Despite how pessimistic it will undoubtedly come off, I simply can’t adequately describe what this race was like without first describing the events that led up to it. Ironman training requires consistency, sacrifice, precise planning, extreme endurance and, most of all, enormous faith to execute properly. What was to follow in Ironman Texas is what happens when you do Ironman without any of these things.
Upon crossing the finish line in Coeur d’Alene Idaho last year, I was pretty sure I was finished with Ironman indefinitely. As the days, weeks and months chipped by, I gradually convinced myself not to take the insulting partial refund offered by the WTC and went ahead with Ironman Florida, which ended up being my best finish thus far. Equal parts being very recovered and being a fast course, it didn’t really delude me into thinking I was any fitter than the previous 3 I had actually prepared for.
Since then, there wasn’t really anything. Sincerely. The goal was to make the winter a running focus, with the Mardi Gras Marathon on the horizon in March. The popularization of Trainer Road did the opposite; I found myself doing a lot of intense but short bike efforts leading up to the spring. I had no motivation to do any sort of long, Ironman-prep workouts, especially when “crunch time” came and it was absolutely necessary to do such workouts.
Let’s see some stats for this time period [Nov 2011 (IMFL) – May 2012 (IMTX)]:
Number of races: 1 – Mardi Gras Marathon
Number of runs over 2 hours: 1
Number of rides over 2 hours: 2 (or 1, depending on your perspective; 2 85 mile days rolled into a weekend)
Number of swims over 1 hour: 1
Number of heat acclimatization attempts: 2 (30 min trainer sessions)
Number of hot yoga sessions: 0
Number of race-day nutrition practices: 0
Number of 100 mile rides: 0
Number of 20 mile non-race runs: 0
Number of bike tune-ups/upgrades/fits: 0
Essentially I did as close to nothing as I’ve ever before managed. The explanation is two fold: burnout and overworking. I have long since been living and dealing with oppressive levels of burnout at the Ironman distance, but hesitated for so long to admit it to myself. I wanted to keep going, to keep chasing this infernal dream of mine to do every one in the country before I turn 30; blah, blah, blah.
In the process turning Ironman into some demented job, some insane purpose I no longer had the power to turn away from. It wasn’t until Texas, when I, for the first time since 2008, found myself without an Ironman on the books. This was my first opportunity to do a final Ironman before allowing myself the time off I’ve needed for years.
A lack of desire to train wasn’t enough of an excuse not to train in the past. It’s a common practice in the Ironman community when you don’t want to train you HTFU, stop complaining and do it anyway. Ironman isn’t for pussies who don’t train when they don’t feel like it. If you had the time, or could make the time, and you always could, you trained. That was true for my first 4, but not for Texas. In February, I was promoted to head trainer at my day job, giving me full time hours, much better pay and much more responsibility. All this means more work hours. I’ve accumulated more 100 hour work weeks than 100 mile bike weeks since the promotion, which is a bit problematic in the back stretch of Ironman training.
A+B=C, where A is burnout, B is no free time or energy and C is simply not caring about Ironman training. I knew enough about Ironman to know I’d survive no matter what, so I came to Texas with no goals other than to finish. To finish and be done with 140.6 for a while. So, to recap, I arrived at the Woodlands as undertrained, underprepared, under-inspired and pessimistic as I’ve ever been.
That said, it was still my goal to minimize the damage.
The pre-race festivities seemed to blaze by at record speed, though I managed to fit “drive the bike course” in with everything else. It didn’t seem like long at all before I found myself up to my neck in Lake Woodlands, counting down the final 10 minutes to the gun. It was nice seeing my GUF teammate, fraternity brother and fellow Ironman Matt Gant next to me before we wished each other the best of luck. Soon thereafter, we heard the familiar countdown; the countdown I was hearing for the 5th time, and he was hearing for the 3rd. The 10 second countdown signaling that it was once again time to shuffle ever forward in pursuit of the finish line.
