Since I’m rehabbing from surgery and not racing, I’m resurrecting some race reports from days gone by. These reports were shared on a listserv-based online group called Dead Runners Society.

Ironman Germany was my third Ironman-distance race, the first being the European Championship in Almere, Netherlands in 1985, and the second being 20 years later in Ironman Germany. I came back to Frankfurt the following year to try and better my time. Enjoy.

They say Ironman is an event that you get better at with experience; this year’s race would certainly put that assertion to the test. Why would a Bay Arean travel all the way to Frankfurt for such a test? Course knowledge might be one reason — I did this same race last year as my second Ironman ever, and my first in 20 years — and it turns out that all my Ironmans have been in Europe (my first was the 1985 European Championship in Holland when I was a young and stupid 23). The long flight aside, though, the logistics are easy: I speak the language, and I get a nonstop SFO-FRA flight followed by a 20-minute taxi ride. Simple.

Another bonus this year was that my brother Neil had just moved to Wiesbaden, a half hour drive from Frankfurt, so to make it a kind of family reunion, I brought my dad over (in addition to my wife Jeanne). To further add to the fun, Jim Cummins and his friend, “the infamous [Tom] Zak,” were racing as well. In fact, Jim and I had a €50 wager on the outcome.

My preparation this year wasn’t ideal, but then it never is. While I have well over 100,000 miles with my butt in an airline seat this year already, my training mileage was down compared to last year. But what you can’t overcome with training, you can make up for with science and money. I got a little coaching on my swim technique, which had me swimming more relaxed, if not exactly faster. For the bike, I worked during the winter on pedaling efficiency using a device called PowerCranks, then got a new tri bike this spring that was more aerodynamic and also had a power meter, a tool to measure the amount of watts one puts out. Power-based training is all the rage among competitive cyclists now; I bought the same system that the newly crowned Tour de France champion Floyd Landis uses. So the only difference is that he actually rides his bike a lot. 🙂

Running of course is my alleged strength in the tri, although I had kind of a mediocre runup to IMG. One 10K in Austin in almost a PW 40:44 (ok, it was hot and humid, but the 40-minute barrier wasn’t something I had seen the other side of since, well, 1981 or something), and then a PW Big Sur Marathon in April in a painful, barely-under-3:10 survival shuffle.

On the other hand, I had a minor bright spot in early June at a half Ironman on the Big Island, in which I had a solid 1:38 half marathon off the bike in hot, humid conditions on a slow course, which at least gave me hopes of running better in Frankfurt than my 4:31 of last year.

So we arrived in Frankfurt five days before the race, and the first challenge was clearly going to be the heat. Germany, like much of Europe, had had a heat wave going on for many weeks, and there was no end in sight. It was getting into the 90s every day, and every day seemed to be slightly hotter than the previous one. Things were made uglier still at Friday’s pre-race briefing — the water in the Langener Waldsee (the swim venue) was so warm that, for the first time ever in any European Ironman, no wetsuits would be allowed. For you non-triathletes, that means less buoyancy in the water, thus more drag and slower swim times. Weaker swimmers are affected by this more than stronger swimmers, so it’s much like a regressive tax. 🙂 The job at hand, therefore, had just gotten tougher.

The evening before the race, we did get some relief in the form of some heavy rain and violent thunderstorms, which cooled things down substantially. I awoke at 4:30 am to catch the bus to the start, and as I walked along the Zeil — the big pedestrian shopping street — there was almost a chill in the air. Almost. It was still probably 70, but it felt cool by comparison. It was weird to see a few people stumbling home drunk or digging through trash cans at that hour juxtaposed with the legion of superfit athletes converging on the bus pickup area.

After a longish 12K bus ride, we were there and setting up in T1. Having dropped off our bikes and gear the afternoon before and then having had the storms, we found things not quite as we had left them. My bike bag had been tied tightly, so none of my stuff had gotten wet, but the guy to the right of me found completely wet socks and was not having a good day.

My slim hope that they would change their minds on the wetsuits after the cooling rain quickly evaporated — the lake temperature was 27C (81F), Hawaii temperature basically. My guts were not behaving well either, probably due to the time change, but one competitor I overheard talking to his friends outside the portajohns kind of summed up my feelings: “ich muss mindestens einmal richtig kakken.” I’ll leave that untranslated, but suffice it to say that eric would not show up when I wanted him to.

