IRONMAN ARIZONA RACE REPORT

IMAZ ended for me just about 72 hours ago.  i am still sore enough to remember. i am just not sore enough that it is starting to slip away...a good time to start my race report.

PRE-AMBLE:

i sorta have taken pride in the fact that i don't really want or need to blog a RR about every stinkin race i do. in my house, 70.3 is a pre-amble to shopping at the mall. oly, is something that happens before lunch. sprint is about as noteworthy as my morning shit.

i am not sure that ironman will ever become anything other than a journey. it is a long day, long week, long period mentally of building up and getting ready. it sorta deserves a race report. i can't imagine racing an ironman and thinking "this was just another day"...

RACE WEEK:

my race week ended, and my race began, when i was treading water in the 62 degrees of tempe town lake, at the crack of dawn, looking up at the road-runner-like sky, and listening the the race announcer, mike reilly talking overhead. what he said, amounted to a modern day serenity prayer, a few lines about focusing on what you can and do control, and an acknowledgement, that, at the end of the day, that pretty much boils down to YOUR ATTITUDE.

attitude. is this not the one thing in life that you can control? an ironman truly is like a small life, a little chance to learn about being human, about how you respond to adversity, to your limits, to pain, to loneliness, discomfort, bad luck, how you ride through highs and lows and get to the finish...ironman is a microcosm that reflects and informs the macrocosm that is life.

but, i get ahead of myself. i am still in race week here, which is like the limbo a soul experiences before birth. who am i? what kind of parents will i get? what colour will i be? where will i live? will i be male or female? big questions. race week is the same: it is like waiting in limbo to be born into an uncertain world in which you must adapt to the unknown, little is under your control, joy may visit you when she feels like it, and suffering is inevitable.

here are some highlights from my sojourn through ironman limbo:

-a few weeks prior to my race, i email the person whose condo i rented, to confirm our dates... only to discover, that, in fact, we had our dates mixed up. i have no-where to stay. boom! i am back on VRBO, and thank the Lord, i find a GORGEOUS place, for a good price and we are in business again. all in the time it takes to take a good shit before bed. thank G-d for the internet. this is one advantage of IMAZ over say, placid or IMC or some race that takes place in a small town. phoenix is the 5th largest metropolitan area in the USA. there are lots of places to stay.

-the entire week, right up until 2 days before the race, i was obsessed with fear of catching a cold. weird. colds are part of life. simple little things. pervasive at this time of year in my homeland. but also, capable of destroying dreams. a cold could ruin everything. sore throat. fever. stuffy nose= no can race for 12 hours in the sun.

i realized that this was not really in my control. i realized, also, that i am pre-disposed to have less than perfect trust in the benign nature of fate, and my body. getting cancer while in med school is a bummer. it makes you realize that anything can happen any time. basically, we are not in control of the things that matter most to us: when we live, when we die, when we become parents, when not. not decisions really up to us.

so, hence my irrational fear of getting a cold. it was my fear that all my work would be for naught and that the largely arbitrary nature of fate would find a way to fuck me over...especially since things have been going really well lately.

-my passport expired. funny how i pay 44% income tax and no-one thinks to send me a reminder, or, better yet, to just send me a new passport in the mail. when i went online to pre-register my family for the flight to arizona, i was horrified to discover that my passport had been expired since july! this was the first time my daughter has seen me cry. i was freaked out. i thought my race was over.

a few hours, and a futile drive to the passport office (which was closed for remembrance day) later, i discovered that, for a nominal fee, my country are kind enough to offer me a 24 hour renewal on my passport. all is not lost.

i spend much of the afternoon on the phone re-arranging flight times, car rental pick-up times and end the day with a trip to the mall to get my passport photo, which doubles as chance for my daughter to play in the indoor playground at the mall. my 2 year old daughter has taught me that even the most deleterious situations are hidden opportunities for pleasure. it is all about your attitude.

-we arrive in arizona, at 1 in the morning because our flight was delayed. after waiting for over an hour to get our car,  i become immediately disoriented in the dark desert night. my wife berates me for my lack of organization. she mellows somewhat when i find a circle k with a wayyyy too friendly person behind the counter, but i manage to score some milk, hand cream, eggs and other sundries that quiet the righteous anger of i have been travelling all day with my toddler to get to your race and i am at wits end brand of exhaustion that my better half was experiencing. my daughter, meantime, becomes frightened because daddy keeps turning the car in circles and this is freaking her out.  finally, i figure things out and we get to our LOVELY, WONDERFUL, townhouse at 2:30 am local time, which is 4:30 our time. we are in a state of spent exhaustion.

- the next day i unbox my bike to discover that my ritzy RTC shifters (the same ones lance was using before all his sponsors dumped him) are not working. warm up ride number one kind've in the air. thanks to Tim at TRIBE multisport everything is set to go a mere 90 minutes later. i have NEVER, EVER, received such good service at a bike store. these guys deserve all the business they can handle.

