Whew. I did indeed finish my hardest week, there in Colorado. I even lost a couple of planned workouts, a swim and weights, when I discovered at the last moment that my plane ARRIVED in Seattle at 7:38, rather than LEFT Aspen at that time. Even so, I got in 16 hours of biking, over five hours of running, 2 and a half of swimming (counting an early Monday morning swim to make up for the one I lost on Sunday), for 24.4 hours of work, more than I’ve ever done in a multisport week, especially one at that level of intensity.
So I entered my recovery week with zero enthusiasm for doing anything, and it showed. I started to get the usual recovery aches and pains in my legs and shoulders Tues-Fri. It’s funny, when the body recognizes that it is in shut down mode, it starts to repair stuff, and let’s you know with “neuralgia” – the nerves firing to say “Hey, there’s repair work going on here, do not interrupt.”
Unfortunately, I had planned a race for last Saturday, the Grand Columbian Half Iron. Now, doing a half iron three weeks before an Ironman is NOT recommended; something about too little time to allow both a good post race recovery and a proper taper/peak before the big race. I felt mentally eager to race, but I think my body was still trying to right itself after the Roaring Fork Epic Camp.
TGC is the most isolated race I know. It’s centered around the Grand Coulee area. This is wheat farming country, a dry, sere plateau cut through by deep dry gorges (coulees) left over from various ice age floods of the Columbia River. At one particularly corrugated spot, we built the Grand Coulee Dam, which flooded the river and provides both power and water for the interior desert of Washington State. The dam’s electricity, besides lighting homes across the Northwest and into California, also lifts massive amounts of water 300 feet uphill to fill Banks Lake, in the Grand Coulee. Thirty miles long, over a mile wide, it’s basically a giant reservoir which irrigates vast areas of the lower desert to the south.
Up on the plateau, the winds blow constantly, without trees or hills to block passage. And without people, the roads are pretty uncompromising, too. No cuts through hills, just a relentless up and down for the whole race, 3800 vertical feet of climbing in the 56 miles. This compares to about 4900’ in Coeur d’Alene, and 5000’ in Hawaii for 112 miles. And these hills are sharp little suckers. The whole course is punctuated by the 14% grade 1000’ up to the plateau at the start, and back down again at the end, with serious cross winds tempering the descent.
I pretty much decided I would NOT race this race, at least not at half ironman pace. I did pop the swim, finishing in a shade under 32 minutes, my fastest 1900 meters ever. I tried to keep my bike pace steady at what I thought would be Ironman pace. A flat tire at the top of the initial Almira grade ate into that patience, but I stuck with it gamely nonetheless.
I suspect the tube popped due to the change in air pressure and temperature. Down at 1600’, 49F, I pumped up the tire to 110 psi. Then, we biked up in the first five miles to 2700’, into a warming sun. This expanded the tube, into one of the little dimples in the rim tape covering the holes where the spokes are. The tube managed to swell into a spoke end, and I got snake bit. Lost 7 minutes, but not my composure. What irked me about this is I’ve done this race three times. Won the first one, and got a flat in about the same spot the last two. I think I’ve learned my lesson now.
Little drops of rain occasionally hit my aero helmet, which is admittedly quite a big target. It’s a solid hollow shell, with no real wind vents, and the effect was like being inside a piano while it is being tuned. I managed to not get too bored through the 3 + hour ride, and hit the run with s bit of optimism.
As I trudged through the course, new this year, I met numerous little hills. Previous incarnations of the run had been pancake flat, a gravel path alongside the Columbia below the dam. So I determined to run up each hill, pretending these were the hills out of town, and along the Queen K, and finally out of the Energy Lab, in Kona. My race there in 06 was a good marathon, my fastest to that point, but I succumbed to walking the hills between miles 9 and 15, and again walked a little too long in each aid station in the last six miles. THAT WILL NOT HAPPEN THIS YEAR.
I was hitting 8:45 +/- miles through the first 8, then seemed to decide to slow it down, and dropped out of any race mode, just content to cool down to the finish towards the last couple of miles. I finished with my SLOWEST half iron time ever, and have determined to give this distance a bit more respect in the future, or else just give it up, and do Olympics and full irons. Most people like this distance as a good endurance test. I find it hard to split the difference between the speed and intensity of the shorter Olympic distance, and the steady pace of the Ironman.
So I was second out of five in my age group, and 52/185 overall. Not my best outing, but sitting here two days later, after having ridden ANOTHER 56 miles in about the same time today, followed by a 40 minute run at about the same pace, I think I recovered well enough, and will get some training benefit from it. But I don’t know if it was worth the 4-5 hour drive each way. I do like racing in Central/Eastern Washington, though. The weather’s good, the air is dry, the hills are serious, and the rain stays on the other side of the mountains.
With less than 20 days to go until the Ironman World Championships in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, I am going to try and get into a daily entry mode, and will start adding pictures once I get there this Friday. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about a couple of secret end-of-training cycle things I do, which have seemed to help since I started doing them: hypoxication, and phosphate loading.