My first race of the 2016 season looks ok on the surface.

  
Not my best 70.3 time, but not my worst by a longshot. The bike is not particularly easy, and my run was 5 or so minutes better than any of my 70.3 runs last season, so no complaints on my fitness.

But my prerace routine was a disaster with a capital D.

The first mistake was a mid-afternoon arrival the day before the race – normally not a problem, except when you haven’t done the race before and have no clue about the logistics. I parked near the bike checkin at the harbor, but it turns out that packet pickup and the expo were more than a mile away, which I only found out by walking and continuing to walk until my friend and I found it (my wife was waiting in the car since the bike was on the roof). This resulted in probably 3 miles of walking in the afternoon sun, which left me a little sunburned since I hadn’t put sunscreen on, thinking it would be a short routine.

But that paled in comparison to the mistakes on race morning. Things started badly by leaving our rental in Carlsbad a few minutes late, which put unnecessary time pressure on things. On my walk to the transition area, I reached in my bag and couldn’t find my timing chip. WTF? I was sure I had put it in the bag right away. So I went to the help desk and got another chip, no problem. Then I got to my bike to set things up, and as I pulled things out of the bag, there was my chip! So that was another thing to take care of. I got my bike set up, and then a woman wanted to borrow my pump, which I obliged since there are plenty of races where I’ve borrowed other people’s pumps. The thing was, the woman kind of disappeared, and I needed to go and take care of my now-extra timing chip. Finally she reappeared, and I took off with everything, went back to the help desk and handed over my original chip. I found my friend and prepared to head to the start, but I then remembered I hadn’t gotten body-marked in all the chaos with my other issues. So I went back and did that, and we were off to the start. 

Or what I thought was the start.

The swim course map showed an out-and-back course in the harbor, with the start on the side opposite the transition area. I don’t know why this got in my head, but I thought the entrance to the water was on that other side as well. So we headed over, despite the fact that NO OTHER TRIATHLETES WERE HEADING THAT WAY. Basically, every instinct I had that morning was wrong. Sure enough, I looked across the water and saw age groups entering the water RIGHT FROM THE TRANSITION AREA I HAD JUST BEEN IN. My swim wave was about 12 minutes from starting at this point.

So I RACED over, and told my friend just to head back to meet my wife. I got back to the transition area, put on my wetsuit, and then weaved my way through the many waves lined up behind my wave, taking care to avoid the pro men who were now coming out of the water and heading straight at me as I tried to weave past people who weren’t expecting someone to be coming through in the direction I was coming, and finally got to the water’s edge just as the final people in my wave were entering the water. Whew! Two minutes to the start.

The gun went off, and immediately I noticed two things:

1. I should have done the spit-clean on my goggles to keep them from fogging up.
2. I was exhausted from all of the prerace drama. I could barely lift my arms to turn them over.

Oh yeah, and the water was pretty cold. A lesser man might have given up at that point – and in fact that lesser man was sitting over my left shoulder, whispering stuff like “you should just make this a nice training day; don’t go hard” – but remember the old saying that “it doesn’t always get worse.” I did start feeling better, even though the swim was getting rougher as we approached the mouth of the harbor. At one point I looked up to sight and got a mouthful of nasty ocean water. 

The difficulty continued in a different fashion on the way back, as we were headed straight into the rising sun. I hoped the people who were splashing around me knew where they were going, but I decided a better tack was to follow the rocky harbor. That worked out pretty well, and soon enough I was exiting the swim, albeit in a sucky (for me) 37 minutes and change.

  
My transition was super pokey – it took a while to get my wetsuit off and my sleeved top on. Some practice would do me good. 

The bike course is…undulating…and the climbing starts almost immediately as you leave the harbor area.

   
 

I was in swim wave 10 – about the middle of the field – which made for a crowded bike course early on as we entered Camp Pendleton. Let’s just say that there was some drafting…

  

There were a few relatively steep climbs on the 56-mile bike, which made me wish I had put the 11-28 cassette on my bike instead of the 11-25 – there was some slow-cadence grinding up those hills. I steadily built my power over the course of the ride and ended up with a normalized power of 215W, one of my best half-Ironman efforts. I was also experimenting with using a lower cadence and bigger gear, and the test for the efficacy of that would come on the run.

Off the bike with a 2:41, which reflects the difficulty of the course if nothing else, I again had a pokey transition but felt pretty good as I started running.

  
The course was two loops, and there were some interesting steep ramps that the organizers made us run up.

  
These felt much better the first loop than they did the second.

I had been managing a low 7:00-mile pace for the first half, but the second half saw me closer to 7:40s. Nevertheless, I did pass a few guys with M50-54 on their calf, and I even got in a head-to-head battle with one around mile 9. I decided I didn’t want to get into a miles-long tête-à-tête, so I surged pretty hard to put a gap on him and try to break his spirit. By the next turnaround, I saw that my tactic had worked. 😎

With a mile to go, I was ready to be done and working pretty hard.

  
The finish line is always worth the suffering!

  
The 5:05 was only good for 16th in the age group, so I have a lot of work to do. But I didn’t cramp during the run, and my troublesome calves and hamstrings behaved themselves, so there’s that. And my switch to Glukos nutrition (the race top I’m wearing) this season seemed to work really well – I took mostly liquid nutrition on the bike and had no bonking or GI issues. (The road rash on the knee, by the way, is from a minor bike crash two weeks prior to the race.)

I give my race a B+. I give my prerace a big #fail. We can only get better from here.