So I was swimming in my one-piece trisuit, which I guess affords some hydrodynamic advantage insofar as it covers the pelt on my chest, but mainly it makes for a quicker transition after the swim since I would already be wearing my cycling clothes. It was a deep-water start, which meant treading water for 10 minutes before the gun went off — decidely more difficult than it was with the wetsuit last year. I found an uncrowded spot over to the far left of the wide starting line, hoping to avoid the melee in which I had found myself in the previous edition.

Suddenly we were off, and I found myself immediately in pretty clear water, so no repeat of last year’s panic. I just tried to focus on swimming with long strokes and not kicking too much, just staying relaxed. The swim was two loops — but not the *same* two loops — with a short run along the beach between the loops (called an “Australian exit”). Sighting the course because of this is a little tricky, but I got through the first loop ok, in fact a couple of minutes faster than last year. The trick was they had moved the start line up by 200 meters, so it was not actually faster. The second loop proved that. I stayed relaxed, though, and finally exited in 1:36, a slow swim even for me, and 11 minutes slower than last year. If I was going to hit my number 1 goal of beating last year’s time, I already had my work cut out for me.

T1 was a minute quicker, though, since I didn’t have a wetsuit to peel off, and soon I was off on the carbon fiber machine. Naturally, it was raining again, and it would keep raining through most of the first loop of the two-loop bike course. The two loops didn’t start, though, until after the 12K ride into downtown Frankfurt, and coming over the bridge into town I saw Jeanne and my dad. Since I was somewhat behind my predicted time, I felt compelled to offer up excuses. “I need a wetsuit!” was all I could come up with as I went by.

The plan was to keep an even pace and not push the watts too high — under 200 on the flats and under 300 on the climbs. The bike course is completely closed to traffic — the only Ironman where this is the case — but it does have a few short climbs and some tricky corners through some of the small villages, plus a brutal 500m section of bone-rattling cobblestones through the middle of one village, and these technical sections were made more dangerous because of the rain. In fact, last year’s winner, Normann Stadler, would crash twice on the bike. Water was spraying off of my tires in buckets, and I saw lightening off in the distance several times. So the weather was a blessing and a curse — it kept things relatively cool, but it also meant slower going and, for a number of folks, crashes.

I made it through ok, though, and was averaging about 20 mph — not quite what I hoped but what I could do on the day. I was not very comfortable in the aero position, though, in particular my neck and shoulders, so that’s something I realized I would have to work on more in training. I also had a technical glitch with my Succeed dispensers — they had gotten wet in the rain, and most of my caplets were coagulating into a gooey, salty mess. I forced a number of them down despite that, not wanting to experience a crampfest later.

Towards the end of the first loop, the sun came out and the road was drying, which was good. It was also heating up rapidly, which wasn’t so good. I passed by my cheering section (by then my brother and family had joined Jeanne and my dad) and headed off for the second loop. Roughly 80K (50M) to go.

I was staying pretty well hydrated — the numerous aid stations had bottles of water, Coke, Red Bull and “iso” (pronounced “ee-zoh”), the German generic term for sport drink (it’s short for “isotonisch,” I guess). I had packed several bottle of Cytomax, but once they were done I switched over to iso, which in this case was supplied by PowerBar. All that liquid eventually had to go somewhere, so I pulled over — like many guys on the course did — for a pee break during one of the sections where we were riding along farmland. Not that the German spectators would care if you did it right in front of them — they have quite a different attitude about nudity and bodily functions than we do in the US.

On the last climb, a guy passed me and started chatting in English — it turned out he was a Brit and had seen my first name printed below my number. He told me not to worry — he had just passed me “for show” during the spectator-filled climb and I would re-pass him shortly. I did, but not before joking that “I hear we have a little run coming up”. We both chuckled, but it was a laughter tinged with dread, because a marathon is a long run on a good day. In this heat, and after 112 miles on the bike, it could be a death march.

The last 10K into town is a nice long descent, and I used the opportunity to get out of the saddle and stretch out both legs, plus take on board whatever water and fuel I could get. I finally got into T2 with a bike time of 5:50, 3 minutes better than last year despite the rain and the pee break. So I was still down over last year and would need to have a good run. I exited T2 at 7:34 into the race, which meant I’d have to run 3:25 to break 11 hours. I felt good, but not *that* good.

