Race Report! Waterman's 70.3 (looooooong)

[wawa]

Waterman's 70.3/Long Course in Rock Hall, Maryland.

The numbers:

Weather -. 50s at the start, a sunny 70’s at the finish, 5-10 mph wind SSW. Water temp 71. BEAUTIFUL

My goal: Under the 8 hour time limit. (cumulative - 1.5 hour in from swim, 5 hour off the bike, 8 hour done) I felt like realistically I could do it in 7:30.



Results:

7:05:48

Swim: 50:03:32 - 2:36/100

T1: 3:01

Bike: 3:34:08 15.7 mph

T2: 2:39

Run: 2:35:56 11:54 mm



124/154 overall, 26/37 women, 4/6 age group.


The many many many words.  Go get a drink:


My first half! I signed up for this in 2019 for 2020 with the intention of doing it with my husband. So THAT didn’t happen. Late 2020 when it started to look like 2021 races might be a go, we talked about race plans and he was 100% NOT.FEELING.IT. I needed something to focus on, so I decided to go for it and took the 2021 deferral.



My entire goal was just to make it through this thing without getting swept. I spent the entire training cycle worrying about my bike speed. I knew I could make the swim and run cutoffs, but the bike was not so obvious. A lot of my training miles even for shorter rides were around 13-14 mph and that wasn’t enough to make the cutoff. I didn’t feel like i had the bandwidth or time needed to really build up my strength to get faster, but my training plan had a one ride/week of interval work, and I focused on keeping my cadence high and made good progress on that so I was crossing my fingers that was enough. I like biking, but I'm just not very fast and the work to get faster is boring as shit (squats and hill repeats...yay...)


I also gave the sour cherry juice thing that people talk about a try and while I have no control race to measure it against...I felt a lot better during and after this race than I expected. So maybe it helped?



Race Day: This was a rare solo race for me since I normally race with family or my TriBestie, but my mom and my husband both came along to spectate instead, and a college friend and her friend joined so she could do the sprint the following day. We rented a house right on the run course, about a 5 minute walk from transition. The race didnt’ start till 8 AM, and transition didn’t even open till 6:30, so this was a VERY leisurely race morning for me. Woke up at 5, ate my breakfast,drank the coffee and giggled with my mama in the kitchen. We walked down at 6:30, I snagged a rack right up front (it was first come first served racking), and then headed back to the house for final sips of coffee and bathroom break. They had announced the water temp the day before at 73 degrees, which is RIGHT on my personal wetsuit line. So I was dithering hard on whether I’d wear it, but when I got back down to transition for final prep I found out they’d announced that day’s temp at 71 degrees. Ok, wetsuit it is! Wiggled into the thing and then over to the swim start.



Swim: Just as I got my wetsuit fully zipped I thought, “oh no...I kinda have to pee.” but decided to ignore it. Surely I could just pee while I swam. (narrator voice: She could not pee while she swam) Swim start was a self-seeded time trial, so I lined myself up at the middle back, talked to my fellow slow folks and got hyped and ready. Eventually the line snaked all the way up and it was my turn to jump in the water!



And we’re off! I settled into a nice steady stroke right away and was able to just hang out there with no hiccups at all. It’s a square course in a protected harbor of salty/brackish water off the Chesapeake, with two laps for the long course. People say they saw jellies, supposedly two people stung, but I didn’t notice any. It’s been a light year for them north of the bridge. (IMMD folks will tell you - not the case south of the bridge…) I had some really minor bumps/touches from other people, touched some toes myself, accidentally smacked one ass when somebody cut straight in front of me, but everybody was polite and reasonable. I had to pee the.whole.time. But could not for the life of me get it to let go. I usually have to really think about it to pee while I swim, and it’s even harder in the wetsuit because ew. Next thing I know, I’m rounding the final buoy and headed into the swim finish. Tried like hell to pee on that final leg, but no dice. Oh well, climbed out of the water and trotted off to the T1, wiping nasty bay beard off my chin.

50:03 swim - pretty sure this was the fastest I’ve ever swam this distance in open water. ~5 minutes faster than my next closest time in training.



T1 - My whole crew was standing there just outside transition chatting with me, so this was a super relaxed transition. But I still got in and out in 3 minutes. It’ll do. Minus the fact that I still had to pee.



