First Oly LONGEST.RECAP.EVER

[wawa]

TL:DR – it was awesome. Course was fun. Wind is a bitch on the bike, but lovely on the run. H beat me by just under 2 minutes, but I am gunning for him hard for next year now. I totally executed the race I wanted to have and that put me solidly back of pack. Also I’m at least infatuated with the Oly distance, and we’ll see next season if it’s true love. Which leads to the following: I’VE FINALLY MADE A DECISION on my speed vs. distance goals dilemma – wawa’s going for speed next year. 70.3 will have to wait.

Let’s start with stats and over-analysis - 173/213 overall, 61/77 women, 10/13 in AG.
I’m actually really happy with how my day went, so the fact that it put me solidly at the back of the pack was a bit of a reality check. People are fast man! I wanna be fast!
Swim – 1500 m – 40:20 2:40/100m
T1 – 3:46 Freakin’ wetsuit.
Bike – 25 miles – 1:30:56 16.5 mph.
T2 – 2:17
Run – 6.2 miles – 1:07:12 10:50 min/mile
Total - 3:24:28.

According to the finish results rankings for each leg I was fairly steady between legs. Among women: 62nd on swim, 58th on bike, 61st on run. For an overall of 61st. So….despite the fact that I’ve been biking my ass off, steady on swim and just barely keeping up with running – my biking has only barely overtaken my running compared to my peers. Interesting. I think this comes down to sheer leg strength. I just don’t have the basic strength, or more maybe importantly, the muscular endurance to push a big gear for very long. My legs will move along until I tell them to stop – but they just don’t have much force behind them. I’ve known that for a while, but it suddenly occurs to me this week with these results and the tri book I’m reading right now that I could actually train specifically to that weakness. Duh.
And the most important stat (LOL) – H beat me. By 1:53. He was 10 sec/100 faster than me on the swim and 1 mph faster on the bike (which is typical) and that put him further ahead than I could make up on the run. He also started 8 minutes ahead of me and this wasn’t an out and back course, so I never had a visual on him to know how fast I’d need to go to beat him. Could I have done the run 2 minutes faster? Maybe? I executed the plan I set but that wasn’t enough. So he wins this one, fair and square.
Now story time.
We drove over to the race location the after work on Friday night. Traffic was crap and H couldn’t get off of work early, so we didn’t manage to get over there till dark. Ate dinner with TriBestie and then headed over to drive the course quickly. Then back to the hotel to get settled and we were in bed by shortly after 10. Success!

This area doesn’t see a ton of traffic on a regular fall weekend, so the hotel was basically booked exclusively by racers. Almost every car in the parking lot had a bike rack. Which means they opened the hotel breakfast at 5:30 AM instead of their usual 7. Yay! We were up at 5:00, got combobulated, got breakfast sandwiches/bananas/whatever and coffee, got packed up, Wambam’ed and off we went.
We got to the race site, smoothly moved through packet pickup, chip pickup, body marking (I have nothing but good things to say about this race org btw. VMTS is the tits) and off to set up in transition and AGONIZE over whether or not to wear my wetsuit. The actual water temp was in the low 70’s. And I’ve comfortably swam in that without a wetsuit for sure. But the air temp was chilly and WINDY. Announced definitively that I wasn’t wearing it, stuck it in my bag, and then 30 seconds later frantically pulled it back out of my bag and tucked it under my arm to carry over to the swim start.
So I wore it. And I’m glad – the water really was pretty warm, but it was cool enough that overheating wasn’t a concern, being able to just bob like a cork for the minutes before the horn blew for the in-water start was nice, aaaaand everybody else totally got stung by jellyfish and while I never even saw one, I’m sure if I was totally exposed I’d have gotten hit at least once. H got it on his wrist and both ankles and barely missed taking one straight to the face, one of my swim friends got one across her ear and tribestie got it on the wrist.

Went through pre-race announcements and then they played the anthem. Two of my fellow triathletes near me in the crowd knelt for it. I was surprised for a hot second, and then proud of them for doing it, and grateful that their silent protest forced me for a second to think beyond myself and remember how lucky I am to be doing something so frivolous that I love so much and how f’d up our society is and how much work we all have to do. I gave them a super awkward “right on” head nod after.

So…they run a 70.3 same time as the international on this course. So the half people started first and we all watched them go. Then it was H’s wave. Then one more wave, and then us! It was an in-water start, you jump off the dock and then tread water next to a channel marker until they blow the horn. We jumped in and the water felt wonderful. Which just gave me this instant boost of confidence. Swim was a two lap square course, so lots of corners to turn and buoys to find – which was a challenge at times. The first couple hundred yards my arms felt like lead and most of my wave was blasting past me, but I just calmly informed myself that I’m slow but I’m steady and that I TOTALLY can do this. Just get warmed up and keep moving. By the 2nd lap I was happily cruising along and almost sad it was over as I came up to the step out. Volunteer hauled me out of the water before I could even get my legs under me on the step and I was off stagger-trotting down the dock toward T1.

