Thirty one years is a lifetime in triathlon. The Big Daddy, Hawaii’s Ironman, got its start in 1978, effectively kicking off a stream of wannabes and look a-likes. In Washington State, a number of communities started putting on their own versions of swim/bike/run soon after. I wasn’t around for the creation, but the written and televised words and pictures from Oahu and the Big Island must have been extremely mythic and powerful.
Spokane put on the “Troika” in 1981; in 1982, Olympia and Ellensburg both hosted triathlons which are still being run. Unlike the larger tris which dominate today, all these remain smaller, non-profit, community run events. The feel at these events is like it “used to be” meaning informal, with little hype, and no big “championship” to shoot for – these race is an end in itself.
There are many small races like this which come and go over the years in the smaller towns outside the Seattle metro area. On the West side of the Cascades, it’s always a crap shoot whether one is going to be racing in drippy, hypothermic conditions. And the environment of usually rolling hills, and many trees, meaning little warmth from the sun.
Head East, though, and the weather becomes more Kona-like – windy, hot, blazing sun. Often, the landscape is volcanic in origin, fields of lava spewed from Rainier, Adams, St Helens, long since covered with seared wheat colored grass and sagebrush. No trees block the incessant breezes which can sometimes ramp up to full gale strength. Real triathlon, down home and difficult. It’s gotten so hot in Spokane for the races, they’ve switched the date from early August to the end of May. Humph.
The Whiskey Dick in Ellensburg has made no such concession. Set at the end of July, the full force of summer down by the Columbia is combined with a purposefully difficult bike ride. On top of the challenge of the race itself, a difficult route must be taken just to get from the start line to the finish.
The swim takes place 28 miles from Ellensburg, in the Columbia River at Vantage. The slack water there is about 64F on race morning, and half the field arrives by bus from town. We’ve had to park near the finish line, gather our equipment for the race, and distribute it be ready for the point-to-point route we’ll take. First, we bag our running shoes and anything else we’ll need, and leave that for volunteers to give to us when we arrive back 4 hours later. Next, we have to ready our bikes for loading on a trailer, sharing space with the water jugs which will be used to serve us out on the run. Then we hop on the school bus which drives the course backwards, going up from 1550’ in town to Whiskey Dick summit @ 2650’, then careen down 1900’ through the layers of basalt to the little park at water’s edge beneath the mammoth I-90 Columbia River Bridge.
It’s a little scary to the uninitiated, this immediate pre-race exposure to the challenge awaiting us on our bikes. But first, we’ve got to navigate the walk from the transition zone to the swim start. This is a quarter mile across choppy gravel between goat-head thorns. Those lucky enough to have loved ones supporting them wear flip flops or other sandals, to be discarded and retrieved. I just go barefoot, distracted by meeting up with Elena and her husband from the old SST club. We catch up a bit: she’s leaving the Army and moving to Denver, where she’ll work as a Pathologist with Kaiser. Good for her!
The swim is a fairly simple rectangle along the water’s edge, in a somewhat sheltered cover. There may be a little bit of a current as we head back to T1, but in general, the water is calm, there’s no wind or chop to see, and only the low angled sun off our right shoulders to give any difficulty at all.
With only 150 swimmers, we’re just one wave lined up an the pebble beach. There’s very little jostling at the start, and I settle in for the one mile swim, even finding a good pair of feet to follow on the way back.
It’s hard to compare swim times from race to race, even on the same course, as buoy placement is more an art than a science, even in the age of GPS. I finish about 4+ minutes slower than my last race here, 4 years earlier. A mile in 30:10. Pretty frustrating, but it’s actually just about the time I thought Id get. I’m no longer rankled by the rapidly diminishing quality of my swimming; I can find a bit of comfort in knowing that I was 49th out of the water, so the majority in this race were slower still.
A little bit of cruelty awaits in T1, where a new 2 minute penalty has been promised for those who do not put their wetsuit and any other swim gear and “dry clothes” in the hefty bag provided. I’ve racked close to the “bike-out”, and take my time from swim exit to bike mount. I wish I could get more excited about “racing”, enough to blast thru the transitions, but too many years in Ironman races, and the dwindling supply of competitors, have taken their toll (I will finish the day 30 and 64 minutes ahead of the other two in my AG, and nearly an hour ahead of the only person older than me in this race.)