Bike: This bike is pretty flat - starts off dead flat, some minor hills on the back end of the loop, and then downhills/flat for the last bits. Half does two laps. Pretty course through farm country. We had a tailwind for the outbound leg, so between that and feeling peppy after a good swim I was CRUISING. I averaged a little over 17mph for the first 10 miles, which is crazy fast for me, but I wasn’t really pushing hard or anything, just spinning along with a favorable wind on a nice flat course. But omg I had to pee. So the first aid station around 16 miles I stopped at the portapot and had the fastest pee break of my life. NO TIME TO SPARE HERE, I’M TRYING TO MAKE A CUTOFF. Then back on the road! For this race I had upgraded my bike setup with aerobars and a whole aero water/bike computer mount/fuel pouch situation such that everything was just all right there in front of me. I was fueling with a mix of scratch in my water and chews and some carby/chocolate treats in my lil’ pouch for when I needed a break from the chews. My triBestie had done her first half a few weeks before mine, and the lessons learned she imparted upon me were FUEL WAWA. FUEL. DO NOT STOP FUELING. So I didn’t! I was refilling my aero water from on course handups and a super concentrated bottle of scratch on the bike, drinking roughly a bottle/hour, and taking half a pack of chews or a chocolate thingy every half hour. There were definitely times I didn’t.want.it. But I made myself eat anyway, and I kept drinking and my legs were staying pretty peppy and I was holding a steady 16.x mph speed. So it was all working!



Shortly after that pee break I got to the section of course where we turned south onto a shitty ass chip n’ seal road. So now the road is super chattery, plus with constant dips from farm equipment overloading the sub-base, and a headwind. It...kinda sucked. My speeds dropped into the 12-13 mph region. But it was short, and then we were back on a smooth road with just the headwind to deal with. As long as I stayed down tight in my bars I could keep it in the 15’s even with the headwind, so I just put my head down and tried to stay focused. Got to the turn off for my second lap and started doing race math in my head like a madman. I was on track on speed. But could I hold it for a second lap? I tried not to think about it and just enjoyed getting back onto the northbound side of the course and out of that headwind. Got back up to the aid station at the halfway point of the lap and started doing that race math again and almost burst into happy tears when I realized that no matter how shitty that chip n’ seal and headwind were going to be ...i was going to fucking make it. In my out loud voice, all alone on the road (because at this point the road had gotten very lonely) actually shouting, ‘i’M GOING TO FUCKING MAKE IT!!!!” I’m so glad I was that far ahead of the game at that point because the second time through the chip n’ seal section just sucked the life out of me. My undercarriage and shoulders were just OVER IT, I couldn't get comfy in aero with all the vibration and dips, but if I sat up I was straight into the headwind. Bleeeeeh. But eventually it ended, and the 'i’m almost done' adrenaline tingles started. A spectator in the final 2 miles or so yelled out from a street corner, “Almost there! Nice Cadence!” and like the loopy weirdo I am, I yelled back, “thanks, I’ve worked on it!” I did start to think to myself here, “oh no….I still have to run a half marathon” since I felt really totally beat. But I told myself, "just get there and we see how it goes. If you have to take it easy, you take it easy. You’ve got time.”



I needed to keep it above 14 mph to hit the cutoff, and I had been planning to aim for 16 mph moving speed knowing I’d dip below that on hills and headwinds. So final average of 15.7 was 100% right on track and I was THRILLED.



T2 - No muss, no fuss here. My spectator crew was right there again, and though I was quite a bit less peppy than T1 it was awesome to see them and say hi and get cheers. I got myself ready to run, stuffed my nutrition, chapstick and emergency antichafe into my pockets and off I went.



Run: first mile was a little out and back leg in the opposite direction, and then the rest of the course was three laps around a roughly 4 mile loop through the adorable little town that is Rock Hall, MD. it’s FLAT. pancake, dead flat. No hills, no false flats, not so much as a bridge over a drainage ditch. (though my watch thinks there was 315 ft of gain, even that’s not true. It was having barometric issues...the bike profile is all wonky too) And it’s about 50% shaded. It’s a wonderful course and I highly recommend it. That first mile I was feeling pretty rough, and I had trained a lot of my solo long runs with intervals, so i decided to go with that approach (I had gone into it thinking if I felt like I could run straight, then I would, but intervals would be my fallback). I think this was 1000000000% the right call. I set my watch to 60/30 intervals and just settled in.

