July 15, 2016July 15, 2016 by ihersey

Vineman 70.3 2016: Sometimes Things Work Out

This season’s been different. At 54, I’m at the top of the M50-54 age group in triathlon, and you wouldn’t think five years would make a big difference, but in this decade it seems to. The run is the first thing to go for most guys, which is hard to take when you come from a running background and are used to seeing the run as your weapon.

I had an OK race at Oceanside in spite of my pre-race blunders, and since then I’ve been trying to improve something each race. I jumped into the Wildflower Olympic distance at the last minute and had a fun time there, albeit plagued with cramping in the second run. I’ve also raced three 5Ks this season, having been called upon by my San Francisco-based running club to help our men’s 50+ team score some points. This is not a distance that’s suited to me, and my training definitely hasn’t included the kind of speedwork that you need for 5K, but as I often tell people, you should embrace your weaknesses. My first two were identical 20:05 times, which is a little embarrassing because I used to hit sub 20 for the first 5K in marathons (usually not the last 5K, though), but by the July 4 Freedom Fest in Morgan Hill, I was able to knock out a 19:51 after a big weekend of bike and run training, so that had given me some renewed confidence in my running. I needed it.

Especially after a disastrous Hawaii 70.3, where I notched an all-time half-Ironman bike PR of 2:28, only to DNF in the run thanks to a painful toe injury I had incurred the day before while entering the water for a last little practice swim. I hate DNFing – for me it’s the worst kind of race failure.

So here we are at Vineman 70.3, one of my favorite races despite the terrible logistics of two transition areas 15 miles apart and loads of traffic all around. My goal for this race was simply to have a good race, which meant solid swim, fast bike and no cramping or walking on the run. My bike power has been very good of late, which gave me a lot of confidence that the bike would be good; my swim, well, has been hit or miss. Some days I’m really on and cranking; other days it’s a struggle. And the run was mediocre early in the season but has been coming around, thanks to two principal changes:

Running more frequently during the week
Going really easy on my easy days

The second point is hard to implement if you let your ego run your training. We amateurs also have the mentality that we have to make every workout count, and in our minds that means go fast. In making this change, I noticed that I wasn’t dreading workouts because I was allowed to go easy, and furthermore my subsequent bike and run sessions were done without the normal residual “workout hangover” I often get from a medium-hard run.

A bunch of my Team Sheeper and other occasional training partners were doing Vineman, so there was the usual pre-race chatter about not getting beaten by so-and-so, all good natured but with a modicum of pressure if you allow yourself to slip into competitive mode. Which I do, since I am competitive by nature.

The first order of business was to have a decent swim; the M50-54 wave started fairly late, which meant we would have plenty of course congestion (slower swimmers and riders from earlier waves) to deal with, but it was a fairly large group that assembled at the narrow start in the Russian River. I got off fairly well, but the lack of warmup really hit me a few minutes into the swim – I got almost panicky from the hypoxia when you go out fast without a good warmup. I know this sensation from past experience, so I also know that it goes away after a bit, at which point the swim tends to go, well, swimmingly.

The water was very shallow this year at the turnaround, so I was forced to stand a few times and then dolphin-dive when it got deep enough. I was passing people from previous waves, but I was also getting passed by some of the fastest 35-39 women in the wave six minutes behind mine. That didn’t happen last year when I swam 31 minutes, but this year’s 33-minute swim was a different story. Not my worst, though, so I wasn’t panicking.

A couple of training partners and I had been doing some transition practice of late (trying to get the wetsuit off and bike helmet on as quickly as possible), and that seemed to help, though I fumbled with getting my bike shoes on. The bike exit was complicated this year, as the mount line was partway up a steep hill, so that pretty much precluded leaving your shoes clipped to pedals and jumping on the bike to get going. I had put my shoes on first and was prepared to run all the way up the short hill, but on coming to the mount line I noticed that no one was around me, so that gave me time to clip one foot in and power my way up the steep climb. I passed a few people this way and sped my way onto the course.

My early effort was at once frenetic and controlled – I was passing riders quickly while avoiding the cars that were on the course and making for some sketchy moments, but my perceived effort was well within my capabilities. What was interesting, though, was that my wattage was high (for me) – 23oW for the first hour, which is what I’ve done in my better Olympic-distance (25-mile) races. This ride would be more than double that, but as I said, my power on rides has been higher than normal lately, so I decided to just go with it.

The bike was complicated by some unusual headwinds, and for me it got even more complicated when my bike computer suddenly went dead at the halfway point (I thought it was fully charged, but I thought wrong). That meant the second half of the ride would be done all on perceived effort, a situation I had encountered before, so again I didn’t panic. We had some tailwind in the second half, so I felt like that had the potential to be faster. I figured I was on a 2:30 or maybe slightly faster ride; officially I hit the line at 2:29:55, my second-fastest half-Ironman ride ever, so I was pretty stoked when I hit transition.

I was even more stoked to notice a distinct lack of bikes racked around me, which meant that very few guys in my age group were ahead of me (in fact, I was in 6th coming off the bike). That meant one thing: run without cramping, and I was going to have a good result.

Easy to say; hard to do. But actually I felt really good leaving transition, and my plan was to run “relaxed fast” if that makes any sense. In other words, no pushing, especially early in the run. The one concern I had was that I had forgotten to put any calories into my carrier on the bike, so the only calories I had had were in Gatorade, which doesn’t have a lot. I had put some blocks in my transition bag, so I took a few of those, but I also noticed that I wasn’t running out of energy or anything, so my typical training ride that I do without calories seems to have conditioned my body not to expect anything.

I was holding 7:20-7:30 pace most of the time, and also holding the cramps at bay – I got a few twinges from my abductors, but all I had to do was to cut my stride a little and relax. I started going back and forth with one guy in his 30s wearing a “559 Multisport” kit, who told me “You’re a beast” and encouraged me to hang on to him in the last couple of miles, which I sort of managed to do.

I crossed the line with a time of 4:45:44, which is a PR for me by 1:16 and netted me 5th in the age group – my first 70.3 podium! I got absolutely smoked by the guy in 1st (21 minutes faster, mostly in the bike), but hey, I age up next year to the 55-59 group, where I’ll still get smoked by a few of the truly elite.