The run course consisted of four loops of 10.5K each. I thought I would try to run each loop in 55 minutes, which if I could do it would get me a 3:40 and a low 11-hour finish time. The fun — and at the same time depressing — thing about the loop course is that you are running with people who are one, two, or, in the case of the top male pros, *three* loops ahead of you. The way you know who’s on which loop if by the colored armbands you collect during each loop — first blue, then orange, then green, then white. Once you look like Neapolitan ice cream, you get to proceed to the finish.

I was moving well my first loop and was about 5K in when the lead woman passed by on her third loop. Then came the then-lead man, Timo Bracht, on his fourth, though he would be passed by the Kiwi Cameron Brown on his was to a 2:48 marathon. This in 90+ degree heat after averaging over 25 mph on the bike. Unreal.

I got to the end of the first loop in 54:55, and that included my 2:00 or so of T2 time, so I was a little ahead of plan. Unfortunately, maybe *too* ahead of plan, because the wheels were starting to come off. Midway through the second loop, I walked through my first aid station, and that wouldn’t be the last time I walked. My cheering section had staked out a place just past the 1K mark of the loop, and each time they would hand me a Succeed, spray me with sunscreen, and then Neil would jog about 400m with me. That went well until the third loop, where I was walking with Neil, and some dude suddently pushed his way through some other athletes behind us and then elbowed Neil in the back and yelled, in a thick Swabian accent, “Scheisse! Koennt ihr nicht rechts bleiba?! Verdammt!”

Translated, he felt it was his right to shove his way through because Neil wasn’t on the far right side of the path. Except that the guy actually had plenty of room on the left, and this got me so pissed that I went off after him.

I caught him within 400m (amazing how adrenaline will turn a walk into a run), turned to him and said in English “Was that really necessary?” I used English because I wanted him to know that I was a foreigner and to think that he was creating a bad impression of all Germans by his actions. Anyway, it must have worked, because he rather sheepishly said, “No, it’s ok. Sorry.”

Maybe anger can work for you when nothing else does, because if there was one thing I knew at that point, it was that THERE WAS NO WAY IN HELL THE RUDE SWABIAN WAS GOING TO BEAT ME. I didn’t see him again in the third loop, which despite the torrid start I took 1:08 to complete (my second loop was 1:03), and things were definitely tough as I entered the fourth and final loop. I was bound and determined to walk as little as possible, and I actually lasted about 5K before I went through a bad patch again and slowed to a walk.

Just at the point where we picked up the armband for the fourth and final time — in a nice shady area just past the 7K mark (now 38.5K for me) — it happened. The Rude Swabian passed by, in a group of a few other runners. No matter how bad, how empty I felt, that reawakened the tiger — I started running again, passed the Swabian, and picked up the pace. I pushed hard over the last bridge over the Main River, picking off runners right and left, floated down the descent back to the river path and then picked it up even more as I neared the turnoff to the finish, picking off 3 or 4 more guys as I ran up the carpeted ramp to the finish, high-fiving waves of spectators — including my dad, who I recognized at the last minute — to finish in 11:46, an 11-minute improvement over last year in much tougher conditions. The marathon time was 4:11 — 20 minutes better — but I still have a lot of work to do.

As a volunteer escorted me along the chute to get water, Coke, assess my general condition, etc., all of a sudden there was Jim, showered and smiling, resplendent in his finisher’s polo shirt, looking like one of the pros who had finished hours ago. I knew I was €50 poorer, but the way he biked (5:13 vs my 5:50), there was no touching him this day. He earned it, and was gracious enough to spend it on a fat-laden Hessian meal with us in Sachsenhausen the following evening.

All in all, a great trip, and I feel I’m slowly making some progress at this Ironman thing. Whether I’ll do Frankfurt again next year or a different Ironman race is unclear. On the flight home, Jeanne dog-eared all the pages of interest to her in the “Road to Kona” guide that lists qualifiers for Kona. There’s South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Switzerland, … So many choices, so little time.

“Dude, WTF happened? WTAF?”

