Peterborough Half Ironman

Niki, here is the report for you!

So after doing triathlons for 6 years, I finally decided to start ramping up for the possibility of one day doing an Ironman. For years, I put off doing an Olympic triathlon because I didn't want to take longer than 3 hours to do, I wouldn't let myself start training for that distance until my sprint race times came down. I trained for my first oly last summer and would have just squeaked by under 3 hours, but the swim was cancelled and I freaked out at the prospect of an Olympic duathlon. After fighting a weird stomach problem for several months (ended up being acid reflux), my run training was not good.

Since then, I have worked back on the running and have lost 20 pounds. Both of which have made me faster, 2 weeks ago, I did my first oly (on a long bike course) and got 2:57 (based on bike pace = 2:50 for a true oly. I have also had this weird though in my head that I didn't want to do a half Ironman unless I could do it under 7 hours. That may seem like a lot of time to some, but I've never been an exceptional cyclist. I enjoy it, I'm just not all that fast.

So the days leading up to the race on Sunday weren't really ideal. Well, the day before mostly. My dad got married an hour away from the race site on Saturday so we had to be there early on Sunday to register the day of the race. Not smart, but I wasn't going to miss my dad's wedding, so such is life. The other downside of my dad's wedding was that it was hard to leave the reception. I wanted to leave around 10 and it was close to 11:30 by the time we left. What should have been a 1 hour drive turned to 1.5 hours, due to 4 stops on the side of the road for my boyfriend to throw up. Nice. Silly boy was very hungover yesterday. So these things combined meant that my legs were tired and sore and I was tired from 4.5 hours sleep.

I wasn't really in the mood to race Sunday morning. Was a little down that I hadn't stayed for the rest of the wedding and wouldn't be able to visit more with my family on Sunday, but I guess it was my decision, and it is done. We got to the race site, water was like glass which was a good omen, and the wind wasn't too bad, but would pick up during the day along with the temperatures.

Swim 38:15, 6/13 AG, 187/580 OA, 1:55/100m
I was originally hoping and thinking I could do 35:xx for the swim, but I guess that didn't happen. I haven't been swimming nearly enough for that to be possible. There was also a 1 minute run into transition and the timing mats, so I likely lost some time there too.

Overall the swim wasn't bad. It was my second mass start swim with almost 200 more swimmers, but it went much much better. Probably a combination of me being prepared for what is was going to be like, and other swimmers knowing what to do. I'm guessing close to half of the racers have done an IM and we were much more spread out across the beach. There were a LOT of M-dot tattoos yesterday!

Overall the swim was pretty uneventful. It was two loops, so running into the water the second time, I really didn't feel much like starting swimming again, and waded in very deep before finally starting to swim again . On the last leg of the swim, I remember thinking to myself "hey! I'm almost done the swim of my first half Ironman" but I didn't let myself get too excited about that since the swim is always my strong suit .

Bike 3:17:33, 10/13 AG, 471/580 OA, 27.3 km/hour

The bike. Me and my bike have a love/hate relationship. I love riding. I find it relaxing and just plain fun. That said. I seem to not be able to do well on the bike section compared to other riders. I don't know why my bike splits are usually so slow but there it is. So given my normally abissmal bike performances, I set myself an ambitious goal of being off the bike in 3:30 which would be 25.8 km/hr. To be honest, I was a little scared that I would miss the bike cutoff and not be allowed to start the run. No need to worry though, but I ROCKED out there

As per my usual triathlon carreer. The first 20 km of the bike were spent with the crappy swimmers speeding by me which to be honest is a little demoralizing. Why can't the swim be longer. Like have a triathlon that is not so heavily weighted on the bike. Say something where the average time for each of the events would be 1 hour. Then I could place better . After about 20 K or so though, the passing became less frequent. I even passed one girl who tried passing me. Looking at the results, she ended up getting off the bike 12 minutes later than I did. I was keeping up a good clip too on a challenging course. Lots of hills in this are. Not mountainous long hills where you are climbing for kilometres at a time, but definitely hilly with no real flat sections. I reached the turnaround with an average speed of more than 28.5 km/hour. Holy crap! That is very fast for me given the distance that I rode. And then within km of the turnaround bam! It hits me! Wind. Nice. Now I know why I had such a speedy time on the bike. The wind wasn't horribly strong, but it was a constant presence during most of the second half of the bike. At least 30 km, were a constant head wind. I learned on valuable life lesson during those 30 km: although I hate headwinds and they slow me down, they slow down others more I probably passed about 20 people during the headwind period, most of which passed me earlier.