Oh yeah, and the Hawaii address – that’s a whole ‘nother story for a different post…

But I’ll take this – it’s a real confidence booster for the rest of the season.

April 11, 2016April 11, 2016 by ihersey

Ironman 70.3 California, a comedy of errors

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:

I should have done the spit-clean on my goggles to keep them from fogging up.
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.

October 26, 2015 by ihersey

Good things come in threes

It’s been a busy few months.

First, my wife and I kicked off a big home remodel project in June. We had never done an extensive remodel before – by “extensive,” I mean both expensive and disruptive – and I don’t know many people who actually keep living in their houses when they’re having the type of work done that we were: not only full kitchen remodel, but knocking down the wall between the kitchen and the living room/dining room, new floor throughout the house, revamping the 1955 electrical system, new roof, skylights, moving the front door 18 feet forward and pushing the wall of the living room out 6 feet, adding a half bath, all new entrance doors, garage doors and interior doors, and that’s just what I can remember offhand.

I’m an endurance athlete, and despite that my hand got tired from writing all of those checks. But more than that, there were a lot of unknowns at the beginning of the project, so we ended up having to make a lot of decisions as it progressed and having to recalibrate timelines as we realized we needed to order things (like carriage doors for the Garage of Pain) that have a lead time of up to 9 weeks. But the results so far have been worth it – here’s a before-and-after view of the same corner of the kitchen:

Before

After

(The cat still does her “freaky drinking,” just not on ugly linoleum. 🙂 )

Anyway, while all this was going on, I was trying to prepare for “the Big Dance,” as many in the triathlon community call the Ironman World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. Most, though, just call it “Kona.” Kona is indelibly linked with the sport of triathlon, much like the Boston Marathon is with running.

I’ve been fortunate enough to do Kona four times, though I should put “fortunate” in quotes, as it’s a very difficult race. The NBC television broadcast of the race doesn’t really do it justice; there is no dramatic music, no deep-voiced commentator delivering punchy metaphors that glorify your endeavor, and no powerful slow-motion pedaling and running through the lava fields. Well, I take that back – it can be slow motion if you walk. Having qualified last November at Ironman Arizona, I had 11 months to prepare for this race, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing – it kind of sneaked up on me. Physically I was pretty ready, but my head was occupied with several other things that were going on even as I boarded the flight to Kona eight days before the race.

It’s always exciting to come to the Big Island; you never really know what the elements are going to throw at you. This trip it seemed to be heat, humidity, wind and rougher-than-normal water, all at the same time. My first heat acclimatization ride involved some of the wildest crosswinds I have ever experienced between Kawaihae and the beach at Mahukona; I was glad that I had packed a shallower alternative to my Zipp 808 front wheel. I did a few swims either at Hapuna or the Mauna Lani and experienced swells, chops and current the likes of which I had never seen on my many Big Island trips. And my short training runs were just sweltering. This was going to be interesting.

Race day turned calmer wind-wise, but the oven was definitely still on. This was my first Kona with the separation of starts for age group men and age group women, and it was a definite improvement. I started at the far left, waited about 30 seconds after the start to swim, and I swam basically unmolested the entire way, other than a few slaps of my toes every so often by someone drafting just a little too closely. I was also quite slow, exiting on the steps at 1:21 (vs 1:16 in my 2013 race, but faster than my 1:25s in my first two Konas). It turns out pretty much everyone had a slower-than-normal swim, so I’m not too bothered about it.

What did concern me was getting on the bike and not having any oomph at all. My normal Ironman normalized power is anywhere from 190-195W, yet I found myself riding 175W with the perceived effort I get at 195W. Not good, but I tried not to be negative, since that can have a snowball effect as the day wears on. Focusing instead on making sure I stayed plenty hydrated, I took fluids at every aid station and calories in the form of gels or banana halves where I could.

In the “hot corner” after a steep descent, 2 miles into the bike

Going back up Palani from the hot corner, not to be seen again for 100+ miles

It took until Kawaihae before I saw the first pros coming back (they did have a 30-minute headstart on me 🙂 ), so my ride wasn’t going that badly. In fact, I was on pace for about a 5:20 ride, which should have been pretty conservative. I did finally get some headwind on the climb to the turnaround in Hawi, and even got rained on for a few minutes, which was pretty pleasant except for making it very challenging to see through my sunglasses. The ensuing descent can often be quite the white-knuckle affair if you get heavy crosswinds, but race day seemed to be mostly tailwind, so it was pretty easy to stay down in the aerobars and just cruise this section.

The climb back up to the Queen K marks the final 30 miles or so, and this is where you get to take stock of how your day is going. You might think you’re close to the end, but you’d be wrong – you often get headwind on parts of this section, and there’s a decent amount of climbing still to be done. At around 85 miles I passed the Mauna Lani resort, where my rental house was, and briefly had a vision of how nice it would be to just turn down into the resort and head to the air conditioning, a relaxing shower and a beer – I knew the front door code, after all. A brief vision, of course, because above all you need to respect Kona – it’s a race that so many people want to do and never get to do that I feel I should never squander an opportunity to finish here. And besides, Mums didn’t raise a quitter.

The day started getting a lot less fun by mile 90, and the astute reader will recall that it hadn’t been that much fun all day. My best guess was that I was running low on calories – “bonking,” as we say (this word apparently means something quite different in the UK) – so I grabbed whatever food I could get my hands on at the next aid station and soldiered on. A female friend of mine who had started 15 minutes behind me passed me with a couple of miles to go in the ride; she had a leg issue so wouldn’t even be starting the run, and all I could think right then was that I envied her. Not doing the run was just not an option – I mean of course it was, but it really wasn’t.

Off the bike with a 5:48 split, I felt about as crappy as I’ve ever felt entering T2. But I just noted it; I didn’t dwell on it. The key question was “what do I need right now?” and what I needed was to get my ass on the run course and take some calories in pronto. The picture at mile 2 tells you exactly how I was feeling:

My body and I are not amused

There’s an old adage, though, that goes, “It doesn’t always get worse.” I ran along as best I could, walking the aid stations and getting as many fluids in as I could, as well as ice down the shirt, ice down the shorts, ice in the hat, cool sponges – anything to keep my core temperature down. I chatted with other competitors who were having a tough day as well. I was not alone in my suffering.