-the day has come for the practice swim. i am somewhat anxious about this as the water temperature is reported to be quite frigid in tempe town lake this time of year. in the end, it was no colder or murkier than lake wilcox in may, so not such a big deal really.

so, here i am standing on the steel steps, watching people jump in. a woman in front of me looks scared. "you go first" she says. i, being macho, jump, feet first, into the dark lachness-like waters...

ouch! there is sloping concrete? another steel step? something has presumably cut my foot. i quickly forget about it and enjoy the rest of my warm up swim, but get out of the water to discover several fairly deep lacerations on the dorsum of my right foot. bummer. "that is not going to feel too damn good when my feet are swollen in the 2nd part of the marathon" i say to myself.

-i place my bleeding foot into my bike shoes and head out on my last warm up ride before the race. finally, some of my pre-race nerves start to turn into excited energy. i am psyched by the desert, the ASU football stadium, the other athletes out for rides. i start to get excited about the race. i do a few pick ups and start to gain speed.

boom! my wheel catches a divet in the road. i am in aero, can't get hold of  the bars, and feel myself losing control, crashing onto the pavement with a thud and a screetch!.

really? did i just crash my bike? the day before my ironman? why is my elbow throbbing like that? i pick myself up and assess the damage. some torn up handle-bar tape. front brake mis-aligned.  a ruined de-soto forza tri-suit. garmin a bit scratched. lots of blood. from my knee. my shoulder and below are throbbing. another rider pulls up to me to see if i am ok. "you look like a warrior", he says. "you have no idea" i think.

a montage of my (five day old) road rash

i ride back into town, wash up a bit, and check my bike. there is no fucking way i am not doing this ironman tomorrow. i am back at the townhouse in time for my daughter's nap and to take over child-care so my wife can go to the mall for a while. between long-sleeve shirts and strategically placed, flesh coloured bandages, i mange to conceal my road rash for the rest of the day. i really did not want to place the extra worry onto her, especially since i knew she might say this is the last in a string of signs to not race. i, on the other hand, was tempted to see how lucky i was in all of this. lucky i saw the rental and passport issues when i did. lucky the gears did not fail on race day, but a few days ahead when they could be fixed. lucky that my crash was not worse and not during the race....the way i figured it, i had had so much shit luck leading into the race, i was bound to have a good day.

wow, this is the longest race report i have ever read and we are not even at the race part yet.

RACE DAY:

i woke up on my own, without the alarm, just before 4 am. the ironic thing was that given how nervous i had been all week, i slept better than i ever have before a big race.

i put my head out into the desert night just to see what was going on and caught an instant chill. i had to run back to bed and shiver in my sheets for a few minutes before venturing out again for coffee, chex with milk (gluten free you know), a cliff bar, and some power-aid. breakfast of champions.

i decided to call the cab company i had reserved with the day before. good thing. because they had tried to call the land-line i provided and got no response and re-routed the cab. another sign? no problem there. i had another cab at the gate in the next ten minutes.

transition was like an ant hill; crowded, bustling with purpose and full of organized chaos. the dark night was lit up with stadium style lights, but it was still tough to make things out (like the tire pressure gauge on a pump for example). a strap on spilunker's flashlight would have come in handy and will probably be in my race bag next time.

i got through my morning set-up chores fine and before i knew it, i was putting on my wet-suit and walking towards the swim start. in one last minute glitch, i realized that i had left my timing chip in my morning clothes bag, just moments before i was about to jump into the water. i ran back and found it.
now, it was showtime...for real.

race morning hub

SWIM:

i have worked really hard in the pool this year, but not seen much benefit yet in race times. i am far less tired when i get out of the water though, and i know the time will come when my swim splits will start to crawl towards the respectable. in the meantime, i have simple goals: get through the swim, maybe a bit faster than last year. be happy when it is over. my race starts when my feet touch land.

i had read lots about how cold and murky tempe lake was. but i really did not find it all that bad. the relatively narrow space, meant there was lots of traffic the whole way. i got caught in a few jams, got kicked in the eye (which led to leaky goggle), charlie horsed in the leg, punched in the head...a nice, normal ironman swim. it was nice to be so close to shore the whole time, so as you breathed you could watch the sunshine light up the desert landscape and glisten off various buildings and nice homes that dotted the edge of tempe town lake.

before the fun in the sun there was the mayhem in the morning

1:27: job done. 3 minutes faster than last year, so still pathetic, but less so. on the positive side, i exited the water feeling fresh like a lilly. race on.

BIKE:

another down side of swimming slow is that you generally come out with weaker bikers and have to fight your way through some traffic for a while. once we got out of town, i was able to settle in to a solid pace and the first loop went by steady, solid and without a hitch. i was pretty much on target for power, and feeling good. i am not too good at math but even i could calculate that i was right on pace for a 5:30 bike, which was pretty much what i had planned for, so i was feeling good overall.