There was also a tonne of drafting in the second half of the bike course. I would be slogging up a hard hill with a headwind about to pass another rider, check my shoulder to make sure that there wasn't a rider I was going to cutoff and sure enough there would be some jerk sitting inches off my wheel. I probably saw this about 10 times, but quite a few times it was the same two riders. I wanted to take down their numbers and report it to the OAT officials, but I'm not sure they could do anything. I realize it doesn't slow you down any, but it isn't really fair if half the people draft. Makes for an uneven playing field.

On hydration, my stupid thing for my areo bottle that keeps the liquid from splashing out fell out again. 2km into the bike course. Crap. On the way back, I noticed several of them lying on the ground in the spot where mine flew out. I had to drink the contents really quickly since it was splashing all over me. Also make the container pointless for the rest of the race. I am pretty bad about remembering to drink on the bike, and this water bottle always makes be drink since the straw is at normal mouth level. Meant that I didn't end up drinking nearly enough for the heat on the bike course.

One last interesting note: I got passed by a chick with 8 km to go. She was Riding a P3. I'm sorry, but if you are going to buy a $5000 Tri bike, I would think that you would want to be a fantastic bike rider. But to be passing me with 8 km left of a 90K bike? I'm sure her average speed at the most might have been 28.5 km/hr. Most people would be able to pull that off on that bike. Rant over.

Run (if you can call it that ) 2:31:13, 12/13 AG, 455/580 OA, 7:10 min/km.

Coming off the bike I was in great shape. Well, kind of, I was out of it a bit, but I was running with around 4 hours elapsed time. My recent run times in triathlons have been fantastic, and I have had two half marathon PRs this year. I thought, Great, now for the fun. Ha. Yeah, not funny or fun.

For the first 7 km I was holding my own pretty well, not passing a lot of people, but not getting passed either (pace was about 6 minutes/km). Was keeping up a pretty good clip, and was happy with how I was doing. That was until I started overheating. Yes. Overheating with 14 km left to go isn't a good thing. I was probably also dehydrated from the bike, but I during the run, I was hydrating well, drinking water and Gatorade (I was carrying Gatorade with me) and took salt tabs, but I think the damage was already done. Soon holding the pace wasn't working and I had to slow down a lot.

They changed the course so that it was a two loop course this year. We had to run by the finish 3 times before we actually got there and it was really demoralizing. Not fun at all. On the second loop I really slowed down a lot. I walked the uphills (there were three good sized hills on the run course that were all back to back, but after the hills were over on the second loop, I needed to take another couple of walk breaks because I was overheating. I was generally able to keep up my spirits and knew I was going to finish well inside my 7 hour goal time even if I had to crawl across the finish. So I was happy about that, but my body was just falling apart. I couldn't tell you what it was really, nothing hurt terribly bad, my calf was cramping a bit in the last 1 km but there was no one thing bad, I just was tired and wanted to sit down for a bit.

After the slowest 21 km of my life (including long runs!) I finished the race in 6:32:08 13/13 AG, 436/580 OA.

Now, this is interesting, I thought this morning. Remember several hundred words ago when I told you about this girl who tried passing me on the. She was in my AG and I know for certain that she didn't pass me again during the race. I'm thinking that she may have only run one loop of the race course, but since I don't know her name, I can't verify this. Mind, you, I don't really care because I beat my goal time by 28 minutes .

So that is that. When I finished my friends asked how I felt, my response was "Like I don't want to do that again". But sure enough, here I am, a day later thinking about IMFL 2009. But for now, it is all about rest and relaxation. I've decided to switch to the half marathon at the race I'm signed up for in November (it was supposed to be a full), and for the next year, I'm going to focus on losing the rest of the weigh I want to drop and shorter race distances. Sprint Tris, and 5K-half marathon races.