› Attention and Inattention to Detail
2003 Ralph’s Half Ironman Race ReportOver the past few years I’ve developed a pretty solid fitness base, worked quite hard on skills to improve my swimming, biking and running efficiency, improved my pre-race and race nutrition and begun to control my emotions during a race. This steady progression in many phases of training and racing has gotten me within the top 5-10% of my age group at pretty competitive races. What I learned from Ralph’s this year was that to be the best I’m going to have to get a lot better at assessing my abilities and not slip up on any of the “small things” that can have a big influence on a race.
Being a week out from my biggest week of training ever (nearly 40 hours with pros Gordo Byrn and Clas Bjorling) gave me a lot of confidence and a bit of worry. I was pretty confident in my early season fitness. Although I’d only been on the bike for a few weeks before my big week of training I was able to hang in pretty well on the rides and complete all of the swims and runs. I was a bit leery of my ability to recover from so much volume but besides some very tight calf muscles I was feeling fine in the days leading up to the race. Looking back, I was too confident in my cycling and not trusting enough in my ability to run well.
The overconfidence in the bike resulted in an oversight that could have really punished me. One of my training philosophies is to make certain aspects of training harder than racing itself. I tend to under gear my bike for training so that I have to work harder, particularly in the hills. I normally run 55/42 and 11/23 gearing for all of my training but will add a climbing gear for hilly races. (Although on the Idlewild ride near Palm Springs a week early I did put on a 12/26. With 9000 feet of climbing in 108 miles it seems justifiable). I didn’t, however, give myself any fall back gearing for the San Mateo climb in Ralph’s and paid dearly for it towards the end of the bike. I ended up having to stand for quite a bit of the climb. Instead of spinning up the climb seated I was relying on pure power to get through.
By the last 10 miles of the ride my legs were feeling a little zapped and instead of continuing to work up through the previous waves I settled in for a steady pace that got me into more trouble. I got into a bit of a group (mostly 25-29s four or five waves in front of me) and while I was trying to keep outside the draft zone, the race officials saw it differently. I had just surged ahead of a group and was out alone when a few guys began to roll past me on the left. It was one of those situations where I felt that holding to the letter of the draft rule would have had me literally moving backwards through the field. So after three or four rolled by I fought the next one trying to overtake me and was inside the box with no intention of passing. My goal was to hold my spot and then back off to 10 meters. Without doing that I’d have lost 10 meters each time someone’s wheel got one inch in front of mine. So I held him off and then backed off from the bike in front of me. About 5 miles from T2 a motorcycle rolled up and handed out four-minute tickets (I’d certainly prefer the 2 minute stand down the pros get). Oh well, nothing to do but finish up the bike and run. The funny thing about the draft rule is that it’s so arbitrarily applied and there’s so much measurement error involved in it that it’s pretty useless. At 20+mph can someone on a motorcycle actually tell the difference between 9 meters and 10 meters? Why is blocking a penalty when it’s a more effective way of keeping people from getting a draft benefit? In my opinion blocking seldom happens as a simple “on your left” gets most people to move over enough to pass. I’ve also never been to a race yet where there haven’t been people complaining about everyone else drafting as well as people complaining that their drafting penalty was unfounded. Unfounded or not, in this case the penalty was a result of my over assessment of my climbing ability. If I had put on my cyclo cross gearing I would have had enough juice and confidence to keep hammering all the way to the line and would stayed out a situation that put me jeopardy for a penalty.
Another contributing factor to getting the penalty was a relatively poor swim. Again this didn’t have a lick to do with my ability or fitness. It was sheer oversight. I prepped for the swim really well – except for one small thing that I do before every swim. With no in water warm up allowed and water temps at below 60 I wanted to be fully warmed up prior to getting in the water, especially since I was swimming in a sleeveless wetsuit. I did a big dryland warm up with swim cords, yoga, more swim cords and even Sixtus start oil. I warmed up so long that I only had a minute in the water before my wave started. In my rush to the landing I forgot to spit in my goggles. I also should have bought a new pair before the race. Total rookie move. I lined up in the front and immediately got a very quick pair of feet – a touch too quick after a couple hundred so I found a more reasonable set and settled in for what I thought would be a 26-27 minute swim. The first problem was that we very quickly hit the slow swimmers from the wave in front of us and I lost my feet as he zigged and zagged. In fact I was having a hard time seeing bubbles in the water and was wondering why it had gotten so murky. I lifted my head up for a look and realized I was swimming in my own little fog. I could see barely 10 feet in front of me and mostly could just see shadows. I thought about stopping and trying to clear up the goggles but thought I’d probably get trampled by the stampede behind me and lose more time fooling around with them than if I either just ditched them completely or forged on doing the best I could.
I settled on the latter and while I knew I wasn’t swimming too fast thought that making progress was the most important thing. I spent a lot of time trying to look up every stroke so that I wouldn’t miss a buoy or land mark. I also realized I was swimming pretty tentatively. A couple of times I literally rammed right into people’s feet because I did not see them. Getting kicked in the face sucked for me and I’m sure they didn’t appreciate my rear-ending them and then clamoring clumsily to get by them. On the way back to the landing I swam right against the boat docks and just hoped I wouldn’t run into a prop, buoy line or some other object (I had a visions of Molina’s bloody face in my mind for a while). I was also worried that I might swim right past the exit but hit the tail end of another group just a few yards from the end so just followed the churn. Swim time was an uninspired 28:59. 1:27 pace is more 10 seconds slower than my one hour non-wetsuit pace back in January. Strike two against me for poor preparation. That’s the kind of stuff that will get a guy booted from gRAAM and I don’t have a wife and kids to plead my case to Gordo and Baron.
Despite my self-induced tribulations I knew I was racing fairly well. I hadn’t worn a watch on the swim so I didn’t know my time but I new I was just over 2:30 for the bike (2:34 it turns out). I’d ridden pretty easy for the first 15 miles and taken in a load of calories (2 cliff bars and a 350 calorie bottle) and then ridden pretty hard the rest of the way. I wanted to run in the 1:30 range which for me is pretty quick. I donned my Gordo visor and did a Coke commercial down the chute. It was actually a good measure of vertical displacement in my stride because even though I’d opened the cap the night before I still gave myself, and some unsuspecting spectators a nice sugary shower when I took the cap off to have a swig.
I felt solid on the run and although I spaced out a couple of mile markers and had to make a pee stop that seemed to drag on forever, I calculated I was running in the 7- 7:15 range most miles. The only issue (beside being covered in sticky cola) was a right hamstring that would twinge every time I tried to stride out a bit. I think it was a residual from the big gear work on San Mateo. So instead of trying to run harder I tried to increase my stride rate (“cadence” being a four letter word in running parlance) while pegging my HR in the low 150s. I had one tough mile where the cramping started to sneak up on me but I downed some thermolytes and was able to pick things back up. Without the cramps hanging around I know I could have worked a faster pace and higher heart rate. I finished well (1:34, 7:12 pace) and had closed in on Rich Strauss who’d had a great a great swim and strong bike. He passed me on the bike even though he’d started in a wave 6 minutes back. I figured giving up six minutes to an athlete of Rich’s caliber this time of the year wasn’t so bad.
Wrong. Those six minutes cost me 11 places and the penalty another 5. Bygones. Besides, had everything gone perfectly I wouldn’t have learned some valuable lessons. In the end I did what I set out to do. I tested my early season fitness (apparently skate skiing at 8000 feet improved my running relative to last year), got a slot at IM Wisconsin (the 25 slots to each NA IM were much more contested this year than last) and had a great time with family, friends and fellow competitors.
