Biting off more than I can chew ..... pt 4

By Saturday evening my legs were toast.

I put on my compression socks, my compression tights ..... and then went to the pub. What the heck .... I wasn't going to win. Four pints and a carry-out six pack later, I fell asleep.

Only to wake up every hour as the blood pooled in my legs.

I finally got up just before five in the morning, packed my stuff up, checked out and headed off to the race site.

The difference between Friday evening and Sunday morning is amazing! On Friday, everyone is there an hour or more before the race begins, getting their stuff together and warming up. On Sunday, people are still arriving fifteen minutes before the start and the warm up is putting on the wetsuit!

As usual, the start is in pairs, and in time trial format. However, on Sunday, race number order has been forgotten about and you just start with whoever you happen to be standing next to at the time.

So began my leisurely half Ironman.

My new buddy, Hayes, and I strolled into the water as with the enthusiasm of people going before a firing squad and started swimming. The water was considerably warmer than Friday and I decided to make the most of the swim as it would delay the time when I had to get on the bike.

Despite my best efforts, I came out of the water in 33 minutes and wandered into transition. Five minutes or so later, having put on socks and waited for Hayes to catch up, I began the bike ride.

I'd have to say that the following 3 hours, 43 minutes and 47 seconds were extremely painful and followed this pattern......

On the flat bits, Hayes and I would ride side by side generally shooting the shit. On the climbs, I'd ride "tempo" in my granny gear and Hayes would crank up, sometimes on the big ring, usually getting to the top twenty or thirty seconds before me. On the downhills, I'd tuck into the most aero position possible and go flying past Hayes and all the others who'd overtaken me on the climb ..... bike handling on wet descents being the nearest I have to a cycling talent! Once on the flat again, I'd soft pedal and let Hayes catch up.

The only time this went a bit wrong was when I foolishly let Hayes lead on a descent and he hit a bump that ejected one of his water bottles from its cage which missed my front wheel by about two inches ..... thereafter, I went first.

On the last hill, five miles or so from the end, Hayes cracked Ulrich-style and despite me not trying any harder, I took three minutes out of him at the end of the bike.

After another leisurely transition, I started the run ...... well, not really.

It took me about two steps to realize that today wasn't going to be a running day. Particularly, if the road was going to be anything other than dead flat and preferably, downhill.

There seems to be two schools of thought in middle-to-back of the pack Ironman running. School 1 is what I'll call the Hayes method, which is to keep running at a constant albeit very slow pace, say 11 mins/mile. School 2, the Charles method, involves running at more or less normal pace when you can i.e. downhill and walking as quickly as you can when you can't run i.e. uphill.

In Hayes' particular implementation of his method, it proved superior by about seven minutes but, I did manage to beat a few other devotees.

Two hours and thirty one minutes later, I strolled over the finish line for a total time of 6:56:07 .... my slowest half-Ironman by about an hour and three quarters.
Although, to be fair, it's the only half that I've done after a half-Ironman warm up the day before and it's the longest race I've done for seventeen years.

With a total time of 13:24:31, I finished 39th in the men's masters and 184th overall...... and mighty glad to be finished.

Biting Off More Than I Can Chew Pt. 3

After the morning race, I went back to the hotel and slept for an hour and a half or so and woke up feeling surprisingly good.

Race #3 is exactly the same as race #2 except that you do it in the order of Bike-Swim-Run. By this time, the temperature was pushing 80 and I was starting to wish that I’d brought my training helmet with the vents.

My legs felt OK and having some idea of what to expect, I made up my mind to try harder in the third race.

Big Mistake!!!!!!!!!!!!

I got to halfway six minutes quicker than in the morning but, I died on the big climb on the way back. The second climb finished me off: my quads were trashed by the time I got back into transition and my bike split ended up being 13 seconds slower than the morning’s effort.

Trying to get into my wetsuit ….. (even though I’d decided to use my sleeveless Xterra Vector Pro …. Thanks again Sponsors!) had me rolling around on the ground for five minutes before one of the volunteers gave me plastic bags to put over my feet and did the zipper up.

The water hadn’t warmed up much and caused my much-overheated quads to cramp during the second lap. Despite this I had a decent swim: only two seconds slower than in the morning.

I tried on the run but, I was noticeably slower all the way. Hills that I’d hardly noticed in the morning slowed me to a gentle jog and I resorted to walking the two steepest sections: a quarter mile section between miles 1 and 2 and a half- mile long section just after the turn. This cost me six and a half minutes and my run split of 60:28 gave me an overall race #3 time of 3:04:50

Biting Off More Than I Can Chew Pt. 2

I dragged myself out of bed at 5:00AM on Saturday morning to find that it must have rained continuously overnight. I hadn’t heard a thing!

Arriving at the race site, I immediately noticed that the water level in the lake was significantly higher than the previous day which usually means the water’s going to be colder. I was right: the water temperature was down to the low 60’s and I was glad that I’d packed my Xterra Vendetta fullsuit. (Thank you, Sponsors!)

Race #2 is loosely speaking an Olympic distance event with a slightly over-distance run and, if anything, a slightly under-distance swim.

Late news was that the organizers had had to change the bike course as a result of the storm. Basically we were going to do the race #3 route for race #2 as well. The good news about this was that we were going to miss out on the 18% climb on the original route …. The bad news is that this route is just as hilly although it would give me an opportunity to learn the route.

