to hit that at the expense of heart rate, which I wanted to keep around 152. For the first 10 minutes or so, I was above on HR but below on Watts, but that’s not unexpected with me (I get super excited to be on the bike, so my heart starts beating fast with adrenalin even though I’m just moseying along). The first 5 miles or so had heavy traffic on narrow roads, but once we got towards the highway things got spread out and I was able to take off. I was able to stay aero for most of the ride, but my concentration really wasn’t as good as it could have been. For the first 60km or so, I kept on swapping places with a guy who ended up finishing well behind me on the bike ride. Whether he was pushing too hard or I was being too lazy could be debated, but I think I was being lazy. In the headwinds, I wasn’t putting in a lot of effort (almost being TOO conservative), but in the tailwinds I was opening up the throttle and taking off. I’m pleased with my position on the bike (I’ll have pictures soon) as I feel like I am getting a lot of free speed there. Anyhow, I need to keep my concentration up and allow a bit of discomfort (too much sitting up and fidgeting in the second half of the ride).

Time: 2:37:15 (21.37/mph). 336 OA/28 AG. 181W average/188W NP (1.03VI). 148 BPM Average

T2:

Aside from almost dropping my bike at the dismount line as someone blazed past me (I really need to relearn the flying dismount), T2 was unventful. Noticed there weren’t that many (maybe 10) bikes on the racks near mine (I thought all M25-29 were there, but apparently not). Got 3 of the 4 gels I had left in my shoes out before I put them on (got the 4th one out when I got my foot halfway in the shoe, realized there was a gel in there, and took it off). Grabbed my watch and I was off. That’s my transition. No hat to grab, no race belt to grab. Just get the bike on the rack and go. Turned the watch on as I ran to run out.

Time: 1:47 22 AG

Run:

In the run out chute, I noticed that a few more people were at the racks near mine. Now, I had no idea how bad my swim was, but I was thinking that I was in a pretty good spot. After a 2:37 bike, that’s not really going to be in podium contention, but I was thinking a top-10 might be in reach given that there were not too many bikes in transition. I don’t know if running scared is the right word for it, but I think it might be apt here. I really didn’t want to be caught from behind by someone in my AG.

Goal for the run was to run easy. I wanted my HR to float around 162 (preferably below 162) for about the first 10 miles. Given that it was hot, I didn’t know what pace that would translate into. But I really didn’t care. I figured it would be around 7:30-7:45/mile. The watch acquired GPS signal after about a third of a mile (half a click? sure, why not). The first mile (on the watch) ticked over in 7:24. Passed a guy who had flown past me on the last third of the bike (not in my AG). Told him he was really flying on the bike, he said he flatted, and I related my story about flatting at the Dextro DC race last year.

The miles started ticking by quickly. As I passed people, I’d give them words of encouragement, especially if they had a team name (or city on the back of their gear). A guy in Hammer Nutrition got me saying how his gear made me think of U Can’t Touch This. After giving some encouragement to a woman by naming whatever team she was on, she said “Good job Team… red and black.” I really need to think of something clever to put on the back of a trisuit. I passed the owner of a NOLA tri-club, and he invited me for a beer post-race at his team’s tent (I couldn’t find their tent, but it was a gracious offer). I passed three women running together, gave them some encouragement, and then they asked if I was being sarcastic, to which I replied in no uncertain terms that I meant what I was saying. You’ve probably noticed that I’m not talking much about paces or anything here. Well, there’s not too much to say. I was running between 7:24 and 7:35 for most of thea day, and up until mile 9 or so, I didn’t really feel like I was putting a whole lot of effort in. At 3, 6, and 9 miles I had a Gu (Vanilla Bean is the best flavor, ever). At the aid stations, I’d take a water, a cup of ice (or ice water if no ice) and a sponge on occasion. The ice/ice water would go down the tri suit for cooling, the water you go in or near my mouth and on my head, and the sponge was placed at my neck. At mile 10, I walked an aid station as I was concerned that I was not getting enough liquids (I wound up, as you can see later, running a 7:34 for the 10th mile, despite walking the station). Once we got onto the neighborhood streets (~mile 10.5), I noticed that pacing was becoming a lot more difficult. I just didn’t have much of a kick to run really really fast at that point (the plan had been 10 miles easy and then all bets are off for the last 3.1 miles). There was a guy with an age of 2? on his leg in front of me, and thinking he might be in my AG, I decided he was my rabbit, so I would try to close in on him. At mile 12, after drawing even, I walked the aid station again and ran my slowest mile of the day (7:40), followed by my fastest mile of the day at 7:09. I caught up to the rabbit, thanked him for being a good rabbit, and let him sprint the last half mile into the finish. The finish line, which runs right through the French Quarter, was a welcome site. As I entered the chute, I gave all the little kids with their hands out high fives. Crossed the line with a total elapsed time (since the first wave) of 6:15, which meant I was definitely under 5 hours (I figured 4:55).

