I was relatively at ease with the thought of racing for 70.3 miles until I got to the check-in tent the day before the race. It's an anxiousness that I always felt when I ran track and cross country in high school. Everyone looks like they're capable of doing a low 4 hour Half and the swim course looks longer than 1.2 miles.
I don't have many pre race rituals yet since I'm fairly inexperienced at triathlons. As I write this, I have completed another two triathlons and there have been a few things that seem to be a pattern. I like setting up an area in my hotel room that will be similar to my transition area the day of the race. Then I like to stare at it and visualize myself coming out of the water into T1 and what I will need to get, in what order and any other variables that may change what I do. I do the same thing for T2 and eventually I fall asleep dreaming of me racing.
Race day came with no surprises. The course was pretty flat and the weather was overcast and cool. I warmed up with no music this time because my ipod decided to die on me. One thing that I did not anticipate was rain. The weather man forcasted a 10% chance of rain. He was 100% wrong. Rain started coming down a few minutes before the gun went off!
Swim: I had been practicing open water swims several times a week. Specifically, I focused on going out really fast for the first few hundred yards then settling into a rhythm. This technique was supposed to get me out in front and keep out of the chaos of people fighting to get around the first buoy. When everyone got in the water for the swim start, I made sure I was in front and right in the middle. The gun went off and a madness of arms and legs thrashed the water. I got absolutely brutalized. Nothing went the way I had planned. I literally got swam over for the first 500 yards. My breathing was off, I tensed up and I felt awful during the swim. The swim was a two loop course and starting the second loop, I felt absolutely horrible. I swam about 10 minutes slower than I am capable of and when I got out of the water, I knew I had expelled too much energy during the swim. This was going to be a long day.
Bike: The first 10 miles of the bike I focused on warming up my legs and getting mentally prepared for the rest of the race. In training I had only gone over 56 miles a few times and it was usually a coin flip on whether I felt good or not. I was hoping that today I would be feeling good after the bike because I had not ran anything close to 13.1 miles after a long bike! The bike course was also two loops so I knew that how I felt at the turn around would be a good indication as to how hard I could push it. Around mile 15, I was taking a right hand turn off this gravel road (yes, gravel roads! skinny tires and rocks everywhere is no bueno!) and two people tried to pass on my inside right. I don't know if there is an etiquette rule about passing on 90 degree turns in a race like this considering you're going to be on the bike for a long time. Pass after the turn! I took my turn out wide and as I was turning I realized that I was heading into a loose gravel strip and I could see the writing on the wall. Wet roads, loose gravel, and skinny tires do not play well together. I ate the pavement going around 20 miles an hour and absolutely killed my entire right side of my body. My arm was bleeding really bad and it looked like huge rocks were stuck in it. To make matters worse, when I'm in the arrow position on my bike, all my weight is on my front forearms. This made the paid excruciating. Even with the bike wreck, I still managed to avg 19.9 mph. That was a personal best for me and I was pretty excited about it.
Run: It's now time to run 13.1 miles after swimming 1.2 miles and biking 56 miles! I started off my first mile at a 6:45 pace which felt really good. Then I got to mile two and all hell broke loose. I started having the feelings of a cramp coming up in my right quad. Then my left quad. Then both decided to fire off at the same time that made me stop dead in my tracks. I tried walking them out for a minute till the pain subsided and began running again. A few minutes later it happened again. This time my hamstrings began to cramp and I had to lay flat on the ground because I could not move or everything would cramp up. I felt like my legs were pulling on muscles in my neck. That's how bad my muscles were cramping. Long story long, I had to fight this back and forth pain for the entire race. I finished up averaging 8:30 miles. I was completely bummed out.
Even though all three parts of the race went bad, I still finished the race with a huge smile on my face. It was a smile of relief, disbelief and accomplishment. I finished at 5 hours and 30 minutes and got second place in my age group. I was about 20 minutes slower than I wanted to be but it gives me some motivation to train harder for next year.
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