Came around for the start of the first lap and I can see my mom and friends in the yard of our rental. They’re waving and cheering and I think to myself, “weird, where’s my husband?” and then omg he appeared. Sprinting, screaming, waving an big american flag, crushing a beer can, and wearing just a towel. We had been joking for months that his plan during this race was just to get drunk in the front yard while I raced. So...when the time came for me to run past he suddenly got this idea in head to pretend to be a drunk ass frat boy. I laughed so so hard. I’m really glad I’d already peed on the bike because otherwise there’s no way I’d have held it here. That laugh break carried me through the next mile in high spirits, as I kept up my regular fueling and hydration, making myself drink gatorade and water at every aid station and fueling with chewable food once per lap. Came around for the second lap and husband now has a lampshade with a felt crab on it on his head and “get some” written on his chest in red (permanent) marker and he's dancing in the front yard. Laugh and laugh and laugh. And then I realized...I was feeling pretty damn good. I thought about dropping the intervals and just running straight through, but instead decided that I’d just start running the run intervals faster instead. So i did. Tried out the coke at the aid station around mile 7 or 8 and that was delicious, so start alternating that with the gatorade. Came around for my third lap and he’s now pretending to be passed out on the yard with beer cans scattered around, and my rainbow leggings tied around his head. OMG. And I feel like a million bucks, so I start going even faster. Come into the home stretch and realize I’m going to run out of intervals (my watch defaults to a max of 99 sets) before I run out of race, so i just finish the last mile running straight for my fastest mile of the run.


People...I got faster on every single lap. I negative split the run by over 4 minutes. After riding 56 miles and swimming 1.2. I’m still not sure how this was fucking possible and am ASTOUNDED that it happened. Combine that with a swim that laughed at my training times and I’m just bowing down over here to the race gods because THEY HAVE SMILED UPON ME. It really was a perfect day in terms of conditions, the course there is lovely, the support of all my people was clutch, and I just didn’t run into a single hiccup or problem. I almost never want to do the distance again, because there’s no way it’s going to be that good again. I probably will, because, of course I will. But for a while I’m just going to bask in this glow, and maybe sit and gaze lovingly at my run splits because omg, that was FUN.

[reginaphalange72]

Holy hell! What a day!!! You did AMAZING!!!

CONGRATULATIONS on a fan-freaking-tastic race! I loved reading this. Your narrator voice and swimming butt slap had me chuckling, but your husband's antics take the cake. I really hope he was keeping it up as everyone else went by too!

Congratulations again on a phenomenal day and all the hard work you put into it leading up to race day! You absolutely CRUSHED IT!!

[sadlebred]

It sounds like an AMAZING race!!! Congratulations! and what a great bike split!

[lilypad1126]

WOW-what an amazing race! Congratulations!

[minzy]

Awesome, congrats!! Thanks for posting the full report. It’s my bedtime story for the night, and a nice one at that. 😊

[brooke77]

Amazing! Congrats! I also was LOL at your husband. Your report makes me miss racing so much!

[breezy8407]

Amazing! Congrats. Thanks for sharing

[coconutbug]

Great job!! Congrats again!

[melmel48]

Incredible! Congrats!

[mrshandy]

You rock!! I’m so impressed!! Congrats!!

[scm1011]

Incredible!! Huge congrats on a well executed race. Your report makes me want to try a tri

[moreace01]

Congratulations!!! Such a great race!
Your bestie is super wise - fuel fuel fuel (if I had a bff like that maybe my first 70.3 wouldn't have been such a s-show - lol). And your husband is hilarious. So glad you had a great race and a great time.

Congratulations again - you're inspiring me to give it another go.

[katyintx]

Ooh yay, another race report! I took a post-race life hiatus and I was hoping to come back to this!

Okay, first off, I mean sure the race gods did well, but also it sounds like you trained well and are reaping the benefits of your training. This was all you, no RGs needed. Congratulations, you’re badass!

And holy crap, congratulations on massively crushing your goal! 25 minutes better than you thought you could do it?!? Amazing! Way to swim, bike, and run, race and fuel smart, and just generally crush it. And way to go to your H for crushing the cheering game. That sounds hysterical... I hope you’re recovering well and still basking in the glow of a job well done!

[jane6672]

Love love love.
Congrats on an amazing race!

And props to the mister for following through on the joke 😂😂

[sassystace]

Congrats! You made that sound like such a fun day! And your husband is something else too