Race Report Ironman Boulder Ironman Boulder, CO. August 3rd, 2014 Wow! What an adventure. Im going to focus on the race day even though Kristen and I arrived in Boulder 8 days before the race. We are in love with Boulder Colorado! The people, the lifestyle, the weather and the shear massive access to the outdoors. Race morning started after a typical sleep deprived night of quasi resting and intermittent naps that ended at 3 AM. We popped up, ate our standard peanut butter toast, honey and banana. Then we began prehyrdating again with OSMO Prehydration. We sipped on this and water up until the race started at 6:15 AM. After getting into race gear, applying massive amount of lube to all the keys areas and grabbing our bags we headed down to the run transition to drop off our hydration and jump on the bus. The bus takes everyone (including the families and friends) over to the boulder reservoir. Race morning of an ironman is actually pretty calm and collected because they make you drop off your bike and run gear at the respective transitions the day before. You also have access to both the bike and run transition on the morning of the race but, getting everything organized on Saturday forces you to be prepared and correct any deficiencies. Smart! After dropping off our special needs bags for the run and the bike we boarded the bus and headed out for the one-way trip to start the our journey and a journey it was! Once we arrived we headed for another biobreak (many of these prior to the race) and then off to body marking. After body marking we layered on the sun screen, jumped in the wetsuits (fortunately wetsuit legal), completed our last biobreak and told each other how proud we were of each other. It has been a 9 month journey of dedication and disciplined training. We both feel so fortunate to be able to push our bodies and minds to experience this process together. Very simply- It’s really freakn cool! We couldn’t do it without each other. At this point our paths diverged as I headed into the rolling start line up that forecasted my swim finish time between 1-1:15 hours. The rolling start was a very reasonable and tempered start to the 2.4 mile rectangular swim with ~ 500 other people around my immediate space. There would be a total of ~ 1500 athletes rolling into the water right after me. Needless to say, I wasn’t alone during my swim! This is the first time I have swam with ~500 fellow athletes at the same time. It creates both opportunities and challenges. The opportunity to draft is frequently available but you have to be experienced at using the draft properly while managing the mental aspect of someone else slapping your feet because they are drafting you. I would say I am fair at drafting but need to practice this more. I have also learned that my cadence is drastically slower than most of my peers because my arms are ~ 5-6 inches longer than the average person of my height. So I have to resist the urge to take on someone else cadence in the water because it appears as if they are sprinting the entire swim while I am jogging. I have become accustom to this and I managed it well during the race. My goal for the swim was to remain relaxed, keep my heart rate in check and try to avoid stopping for any reason. I succeeded at most of this. I did pause once because I was sighting off someone who took us quite far outside of the buoy. So I looked up, paused and turned about 20 degrees right back toward the pack. I knew it was getting too quite and calm. That is what made me look up to see where I was headed. I knew I couldn’t have found that much quite water around all those swimmers. Once I made this drastic move back toward the crowd I realized that I had made a mistake by reacting to quickly to the situation. I should have just maintained my pace and slowly transitioned back toward the swimmers. They told us we had to stay on the right side of the buoys and I was a good 6 feet to the left and I was heading within site of the kayaker who is supposed to make sure we stay inside. But, I realized after this situation that they do not penalize or DQ you for a subtle offense. You would have to really swim into the official AND disregard their instructions to return to the correct side before they would make a decision to pull you out. Anyway, I figured this cost me a couple minutes in the swim but besides that I had a very cool, calm and collected jog in the water. Stayed very calm and bumped up the speed and cadence once we got with in 500 yards of the finish. Time: 1:15. On target with my goal and expectations. Take away- DO NOT STOP AND MAKE TURNS WHILE YOU ARE SWIMMING. Think about a boat. You can’t turn a boat on a moments notice without expending a lot of fuel and throwing your momentum at the wrong angle. You can’t do this as a swimmer either. T1 was pretty straight forward. But, Boulder had a bunch of rain coming into race day so the tent ground was a muddy mess. So after laying down for the wetsuit strippers to do their job I grabbed my Bike Gear Bag from the volunteer (said thank you :-)) and headed into the grass to get my sunglasses, helmet, shoes and go! On my way out the volunteers lathered this BullFrog sunscreen paint on me (I am not sure how I