The first turnaround is just past 5 miles, and on the return leg my body started to show some signs of life. Here’s a picture of me in happier times, around mile 8:

There’s that smile – this is fun, after all!

The fun was short lived, and I was soon back to a run/walk. The key from here on out was to keep the walks as short as possible while maintaining my ability to just get to the finish line. I saw my family on the steep climb up Palani (just past 10 miles), who were probably dismayed to see me walk up it, but I needed to save my energy.

Once on the Queen K, my main issue became not calories, but sloshing in my stomach, which likely meant I was low on electrolytes. Luckily I had a lot of Succeed S-Caps on me, so I started taking those along with some of the Base salts that you put right on your tongue to ward off cramping. It took a number of minutes each time for the sloshing to subside, at which point I could start running again.

As best I could calculate, if I continued to have to walk I would be looking at a PW – “personal worst” – Ironman finish of around 12:30. All other goals besides finishing now out the window, I made beating that my new secondary goal. As I got out of the Energy Lab and back on the Queen K for the final 10K, a breeze had kicked up, and I suddenly felt much, much cooler.

So I ran.

And I kept running.

And I kept telling myself there was no reason I needed to walk again.

Just. Keep. Running.

So I did. And all of a sudden, I realized I didn’t need to get a PW. In fact, I could still break 12 hours. If I could just…keep…running.

By mile 24, I knew I was going to do this thing. As I got to the top of the final hill and then turned down Palani for the final mile, I saw my brother Paka and sister-in-law Shelton on their way back to their car – they had to make a red-eye flight back, and I was way behind schedule 🙂 – but we had a quick hug and I continued down the hill, hoping just not to cramp before the line.

The finish on Ali’i Drive was electric, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see a finish line. I was high-fiving every hand I could see. This had been a hard one, a well-earned finish.

“Ian Hersey, you are an Ironman!”

11:50:22 was my official time, which turned out not to be even my slowest Kona (though my 4:29 run split was my only run here over 4 hours).

The effort had cost me, though. After volunteers led me into the finisher area and removed my timing chip, I realized I was about to pass out. A couple of volunteers walked me over to the medical tent, and the next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair and cramping up like I had never cramped up before: hands like claws, elbows bent, various muscles in both legs forcing me to straighten them, my jaw tingling.

I needed IV fluids badly, but the volunteers said they had to weigh me first to make sure that I was dehydrated and that it wasn’t something else. This seemed incredulous to me – I knew I was severely dehydrated and electrolyte depleted (after 16 Ironmans and countless other races I know my body really well – but they insisted and had to lift me out of the chair and onto the scale. Down 7 lbs, and that was with shoes on (they’d weighed us in morning without shoes), so they finally agreed with what I’d been telling them for 10 minutes. 10 minutes of absolute agony.

The vein burst with their first attempt, so they went to the other arm but had trouble locating the correct gauge needle. I could barely contain myself; I felt as though I was going to die right there while someone figured out how to get an IV in me on a day when you could have easily forecast a higher-than-normal rate of severe dehydration.

Finally they got one in me and pumped me full of fluids (two bags) and magnesium, and this took effect quite quickly. The claws started releasing, and my elbows straightened. The volunteer doctor was very nice; he himself was a triathlete who was hoping to qualify for Kona someday. I joked that I wasn’t sure I would recommend it based on today. After about two hours, they released me to my wife Jeanne and our friends Mike and Luree, who had already conveniently retrieved my bike and gear bags from transition. I made quite the slow hobble back to my room, which was fortunately in the race hotel right by the finish.

They say that how you deal with the challenging times says a lot more about you than how you deal with the good times – on days in which you’re physically on fire and you’re setting personal bests, finishing comes a lot easier – so I’m happy with my race in that regard. Not satisfied, but happy. As luck would have it, that same “finish what you started” ethos was being tested almost simultaneously in my work life.

As many people saw announced today, my employer Saffron was acquired by Intel. Yes, the Intel.

It’s a great outcome for all concerned. For me personally, though, the decision of whether or not to join Intel as part of the acquisition prompted a fair bit of soul searching. Not because there’s anything wrong with Intel or Saffron, but more because of both my stage in life and my long experience in small companies vs. large ones. Large ones scare me.

In the end, though, I realized it’s just like the anxiety you feel five minutes before the start in an Ironman. You know you’ve trained for this. You know you can do it.

But you also know that you don’t know exactly how it’s going to unfold. There will be hurdles. There will be things you hadn’t anticipated. But the combination of all of those things and of how you respond to them and how you decide to act…well, that becomes the story you write.

So here, like in Kona, I didn’t hop off the course at mile 85 of 140.6 to go home and drink a beer. There’s just too much more fun to be had before the finish line.

And I’m pretty sure I won’t need the med tent after this one. 🙂

August 11, 2015August 11, 2015 by ihersey

Ian, Kona is wondering where you are…

So goes the title of the second such email I’ve received this year from United.

The thing is, I have a trip booked to Kona already…on United even.

Last time I got an email with this subject line, I had two trips booked to Kona on United (one for the Hawaii 70.3 race back in May, and one for Kona in October), and they were in fact the only upcoming trips I had at the time.

Somewhere at United, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

As ridiculous as this scenario seems, it happens all the time, and the problem isn’t unique to United Airlines. Marketing automation systems attempt to do personalized campaigns in order to get a better response rate. But they lack two central ingredients:

Current situational awareness from other transactional systems. United’s reservation system and all ancillary systems, such as checkin systems, frequent flier account, etc, aren’t one monolithic database, but rather a series of systems that need to update one another. This doesn’t happen instantaneously (this is why your frequent flier account doesn’t have your most recent flight on it as soon as you land); if every system updated every other system instantly, everything would bog down and grind to a halt – at least in the IT infrastructure on which a lot of these systems are currently built. Everyone wants “real time,” but most often the cross-system updates are still scheduled in large offline batch operations. (A good lesson on the IT complexity of airlines is talked about here and other places with respect to the merger of United and Continental.)
Intelligent, adaptive systems that take as much current customer context into account as possible. This is the holy grail of personalized marketing, but more often than not, campaign management systems are rule or model driven, and they only look at a few factors, such as when I made trips in the past and to where. The timing of my Kona emails is no surprise when you think about my past history: I’ve done the Hawaii 70.3 race in May a grand total of seven times since 2006, and this is my fourth Hawaii Ironman in October. The fact that I’ve already got reservations is a comical illustration of point 1 above, but anyone who knows me, either personally or through my various social networks, would know which races involving travel I’ve already signed up for, and combining that intelligence with my current transactional status would prevent emails like this that make it seem like the airline doesn’t know me, when in fact I’ve flown well over 2 million miles on United. They should know me very well by now!