T1 – I need to practice taking off my wetsuit. ‘nuff said.
Bike – I’ll just share a few direct quotes straight from yours truly on the bike course:
“Holy shit wind!”
“Holy Mother Fucking Wind!”
“Goddammit wind!!!”
“How ‘bout this wind, huh?”
“HOW IS IT A HEADWIND BOTH WAYS??”
And finally:
“COULD THIS WIND JUST STOP GUSTING SIDEWAYS SO I CAN TAKE A DAMN DRINK!?”

So yeah. It was windy. Pretty flat course – gently net uphill on the first half and downhill on the second half. Total ascent was 561 feet. But whoo boy the wind. Wunderground says it was 11 mph wind (which doesn’t sound that bad) but 18 mph gusts, and I swear it was mostly gust. The course was a long skinny loop headed out north-northeast and back west-southwest. The wind was coming in from northwest so it was a slightly crosswise headwind BOTH DAMN WAYS. (I think I got all those directions right…) More cross than head on the way back, and more head than cross on the way out. Oooof. So the way out was just a bit of a slog when the wind would gust, and the way back I kept thinking it was going to blow my bike right out from under me so I had to wait through the gusts to drink. But overall I had a blast on the bike. I was keeping an eye on my rolling average and buckling down if it started to dip under 15mph on the way out. On the way back with the downhill tendency I was rocking more like 17 minimum. Ended up with a 16.5 mph average, which kinda feels slow since I can do 15 on a 16 mile hilly course – shouldn’t I be faster on the flat? But…no. I mean, I laid it all out there, and that’s what I had. This is obviously something I can focus on for next season – I’ve got good endurance I think, but my just sheer strength isn’t there and then putting them together for muscular endurance training to really push those big gears for a long time is clearly something I can work on long term.  Oh...also...I wanna get aero bars.

T2 – I let myself take a long pause to drink as much of my leftover skratch from my bike bottle as would fit in my belly without feeling sloshy, so this wasn’t fast. Deliberate decision since I was thirsty. I think the wind just dried me out, because I’d actually drank my entire first bottle.

Run – I knew this would be a struggle. I only ran 9 miles all month. That’s not a taper, that’s just falling off the wagon. So I set out to do a run 10/walk 1 interval, which was complicated by the fact that they had a TON of aid stations on this course and I was thirsty. So I took just a long enough walk pause to down some water at most of the stations, and otherwise kept up my intervals. It was a two lap course, and I gave myself permission to take it pretty easy on the first lap. 2nd lap I started to step it up a bit, but I was really struggling to maintain the effort. Panting like I was sprinting for a really modest increase in pace. I could see it after the fact on my HR stats – my pace would creep up by a teeeeny little bit and my HR was just skyrocketing. Just tired I guess. Dehydrated a bit maybe? I dunno. So I just held on as best as I could and counted down the wee little bit I had left. Around mile 4 a bike came rolling through calling out, “HALF ON YOUR RIGHT. PLEASE MOVE OVER” and the LEADER OF THE FREAKIN 70.3 rocketed past me. He was FLYING. After having gone literally twice as far as I had. Talk about humbling and AMAZING. It was the coolest damn thing. AND THEN, he passed me again as I came up to the final turn into the finish chute. The half had 3 loops to do with a slightly longer loop – so he did something like 5 miles in the time it took me to run TWO. After biking 55 and swimming more and etc etc. I slowed down to a walk to watch him run up the finish chute holding a flag, and I whooped and cheered like a lunatic. And then once he had his moment at the finish line I picked it up and sprinted up the finish chute entirely for the sake of my picture so I didn’t’ look like I loafed my way in. Even though I guess I kind of did since I was totally just spectating back there instead of finishing my own race. But still…come on! More than twice as far! Same amount of time! That’s so damn cool!

H was at the finish line and the first question I asked him was how long ago he finished. 10 minutes. His wave was only 8 minutes ahead of mine, so he won this one. Next question was, “dude, are you OK??” because suddenly I noticed that he was hobbling like an old woman. Turns out he had blisters on the balls of both feet, had tweaked the outside edge of his left foot and his calves were cramping. He was like, “Also I think something is just wrong with me. I keep having to fight back tears.” And I admit that I’m an asshole because I laughed at him. I was like, “babe, that’s totally normal. A LOT of people cry as they cross a finish line. You’re hungry and you’re tired and you’re in pain and you just spent the last 3 hours stomping on every impulse in your body that told you to stop what you’re doing and then abruptly let it all go as you crossed the finish line. That release does WEIRD things to your emotions. Let’s go get some more food for you.” Two pieces of pizza (that’s right. Finish line pizza. Did I say that this race org is awesome? They are) and he was feeling much better. Hopefully his foot feels better in short order though, because we’re supposed to go backpacking this weekend, but I am shamefully proud that he had to push that hard to beat me.
We went and changed into warm dry non-spandex clothing at the truck and then walked over to the restaurant overlooking the swim course and proceeded to eat everything that wasn’t nailed down. Then H drove us home and we took shower and I got comfy on the couch with my fuzzy robe, calf sleeves and a nuun-tini to watch live action Beauty and the Beast and sighed a sigh of deep contentment.