“The tracker’s messed up again. Did you finish?”

The short story:

I had entered Ironman Santa Rosa about two weeks before the race. In some ways, I had no business being there – I hadn’t really been doing targeted Ironman training – but my fitness was really good, and more important I finally had the motivation to do another Ironman. This one fit into my schedule and was close to home. I enlisted the support of my training buddy Mikey, and off to Santa Rosa we went.

The day went surprisingly well – easy 1:12 swim, then a surprisingly challenging bike (lots of rollers, and some really bad pavement), but I rode very conservatively, making sure I got plenty of nutrition in, and came off the bike in a not-too-bad 5:27, feeling great. Moreover, I was 4th in the age group.

By the end of the first of three run loops, I was 2nd in the age group and flying. I had what I believed to be the second Kona slot in my greedy little hands.

Within a few miles after about mile 11, though, it all went horribly wrong. First, my stomach was sloshing, and it became clear that nothing I was taking in at the aid stations was being absorbed by my GI tract. A portapotty stop after the halfway point didn’t really help. I started walking more and more, then apparently I started staggering (people passing me were asking if I was ok, which means I must have looked really bad). Then I threw up. Six. Times.

This was within sight of the mile 16 aid station, and a wonderful woman whose name I was unable to retain stayed by my side while the volunteers called the medics. I got checked out on the spot with everything they had – BP cuff, EKG, blood glucose – and the EKG, heart rate and glucose were normal, but the BP was 80/45, which pointed toward severe dehydration/electrolyte loss. Oddly, though – and contrary to my normal race experience – I had experienced no cramping.

The medics strongly recommended calling it a day, and I did after finishing the second loop so that I could meet up with Mikey. 8.7 miles short of Ironman #19, but happy with how I had raced it. I got cleaned up and we met a couple of teammates for a quick dinner, and I chalked up the day to nutrition problems.

That wasn’t the end of it, though. At 3 a.m. I had another sequence of vomiting, and this time I actually passed out on the bathroom floor, awaking in a disoriented, sweaty, vomit-soaked mess. I cleaned myself up, but had another episode at 9 a.m., and at that point I felt so weak that I knew I needed to go to the ER.

6 hours and 4 liters of IV fluids later, I was released to the care of my wife Jeanne, and we headed out to Bodega Bay to start a couple of nights of resort stays. I felt much better. However, the next night Jeanne was violently ill, which I initially chalked up to food poisoning until I got a text from Mikey in the morning saying he had been throwing up all night. The light kind of went on at that point, and I realized I must have had some sort of stomach bug, which explains a lot – I rarely have any kind of GI distress in races, and it had never been like this one.

So I’m taking the fitness and race experience I got from this and trying my luck again in Ironman Arizona. Back on the horse!

Let’s be clear right off the bat: I didn’t participate in this insanity as an athlete, but rather as crew chief for the illustrious Tim Sheeper. This is not a race; it’s more of an adventure. Five Ironmans in five days on five different Hawaiian islands. Complicating the enormous athletic challenge are the many logistical challenges. We had assembled a stellar crew of Team Sheeper athlete/coaches: Mike Osmond, an experienced Ironman and a great planner/organizer, and Jen Ford, a great athlete in her own right but also a chiropractor/massage therapist. The schedule looked like this:

Day 1: Kaua’i, 6 a.m. start; 10 p.m. flight to O’ahu

Day 2: O’ahu, 6 a.m. start

Day 3: 6 a.m. flight to Mokoka’i, 9 a.m. start

Day 4: 6 a.m. boat to Maui, 10:30 a.m. start

Day 5: 8 a.m. flight to Kona, 11 a.m. start

Looks simple until you realize that the athlete is going to take anywhere from 12 to 17 or more hours to complete each day. Between increasingly late starts and accumulated fatigue, that tends to lengthen the time it takes each day to finish, so you can imagine that doesn’t leave a lot of time for sleep – either for the athlete or the athlete’s crew. This was brought into its most acute state between days 4 and 5, in which Tim (and I) got a grand total of 40 minutes of sleep between his finishing the Maui stage and our leaving the condo for the airport.