IMAZ is flat, with one very gradual "uphill" before the turnaround that you don't need come out of the big ring up front for. but, it is rather windy, and furthermore, the wind changed direction, so that at one point, there was a headwind in both directions. the wind can wear on you mentally. i just tried to focus on keeping my power and turnover steady, staying on target with nutrition and remembering to hydrate frequently.

i felt a bit stronger over the second loop and was starting to get stoked about racing. in fact, i was quite emotional at the turnaround the second time, having what amounted to a small epiphany about how amazing the whole experience was and feeding off the energy of the warm and enthusiastic tempe crowd.

one thing about ironman, is that you experience ups and downs throughout the day. you need to manage them all in a context and not get too excited one way or the other. within minutes of my epiphany, i began to feel hot, bothered, uncomfortable and a bit bonky. this was the beginning of the final loop. i fought through this by telling myself it woud pass, and focusing on taking in some extra energy in the form of a cliff bar, some salt and some extra gatorade. this got things going and i soon began to feel a bit more fluid again.

the aid stations were quite easy to navigate and i must say i was impressed by them. i had no issues with missing a bottle or getting anything i wanted. i did not even put a special needs bag on the course, so that was a non-issue.

on the way home, in the final loop, i rode up to a group of strong bikers who were clearly riding in a pack. i had gone out of my way to ride clean the whole time, and i must say that i was pissed off by the blatant group effort that i was witnessing. the trouble was, that my options were limited. i tried surging through them, but they caught me and i realized that i could not ride away from them without blowing myself up. if i kept my steady power numbers up, they would always catch me after a minute or two, because they had the speed of a small peleton going for them. it was a dilemma. i tried to hang back, at a legal distance for the most part, but also, to stick close enough to them that my own race time would not be compromised.
the end result, was a drop in power numbers over the last half hour or so, and a kind of tactical bike riding that i really do not want to do ever in any triathlon and certainly not in ironman. this was to me, the one serious complaint i had about the race, and probably a major down-side of the three loop format.

it was nice to ride into town for the last time and hand my bike over to a volunteer:

5:26; solid and right on target for the kind of time i was hoping for (somewhere between 10.5-11 hours)
now, all i had to do was not blow up on the run. as anyone who has run an ironman marathon knows, easier said than done.

i kept expecting to see coyote opening an acme box, i do think i saw road runner

RUN: 

i felt a bit hunched over getting off the bike, so i was surprised at how quickly transition went by and that my quasimoto strut had disappeared when i got off my change tent chair to start my run.

in fact, i was feeling rather spectacular. experience and research, however,  have taught me not to trust that feeling. i knew the shit would hit the fan, sooner or later.

nevertheless, it was nice to be struggling to restrain myself to run 5m k's. this carried on for the first 6-7k's, until i hit the first little uphill section and began to experience the humanity of running in the desert in the middle of a sunny afternoon for the first time. things did slow a bit, although my subjective effort was still very smooth. i wasn't worried. i had slowed to my goal pace, so that by the end of the first 14k loop, i was running 5:10/k, dead on.

just starting to hurt here, but the worst was yet tocome

the run course at IMAZ is quite beautiful. the view is always changing: desert mountains, office buildings, bridges, downtown tempe, the lake, a park with delicious smelling bbq, some dirt patches thrown in, passing under a highway, even past a small horse farm. every time you approach the finish line the crowds get thicker and you get lots of energy from the crowd, then it becomes lonley again on the other side of the lake.

loop 2 and 3 were not pretty. it happened gradually, i didn't bonk, i just gradually felt my quads tighten, my stride shorten and my turnover slow. soon my PE was high and my pace was well over 5:30. i knew i was not going to run 3:40, but i figured i still had a chance at sub 4 and sub 11 hours by extension, if i held on strong and steady. so this is what i did. i just kept going, like a jogging pace for marines in training, steady and strong.

eventually, and painfully, the second and third laps passed on by, and i was finally back on the finish line side of the lake for the last time. i knew i must be close to 11 hours, but i just wasn't sure. a little less than1 k from the finish someone in the crowd yelled out "10:54 on the race clock". i can't thank that person enough. he was like my guardian angel. i knew i could make 11 hours, but i would have to move my ass.

all at once, i found strength i did not know i had. i was running 5/k pace again, fluid, strong, desperate, angry, determined. i was flying by people as i headed into the finish chute. as i rounded the corner into the final few yards i could see the race clock was at 10:59:30,  i knew i had it! i could hear mike reilly and the crowd cheering a few of us on, the last couple to break 11 hours. there was a real excitement at that moment and you could feel people willing you on to the finish before the clock hit 11.

i passed my coach ian on the way and gave him high 5's. i could see he was stoked for me and he was yelling to me to run hard, i could break 11 hours. he had a stellar race of his own, finishing 6th overall, and it was more than nice of him to stand there waiting for my sorry ass to come home. thanks ian. and thanks for your help pushing me to a new level this season.

i am not usually prone to much celebration at finish lines. i am too self critical. to be honest, if i had finished in 10:48 or something i probably would have just clicked stop on my garmin and been thankful it was over. but the excitement of just beating the clock and getting in just under 11 hours was a great cap to the day and i let out my best, hands over head, thorbjorn scream as i crossed the line.



"YAAAAAAAA"...or something like that

3:57: not a thing of beauty, but i am proud that i was able to hang tough and finish with a kick

in the end:
10:59:42. 

job done. journey over. i went home and watched HGTV with my wife while i elevated my feet on a  giant cushy pillow.  i felt tired yet content. somewhere in there i was already thinking about the next one.