I REALLY enjoyed this distance, and this race. And falling to the back of the pack has helped me with the decision about next year that I’ve been agonizing over – speed goal vs distance goal. I want to keep doing this distance for a bit – and I want to make it my bitch. I mean…as much as one can in a single season. But that’s my focus. That sounds FUN to me. Now to figure out how that actually looks when I try to put together a potential race calendar – A races, B races, etc. I’m excited about the idea of actually putting together a coherent race schedule that builds in a logical way, even though I know I’m going to have to stamp down HARD on my FOMO race tendencies. So many races! So little time….

[lilypad1126]

Congrats! And, wow! What a race recap. It was so much fun to read, I can imagine how much fun it was to race it!

[sadlebred]

Congratulations on a great race!

[gt7301b]

Congrats! What a fantastic recap. You were amazing out there.

Now for the important matters... good luck knocking those two minutes off next year and crushing your husband

[sweetptater]

Congratulations! Amazing job out there!

I love your recap - you HAVE to beat your H on the next one. 

[labbie]

Congrats on a great race! Glad you found the distance you like and want to keep working on. I can't wait for you to beat your H next time :-)

[thom]

It's so awesome to train well and have the race come together like you've prepared for. You have worked so hard this year, and it shows. Those times are very solid, and you know how far you have come. If this puts you back of the pack, I am confident in my decision to stay away from tris, lol.

Congrats wawa!!

[hannahb]

Congrats! You'll get him next time.
Also ditto on focusing on speed next year. This long stuff is just so time consuming

[jreeds]

Great recap! Congratulations!!

[hurricanedrunk]

Fabulous recap! Great job on your race. I am glad to hear this one helped focus your goals. You can absolutely beat your H next time!

[mrs.jacinthe]

Congrats on a great race!!!

[Deleted]

You did amazing. I chuckled at T1 'freakin' wetsuit'.

[mysticmuffin]

Congratulations on great race execution! I happy to hear that you can finally put the speed vs. distance decision to rest (for now, I know you better than that).

The wind sounds brutal. I had one this season like that, big square route and hand to God there was a head wind the whole time.

[wawa]

Oct 3, 2017 11:22:37 GMT -5 mysticmuffin said:

Congratulations on great race execution! I happy to hear that you can finally put the speed vs. distance decision to rest (for now, I know you better than that).

The wind sounds brutal. I had one this season like that, big square route and hand to God there was a head wind the whole time.

lolol!  Confession - I was JUST talking to my mama and breaking the news that I was out for her 70.3 in 2018 plan, but that the plan we did have probably would fit into her 70.3 training just fine as long as she didn't push too hard on what would be, for her, B/tune-up races.  (she's looking at an october 70.3.  Our last oly of the season would probably be about 4 weeks prior to that if our extremely vague plan actually holds)   So then of course I was like, "oh. so I guess technically I COULD do a couple of Oly's and still do a 70.3"....and then smacked myself.   NO WAWA.  BAD WAWA.  I can't ramp up distance and be nailing hard tempo workouts and the like AT THE SAME TIME.  That's the whole POINT.  I'm bad at this game called "focus."

[mysticmuffin]

Oct 3, 2017 11:37:09 GMT -5 wawa said:

Oct 3, 2017 11:22:37 GMT -5 mysticmuffin said:

Congratulations on great race execution! I happy to hear that you can finally put the speed vs. distance decision to rest (for now, I know you better than that).

The wind sounds brutal. I had one this season like that, big square route and hand to God there was a head wind the whole time.

lolol!  Confession - I was JUST talking to my mama and breaking the news that I was out for her 70.3 in 2018 plan, but that the plan we did have probably would fit into her 70.3 training just fine as long as she didn't push too hard on what would be, for her, B/tune-up races.  (she's looking at an october 70.3.  Our last oly of the season would probably be about 4 weeks prior to that if our extremely vague plan actually holds)   So then of course I was like, "oh. so I guess technically I COULD do a couple of Oly's and still do a 70.3"....and then smacked myself.   NO WAWA.  BAD WAWA.  I can't ramp up distance and be nailing hard tempo workouts and the like AT THE SAME TIME.  That's the whole POINT.  I'm bad at this game called "focus."

You crack me up. I need to focus on the speed part once I start making my comeback. I need to get to something faster than turtle stampeding through peanut butter before I can realistically start looking at going for the long stuff.

[scm1011]

Awesome recap! Congrats on a really well done race! Glad the wetsuit warded off the jellyfish, yikes! You def have it in you to beat your DH next year

[bostonmichelle]

Congratulations on a great race! Glad the wetsuit worked! Good luck to beating your DH next year!