Oh, and the neatest part of the day, which I realized when I downloaded the data off of my watch? I even split the first and second half of the half-marathon to the second. Not all of the best laid plans go to shit, apparently.

Time: 1:37:42 (7:28/mile) 99 OA/9 AG (2 seconds off half marathon PB stupid walking aid stations) 159 BPM Average
(map and splits here. Splits match course marked miles after mile 4).
Total time: 4:57:54 152 OA/15 AG (Top 10% AG)

Final thoughts:
Aside from the swim, the day couldn’t have gone better. Bike was right where I thought it would be time-wise, and run was faster than I expected. Never felt like I was in serious discomfort (except on the swim). Top 10% of my AG has been a goal of mine. Don’t know if I consider it the pointy end of the race, but it’s definitely close. There’s a lot of work to be done still as I was 40 minutes back of first place and 30 back of third. But it’s definitely an improvement over previous races and it’s motivation to work even harder.

See you again in 2 weeks. It’ll be hard to top this race.

I’ll get there.

I need another reason why I need another reason

As a computer scientist, I’m always looking for an easier way to do things. I also get quite upset when I see things that could be done in a much simpler, more open, more consistent way. Which brings me to WKO+⁰. On a base level, it does most of what needs to be done by a tracking system (note that most of my complaints are triathlete based). In conjunction with TrainingPeaks.com, it does more of what a training system should do, and adds on some other nice-to-haves. But they are two very separate¹ systems built on two very different platforms with integration going only one way. I can understand why the two systems are so different. They were both built with different audiences in mind (WKO+ was formerly CyclingPeaks and was geared towards cyclists with power meters, while TrainingPeaks (TP) is a newer (I think), web-based system geared more towards… everyone). WKO+ is a one-time payment for the software (one-license), while TP is a monthly (or free) subscription. They’re integrated only by the fact that you can correct your GPS files in WKO+ with a system/database/magical wizard hat that resides in the TP universe, and you can upload your workouts/training files from your WKO+ to your account on TP. That’s it. So while the original workout plan may reside on TP, you can’t see that in WKO+. But if you really want to do in-depth analysis of your training load and power progressions, you can’t do that in TP. They both have good interfaces for running files (I think the normalized pace data in WKO+ only makes me a bit more willing to go easy up hills by thinking that it’s ok, cause my normalized pace will be faster than I expect it to be), although I think the ability to quickly see all the intervals in a graphical form (in WKO+) is a nice touch. Neither has a really good system for tracking swimming workouts. I don’t know of any system yet that does a good job of that.

So far, except for the integration, everything seems great, right? Well, not so much². WKO+ only runs on windows. Only as in you can’t run it from within WINE (I think) or on a Mac (unless you’re using parallels, bootcamp, etc). I get that. The population fo potential users is pretty damn small all things considered. So we’re talking about making a change to make things easier for maybe 15% of the potential audience. It’s quite clear that WKO+ is a legacy Windows product, and, again, I have no issue with that. Except that if I were going to rebuild WKO+ from the bottom, it would be a web/AIR/QT/GTK(ew) based platform. I’m not sure at this point in time that there are a huge number of things that need to be built in such a way that they are tied to one platform.

It’s also very difficult to go back and compare two workouts. Let’s say 6 weeks apart, I do the same workout. Let’s say it’s 4×15′ at 90% of FTP with 4′ of rest in between each set. If I remember the workout that I did 6 weeks ago, it’s pretty easy to compare today’s workout. Otherwise, I’ll have to go into TP, and try to find that workout, cause the workout details aren’t sent to WKO+ unless I hand typed them after my workout got downloaded from whatever device. Now, let’s say I’ve done that same workout 20 times in the past 2 years, and I’m interested in looking at the progression or making some comparison. There’s just no way I’m going to manually look through all of my history to do that.

So, if I were Peaksware and I were going to rebuild WKO+ from the bottom up, I’d probably make it a non-free plug-in/addition for TP and/or a more tightly integrated web-app³. Data from WKO+ should flow freely into TP, and TP data should flow into WKO+ (they are two very complementary products). Data within TP/WKO+ should be able to be searched for similar workouts, and if the data exists (lap data mostly), that should be searchable too. TP/WKO+ should be able to generate workouts for training devices (e.g., my 4×15′ workout should be something that once setup in TP, I can download easily into my Garmin or whatever other device that is capable of doing the like). Finally, I forget what I was going to say. Guess this is long enough.