Wisely having put my big in the smallest gear, I pedal easily up the first steep slope to the Vantage Highway, which we will follow all he way into town. The first half is relentlessly up, through a wind farm. So fighting gravity, and the wind in our face all the way. I decide to just stay steady at about 78% of my FTP, which would be a good pace for a half Ironman, and probably is too slow to do this race justice. But, again, I’m just here to have fun and feel like Ive worked, not exhaust myself.
A couple of 50-something women pass me near the start of the climb, and I keep trading places with a 58 y/o guy in red, and a 40 y/o in blue. The climb takes over an hour, 14 miles in total, and then we hit the downhill. I get low, and try to practice pedaling while going downhill, into wind, in the aerobars. I’m pretty successfully most of the way. After a few miles, the gradient slacks off, and I treat the rest of the ride as a 40 minute time trial.
Red guy and blue guy get lost in my wake. Once or twice early on they go by, meaning they are trying to get a little draft off of me, but the more open the terrain, and the less the slope, the more I just over-power them. Apparently, they were working harder than I up the hill, or don[t know how to get down and dirty on the flats. I’m holding about 80% +/- 1, and covering 2 miles in about 5 minutes, 30 seconds, give or take. It feels good to be working. I concentrate on keep my head as low as possible. Every time I lift up a bit to see where I am going, I can feel the wind fighting back, slowing me down. Tucked in, I don’t notice the wind nearly as much, and that’s the feeling I try to hold in place.
Nearing town, I pass first one, then the other of the 50 y/o women, along with a few others. I was 49th out of T1, 46th to the top of the hill, and maybe 35th into T2. There, we rack out bike in a special little spot, from which a volunteer will take it to its final resting place. Then we head over to a long blanket, on which volunteers have laid out our T2 bags just for us. I slap on my shoes, cinch them up, and zoom out into town.
The two ladies have both passed me in T2, that’s how leisurely I’m going; the 1 minute 27 seconds I spent there was 99th overall!
The day is now warm, 72-78F, no clouds, and the first 5+ miles are perfectly flat, first along a gravel levee road, then a circuitous route through town. Along the gravel, I pass one of the ladies (I end up 15 seconds short of getting the second). At the turn-around along the levee, 2 miles in, I spot red and blue guy about 15 seconds behind me. Red guy, 58, eventually overtakes me, running 3 and a half minutes faster than me for the 10K. This is actually the difference is my time from 2009 to 2013.
Just like before, I am really, really enjoying this race, this run, this warmth, the uncrowded racing pack, the rural feel of a small town’s in town neighborhoods, and even the final mile which goes up to the top of “Water Tower Hill”.
This water tower was visible on the bike for the last 12 miles, at first just a blue cylinder on the horizon, then ever so slowly and gradually getting bigger, and constant lure which promised that, eventually, the ride would be over. But since it was always there, it was also a tease, showing just how slow and inexorable a ride through central Washington winds can be. So it was fitting that, with less than a half mile to go, we finally got to the base of the tower itself, almost touching at as we circled back to go downhill. Although the scale and views are vastly different, it feels a bit like getting up to the Observatory in Griffith park, in LA, and I kept having flashbacks to James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause”.
My miles splits were pretty steady, dropping from 7:59 to 7:44 over the first three miles, holding steady there for the next two, then rising to 7:58 for the mile with the hill. The finish ends up in the town’s Memorial Park, hard by the Kittitas County Fairgrounds, old cottonwoods, maples, and oaks shading the now nearly noon-time sun. I feel rejuvenated, not tired, and glad that I have found something which provides such a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, and community.
Blue guy comes up to me, having finished over a minute behind. He seems genuinely impressed with what I was doing on the bike in the flats. I reminded him of the value of getting low and aero, and made a little gesture to the need for constant concentration (some folks call it focus) to just keep going into the teeth of a relentless wind.