Ironman 70.3 Cancun 2007

At the swim practice session on Saturday was the only moment when I doubted myself. This was my first ever ocean swim in a race, and honestly, I can’t remember ever having gotten much farther out in the ocean than 50m from the beach. So, I was intimidated. I should be intimidated. Water kills you if you breathe it. But, I conveniently remind myself that water also allows you to float and move around relatively freely. If the race started out in giant vats of poison oil or boiling quicksand, there would be more reason to fret. With such helpful logic in mind, I head off to the swim practice with the intention of swimming out to the first buoy, having a nice look at the second one, and heading home for some coffee and oatmeal.

Although it had started raining a few hours earlier, I expected the clouds to blow off and leave me with a nice reason to coat myself with a heavy layer of 60 spf sun-block. The sun-block, it turns out, wasn’t needed. I beat the clouds to the race site, but only just. I got a nice look at the water and was, then, hit hard with wind and rain. “No problem, it’ll blow over,” I said with a wink to my subconscious racing self. It didn’t. It rained all day. The water got choppy. Waves came in. All the refreshment stands that were being set up blew away.

My last once-over for the bike and the official check-in was cheery, exciting, but still helpless. We all stood in line like wet dogs with expensive bikes in the pouring rain. There were opinions about wet lube and dry lube. I heard at least 10 different weather forecasts for race day. The local waiting-for-check-in popular consensus was that the man from Scotland had a distinct and unexpected advantage here in “sunny Cancun”. So be it. Ahhhh, paradise!

Race day. 4:30am. No rain. Time for strict concentration on the business at hand. Get set up. Have a little walk down to the porta-baños with faith that the early morning breakfast would have it’s proper digestive effect. This always takes a great deal of faith and patience for me and is a crucial moment in the success of the day. Confirmation. All systems are go! I head down to the water for a bit of swim warm-up, the sunrise and bullhorn that signals the official start to my day.

[Horn sound] Yeeeehaaw! I’m off! I start at the outside edge of my wave and head for the first buoy. Before I get there, I have a realization. I just started the race feeling, ‘yeehaw,’ and not, ‘oh, shit, I’ve got to survive.’ This is a first. Rockin! I head straight for the inside corner of the first buoy. I get a few elbows in the ribs and one strong knock on the head and I’m out the other side headed for the next buoy. So far, so good. Next challenge: waves. Not giant waves; just large enough to block any vision to the next buoy. No problem. Swim up. Swim down. Breathe carefully and sight a bit more often. Easy. Try to draft the fast girl who just passed. Uhf, maybe not. Better to catch the fat guy just ahead and go from there. Perfect. I saw a few people stand up for a bit of rest at one point. Yes, it was a bit shallow at the farthest buoy. It seemed maybe they would pull out packs of cigarettes and a have a coffee break. Weird. I kept on and made it out of the water in 36:28. Slow, but still under my “being disappointed” limit of 38:00. As I ran the 400m to T1 I did some immediate reflecting on my current situation. I’m not a weak swimmer any longer. I’m still slow, really slow, but I’m not a struggling survivalist swimmer anymore. I wondered what rainy storm swimming would’ve been like. Too bad we didn’t have a bit of rain and wind at the start. Might have interesting.

I’m through T1, on the bike, and my HR is predictably high. Be smart. Stick to the plan. Even if it feels good, 40 kph and HR 149 is unreasonable for me right now. Oh well. Maybe next season. I get things under control and start pushing through the kilometers as consistently as I can. After about a half hour into the bike, the rain starts. It comes and goes in extremes for the rest of the day. It’s interesting rain, though; incredible downpours followed by patches of sun. Sometimes we get some nice wind with the rain free of charge, like a little bonus. The wind didn’t stick completely until the last half-hour or so of the bike. It still didn’t add much to the challenge. It cost me a few beats of HR and a kph or two, but nothing more. I was still very deep into my “hold back” and “conserve” thinking that I didn’t really make the wind much of a consideration. The challenge of maintaining pace on the bike was a passive challenge, always thinking about doing less. “Not yet.” “Too soon.” “Nice and easy.” Towards the end, as a present to myself, I let my HR drift up to the mid 150s. It felt good to push a little harder and see the effort reflected in my HR. With the body was behaving as it should, I dropped back down a bit and concentrated on my T2 and the upcoming run.

A note on the more active challenges on the bike in Cancun: The active and constant challenge on the bike in this race comes in the form of other riders. There was a lot of drafting. This shouldn’t represent any problem. Stick to a steady effort, maintain my space, pass when I need to and back off when I can’t. But the drafting here was really stupid. First off, the Mexican Triathlon Federation rule for no drafting is 5m. Going anything above 25 kph, 5km IS drafting. So, why does one need to draft at 5cm and piss other people off? Dumb. Second, if you’re going to draft and roll down the road in a peloton of 30 people, go fast. That’s what drafting is for. Here, the 30-man pelotons would roll by at 37 kph, engulf other people (me) and just sit there. My HR would drop because I’m suddenly in a large group with no wind. I’d go to the outside, get clear, spend excess energy and be engulfed again 20 min later. Blatant drafting is an unresolved problem in Cancun. The problem might be solved with strict judging and penalties. But, I think there are deeper problems with the event staff than might be resolved by just telling them to be stricter. I saw and heard a guy tell a judge on a motorbike directly to fuck off. “Leave me alone, I’m not working with any of these guys. Go pick on somebody else.” And the judge did, he just left. The only effort I saw from the judges to break up the pelotons was to stop a whole group at a turn-around and only let them go through one by one. It helped, but there needed to be some control demonstrated on the part of the event staff.

Through T2 and into the run, and after 2:35 min of “take it easy” and “not yet,” I was really ready to stretch my legs. This translated into HR 159. Yikes! My target HR for the start of the run up to km 10 was max 149. Okay, a bit more of “take it easy” and now a bit more of “little by little”. I got the HR back under control and saw the first km go by at 4:20. That’s quite fast for me but not insane. But, there was no way I was going to be able to keep the HR anywhere near 149. I was ready to go go GO! I decided that if I kept things cool below HR 160 at a 4:20/km pace until the half-way point, I’d still be able to negative split the second half with a 4:15/km pace and let the HR creep up to 175+. Now, it seems like it was a really optimistic plan, but at the time, in those first few kilometers, it seemed almost conservative. All other variables remained the same.

I met my goals for the run, and I met my goal for the swim. And with a finishing time under 5 hours, I met my goal for the race. Fantastic! It was an important lesson I learned concerning the bike, also. From the beginning of this season, I’ve considered the bike to be my strongest sport. Maybe it is. Maybe a slow but strong bike was the key to speed during the run. Who knows. And fortunately, the speed I lost during the bike was disproportionate to the speed I gained on the run. This is a complex and strategic sport.

It was a fantastic feeling to begin seeing the results of so much passive aggression all day. The inverse relationship between fatigue and results is very encouraging at the end of a race. I was tired, but the running felt good and nobody passed me. It’s a fair trade-off, in fact, it’s one of the reasons I do this, even if it’s all in my head. Fatigue for glory! March on!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 2:56 am and is filed under Cancun, Ironman 70.3 Cancun, Mexico, Richard Stoutner, iroman, ironman, ironman 70.3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.