⁰I don’t think they haven’t had these discussions internally. I know that software development, like all things, is a matter of compromise and a matter of what is possible to be done in a given amount of time. I’m free from those constraints here. Furthermore, if anyone from Peaksware (the makers of the packages discussed today), reads this and has any comments about it, I’m more than willing to give them their own post to respond, free from any editorial interference. Look, I’m not much read by anyone, so I’m not sure why they’d want to respond anyhow.
¹I think one of the things that I’ll never forget from 9th grade english is how to spell Separate. A Separate Peace was one of our summer reading books. In the first week, we had an open book test/essay to write in class about ASP. I forget what I wrote about, but I do remember that we all were docked a third of a grade (e.g. A to A-, A- to B+) for misspelling Separate. I mean, we all had the book there, and misspelled the name of the book. I do find it hard to spell desperate from time to time, until I remember that it’s not spelled like separate.
²I’m ignoring the proprietary nature of the .wko file as there are workarounds and from, what I’ve heard, it’s changing in an upcoming release. Also, I don’t blame them for any driver finickyness in pulling data in.
³I think, given the market size and the amount of time it would take to relaunch a new WKO+, I’m probably out of luck here, as doing a major rewrite would probably require 2 teams: one to maintain the old code until the new code is ready, and another to build the new platform. And I don’t think the market is big enough to support that. But that’s a SWAG, as is this whole lecture.

I have to say first and foremost I picked pretty good parents. Genetically, I think it’s a testament to them that given my athletic background I’ve been able to compete as well as I have. I mean, if you look at my athletic history, it’s been pretty unfocused and until I started doing triathlons, it was dormant for years. Sports I played as a kid: baseball (through 7th grade), basketball (through 4th grade, or maybe 6th… I think until we moved I played rec league), soccer (through 2nd grade maybe?), hockey (6th-freshman year of high school), swimming (through 5th grade), rowing (freshman year through senior fall of high school), golf (recreationally to the point that I got down to a 7 handicap at one point). In college, I played one week of lightweight football, and one year of rugby. Aside from that, I drank competitively. By the end of college, it really showed (I looked for pictures, I couldn’t find any online. I know there are… somewhere). I had gone from doing an olympic triathlon in September 2003 to probably weighing 200 lbs by June 2004, and looking it. Then graduation came and for 2.5 years I did nothing (except for maintain weight).

So that’s my athletic history. In spite of that, I’m a front middle of the pack (or back front of the pack) triathlete. I know there are others out there who are more athletically gifted and have a similar background and do much better. But I know that I am quite lucky to have the genetics I have.

So how does this tie to a training philosophy? Suffice it to say that the only background I had in triathlon was swimming, and those skills, while very useful, were a bit rusty. But here I am competing against people transitioning from competitive running (former collegiate runners, etc) and swimming and (less so) cycling, and the longest run I had before my first Ironman was a half-marathon. I’m competing against people who easily run sub-38 minute 10Ks. A lot of these guys have had years of coaching in one single discipline, years of competition. I’m not complaining at all. I may not have been good enough to run collegiately (I never tried). I may not have been good enough to run in high school (I never tried).

It’s probably best to discuss my goals for this upcoming season before I go on:
1. I live 8 miles (give or take) from work. I’d like to start running to work (getting some quality work in in the morning), and then running home (easy pace). I’d like to start running with a group regularly (let’s face it, I need to meet people). Basically, I’d like to up the mileage pretty significantly and see what my body can handle.
2. I have this vague idea that I can run a 17:XX 5K. After 3 weeks of no/light training, I think it’s possible to get stuff started up again and start crushing things. I think it’s doable. It’ll be hard, but, I think, doable.
3. I think for this year, I’ll pass on full IM distace racing. It’s a lot of time commitment, and while I think it is worth it, I think the ROI on doing a full ironman is much lower than doing 3-4 triathlons (olympic and half iron distance) in its place. That ROI is my own, of course. For instance, with each ironman, I get one datapoint of what works and what doesn’t. So I get one datapoint a year, and next year would be a third datapoint (now I know people are successful doing this and do a lot more races leading up to their ironman races than I do, but that’s not my plan).

In any case, I want to accumulate experience with different pacing, different race strategies, different tapering techniques, etc. Any coach you talk to should (and most will) say that what works for one person doesn’t always work for another person. Things happen and go upside down at a race that you can’t control, and I want to go from where that’s something I have to real with and adjust to and be surprised by to having the experience that tells me “hey, I know what’s happening and why and here’s how I deal with it.” Given my lack of racing experience since forever, I think taking a year off from doing long distance racing (and the amount of training entailed), will allow me to accumulate metric tons of experience and new abilities that I would be able to take to longer distances.

