Ironman Maryland 2016

After this race, I’ve got a new coach. No, I’m not replacing EN, but if Rich and/or Patrick aren’t around, I’ve got a great substitute – my wife, Cheryl. She completely turned my race around in the middle of the run.

The day started with improving weather. Of course, all things are relative. The Eastern Shore had been pounded with multiple storms the preceding three days. On the totally flat countryside, the rain had little choice but to turn the marshes completely boggy, over-running part of the bike course, shortening it to somewhere around 102 miles. Winds had been whipping down the Choptank at 10-20 mph, with gusts as high as thirty, stirring up white caps, and reversing the expected current flow. Race morning was dry, though cloudy, air temp at 67F and the water at 71. To my eye, the surface was fairly smooth – less than six inches of chop, no whitewater visible.

Walking into transition at 5:45 AM, we slogged through about three inches of water, apparently from a coastal tidal surge. The race director was telling everyone who entered, “Yeah, you’re getting a little wet now, but I promise it’ll all be gone with the tide by the time you go out on the bike.”

2000 expectant triathletes lined up behind the blue arch, filling the space between the seeding signs. I aimed for the middle of “1:10-1:20”, getting there about two minutes before the 6:45 start. Immediately, I heard a crackling from the PA, and someone said, “OK, here it comes.”

“The conditions are just not favorable at this time. We will be delaying the start until 7:15. We’re sorry, but athlete safety is paramount…” I strolled over to the water’s edge, and stared out across the river. Bear in mind, this is no ordinary river. It’s miles wide at this point, a tidal estuary spilling into Chesapeake Bay. The wind flowed in from the East, at about 7-8 mph. Flags whipped at shoreline, but the kayaks and SUPers easily rowed out to the race course. I warmed my hands on a generator, and shared my confusion with the other racers huddled there. We agreed that we’d raced in worse – Lakes Coeur d’Alene and Tahoe immediately came to mind – but that with the persistence of swim leg deaths over the years, WTC really had no choice but to place the safety of the “bottom ten per cent” over the competitive desires of the “upper ten percent”.

7:15 came and went, and with it the inevitable swim cancellation. I proceeded into my slowest T1 ever. With a relatively low number (442), I had an hour between stand down and roll out. Racked next to my toughest competitor, Pat Peppler, I had an opportunity for a little trash talk. At our age, that consists of polite support and commiseration, apparently. I went over how I might alter my ride, based on no swim and 10 miles less to bike. I decided to place more emphasis on heart rate, aiming to keep it in the low teens until the last half hour, then let it ride up towards 120. The run would then proceed in the upper teens.

Out on the bike course, that’s exactly where I ended up. Overall average, moving, and pedaling HR was 112. My 20 minute intervals were all either 111, 112, or 113. VI on this totally flat course was 136/132, or 1.03, which strikes me as pretty poor, considering there were literally no descents of greater than 1′ or 0.5o % grade.

For nutrition/hydration, my total fluid intake was 60 oz of Infinit over the 5:10 ride. Even that minimal 12 oz/hour had me pee’ing sometimes every ten minutes between hours 1.5 and 3.5. Added to those 800 calories were 400 from Clif Bars, and 300 from EFS gel, a total of 1500 or 300 per hour. Side note, of some import to me – this was the first time, ever, racing or training, that I had been able to pee while riding. I think the several rain showers we had over the course of the ride helped a bit? Old dogs can still learn new tricks, I guess.

I kept expecting Pat to overtake me, as he had a history of faster bike splits than me. He never showed up, and when I returned to the rack, his bike wasn’t there, He still hadn’t shown up when I ran by 5 minutes later, so I said, “Hmmm,” to myself, and lit out on the run. I started clicking over the miles at 10:15-10:45, and felt pretty good through the first 10 miles, especially considering the dew point and temperature were both peaking at 80.

At that point, in downtown Cambridge, with the finish line on my right (I had a couple more loops before I could get there), and a turn-around about a mile ahead, I noticed runners splashing through a giant puddle. Now, I should point out that I try assiduously to keep my feet dry during a run, hoping to avoid blisters and trench foot . This made me angry  for a few moments, but there was nothing for it but to wade through. Even the sidewalks, six inches above the road surface, offered no respite. I did a high-stepping run for about two minutes, coming out the other side. Ten minutes later, of course, I had to slog back through it after the downtown turnaround. I didn’t quite register at the time, that, with two more lakes forming, there would be ELEVEN total trips through this “coastal flooding”. Some of it was literally flooding direct from the Bay/River; others were due to backed-up storm drains. After running the first two times, I realised that letting myself walk a bit in the deeper parts was really not much slower, and gave me an excuse to look forward to slowing down momentarily.

After the start of the second loop, just after mile 12, a new puddle had formed at the exit from transition. As I tried to start running out of that morass, I began to mentally fall apart. I was ready to walk. I was feeling gone in my head, almost dizzy. Faint-hearted and faint-headed at the same time. Cheryl appeared on my right. I said, “I don’t know, I don’t feel so good. I’m not sure about this.” Mind you, I wasn’t slowing down, and I was well-nourished and well-hydrated. I had been taking diluted GE at each aid station, walking from taking the cup to finishing it, and actually pee’d once about mile 8. Just: something didn’t feel right in my head.

She took one look at me (she’s seen me in maybe 25 IM runs, so she may have a better read on how I’m doing that I would), and said, over and over, “Eat something. You’ve got this. You need to eat something. You can do this.” She’s never given me advice before, and she said it so assertively. I didn’t have any other plan, so as an aid station was coming up. I walked into it, found a cookie and cup of Pepsi, and slowly went to work. That mile was 13:00, and my HR dropped from the high teens to low 100s, but my pace picked up along with my HR over the next 20 minutes, while I took on board another cookie and cup of cola. My mood and attitude improved, and were buoyed by seeing other EN supporters – Scott Dinhofer, Danielle Santucci – along the way. I realised that while I was quite capable of letting myself down in a race, I was incapable of facing them if I stopped running, not after all the biking and running we’d done together earlier in the year.

With the puddles getting longer and deeper, I couldn’t did get my mile times back into the low 10’s, but I did keep running, and felt stronger as the afternoon went on. I never did delve into my trove of One Thing mantras, managing to power the run without them.

Overall, this was the most satisfying IM I’ve had since 2013. I felt the 3000 miles I’d biked, and the 500 miles I’d run since early May had been honored, and I had let neither the bizarre conditions, nor my mysterious mid-run breakdown torpedo a successful race. As I tell others, it’s always a success in an Ironman when you run the whole way. Keeping my bike steady, 0.5 mph faster than I’d planned, and keeping my run (at least outside of the lakes) in the 10s added to that feeling of accomplishment. Looking back at my race plan, my goals had been: “I have the primary goal of being satisfied with my performance at the end of the day, and the secondary goal of meeting my process targets.” And: “I have to demonstrate to myself that I am willing to actually race to the limits of my capabilities, whatever they may be at this time and at this age.” It’s the rare race when I feel completely satisfied at the end; out of more than 100, I can count them on the fingers of one hand. This is one of those. Only one was a win (IM CDA ’09); the others were 6th (Capitol City HM ’03), 4th (IM Moo ’05), & 6th (IM AZ 2013). In Maryland, I ended up 4th in my AG on the day, but first in my own accounting.