In fact, if they were smart, they’d be making me offers for business class fare to Klagenfurt, Austria next summer, seeing as (a) I’ve signed up for Ironman Austria, and (b) I likey my business class as long as you give me a reasonable deal. True personalization like this is something we’ve worked very hard on a Saffron with our autonomous learning platform, and we have some very good proof points in accuracy of individualized product prediction. We co-presented on this with our customer USAA at Wharton back in April. “Cluster of one” personalization is just in its infancy, but with the IT industry on its way to adopting technologies that solve the two challenges above – low-latency updates from transactional systems and intelligent systems that can treat all of us like the individuals we are – we shouldn’t be surprised to see the marketing of the future become “scary good.”

Meanwhile, back in the present, two days after I booked my trip to Phoenix for this November’s Ironman Arizona race, I got this:

<sigh> Really, United?

July 20, 2015 by ihersey

So…How We Doin’?

We’re in the middle of the triathlon season now, and I find myself less than three months out from my fall Ironman campaign, which features both Kona and Arizona, five weeks apart. I remind myself every once in a while that I’m actually training for two full Ironmans, seeing as there will be just enough time to recover from the one and roll into the other. Recent races have indicated pretty good fitness but have also highlighted some areas to work on:

Swim. I had a disappointing 38-minute swim in the Hawaii 70.3 race, but that time was mitigated by seeing the splits of others that I know are fast, and they also had (for them) slow splits. On the flip side, I had a three-minute PR swim for 1.2 miles at Vineman, but the comparative times there were similarly quick, though I did somewhat better than usual in my placing. So I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic on my swim, other than needing to do some longer swims to be ready for the full distance.
Bike. My 2:30 split a Vineman was a three-minute PR. This was due to a combination of a faster bike – the Dimond, which prior race analysis has already shown to be quicker – and putting out 9W more power over the course of the ride than last year. This was also the weekend after a big training block over the July 4 weekend, which I just felt recovered from a couple of days before the race, so I’m feeling good about both my bike setup and my bike fitness.
Run. By contrast with the other two sports, my runs in the three 70.3s I’ve done have been subpar – up to 10 minutes slower than “normal” and all marred by severe cramping. I’d be tempted to chalk it up to overcooking the bike, but if that were the case, I would have had dead-feeling legs coming off the bike. If I look at my initial mile splits, I see this: The table illustrates “data regret”: I opted to forego wearing my heart-rate monitor strap in my 2014 races – I don’t look at my heart rate during the race – but it sure would be nice to compare the data year over year to determine whether I have a fitness issue, a pacing issue on the bike, or simply – as I believe to be the case – a hydration/electrolyte management issue. Lesson: don’t be like me and get data regret.

The run segments aren’t strictly comparable year over year; St. George in 2014 was a half mile short of 13.1, Hawaii was hotter this year in the run, so everything suffered, and Vineman was cooler than the prior year so should have been a little quicker. The big difference for me, though, was that last year I didn’t cramp during any of the runs, and this year I cramped in all three. Badly, and at multiple points. In any case, it’s something I need to address before I face the lava fields of Kona, and I am a man with a plan, so stay tuned on that front.

After all, I have various family and friends joining me this year in Kona, but one guy I specifically did not invite was Crampa.

May 11, 2015June 10, 2015 by ihersey

It might be about the bike after all…

I have to admit it, the Dimond bike is a head turner.

The Dimond is ready for its close up

It looks fast. But the question is, is it fast? When I switched over in the middle of last season from my tried-and-true Specialized Shiv (the original with the nosecone), I took a little bit of a leap of faith that it would be. Sure, there was some wind tunnel data, but this data gets endlessly debated on Internet forums by “experts” of all kinds, so it’s hard to know. Also, it had just been ridden to a convincing victory by pro TJ Tollakson at Ironman Mont Tremblant, but pros are likely to be fast on any bike.

What is important to know is whether I am faster on it than on my old bike. For that, we need data. Luckily, I have lots of data-gathering devices – especially the power meter – and I also like to do the same races either every year or every two years. Call me a creature of habit.

The key in performing an apples-to-apples comparison is to eliminate as many variables as possible. I only had a couple of races on the bike in 2014; the second one was Ironman Arizona. Here’s a comparison between 2014 and 2012:

The overall times aren’t quite right since they’re when I started/stopped the bike computer, but they’re close enough. The heart rate data is almost identical, and the power data is pretty close. The split is a lot slower on the Dimond, though, so at first glance it wouldn’t appear to be a faster bike at all.

However, 2014 was really windy, and 2012 had no wind to speak of, so the conditions weren’t comparable. In 2012 I had the 4th-fastest bike split in the age group, and I did again in 2014, so that might argue that the two performances were equivalent. However, placing is a factor of who shows up, and two trials aren’t enough to claim a trend. So onward we go.

Then comes last weekend’s Ironman 70.3 St. George in southwest Utah, a venue that’s become one of my favorites. I did race here last year on the Shiv, so this race presents an opportunity to generate more comparison data. First, the tale of the tape:

A minute faster in the swim and 4 minutes on the bike (we won’t talk about the run). So the Dimond scores on the initial numbers; however, we have to examine two main variables: was this year’s course faster than last year’s, and how did the efforts compare in terms of watts?

The course was slightly different this year; while it eliminated some strange, slow sections on a bike path where two parts of the course crossed one another, it did add a section on a bike path in Snow Canyon, which we then partially descended and had to execute about the tightest 180-degree turn I’ve ever encountered in a triathlon. Then climb the canyon. The total elevation gain recorded by my Garmin, however, was nearly identical at just under 3300 ft (1000m for the rest of the world).