They started chivvying us into line just before 7:30AM and, a few minutes later, Deb and I were off. The swim course was a two-lap job where you more or less had to exit the water at the end of the first lap as the water was only a couple of feet deep. Other than the water was a bit on the chilly side, it was fairly pleasant swim and I was pleased to swim consistently: I finished the first lap in 13:30 and the second in 13:27.

I jogged into transition and set off on the bike making a mental note to take it easy.

The bike course is as follows: the first mile is fairly flat and you then climb for the next two and half miles; fairly gently at first but, it gets steeper as you get to the top of the first hill. You then lose all of this height over the next mile and then you start climbing again … only this second hill is shorter and steeper: you climb about 260 feet in less than a mile. You then have a couple of relatively flat miles followed by a steep descent where you lose 500 feet in a mile and a quarter. It’s then about three and half miles to the turn, slightly uphill all the way.

All you really need to know about the way back is that it takes significantly longer to climb 500 feet in a mile and a quarter than it did to come down ….. by about a factor of five!

None the less, I was reasonably pleased with my bike ride: 44 minutes each way without trying too hard. It’s difficult to compare these hills to any in Michigan …. Maybe the hill at the end of the Big Fish triathlon is the nearest although it’s probably only half as long and half as steep. These are more like mini Tour De France type climbs and I was starting to wish that I’d brought my road bike rather than the P3.

The run route is out and back along Lamp Black Trail. Most years, the run is entirely cross country but, because of all the rain, this year the first half mile or so was on asphalt. Good news in that it kept our shoes cleaner and drier; bad news in that it stuck another couple of hundred yards on the run.

On the whole, I’d say that this run is comparable with that of the Ann Arbor Tri. It’s a mile and a half longer but, the really steep bits are much shorter and most of the downhills are steep enough to make you run faster but not so steep that it trashes your quads.

Once again, I didn’t push it and was pleased to finish the run in 54 minutes for a total time of 2:53:46.

Not too bad ….

Biting Off More Than I Can Chew ... Part 1

In this case .... The American Triple-T held last weekend in Portsmouth, OH.

For the uninitiated this is four triathlons held over three days: a "super sprint" prologue on Friday evening; an Olympic distance race on Saturday morning with a second Olympic distance race in the afternoon; followed by a half-Ironman on Sunday. The organizer describes the hills on the bike course and on the run as "challenging" ...... and he's not kidding!

When I entered the race last November on the back of a decent triathlon season, this seemed like a great idea and a fantastic opportunity to get in a final big week of base training before starting my build phase.

By the end of April, it didn't seem like such a good idea! I'd broken a toe and my longest run had only been 12 miles. Furthermore, my longest bike ride was still only around 40 miles and there had been a few too many "weekends off" for one reason or another.

Still, I'd paid my money and it was time now to pay in other ways. I'd made the decision to taper by doing close to nothing the week before the race and Friday morning saw me throw my kit in the car and drive six hours in the pouring rain down to Portsmouth. About an hour south of Columbus, the terrain started to get hilly and I started to get nervous.

I arrived at the race site around 90 minutes before the race and, having checked in, decided to ride the bike course as a warm up. This isn't particularly heroic ... the prologue is only a 250m swim, a 5 mile bike ride and a 1 mile run. As I got the bike out of the car, it finally stopped raining and I decided that this was a good omen.

The bike course is in the form of a 'T.' You exit transition, turn right, ride half a mile to the park entrance, turn around ride a couple of miles to the top of the hill, turn around and return to transition.

Dead easy ...... apart from the bit "ride a couple of miles to the top of the hill," which involves about three hundred feet of climbing. Imagine the hill in Franklin from the Post Office up to the cemetery. It's a quarter mile long and you climb about fifty feet. Now imagine it's six times as long ..... and that's about the easiest hill you climb the entire weekend.

Once in transition, I started to feel a little bit left out as I seemed to be the only person without an "M Dot" tattoo or any other piece of Ironman regalia. It occurred to me that it was, in fact, 17 years since I completed my last Ironman and that my longest race since then was last year's Battle of Waterloo which took me a grand total of 4:30. I started chatting to the lady next to me in transition who'd done the race three times before and gleefully informed me that the race was "much harder than an Ironman."

That'll teach me to talk to strangers.

The races are all run in a time trial format: you line up in pairs, in race number order and each pair starts five seconds or so behind the pair in front.

Having had a quick paddle in the lake, I decided not to bother with a wetsuit. Yes, the water was cold but, it wasn't unbearable and I'd only be in it for three or four minutes.

After standing around on the beach for a bit, the organizers chivvied us into order and eventually my new friend, Deb, and I were off ..... which was the last I saw of her until the next morning as she finished about five minutes in front of me.

Basically, I did the race at a conversational pace: swam easy, jogged through transition; rode up the hill at just under my anaerobic threshold; rode down without falling off; put on running shoes; jogged across waterlogged field getting shoes really muddy; jogged back; job done.

I then put my stuff in the car and drove back to the hotel ..... via the pub. Or, more precisely, the Portsmouth Brewing Company. (The pilsner wasn't that great but the Vulcan was pretty decent ... so I had four more of them)

Back in the hotel, I cleaned all the crap off my running shoes and then hit the hay to be ready for Saturday.