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.