Ultimately, I love triathlon. I’ll do more. I’ll continue to try and qualify for Kona. Not next year though. But I also want to explore other opportunities to pu[ni]sh my body. See how far it can go till it breaks, and then see how well it works when it does. All within reason.

I suppose in the week and a half leading up to my travel, I hadn’t gotten much good training… one longish (1 hour) run and a few 30-40 minute swims. I also moved apartments (lots of lifting, etc). I also hadn’t been sleeping well, as lots of changes had been going on both at work and at home (and in the new apartment, new allergies or something). In any case, it was taper, so I wasn’t too worried. I wasn’t injuring myself, and I wasn’t completely stopping everything.

Once in Penticton, I met the crew from Endurance Sports Travel, who totally rocked. Got a preride of the bike course, a dinner, met tons of cool triathletes, and basically had worry free travel in Penticton. Also got to get in some good swims with those folks on Thursday. Friday brought my first meeting with Coach Matt, who aside from being a pretty cool guy has been my advisor on all things training (though I think he and I probably both agree that I would do better for myself by actually doing more of the workouts), and his fiance Sue, who despite being a Red Sox fan is a decent human being. Anyhow, I was feeling really good about my swims during these “workouts”. No idea what my times would be on Sunday, but I thought I could get by without really working all that hard, cause I’m lazy.

Saturday brought some family into town (my mother, sister, and uncle), as well as bike checkin. I had some bad thoughts on Friday night about my bike cleats, looked at them instead of sleeping, and lo and behold, the left cleat was chipped. Saturday morning I ran to the Bike Barn, got some new cleats, and put them on. Then I dropped off my bike, and we tooled around the Okanogan Valley and some vineyards (me mostly sitting down). Got to bed relatively early, and despite waking up every two hours, I slept pretty well. Woke up, had a bagel, some wheat thins, a gatorage, and grabbed another gatorade to go.

I met some more new people traveling with us on the way to the race site, got my body marked, and dropped off my special needs bags (not for those kinds of special needs. Hit the portapotties three times (twice for one, once for two, heh). Then I got my wetsuit on, found Matt, and we took some warmup strokes in the very crowded lake).

The Swim
The idea was to stay on Matt’s feet as long as possible, if not the whole way. He’s a stronger swimmer than I, but given the impact
of drafting, I should be able to at least get a good start on the race. Turns out the longest I could stay on his feet was oh,
five yards. Why?

That’s pretty much what it was like. I was about 2 or 3 rows back in the scrum. No kicks to the face, just not a lot of comfort in swimming for the first few minutes. Once I got out of that, I typically found a bit of room and some feet to draft off of. I was a bit wide on the outbound leg of the triangle towards the sailboat that marked the first turn. Made the turn, still had some feet to go off of, and made my way towards the houseboat that marked the turn for the inward leg. That’s where things got really interesting. All of a sudden, I found myself in packs of swimmers again. It seemed like every time we got close to a buoy, all of the swimmers would head straight for the buoy, then spread out again. It was very very odd. Had some pink hat try to rip my goggles off at one point (not intentionally, her hand just scraped right against my face). Also on the inboung leg, I started getting cramps in both calves. Typically, it can happen when I’m swimming in the pool and pushing off so frequently from the wall, but that doesn’t happen in open water swimming, so I’ve got no idea what it was. Even with the cramps, I, for the most part during the swim, felt like I was swimming well within myself, sighting buoys really really well, and not really pushing hard.

Swim time: 1:03:25. That’s a 2.5-3 minute improvement over last year, and aside from the cramps, I did no harm on the swim. It’d be nice to be 5 minutes faster, but that’ll come.

T1 was pretty uneventful. Lost my goggles (clear Tyr Socket Rockets), but other than that, nothing to report. Instead of putting my shoes on in the tent, I carried them with me. See, I had a long run on pavement to get to my bike, and I can run barefoot much faster than I can run on cleated bike shoes. Probably could have gone maybe 30-60 seconds faster with some faster movement and perhaps some more thought into exactly what I was going to do in transition.