feel about this sunscreen yet. It could be good but it was just hard to get on when you are wet and sweaty.) Grabbed my bike from the rack, shoes in hand and ran up the hill with my bike. T1 was a bit long. It was a good 300-400 yards uphill before you could get on your bike and ride. I put my shoes on at the start line after passing about 6 guys that were trying to run up the hill with the bike shoes on. But, by the time I got my feet into my shoes and on the bike we were even. So the real advantage for carrying your shoes (IMO) is safety. You can slip and fall trying to run in your bikes shoes. Especially, if you are running up a little wet incline like we were on Sunday. Now the 112 mile Bike ride has begun….Now Kristen and I had seen the first 40 miles of the course and we somewhat knew what the end looked like but we didn’t know what the weather would bring and we didn’t know what the middle of the course looked like. At the top St. Vrain (one of our climbs shortly after the first aid station) I was talking to a guy behind me and making a left turn onto the next road when I put my front tire into the roadside hill of soft sand. I knew immediately that I would not be able to recover from this position so I immediately unclipped my shoes and chose to stop, drop and roll down. As I pushed myself away from the bike it just laid down on the embankment and I relaxed and rolled a couple times. Popped up, did a systems check on me, the bike and my nutrition and jumped back on the bike! All that I lost was a little skin on the lateral side of my right knee and I pulled a little muscle in my arm pit area from bracing the fall. It’s odd. It actually has a bruise where the tear occurred. But, I didn’t lose a single ounce of nutrition and my bike was in top condition still! Pretty lucky! Volunteers checked on me and off I went! The middle miles 85-110 were 100 degrees, no breeze and false flats. So you are climbing at a subtle grade for more than an hour. Now, the false flats didn’t bother me too much because I road by power and cadence. I just tried to keep my normalized power between 155-160 and I ended up with a NP of 151 for the day. Very pleased with this and my time. But, I had used all six bottles of my liquid nutrition, and had some fresh water during the ride. This still wasn’t enough. The heat and dry air just pulled all the water and electrolytes out of me and I came into T2 with no fluid on my bike and needing water. One last note: I did force down a Bonk breaker. this was very very hard to choke down but I knew it needed to go down the hatch. My stomach was on the verge of turning and vomiting and I could not afford to lose all that liquid to the pavement. Bonk Breaker Saved Me! This settled my belly for the time being! Bike Time: 6:53 T2 tent was hot! and no water! I am confident they will change this for next year. It was really hot and humid in the tent and there was no water to be found. But, again, the volunteers were amazing! I asked this guy to find me some water and he came back with an ice cold bottle of water! I got bogged down putting compression socks on but in the grander scheme of things this was time well spent. I think the compression socks helped. But, I failed to replace my tracking chip after putting on the socks so I got held up in T2 exit because they had to issue me a new chip! My fault. So glad that the volunteer caught it AND that she instructed me to go back to the detection pad so that Ironman knew where I was. This was pretty seamless considering it could have been a deal breaker for tracking purposes. But, I lost a couple minutes here as well. THE RUN : Oh My. Well, my goal pace was 8:45/mile with aid station stops + Napalm nutrition and water. This didn’t last long. I could not catch my breath and I felt like I may heave at any moment . The dehydration and electrolyte loss were now setting in and it was hot. I was quickly losing my split times, my goal pace, my target run goal and I could not catch my breath. So I had to listen to my body and walk more often, drink more often and run when I caught my breath. I had no idea how dehydrated I was until I looked back at the amount of water I consumed over the marathon (water/perpetuem/coke). I must have drank 180-200 ounces or more during the run and I never went urinated. At mile 10 I finally connected with Kristen at the aid station and she was having the same problem. But I actually think she was worse off because she hadn’t been able to take in calories for over tow2 hours and she stopped drinking the infinite because it was too hot. So she learned not to fill these containers with water until she needed them. Because she can not tolerate the hot infinite. I don’t like it but I can get most of it down. So we both were having a difficult time because we now had to come to the realization that our targets needed to shift and we needed to listen to our bodies while continuing to move forward. It was a humbling experience. There was nothing we could do about the elevation but we could focus on drinking, getting some calories on board and continuing to move ahead. The strange part of this was that our bodies weren’t being challenged to the same perceived exertion that they have been during