4 years of work

Four years after losing the weight and I'm still living the dream.  Here's the proof: 

Ironman Texas 2013 Report

 

Woke up at 4:15, ate breakfast(two packets of oatmeal), mixed bottles, grabbed bags and headed to transition.  Made a few adjustments to gear bags but forgot to bring a bottle of water to fill my aero bottle.  It was the only mistake I made in setting up race morning, and easily fixed.  Made the mile walk to the swim start, dropped off special needs bags, and got in line for the port-a-potty.  After about 15 minutes I could tell I wouldn’t get through the  line before the swim start.  My anxiety level began to rise at this point.  The bowels wanted to move pretty bad, and I didn’t think I could make it through the swim.  Contemplated swimming and stopping if needed to float one, but settled on finding a spot in the park.  We were in the Woodlands after all and there were plenty of trees and leaves.   Found a private spot and did my business, but now I was without socks.  No more worries, I was ready to race and feeling good.

 

I went into the water fairly early, and found a kayak to hang onto.  Waited until the pros started, then swam up to the start line near the middle.  I ended up about 4 feet back from the front when the cannon fired.  It was a great place to be for the start.  Kept my stroke tight, and did my best to swim clean without to much contact.  That was impossible though, and I spent a lot of energy recovering from having my legs pushed down.  My lower back was tight when I woke up, and I began to feel it more as we swam.  I was concerned it would be an issue all day, but after finishing the swim I soon forgot about it.  My hip that had been hurting the couple of weeks leading up to the race was also reminding me it was there, and I was concerned about it too, but it also settled down in T1.  Nothing out of the ordinary on the swim, but competing for space with other swimmers lasted pretty much the whole swim.  I took one good hit to the goggles at the beginning of the swim, one good kick to the gut in the middle of the swim, and a hard kick to the nose in the channel.  I expected the jostling, I just didn’t expect it to last the entire swim. 

 

When I exited the swim at T1, I was tight and had some trouble making my way to the tent.  My back was still tight, and my calves had tightened up.  I’m guessing it was from all the work to keep my kick high in the water as my feet kept getting knocked down.

 

I made it through T1 a few minutes faster than planned, got slathered up with sun screen, got my own bike and got to the mount line.  There I just focused on getting on the bike without falling and then got going at a comfortable pace.  We had the wind to our back and the ride was feeling easy.  I started checking heart rate and it was much higher than my target of 120.  It took a little while to finally find the pace that got it down to 120, but at that point I felt like I was crawling.  I was getting frustrated by my speed.  The pace was much, much slower than I wanted to go. After 20 miles of riding slow enough to keep my heart rate at target, I was starting to get discouraged.  I was afraid that to keep to my plan, I was going to end up with a much longer bike split than I had anticipated, but I kept a close watch on my HR anyway and stuck with the pre-race plan, hoping that I would be able to make up any time I lost on the bike when I got on the run.  Many, many people were passing me, but this didn’t really bother me.  I expected to be able to overtake lots of them when I got off the bike with fresh legs for the run.

 

The special needs station through me for a little loop.  I expected a stop like at Redman with an aid station/special needs stop combo.  Here all they had was the special needs bags, so I had to get my nutrition to remix my bottles and jam my pockets full for a mile ride to the aid station.  Got to the aid station and took a few minutes of the bike to mix bottles and use the port-a-potty.  I was able to pee, but it was dark and not much there.  I got back on the bike and munched down on my Uncrustable. 

 

We had the head winds now on the way back to town.  It was nearly impossible for me to keep my HR at 120 climbing the hills in the head wind, so I focused on those climbs at keeping it below 135.  I had some really slow climbs.  Like really slow.  But by this point I was beginning to think more about the run and had come to accept the pace I was riding.  For most of the ride back I had the normal bad attitude I get when riding mile after mile into head winds, but when we got close to town and started turning out of the wind, my outlook improved greatly.  Soon after we started coming up on larger crowds of people and that helped my attitude as well.  6 hours and 51 minutes on the bike is an eternity.  I’d love to take 30 minutes off the ride next time. 

 

I saw so many people on the side of the road laying or sitting next to their bikes looking defeated.  I kept thinking how all of the people had trained as hard or harder than me and that it could easily be me in their place if I neglected nutrition or pace, and maybe even if I stayed on top of my race.

 

Dismounted without a scene, and got into the tent.  T2 was a couple of minutes longer than I had hoped for, but I guess that is the price of changing clothes.  Out on the run and on to aid station 1.  The plan was to run 5 minutes and walk 1 minute for the first couple of miles and then judge how to proceed with the run.  It was so stinking hot on that first 9 mile loop (who runs marathons when it’s 92 degrees?) that I pretty much stayed with the 5/1 plan.  At one point I tried to make an entire run from one aid station to the next (about a mile) but it was too long and I went back to 5/1.  The timing wasn’t perfect for me to make it from aid station to aid station, so at some point I switched to running a half mile, no matter what the time was, walking a minute, then running the rest of the way to the aid station.  I kept this up pretty well until the last 3 miles.