I could write a novel about the event, but to give the highlights:

• Kaua’i. We arrived here a few days early and stayed up in a nice condo in Princeville. The event started down the hill in Hanalei Bay, and the water was calm, making for fast swimming conditions. Of the 10 athletes, Tim was the class of the field in terms of swimming, so he was out of the water in about 54 minutes with a pretty good lead. This put us out on the bike by ourselves, and we didn’t see another soul until Tim had circled the island to the turnaround point at the road to Polihale (65 miles). It was hot, and Tim was having trouble all of a sudden keeping food down (though he kept the extent of this to himself, unfortunately for his crew – this would have been good info to have had). Untimely double flats with 10 km to go made him lose 30 minutes, and the “lead” (this was an event, not a race, though some of the participants seemed to be treating it as a race). We would be plagued by flats on two more stages, and as all of them were pinch flats I’d consider riding latex tubes next time. The run was on a course near the airport in Lihue in order to facilitate getting to the evening flight as quickly as possible, but it was a not particularly pleasant course to run in Friday afternoon pau hana traffic. Tim was on a plan of 25 minutes of running followed by 5 minutes of walking, then repeat. His nutritional challenges on the bike came back to haunt him, though, so he modified that pattern to a 12/3 run/walk in the second half of the run, then walked the final 2 miles in. Total time of around 12:30, including the flat and very leisurely transitions. A quick massage by Jen and we were off to the airport. Somewhat worrisome was Tim’s continued inability to eat; this didn’t bode well for the O’ahu stage. 
• O’ahu. After overnighting in the Ala Moana Hotel with about 4 hours of sleep, day 2 started with a swim in Ala Moana Beach Park with two out-and-backs. Tim went really easy in about 1:15 and took a very leisurely transition to steel himself for the logistically challenging bike, which consisted of many turns through Diamond Head and Kahala, then heading through the windward towns of Kailua and Kaneohe to the eventual turnaround in Laie. Tim had turned the flame down very low; we were characterizing this as a “recovery Ironman,” so he was riding near the back of the field. One nutritional challenge with Tim is that he is a strict vegan, so some refueling options are off limits. Luckily there was a Whole Foods in Kailua, so we were able to find some chia gels and drinks, as well as some other gel blocks and electrolyte drink mix at a local bike shop (where we also got some replacement tires and tubes for Moloka’i, where there are no bike shops). With all the traffic lights, stops, and the reduced intensity level, the ride took around 8 hours, and adding to that another leisurely transition, Tim took off on the run around 5 p.m. Given that he was walking, not running, this was going to be a long night. It was time to initiate a crew resting strategy as well, so I took the first one in order to be freshest for Moloka’i, getting about 5 hours of sleep in two separate stints. Tim ended up finishing at midnight and getting to bed at 1, and we had a 4:30 a.m. departure from the hotel. An 18-hour day and about 3 hours of sleep. This was getting ugly. 
• Moloka’i. The least tourist-friendly island presented some major logistical challenges. First, the typically rough ocean meant the organizers had set up a pool swim in the 6-lane, 25-meter pool in Kaunakakai, the island’s main town (you might say only town). Second, Moloka’i on a good day has very few restaurants or grocery stores, and on a Sunday you can cut that number by two-thirds. Luckily, all we really needed was water and ice, plus some food for the crew. Third, what was open was going to close early – no gas after 6 p.m., and only one restaurant open after that. For the swim, Tim ditched his wetsuit and used Roka neoprene shorts to provide hip flotation without letting his body overheat. His “easy” 1:02 put him out of the water well ahead of the rest of the athletes, so once again he was soloing on the bike in front of everyone else. The course was spectacular, first heading east 21 miles towards the Halawa side, then turning around, coming back through town and heading up a long climb towards the ghost town of Maunaloa. The eastbound out-and-back was then repeated to fill out the 112 miles, ending at the Hotel Moloka’i, where the run started. Tim was having a much better day than he’d had on O’ahu, so managed to run a fair amount before he started bonking, and Jen walked him in just after midnight. That made for about a 14-hour day and set us up for 4 hours of sleep before getting up to head to the chartered ferry to Maui. 