some of our toughest training days. But, the lack of electrolytes, fluid and elevation made it impossible to run the engine at the same pace. This was an odd feeling. The inability to push because I just couldn’t get a full breath. I think back now and believe this was part mental and part physical. So we had to simply slow down the revolutions per minutes and focus on the goal. Compete the ironman and here Mike Rielly say our name! So that is what we both did. I started to chug along at a 12-13 minutes/mile pace . I kept eating chips and drinking water at the aid stations. And then the most amazing happen! Those of you who know me and now those of you who don’t have extreme ADD or ADHD and make it this far into the story will also know that I have a unique approach to faith and concepts of spiritual nature so I must stay true to these beliefs and behaviors. But, what happen next drastically changed the outcome of both my race and the outcome of another kind gentleman named Camilo Lopez. I was into ~ mile 18 and I was still struggling between run/walk but there was an identical cadence right behind me for about a mile. He was close and he stuck with me regardless of what I did. I went faster (relative term :-)) he picked it up. If I slowed he slowed. It kept me moving longer than I thought I could and then he finally engaged with me. “Hey man, can I pace you?” I laughed telling him that I am barely moving but if it helps you then please do. We started jogging together and we made an agreement that we would run the flats, walk the bigger hills and walk the aid stations. We started telling each other our story and we had experienced the same day! His had gone exactly as mine had gone. It was uncanny; the likeness in our fitness and challenges. His wife was out on the course and very supportive. Julie was keeping us going on a couple occasions. She had to be tired as well. This made me think of my wife Kristen. She was out there struggling with me and I could only hope that she found the strength to continue. We finally caught up with her and she was back on track as well. Moving forward! I still continued to need brief breaks because of the elevation but they coincided with our aid station walks and a couple hills. But, now that we were running together we kept a nice pace (albeit far from the pace either of our egos thought we would end up needing to run!) But, the consistency shined throughout the last 8 miles and we finished very strong on the run. He is 30ish 30-34 and we started in the same swim group. Our swim times were 4 minutes apart. Our bike times were 4-6 minutes apart and our run times closed out the day in such a manner that we crossed the finish line at slightly different times because of a kick but our overall times were exactly the same! 12:36! We both finished the Ironman in exactly the same number of hours:minutes! That is an amazing coincidence! See we both had experienced such serious dehydration and elevation effect from staying on our goal paces during the swim and mostly bike that we had no idea what it cost us and we didn’t feel extraordinarily exhausted from the first two legs. But, the run caught up with us and then the mental game really grabbed us because we knew (separately-before we met) that our target 4-4:30 marathon was gone! So we had a tough decision to make. Dig deeper and finish as strong as our body would let us OR fold, walk, glad hand and support others! Enjoy the day differently since we weren’t going to make our target of < 12 hours. We both chose to dig deep and when we dug deep together we were very strong. It was awesome! We have the same cadence, the same stride and we stayed in step with each other until the last 3/4 mile. Then I left everything I had on the course and sprinted to the end! Could not have done what I did RUN: 5:09 without Camilo Lopez! It was the most unique experience I have ever had in triathlon and it is also the absolute reason that I am in love with this sport. Ironman is a test of will and mental strength along with strategic training and planning and even when you prepare (as both Camilo and I did for 9 months with coaches) there are things outside of our control. If I had decided to take a different direction because of my ego or Camilo had done the same we wouldn’t have met. We wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we were able to accomplish together. Come to find out Camilo and I have several other personal things in common and they live a stones throw from Kristen’s old place in the DC area. Needless to say we are going to stay in contact and get together sometime in the near future. But, it was a very rare moment of pure symbiosis. There wasn’t an upper hand. I didn’t need him more than he needed me and he didn’t need me more than I needed him. We balanced the perverbial scale of shared motivation that drove us to turn what we thought was a lost cause into a huge win! That is the essence of this endurance community! For you ADD and ADHD fans: Total time: 12:36. Now to rest and prepare for Chattanooga on Sept. 28th! Trent Coach Truth and Triumph Fitness
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 21:57:50 +0000
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