 

There was an extraordinary amount of energy on the run course.  People cheering, the music, people dancing; the spectators were the most enthusiastic I’ve seen.  Their stamina was impressive, showing as much enthusiasm when I was on my third loop as when I was on my first.  And BAM! people kept popping up everywhere.  On bikes, at random aid stations, and of course the amazing BAM! tent.  And I had the pleasure of seeing Kathleen on the course, and running with Tom Johnson for a while.  Other notables who gave encouragement were Matt Chauvin, James Yarzy, and Jeff Oakley.

 

There were so many people dropping on the run.  It seemed like at every aide station there was someone laying down on a pallet with an IV.  Medics were constantly running to athletes in distress.  Lots of runners were either puking, or taking about how they had puked at mile so and so.

 

The third loop of the run course was a time I hope to never forget.  I get goose bumps even now thinking about it.   I was starting to get slightly loopy and my thinking wasn’t quite straight.  I wasn’t disoriented, but I was beginning to lose track of what parts of the course I had already run, and my math skills were falling off.  I didn’t let myself check what time it was and start calculating my finish time until the last loop.  Somehow, I was sure that I was working for a 15 hour finish.  As dumb as it sounds, this was really starting to depress me.  Here I was, pretty sure I was at a point where I was at least going to be able to finish Ironman, and I was getting depressed that I wasn’t going to make the 13.5 to 14 hour finish I thought I should have been able to get.  I started to get to a low point and wonder why I kept pushing myself to run when I wasn’t going to make my goal time.  What was the difference between fishing in 15:00:00 or 15:10:00?  It was still going to have that 15 in front of it.  There were so many people who were done with running and just walking the last loop to the finish line.  I could just blend in with them and enjoy the walk back in.  I still kept up the .5 mile run and 1 minute walk, but it was getting harder each time to make myself start running again. 

 

At some point on the last loop I did the math to calculate my finish time again, and realized I was actually going to be close to a 14 hour finish, not a 15 hour.  I’m normally pretty good at figuring paces, speeds, and times, but I was having a hard time getting my mind to work out the problem.  It was getting pretty hard to focus my mind on the problem.  The best I could tell was that I would be close to 14 hours if I could keep a 11:30 mile average to the finish.

 

So the last 3 miles I ran the most amazing 3 miles of my life.  They were by no means the fastest 3 miles, but I’ve never put more effort into running a 5k like I did those last 30 minutes.  My goal for those last miles was to run from aide station to aide station, and only walk long enough to drink a couple cups of water.  I could tell I was going to finish shortly before 9:00 on my Garmin, but I was scared that the Ironman clock might be faster that the Garmin clock.  I would have been heart broken to finish at 8:59 on my watch only to have the official time be 9:01.  So I pushed so hard not to have a faster finish time, but just to give myself some wiggle room.

 

I never went to look at the finish line before the race, so I didn’t know what to expect when I got there.  I had heard it was uphill, so when the last loop veered off and up a hill, I thought that was it.  I put whatever kick I had remaining in me on, and raced up that hill, only to find out we had to run downhill in a chute then u-turn and go back up another hill.  I had pushed so hard to get to where I was, my heart dropped when I saw this.  I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to run up that second hill and was beginning to fear I was going to end up walking across the finish line.  But somewhere in me there was just a little heart, and a little energy left to keep me running back up the hill and onto the finish line.  By this point I was beginning to get more disoriented.  And that bright light in my face didn’t help at all.  I had some kind of plan for how I would cross the finish line to get a good picture, but I couldn’t remember what it was.  My thoughts were coming slow, and I couldn’t think of anything special to do, so I ended up just running across with no victory sign or fist pump.  Most boring Ironman finisher pic ever.

 

Lillian was there to catch me at the finish line(ironically she was also the person to check me in 2 days earlier), and it’s a good thing because I was completely lost.  They do that post race pic immediately after the finish line, and still I couldn’t think clearly.  I wanted some grand pose, but nothing would come to mind.  All I could remember was Jeff Ryder holding up 3 fingers in his photo after his third Ironman, so I finally just held up one finger.  That seems a lot more interesting if you’ve done more than one Ironman, pretty lame if you’ve only done one.

 

Off to sit down and drink some chocolate milk.  Once my HR slowed down, I started to get dizzy from my blood pressure dropping.  I was afraid I was going to pass out while I was sitting in the chair with my family, but I didn’t want to tell anyone and look like a sissy.  Luckily, I recovered after about 10 minutes and was able to save face.