Another way to look at relative difficulty is to look at the pro times. Since many of the same pros raced this year and last, they’re a good benchmark, since as a group they have the most consistent fitness year over year, and they are racing for a living, which means they’re both supremely motivated to push hard and also able to sustain a higher intensity level than age groupers, in part because their race doesn’t last as long. 🙂 (Joking aside, that’s actually true if you look at the formula for how Training Stress Score is calculated – to achieve the same metabolic cost, measured in TSS points, for a workout, if your duration is less, then your Intensity Factor is higher, actually by its square.) Anyway, if we look at the male pros:

(2014 is on the left and 2015 is on the right.)

What we see is that the same pros year over year were mostly 2 minutes or so slower this year than last year. The male pro race dynamics could have been different, though, so let’s look at the female pros:

Not quite as many repeaters as the males, but of the 6 or so, the gap – other than Heather Wurtele, who was not quite 2 minutes slower – is 3 minutes or more.

That tells me that this was definitely not a faster year, and in fact was probably a bit slower (I’d love to hear from any of the pros about the differences from their perspective between this year and last, especially if I’m missing something key in my analysis).

The other possibility, then, other than the bike being faster is that I worked harder this year, i.e., put out more watts. But that doesn’t appear to be the case:

Compared to 2014, my faster speed in 2015 was achieved at 6W lower normalized power and 10W lower average power – for .8 mph better average speed. I hadn’t worn a heart-rate monitor in 2014, so I can’t compare the efforts along that dimension.

Finally, if we go back to Strava, we can use the segments to compare each year to see whether I rode the course any differently, i.e., did I push the uphills or downhills more in one year than the other?

I’ve just shown the beginning and end pages here (I skipped another couple because I see many eyes glazing over already), but you can see the trend: I did start a little harder this year (2015 is on the right), but after those initial climbs I was faster on pretty much every segment, and at lower wattage. In 2014 I pushed up Snow Canyon a lot harder (I was also probably fitter, having come off of Ironman Los Cabos at the end of March), but even so my splits are very close. I have a few theories:

The Dimond definitely seems faster on the flats and downhills. I saw the same phenomenon on training rides, when I started getting Strava segment PRs on routes I ride pretty often. These always came on flat and downhill sections.
The fact that my uphill splits were so close (and still mostly better) at lower wattage is somewhat baffling. I don’t weigh less than I did last year, so watts/kg doesn’t explain it. The Dimond itself weighs about a pound less than my Shiv, which could be part of it.
Both bikes are equipped with Quarq power meters. They both run the same firmware version, but they are slightly different models, so I suppose there could be a slight difference between the power readings on the two.
I did run a different wheel combination this year – Zipp 808 front / Super 9 disc vs. a pair of Reynolds Aero 72 wheels – which likely gave me some of the better speed on the flats and downhills, though likely cost me a little on the uphills due to weight. Tires were, in both cases, Specialized S-Works Turbo 24s with latex tubes, so no difference there.
Finally – and this could be a big factor – I could be spending a greater percentage of my ride down in the aerobars than I have in the past. This season I have been making a concerted effort to do my hard efforts on the trainer in the aero position, and I’ve also been doing a weekly stretching class (and reinforcing the exercises at home during the week), so I feel as though I maintain the position more easily. I can’t quantify this as a percentage of my race, but it could certainly explain some of the better speed at lower watts.

To be clear, I do believe I have enough data to say conclusively that the Dimond is a faster bike than the Shiv, at least with me on each of them. What is unclear is how much faster. I rode 4 minutes faster on a course that the pros rode 2-3 minutes slower on, and I did that at 6W less normalized power. So that alone would say that it’s way more than 6W faster. However, some of the other variables I listed above potentially contribute to some of that speed gain, so I don’t feel I can say anything more than “it’s at least 6W faster than the Shiv.”

The rest of my season has a lot of repeat races from last year and/or two years ago, so it will offer plenty of additional data points to see whether this trend holds. I’m happy thus far, though, with what I’ve seen from the combination of Dimond and rider. We’ll try and keep improving the rider as the season progresses.

March 30, 2015March 30, 2015 by ihersey

You Won’t Believe What I Did Next…

For a guy who’s been in the business of analyzing human language via computer for almost 30 years, you’d think I’d be happy that the language of the Internet and of social media is becoming more and more predictable. The same conventions everyone uses to be found and to be heard – hashtags, @mentions, clickbait phrases, unimaginative headlines aimed at search engine optimization (SEO) – play right into the hands of those working in the field of natural language processing and text analytics. After all, whether their purpose is social engineering or algorithmic engineering, they’re formulaic and therefore amenable to pattern recognition.

However, I’m married to a journalist, who happens to be one of the wittiest writers I’ve ever known. She’s worked at big-name newspapers – the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, to name the most notable ones – and what I think has kept us together over 30+ years is our similar sense of humor, a lot of which revolves around language (of course, she has many other charms as well 🙂 ). Non-straightforward, novel use of language is part of what makes for great writing, and for great humor, but it’s exactly these sorts of literary devices – metaphor, puns, intentional malapropisms, etc. – that confound computerized language analysis. We in the business like to call them “corner cases.”

Headline writing, when done well, is one of the supreme literary art forms of the pre-SEO days. Back in the day, when writing for print only, headline writing genius often emerged under very tight print deadlines, with fixed page real estate dictating the constraints of one’s expressive canvas. One of Jeanne’s Boston Globe headlines actually made the Tonight Show, where Jay Leno had a regular bit on funny headlines. Hers was for a movie review about a well-intended-but-poorly-executed period piece about a castrato singer, and her headline was “Beautiful Castrato Movie Missing Something.” I’m afraid the 2015 version would be something like “Singer loses his ‘nads, and you won’t believe what happens next.”

Of course, the best headlines often never made actual print – they remain forever locked in newspaper publishing systems, fueled by late night deadline fatigue, gallows humor, and the almost certainty that upper management would never see them. Case in point: this Washington Post review of “The Hunt for Red October.” Unbeknownst to all but a few, the original, never-published headline took the submarine theme, together with the reviewer’s critique of the film’s ponderous and difficult nature, and wrapped it up neatly in a bow worthy of junior high stardom: “Long, Hard and Full of Seamen.”