The bike is a big loop that takes you southbound on a slight downhill before you make a right turn and start hitting some hills. At first, my powertap started providing really odd power numbers (flashing things like 74 watts). Reset it twice and started getting nicer numbers. This is a good thing as having power numbers really helps me mete out my effort. There’s only one steep hill in the first two hours and it’s less than 10 miles out of transition. A lot of riders around me hammered up the hill; I just stayed seated and tried to keep my watts down. No point in killing my day after being out there for only an hour and a half. Anyhow, saw quite a bit of drafting going on. Some of it was understandable, some was just blatant crap. I would pass someone, and minutes later see them hanging onto a peleton going by me maybe half a mile an hour faster than I was going.

We turned after about 2 hours and then the climbing started. Really enjoyable climbing too. I was able to just sit up and spin up the first hill. One of the very cool things about the bike course at IMC is the number of fans out on the climbs. Two of the climbs at IMC are epic: Richter Pass and Yellow Lake. Spectators were out in full force cheering people upwards and onwards in all sorts of outfits (wigs, superman suits, etc). Anyhow, climbing Richter Lake (the first climb), I started getting some intense pain in my left hip. This wasn’t the first time this year that the pain had come. In my last two rides before I left DC, I had had some hip pain as well, but typically I could run on it. But the pain was always at the front of my mind, except when I was climbing, at which point getting up the hill was the ONLY thing on my mind. It was hard to get comfortable in the aero position from this point, and hard to get comfortable sitting up. There’s one out and back on the course and that’s the second time on the bike that I saw my cheering section, who rocked. At the turnaround you get your special needs bags. I didn’t need my bag, but I really needed to pee. So I stopped for about a minute and a half, did my business, and tried to work a bit on my hip. The hip pain, I noticed, was really bad if I was coasting with my left leg forward, so that was right out for the rest of the day. Came back and got ready to climb the second big climb of the day: Yellow Lake. Yellow Lake was something totally different from anything I’d ever ridden before. It’s pretty close to what climbing looks like at the Tour: fans crowding the street, screaming their heads off, chalked messages all over, and just in general being awesome. I think after that climb I really wasn’t prepared for what was next. In driving the course, it felt pretty much downhill all the way from the peak. In reality, there were a couple of climbs and it was a bit flatter than I was expecting. Maybe lost 5 minutes here just being unprepared. Mentally, I was really worried about whether my hip would allow me to run at all and not focused at all on the bike at this point because I was really really concerned. How do you explain to people that although it looks ok when you walk, your hip is killing you and you can’t run a marathon? Got into T2, and decided I would take my time and just make sure that everything was working.

Bike time: 5:45:36. I was really shooting/hoping for 5:30, but I expected I would fall anywhere between 5:30 and 6:00, so I split the difference pretty well. I think my nutrition may have been a bit off for the last 35-40 minutes

T2 saw me hit the bathrooms, again, before heading out on the run. My hip was not hurting at all anymore, so it must be some kind of rotational injury.

My plan for the run was pretty straightforward. Go out easy and try to maintain the easy pace. I had a water bottle to start, and decided to toss it after 4 miles. After that point, I was just cruising, checking off the miles at ~8. At mile 7 I accidentally ingested some water into my lungs and spent a few seconds coughing, but kept on going. Around mile 9 or 10, I stopped to pee, again. After mile 9, we hit the first hill, and that’s where my right calf started cramping up on me. I walked for 30″ or so, and tried to continue on. I was able to, but every half mile or so, my legs would start cramping again. I reached the halfway point at 1:58 minutes. At this point, I had to even split to get back and finish in under 11 hours. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t able to run consistently for any significant amount of time (longer than .5 miles). So I just kept running until my legs cramped, walked a bit, rinsed, and repeated. This was punctuated by multiple bathroom breaks. As I got back towards town, a couple on bikes started screaming at me telling me to run and pick off people on the course. Half of me was grateful, half wanted to commit a capital crime. Unfortunately, my left quad was having some issues supporting my knee from time to time, but still, just one foot in front of the other towards the finish line (kinda like this race report). At ~24.2 miles into the run, I decided I was just going to run the rest of the way. At this point, I’m in town and there are still people out there cheering me on (really, they’re cheering everyone on, but that’s just them being awesome). Saw my mom and sister, and just started smiling. I was going to finish, I was going to beat the previous year, I was going to cross with a smile on my face.

Run time: 4:20:03. About 2 minutes slower than last years race. Really the only portion of my day that I was disappointed with. It wasn’t a fitness issue, it was my body just not agreeing with myself on the day. So there’s definitely room to work on that. I think I’ll be doing some open marathons, and longer, to get myself there mentally.

Total time: 11:17:41. Yeah, a 21 minute PR. Would have liked to have seen how I could go if my body were there. But I finished, and finished well. I didn’t have a great day, but it could have been much much worse. I’d call it a fair to good day.