• Maui. Perhpas the most logistically challenging of all of the days, Maui was tough, kind of like the third lap in a mile race. You’re not in the home stretch, but you have to push hard to maintain the same speed that you were doing more effortlessly earlier. The ferry docked in Lahaina, and we boarded two sets of shuttles, with most heading directly to the swim start in Kihei and the lead drivers heading to the airport in Kahului to pick up the minivans. In this process, one of our pieces of luggage went missing, so we were down a few items (mainly replaceable supplies like washing poweder and batteries – in the grand scheme of things more annoying than devastating. As the van driver, I arrived just after the swim had started, and the ocean was looking rough! The course was 9 laps of a quarter-mile or so out-and-back, and Tim was in his element. Surprisingly, though, a bunch of the other competitors exited the water way before Tim did, and confusion ensued, since Tim had been motoring past them the entire time. It turns out that they were struggling in the conditions and, seeing 2.4 miles on their Garmin watches, decided to exit after only 6 laps. WTF?? I won’t go into the technicalities of why you don’t trust wrist-based GPS in a relatively short swim course (e.g., you don’t use GPS mode in a pool), but this was blatant course-cutting on the part of those guys. This put Tim, who swam 1:30 under those tough conditions, in a 40-minute hole relative to the cutters vs having a 40-minute advantage. Again, this wasn’t a race, and Tim was mellow about it though disappointed that his strength as a swimmer had been negated, and we (his crew) were livid. I would guess only 4 of the 10 swam the full course, and I’m not even sure of that. Anyway, Tim was finally off on the bike around 1 p.m., which headed first down through Wailea and Makena to La Perouse, then headed north to Kahului before circling part of West Maui through the pali, the town of Lahaina and the resort areas of Ka’anapali and Kapalua before reversing course and ending back at the beach in Kihei. I had gotten a couple of hours of sleep while Tim was out on the bike, done our laundry and gotten some food for the crew (and a veggie burrito for Tim to help him get calories). Tim got back around 8:30 p.m. and started the run around 9. He was severely depleted, so this was going to be a walk rather than a run – another “recovery Ironman.” I sent Mike and Jen back to the condo to get some sleep, so it was just me in the support van for the long night. The veggie burriot wasn’t sitting well, so we got some Rolaids in him (thank goodness for the Epic 5 staff members who had some extra supplies and came to meet us with them). Tim was essentially going about 20-minute miles, so we were looking at an 8-hour run. Normally-busy Wailea and Kihei were eerily quiet in the wee hours of the morning, other than one drunken couple stumbling along the sidewalk in Wailea who became quite animated when Tim passed them…animated, if not exactly coherent. At the suggestion of staff member Mary Margaret, whose husband is an experienced ultrarunner, I headed to Kihei’s 24-hour Safeway once we were back from the southern out-and-back 16 miles and bought some chocolate Ensure, which provided essentially a 350-calorie meal in a can. That worked very well when cut with some water; the other thing we tried was chicken broth, with worked horribly at room temperature, and even once I threw some in the microwave Tim couldn’t tolerate it. The Ensure did work its magic, though, and Tim started to come around. I turned over shephering duties in the final mile to Jen and Mike, who had been able to get a few hours of sleep, and headed home for a quick 40-minute nap while Tim finished and Mike and Jen organized the van and packed up. As bad as I felt when I was rousted out of a sound sleep, I knew Tim must have felt way worse – he looked like a zombie. That’s what another 18 hours of an Ironman + 40 minutes of sleep will do to you. 
• Kona: we got to Kahului airport in time to make the charter flight to Kona, and again (as with the flight from O’ahu to Moloka’i), we had to decide which few pieces of luggage we could leave behind to come in on a later flight. We left the spare wheel case (which we never needed – lesson learned for the future) and the massage table, and they dutifully showed up mid afternoon. The Kona course was the same as the Ironman World Championship course, except for the run, which due to road construction on the Queen K was turned into a double out-and-back along Ali’i Drive down to Keauhou (which added a cruel series of short steep hills). The ocean was rough, and with all the inevitable delays the swim started around 11 a.m. Tim seemed pretty chipper for someone operating on such enormous fatigue – probably some combination of the better nutrition kicking in and the knowledge that this was the last one and was on a course he knew very well. The conditions were rough enough that the paddlers were having problems, but Tim knocked out a “relaxed” 1:06, about 30 minutes clear of anyone else. We took our time getting him ready for the bike, now using white arm and leg cooling sleeves to avoid further sun damage, which he’d incurred in the previous days despite frequent applications of sunscreen. It was hot and windy for the initial portion of the ride, and the winds were really ripping on the road between Kawaihae and Hawi – fortunately, Tim’s a confident bike handler. The question mark for today was going to be the run: how much of a toll had the previous four days taken, and was it going to be a run or a walk? It turned out to be a run! The best news about that was that neither he nor his crew were going to be up all night. 🙂 This ended up being his second-fastest day (after Kaua’i), so he really ended on a positive note. 