I’ll take “Anal Bum Cover” for $7000

Come to think of it, that headline would probably get a lot of clickthroughs today.

December 12, 2014December 12, 2014 by ihersey

Age Is Just A Number

Out on a run in Northwest Florida the other day, I passed a house with a bunch of decorations in the front yard, among them this:

Some of the other decorations, which included black balloons and tombstones, made it clear that someone in the house was turning 40.

40.

The implication, even in jest, is that it’s all downhill from here. I can understand the fear – when I was a teenager, I thought anyone over 20 was old. In my 20s, it was a big deal when friends hit 30. Back then, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be 52, the age I am now.

It’s awesome!

First, I’ve maintained myself physically. In fact, I just had my best year in triathlon EVER. Not age adjusted or anything – ever:

My three fastest half Ironmans of all time
My two fastest Olympic distance tris of all time
My second-fastest full Ironman ever and highest age group placing ever (2nd, qualified for Kona – did I mention that? 🙂 )
My first overall win ever in multisport – a sprint duathlon back in March

Fitness aside, I also think I’m a better person. When I was younger I was very impatient in all kinds of ways. Impatient with people with whom I disagreed. Impatient with people I didn’t consider intellectual equals. I lacked empathy at times. I lacked perspective.

Not that I don’t still have a juvenile, sophomoric sense of humor. (My brothers can still send me into fits of uncontrollable laughter with the right look or insider reference.) But now when I’m disappointed or angry with someone – which happens, both in work and in life – instead of letting go of my emotional control, I try to examine where they’re coming from, what’s driving them. I find that taking that perspective often leads to quicker conflict resolution and fewer hurt feelings. Life’s too short to hold grudges.

I also examine failures more objectively. If it’s a sub-par race, I examine what went wrong, whether it was inadequate preparation, equipment issues or poor race execution, and come up with a plan to rectify the issue in my next race. If it’s a setback at work, it’s the same approach.

Physical and mental decline will hit all of us at some point, but I for one am not going to go down without a fight. A large part of it is attitude:

Never EVER let age be an excuse. Ask my training partners about my competitiveness. I don’t care if they’re 20+ years younger than I am – when I go hard, I’m going to make it hurt.
Learn from the past, but don’t live in it. I never think that my best days are behind me. I’m going to make today the best day of my life, and tomorrow even better. It doesn’t always work out, but I get up each day and try again.
Have audacious goals, and work towards them. My goal is to be the first 90 year old to finish an Ironman. Plain and simple. But that goal entails a lot: living that long, and having immense physical vitality that long. Plus a host of other things, some of which are luck of the draw. Someone may beat me to the feat, but in that case I’ll just have to raise the bar. Maybe it’s 95. Maybe 100. 🙂

Anyway, enough motivational speeches. But if you’re in Kona in 2052 and see me cross the finish line, buy me a margarita. I’ll likely be sodium depleted.

Oh, and the house with the tombstones and black balloons? They were all gone when I ran by this morning.

I guess the party’s over. Let the downward spiral begin. 🙂

November 23, 2014November 23, 2014 by ihersey

Ironman Arizona: Coffee’s for Closers!

This was my fourth Ironman Arizona and – assuming I finished – would be my 15th IM overall. But it came at the end of a very long season: I had some nice volume coming into the year, thanks to the mild Bay Area winter, but I started a new job (at Saffron) in February and went into Ironman Los Cabos without my usual focus. I had a disappointing race there, “running” 4:51 and deciding then and there to quit chasing Kona for 2014. Instead, I did lower volume but some higher intensity, and raced my ass off at Olympic and 70.3 distances – that training was much more compatible with the new gig and with re-establishing a sense of fun. And I managed to break my Olympic-distance PR twice and do my three-fastest 70.3s ever (StG, Honu, Vineman). For an “old man” of 52, I was pretty happy with that.

But then IMAZ loomed. Even if my shorter races indicated great fitness, my training volume numbers were way lower than I would have liked. I’m talking under 10 hours per week for all but 5 weeks in the past 6 months; biggest week just under 15 hours. By mid September I knew there wasn’t much to be done – you can’t cram a bunch of volume in, but you can do some focused volume, so I did one key 100-mile ride that I probably did 10 times before my breakthrough IMAZ 2012, and it went well enough to convince me I could do this thing. The race is also a qualifier for the 2015 Hawaii Ironman, and I figured, based on past years, that I would need to finish in the top 3 or 4 of my age group to get a Kona slot.

I wasn’t getting a lot of pool time (like 1x per week), but I did a lot of sessions on my Vasa to try to at least build some swim-specific muscular endurance in the upper body. It appeared to work, because when I did make the noon masters swim (I am not a morning person, unlike most triathletes), I was able to swim in my usual lane and sometimes up a lane with no problem. Also did our team’s “hour swim” and got 3800 yards in, drafting about 1000 of those, so I figured I was good for my usual 1:10-1:15 range.

Hydration issues in IM aside, the run has historically been my strength, so my only worry there was proper pacing – oh, and having the old body hold up. A last-minute equipment change was to run in Hoka Cliftons (not brand new – had run in them a number of times) rather than the Newtons I normally wear. The IMAZ run is pretty flat, but the surface is hard, so I figured the extra cushioning would come in handy. To that end, I also decided the night before the race to wear compression socks (really “sleeves,” since they didn’t cover the foot), but the only pair I’d brought was a non-kit-matching green. Oh well – going fast isn’t about fashion. 🙂

The final component of my race that I had to get ready was my head. The long season had taken its toll on me – mentally, I was ready for it to be over. Physically, I felt tired, and also got sick for the first time in two years, just prior to Challenge Rancho Cordova, which I was forced to turn into an aquabike because I felt so bad. The Wednesday before IMAZ, the congestion made its return – rut roh! I tried to remain upbeat and positive, and I was determined not to repeat my biggest mistake at Cabo: not having my head in the game.

Much as I tried to be relaxed about it, I did have the goal of getting a Kona slot, so there was the competition to consider. I had peeked at the bib list coming in, and the one name that stood out was Bill MacLeod – I’d met him at Malibu and knew he was out of my league. He also always shows up to races prepared, so that was one slot likely gone. Anything can happen in IM, of course, but he isn’t a guy who “blows up.” Beyond him, I didn’t really know anyone else to be a “heavy hitter,” which didn’t mean that anything was in the bag but simply that I had as good a shot as anyone else at a KQ if I executed well. Or so I told myself.

