I'm going to skip straight to race morning:
Three alarms beeping at 3:50a.m.? Must be race morning.
Mary and I hop out of bed eager to get this thing on the road. I make my normal oatmeal and bagel breakfast, chase it with some h2o, and grab my morning clothes bag containing my swim gear and head out the door for transition.
Throw some water into my bottles on my bike, borrow a pump and top of my tires, and then head to Mary and her bike position. As we are starting to get colder we decide to dawn the wetsuits a bit earlier than normal so as to keep the heat in. We drop our bags in their spot and head off to the lake to get our positions and watch the pro field take off. The cannon blasts for the first time at 6:45am and the pros are off. We now have 15 minutes before our turn, and we are just excited to hear our cannon, and before you know it BOOM!!!
THE SWIM:
Just seconds before the cannon goes off I tell Mary to get in front of me, so that I could protect her for at least a few feet from getting pounded by some of the big guys at the front. My plan was to try to stay behind her as far as possible, well that last about 5 seconds and then I got REALLY rough. As Mary said we ended up being in a boxing match not a swim. It was probably the most beat up I have ever gotten in an Ironman start. After about 200 or so meters of this I decide to just go inside the buoys to try and find some open water, and this help some, when we hit the turn around boat/buoy, I was glad to be heading back towards land, but two things instantly hit me. One being some guys foot kicking me in the face and on my fixed collar bone, it really dazed me and my clavicle starting hurting instantly and I am thinking oh shit, I hope it didn't break again, but i have no choice but to keep going to shore. The second thing that hit me was a BONK, yep, I screwed up and didn't eat something 30 minutes to the swim start and I got that low sugar and energy feeling. Not good when you still have over 1800 meters of boxing/swimming left until you reach solid ground and food. I started wondering if this was going to be my worst swim ever, as nothing seemed to go as planned. When I finally reached the spot where I could stand I did, now normally I would keep swimming because it is faster to swim until your hand hits the bottom, but because i was bonking I was just happy to stand up and walk. As I looked at my watch it said 1:02;??, I was totally surprised, and once I exited the water and hit the timing mat it was 1:03:30. I will take that!! Not my fastest, not my slowest. on to T1 change tent. It was slower than normal because my bike was in the farthest back corner that your could be from the bike exit, and i had to pee, and figured I might as well go before getting on the bike for 112 miles.
THE BIKE:
Ok, finally off on the bike. Mary and I had a race plan, and I was going to stick to it. Basically go out one gear easier than I thought I could handle the first 40K until we hit the first of the big climbs (Richter Pass), and my plan worked to a tee, I spun up to the top, never standing up even once and just using patience, it was going to be a long day, and we still had the biggest climb over 100K away still. I bombed the descents, I was going to fast to actually look, but my bike computer said that at some point during the day I hit 76 mph!!! That could be wrong, because I was just pushing so hard with my head almost completely buried out of the wind i never really looked at my speed. The middle part off the bike was mostly rolling hills into a steady head wind.
Finally at mile 76 I was approaching the biggest climb of the day and ready to pull out the big guns and hammer it and everyone on it, and so it went. Just as I started the climb the skies opened up, the rain and hail started and the temps dropped big time. At this point though I am climbing and working hard as I am dropping people left and right. God this feels great, just a few more miles of climbing and then I get a nearly 40K descent straight into town and T2. I do a little calculation as I approach the crest of the mountain and I am clearly on pace to go about 5:15-5:19 on the bike and I am feeling very confident. so here we go baby, the best part of the entire race course straight down a mountain at the end of the bike leg. As I start descending all of a sudden i can not keep my bike on the road, I figure it is because I am going so fast and into a wind that I would just sit up a minute and get under control. Then I try again, and almost go over the edge of the road out of control, Now It dawns on me that I am shivering uncontrollably and I am not able to keep the bike on the road no matter what I did. No it is getting really scary, I sit up and hold onto my brake levers as hard as I can, but that still only slowed me to 16mph with wet carbon brake pads and I still could not stop shaking. I have several guys come by me and tell me I should pull over and warm up, but i know that this will not help, how will I warm up out here in the rain? It will just make this last longer. One super nice guy actually stops and rides next to me trying to talk me down. He tells me I look really bad and should consider stopping, he even volunteers to stay with me all the way back to town, but I told him to just go, I didn't want to screw up his day. It wasn't his fault that I lost 10lbs gearing up for this race and didn't have enough body fat to keep me from freezing! At this point I am in the worst place I have ever been in an Ironman, I have never been so close to DNF ever. It took all my will and inner voices to get me down that mountain. When I came into T2 finally after 16mph down hill for over an hour, I was shivering so bad that the medic staff grab me and tried to take me to their little tent, i had to fight with them to not make me go in there. They walked me to the change tent and I could not use my hands to change my gear, so they had to do it for me. They tell me it will take at least 25 minutes for them to warm me up seeing that I am hypothermic. I look at them and say no way, I am gone, and off I went doing something like running.
THE RUN:
So the medic runs through T2 with me saying I should come to his tent, but I keep running and out onto the road I go. Right away I realize two things, A-I can't feel my feet, B-My back is extremely tight. Both= not good! I have no sense of my pace at all, but figured just keep running and you will warm up at a minimum. We do the little mile out and back and before I know it I am on main st. and passed mile 2, and just focusing on getting this thing done. I realize at this point that me finish won't be the time that I had hoped for, but this was a training race anyway for IMAZ, so get some training in! I would say the first 6-7 miles went by pretty fast and I actually found myself running through the field, I had to make myself stay in control and have patience, just run the pace you trained for (7:30's). As I clicked off the mile for the first half of the marathon I was consistently hitting 7-7:25 pace, hell accidentally threw in a couple sub 7 miles. All was going as well as possible until about mile 14 when I started to bonk, I said to myself instantly OH SHIT! I forgot to eat. Damn it! See what happened was I was to cold to take in nutrition on the last hour+ of the bike, and because I was shivering so bad I actually used a lot of energy and calories up, then once I got off the bike I was so cold I couldn't even think about anything but getting warmed up. So when I hit mile 14 it had been about 3hrs since I last took in calories, and I should be taking them in every hour. So in my haste to fix this I started taking in gels, cola, soup, oranges, whatever they had. Well that was the end. Now by mile 16 my stomach stopped absorbing anything and I became bloated and nausea set it along with the stomach cramps. I started the run/walk think for the next several miles thinking that maybe my gut would clear and I would feel good again. Nope, not working at all. Finally I made it to mile 22 and though to myself: "ok, four stupid miles, you can do this", just about that time the cramps and bloating stepped up their games and it go even worse then before. Mile 22-23 was a 17minute mile. Ouch!!!! Between sitting, laying, bending over, walking, and even a couple feet of running, some how I made it to the 23mile marker. On a side note, the funniest thing happened along this mile, at one point and old lady sitting in a lawn chair yells over to me "would you like some company?, I will walk with you as far as you need me to". I of course said no, but thank you! so freakin awesome!!
Anyway, I hit that 23 mile marker and made a promise to myself that NO matter what I was running this bitch to the finish line. I had to talk myself through each and every step of that last 3.2 miles, but I got it done, and no walking. I was very much done when I hit the finish line as my finish line photo shows. i then spent the next hour laying on the ground wrapped in Mylar blankets trying to warm up and feel better. Thank you sooooooo much to Erika and Chris Mcclurg for taking such good care of me!!!
FINISH TIME: 10:44:37
The take away from this day was that I felt physically very strong! I am feeling very confident that IMAZ is going to be a successful day. I already have some promises of bikini clad hotties on the run course to keep me motivated!!!!