10 athletes started, and 10 athletes finished, which was a first in terms of both sheer numbers and of a 100% finisher rate (we’ll ignore the Maui swim for record purposes 🙂 ). Overall, it was a great experience, and we made so many new friends among the other athletes and crew – joint suffering will do that. I can promise my wife Jeanne, though, that I have little to no interest in actually doing this one myself.

Biggest takeaway was something we already knew: Tim Sheeper is an animal! 🙂

It’s been a long season, with a mixed bag of results. The highs were few — a PR and podium finish at Vineman 70.3 — and the lows, at least compared with past seasons, were numerous: DNFs at Honu 70.3 and Superfrog 70.3, and less-than-stellar finishes at Ironman Coeur d’Alene and Ironman Arizona. That doesn’t mean the year was a disaster — I had a lot of fun training, and my Coeur d’Alene experience was really about being there for my friend Jim’s first Ironman, so that part was a success all around. But this year my run really let me down a number of times, and seeing how running has mostly been one of my strengths, that’s kind of hard to take. At 54, this year more than ever I’ve noticed the decline.

But a great thing happened this year as well. In addition to my triathlon team, Team Sheeper, I’m also part of the Excelsior Running Club based up in San Francisco, and have been for about 15 years. I haven’t been that active the past few years, as triathlon season and important races are hard to balance with competitive running races, but we had a great organizer this year — Nakia — who tirelessly rousted dormant team members, coaxed and cajoled via email and other means, got me to actually race three 5Ks and two half marathons in the middle of triathlon season (sometimes the day after a long ride, which trust me is not the recipe for a fast time), and the end result is that both the male 40s and 50s teams find themselves in first place in the Pacific USATF road racing series.

The capstone of that series is the California International Marathon, which is important because (a) it’s much more difficult to field a full team (which needs three runners in order to score) of 50+ guys, because, you know, we’re old and fragile, and (b) it’s a double-points race, which means it counts for a lot. My last time here was 2009, eight weeks after my very first Kona, and at that younger age I was able to scratch out my last sub 3:00 (barely — a 2:59:54). This year’s was only two weeks after Arizona, so I had no real idea of what to expect in terms of time. My last open marathon was 2011 when I did the Boston-Big Sur double (3:03 and 3:04, which showed at least that I could recover decently in two weeks), but then again I’m five years older now and my runs this year weren’t that great. I told Nakia I’d be happy if I broke 3:20, and I meant it.

In the meantime, my recovery from Arizona consisted of doing a little swimming and crewing for Rob Gray at Ultraman, which was an awesome experience. It did involve some running, but it was mostly short sprints to hand off fluid bottles as he was riding by at fast speeds, but I did notice that my legs felt pretty decent. The following Tuesday I did a 5-miler at the Old Kona Airport that involved two quickish miles to see how the legs liked 7:00 pace or faster, and that went pretty well. So all in all my confidence was increasing that race day wouldn’t be a total disaster. Still, two miles at race effort is a long way from 26.2.

Given the unknown of how my body would react to both the residual fatigue and a pace that I hadn’t done any really long runs at, the question was what my race strategy should be. My feeling was that I should be conservative and go out at 7:15-7:20 pace through at least midway and then pick it up if I felt good. I discussed this plan with my teammate Cliff the evening before over a pre-race Indian meal (yes, really!), and I got the impression that he thought I was maybe selling myself a bit short. Plus there was my ego — I’ve only run two marathons slower than 3:09:50, one being my very first one when I was young and stupid (I’m no longer young), and the second being one in which I paced my brother-in-law through his first marathon — so I started thinking maybe I should think about holding 7:10s, which would get me around a 3:08 and keep my record intact. So yeah, I started getting greedy.