Anyway, the race:

Swim: I hate this swim. Not because of the water or anything – just way too many people. I’ve tried both sides but had my best luck on the left, so I headed that way again, and it was the right call. Other than some of the paddlers trying to move us right too early (no way I’m moving into that melee, pal!), I was moving along pretty well, with the normal bunching up at the turn buoys. I got right in the scrum there, but people were pretty good in general, and after the second one I moved over to the shore like a guy on Slowtwitch had suggested. Boom! No one other than a couple of other caps – everyone else was following the buoy line. My only regret was not staying right for longer; the buoys kept moving right, and I could have stayed near the shore almost all the way to the Mill Ave Bridge. Anyway, I looked at my watch on exit and saw 1:11, which equals my best swim here, so I was pleased enough. Score one for the Vasa!

Bike: I rode 5:04 here in 2012, but as soon as I hit the road it became apparent from the winds that that was going to be challenging to repeat. I had my wattage plan anyway – basically average between 190 and 195W, which is what I did to get that time before. My first problem was my Garmin 510 bike computer – for some reason the display wasn’t showing power, and the only thing I had changed before race day was to set alarms every 15 minutes to remind me to drink. This clearly wasn’t going to work – if your plan involves sticking to power but you can’t see power numbers, you’ve got a problem – but luckily it’s easy enough to change the data fields on the fly, which I did once things had settled down a little and I wasn’t surrounded by other riders. From there it was just a matter of being patient; I let myself go up to 205-210W uphill and into the wind and occasionally spike above that if I needed to pass someone quickly to avoid drafting, but otherwise I was Steady Eddie. I made sure to drink a lot. The first lap was a 1:42 – already a couple of minutes slower than I’d done in 2012, but it would get worse from there. I think my second loop was 1:45 or 1:46, but I was still mostly passing people. I didn’t see much, if any, drafting where I was. The real key was avoiding collisions with riders I was lapping, some of whom didn’t heed instructions to ride right. I did my best to announce myself as I was passing, but it was hard to hear with the wind out there.

My Garmin crapped out on the power data (and HR) around mile 80, so the last loop I was “riding blind.” This may have been a blessing in disguise, because it forced me to go by feel, knowing that I had a run that I really wanted to nail. Nail in a “don’t cramp up and lose a bunch of time” kind of way. I couldn’t wait to make that final turn at the top of Beeline, and once I did I really relaxed on the downhill and made sure to get a bunch of nutrition in. I was ready for the ride to be done, which was a good indication that my long-distance bike fitness wasn’t as good as it should have been. Still, I executed a decent flying dismount into T2 with a split of 5:19, my second fastest. A far cry from 5:04, but I’ll take it on the day.

For data geeks, luckily I was also running my 910xt, which didn’t crap out, so I got the stats. NP of 188W (5W less than in 2012), TSS of 286, avg HR of 127, VI of 1.03 – not 1.01 like in 2012, but with the winds and all this is pretty even).

Glad to be off the bike!

Run: I felt ok running into T2, made a quick pee break (why don’t people push the locks when they’re in the portapotties??), and got out on the run course at 6:39ish into the race. I was pretty sure there would be no sub 10 at that point; my fastest IM run ever is 3:32 (from IMAZ 2008). That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try, but I’ve gone out at 7:00 pace in the past and that didn’t work out so well. Plus, I didn’t feel particularly punchy in my running, so I figured I’d just settle in. First couple of miles were 7:40ish, then on the return with a tailwind I hit a 7:15 mile 3 and told myself to simmer the f*** down. This would turn out to be a run in which I never felt really good, nor really bad. I was trading places off and on with an Executive Challenge guy I know – he would stop and I would pass him, then when he was running he would blow past me again. The two-loop course was new to me yet had a lot of familiar stretches from the three-loop course, including the climb up East Curry, but for Bay Area types it’s not much of a climb.

High-fiving my good luck charm Alexa

I was glad I had the Hokas, but after the first 10 miles or so even they didn’t feel that cushioned. I just kept focusing on nutrition and every once in a while on other runners (former world-class marathoner Colleen de Reuck flew past me at mile 16 with some guy in tow, so she was hard to miss). At mile 17, my wife told me that I’d come off the bike in 4th in the AG and might be as high as 2nd now, but that 1st was “out of reach” (that’s putting it mildly). That was the first update I had had all day, and to be frank I was kind of shocked. I thought I had blown it on the bike and was maybe running for top 10. Knowing how unreliable the live tracker can be, I didn’t fully trust the intell, but all the same my focus was now on maintaining – no way I was catching 1st, but if I blew up I could lose 2nd. Or whatever place I was actually in.

My mile splits were consistently in the 8:30 range, and I had had no cramping yet, so once I hit that East Curry hill the second time to get to mile 23, I started my push for the finish. I had no idea where anyone was at that point, and I’d had no updates since mile 17, so my job became simply to make it very hard for any geezer to come by me. Those last 3 miles hurt. A lot. One or two younger dudes went by me in the last mile, but just before the final turn into the chute my friend told me he was pretty sure I was 2nd. I crossed the line in 10:15:50 (3:36 run), my second-fastest IM ever and indeed 2nd in M50-54. Kona, baby!

Glad to be done!

With Jeanne, my biggest supporter

To say I’m ecstatic with this result would be an understatement. I was worried I didn’t have enough volume coming in; I knew early on in the bike that my sub 10 goal was likely out the window, yet I got my best Ironman AG and overall (117th) placing ever. And I’m old. 🙂

So what did we learn?

Well, sports cliches are used in business for a reason – days like this are a metaphor for life. Here’s what I took away from the day:

Have a plan, but be prepared for things not to go to plan. I had time goals for each discipline, but the heavy winds changed things on the bike, so I adapted. I also had to adapt to not having power data throughout the entire ride, and just go by feel.
It’s tough for everyone, not just you. When you encounter tough conditions and get into a negative frame of mind, it can turn into a pity party. I tried to turn it around and revel in the conditions by telling myself that others were having it worse, that faster guys were going to overbike (trying to hit a time goal) and blow up on the run – basically, make lemonade out of lemons.
Don’t count yourself out, even if you think you know the score. I had no idea what my position in the age group was (and therefore what my chances of a Kona slot were) until mile 17 of the run, and even then I didn’t know for sure. I just kept trying to run my own race, and it worked out.
Mental toughness is equally important as physical preparation. I was in better physical shape going into Cabo than I was going into Arizona, but my head was in the game in Arizona – I paced myself well, and executed on nutrition and hydration better than I ever had before.

So my way-better-than-expected day really came down to execution. One of my favorite movie scenes of all time (and I joke about it all the time with the sales guys I work with) is this one from Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s harsh (as is the language), but I sometimes use it to toughen up and remind myself – especially in the last part of the marathon, where everything hurts – that I want to finish the race with no regrets. No regrets that I didn’t push when I could have, that I let up and someone else came by me. In other words, I needed to seal the deal, run “like I stole it” – in short, close.

Second place? I think I earned more than a set of steak knives.

Who’s going to Kona? *These* four guys!

Thanks to my great support crew of Jeanne, Greg and Alexa, and to my awesome Team Sheeper teammates and training partners, who are not only great friends but who also push me every day to be better.

October 6, 2014 by ihersey

Coach, heed thyself!

Giving advice is easy; taking the advice you so freely give is a lot more difficult when it applies to yourself.

My lead-up to Challenge Rancho Cordova was a week of a nasty cold – my first in at least two years – along with two airplane trips across the country, and not the best diet or sleep. Wednesday through Friday were the “height of misery” days, which made me dubious that I would even drive up to Sacramento on Saturday to pick up my race packet.

But as these things go, I woke up Saturday morning feeling human enough to go on an easy spin with the team and test out my race setup on the bike. So the drive up to Rancho Cordova (a suburb of Sacramento that looks like a technology park with housing developments and color-coordinated strip malls thrown in) was on; the plan was to see how I felt on Sunday morning before deciding to dive in and actually start the race. IF I did end up racing, I told myself, I would do it at Ironman race pace instead of the higher intensity I would normally do in a half Ironman. The objective of even doing this race, I reminded myself, was to mimic Ironman Arizona conditions and race setup.

Sunday morning had me feeling decent enough to start the race, even though I still sounded terrible. My coach Tim was there to spectate and questioned why I was even doing this. “I feel better than I sound” was the only thing I could come up with. Conditions were really nice, actually: calm 68F water, perfect for a fast wetsuit-aided swim, and though the day would get very warm indeed by the run, the first couple of hours of the bike were doing to feature ideal air temps.

A relatively small field combined with age group waves made for a very civilized start, and after the first couple of hundred meters of adrenaline-fueled strong pace, I settled into a moderate, Ironman-type effort. Swimming when your nasal passages are congested is quite an interesting experience – the activity itself already produces enough hypoxia that you don’t really want any additional difficulty getting oxygen in. I didn’t feel exactly panicked at any point, but I did stop briefly a couple of times to clear my nose out a little (no further detail necessary). My left calf also cramped a few times, which I guessed was due to the dehydrating effect of all the decongestant I’d been taking. Fortunately, I swam a pretty straight line, so I exited the water with an average swim time for me that turned out to be 34:02 (I wasn’t clocking it on my watch).

I spent too much time in T1 fumbling to get into my tight long-sleeve top (sun protection), so that was a good lesson and “opportunity for improvement” for Arizona. Once on the bike, I felt pretty good other than fatigued arms and shoulders (note to self: more swim time!). The first half of the ride was mostly rolling and a net uphill, with a couple of climbs that forced me into the small chainring. I was averaging around 215 watts for that part, which is slightly above my Ironman target effort. I did allow myself to spike well above that for short sections on the steeper climbs but otherwise held myself in check. The first aid station was, uh, interesting – for some inexplicable reason they had set it up near the bottom of a long downhill, so the chances of successful bottle handoff when riders are going 30 mph was practically nil. Oh well – I still had plenty of fluids at that point.

After 25 miles, the climbing was pretty much over, and the course had a net descent of about 600 ft over the remaining 31 miles, which meant fast riding for less wattage – I averaged over 23 mph on this part with only 186W of average power. That allowed me to focus on hydration and electrolytes, and I came to the end of the bike feeling reasonably good, although a little hungry (the aid stations only had enough volunteers to hand out bottles, so my only calories came from the one gel I had in on me). My bike split was 2:35, which I think equals my best half-Ironman split ever, even though my average power was Ironman effort. All that says is that the course was fast. 🙂

I had debated about ending my race as soon as I got to T2, but I decided to see how I felt. Since the course was two 6.5-mile loops, I told myself I could always stop after the first loop. Here’s where the voice of the coach and the voice of the athlete were at odds – if it were one of the athletes whom I advise, I would have told them in no uncertain terms to stop after the bike. The competitor in me, though, doesn’t like DNFs. The competitor won round one.

Once out on the running course, I tried to run relaxed. The legs felt good and wanted me to do some quick turnover, so I started out at around 7:00 pace. Pretty soon, though, I felt as though I should back off – I was still pretty congested and coughing a bit. Through 3 miles I was averaging 7:15s, but I also realized that I was violating my rule about not digging a hole for myself. Right then and there I decided I was going to be done after the first lap, and at that point I started running an easy 8:15ish pace and walking the aid stations.

What did we learn? A few things:

Work out how to more quickly put on that long sleeve top after the swim.
Take more calories than one gel per 2.5 hours on the bike.
Slightly alter the angles on my saddle and aerobar pads/extensions for more comfort and weight balance.
Learn to listen to the coach in me sometimes and not the athlete!

As somewhat of a sliver lining to the DNF cloud, the organizers let me switch to the Aquabike division after the fact, which I apparently “won” (they still gave the official awards to those originally entered in the division, which is fair enough). I love customer-friendly flexibility! Thanks to Challenge for creating the event, and special thanks to USA Productions and SVE Timing, who actually made the event happen.

I have some work to do before Ironman Arizona. The first “to do” is to get healthy! The second is to listen more to my inner coach. 🙂

spinning

by day I'm a software exec; by night I'm a lifelong, moderately talented endurance athlete