That said, my two sub 1:30 half marathons run shortly on the heels of long bike rides did at least provide some empirical validation to my plan (the old “double your half marathon time and add 10 minutes” rule), but that approach implies that you have sufficient training mileage for the longer distance. Here’s what my run volume looks like for the past six months:

That’s right — 15 miles per week average, and the only weeks over 30 miles were those that included an Ironman. No running coach would recommend a program like this.

I had a few things going for me, though:

1. I get a lot of weekly volume from cycling and to some extent swimming.
2. I have a lot of marathon experience, and I have always run pretty well off of low training volume.
3. CIM is a fast course that’s ideal for “rhythm runners” like me.
4. I’m not very smart. Sometimes you shouldn’t overthink things — just do them.

I carried all my nutrition except for the water and Nuun I’d get from the aid stations. The nutrition consisted of three Glukos gels (60 cal each), which I planned to take every 45 minutes, four Glukos tablets (15 cal each), which I planned to take as needed in between and after my last gel, and about eight Succeed S-Caps sodium/potassium caplets, which I planned to take every 30-40 minutes early on and then more frequently later if I got crampy. This array worked very well for me as it turned out.

The race had pace groups oriented around times two minutes faster than the Boston qualifying marks (since that was the gap you needed this year to get in); I wasn’t so concerned about that since my qualifying time of 3:40 is easily within my capabilities (there are certain benefits to being old), but 3:08 seemed perfectly aligned with my revised goal for the day. The race started, and it took my group about 30 seconds to cross the start line, so I started my watch then. The 3:08 pacers were a little quick to start with, taking us out in 7:03 (vs the 7:10 you need to hit 3:08) and then following that with some sub 7:00s. The course is pretty rolling in the first half, so you expect a little pace variation, and in my case my legs felt very good and the effort felt very controlled aerobically, so I went with it. At the first aid station before mile 3 I pulled slightly ahead of the group, remembering how crowded it got in 2009 trying to get fluids when you’re in the middle of a pack. That felt fine, so I basically kept rolling at just under 7:00 pace average — sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower.

Mile 9 at 1:03:06 was the first time my average crept over 7:00, and that began the middle third of the race in which I definitely started to feel less fresh and energetic. Still, I hit halfway in just over 1:32 and mile 18 in 2:03:32, which meant my second 9 miles were run in 1:03:24 — only 18 seconds (or 2 seconds per mile) slower than my first 9. Sub 3:10 was definitely looking more and more possible!

The effort level to maintain this pace, however, was hitting an inflection point. Mile 20 (2:20:53, or just under 7:03 average) was my last mile at 7:10 or faster, and even though I felt positive mentally, physically I was slowing despite putting out a lot of effort. My quads were very sore by this point, too, so every footstrike hurt. Not bad at first— mile 21 was a 7:15 — but each subsequent mile became that much harder, slower and more painful. 7:26, 7:27, 7:38. With 2.2 miles to go at 2:50:40, I basically had 19 minutes of breathing room, so all I needed to do was not cramp. My quads and hamstrings were tingling, though, in that “I’m about to cramp” sort of way, so I just tried to change my running form up a bit and take some of the pressure off by leaning forward a bit and making sure my foot was striking underneath my body.

Mile 25 was a 7:25 — good! Just keep it going, I told myself. But that last mile was awful; I felt like I was running in slow motion through quicksand. The 3:08 pacers caught and passed me, but weren’t pulling very far ahead, and the road signs helped count things down — “a half mile to go,” “400 meters to go,” “200 meters to go!” I don’t remember very much except turning into the final straight, seeing 3:08:xx on the race clock and hitting stop on my watch after I crossed the line.

I am beyond happy with the result, and it was a nice surprise for my team as well. “Underpromise and overdeliver,” to quote what’s now a cliché in the business world.

But there’s a basic truth in there somewhere, particularly as it relates to teams. I always seem to race that little bit better and try that little bit harder in workouts when I’m doing it with and for others beyond myself. If I look back at my best memories from this past season, they all revolve around training sessions with my teammates or races in support of not only myself but others — Jim’s first Ironman, the Hana Relay with my Maui ohana, Ultraman, and now this.

Bonus: I didn’t have to stop at mile 16.5 for a hot shower. 🙂