Ironman Texas: The Swim
Lake Woodlands was a bit of a mixed bag; a fair split between the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good: it was damn near the perfect temperature. We ended up shivering waiting on the gun, but it was the definition of comfortable for an Ironman pace swim. And with no current, it was as easy as it could have been, given its shortcomings.
The bad: at 80+ degrees F, it is not and eternally wouldn’t be a wetsuit-legal swim. If you had planned on making it 2.4 miles, you’d have to do it without any personal flotation devices.
The ugly: despite racing for half a decade on all corners of the country, I’ve never seen darker water. I’ve never before been in a race where I couldn’t see my hand in mid-stroke. So in that sense, Lake Woodlands was a first. Lord only knows what’s lurking at the bottom of that water…
The rightmost bank of the start was quite shallow, allowing me to take a handful of steps before hopping across the start line. This time around, I was content to let the overly eager participants go first and hang in the back for a while; no ancillary benefit to getting my ass kicked searching for a draft pack. The course reminded me a bit of IM-Louisville, a combination of a one loop and a point-to-point. You swim down to a turn buoy and swim back to very near the start before banking right into a canal. I had no idea how far apart these dividers were from one another, but at least knew enough to look for them as checkpoints.
I concentrated early on finding a nice, easy pace that I could maintain for the whole swim and felt like I was making pretty good time. It was a pretty easy trip out; not much contact, no mishaps of swallowing a ton of lake water and no one lighting my world up with a fist or a heel of their foot. In fact I still felt quite comfortable reaching the first turn buoy likely around 1 mile into the swim leg. There was the predictable traffic jam at the turn, but we were soon swimming directly in line with the sun for a quick 100 yards before turning NE back to the pier and canal.
I managed to pull off a trick that’s eluded me as of late, peeing while swimming, on the trip back. This was a cool feeling in an efficiency of movement kind of way, but ultimately the trip back was just boring. I wouldn’t say I was tired, or sore or particularly wanting and needing to be out of the water, I was just bored. So bored I could barely stand it. I stopped more than a handful of times to try to peer down the never-ending stretch of buoys looking for the turn for no other reason than to have something to look at. This sucks. Will it never end?
Finally the course veered right into the narrowness of the canal. I’d heard lots of stories about how violent it gets in here, and was prepared for it. As it turned out, it wasn’t considerably more violent than any other part of the swim, making Texas one of the more tame swims for me (though the wetsuit wave starting 10 minutes after us and running through the field was markedly annoying). What I found unpredictable about the canal was that the squeeze was pretty gradual. I was expecting to have to funnel in very quickly, making swimmers go sideways to file in to what appeared to be a 10-foot wide channel. In reality, it tightened like a funnel getting skinnier and skinnier as we neared closer and closer to the transition. The increased physicality came more from the wetsuit swimmers than from the cramped quarters, but it did feel like I was running into more people over the last part.
The change of scenery helped mollify my boredom and the swim became bearable again for a time. In all fairness, it was a very cool section of the swim. The canal not only broke up the swim well, but also made it my favorite swim course so far. Still, it wasn’t enough to make me like the last half mile of a 2.4-mile swim interesting. I was still very much counting down the last few hundred yards. Soon enough and not just too long after the canal finally clamped down to the under-handed throw width I saw earlier in the week we turned left and climbed up the stairs into transition.
Climbing the stairs proved to be pretty difficult and I was mildly disappointed to see my relatively slow swim time. In hindsight, I did stop and sight a lot. I also didn’t train, but I think I’ve covered that already. I grabbed my bag and hustled into the change tent. I’m not sure what happened exactly, but my Cool Wings weren’t in my bag, despite being in there earlier that morning when I checked my gear bag. Maybe it fell out; maybe I absent-mindedly took it out. Either way, I took a second to mentally prepare myself for the horrific sunburn I was about to get. I took a second at the porto potty (which was a LOT more, shall we say, productive than I expected), slathered with sunscreen and took off towards my bike.
1 down, 2 to go.
Swim Time: 1:26:23
Swim Place: 83/160 in AG
T1: 9:08
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Ironman Texas: The Bike
The 1 loop Ironman bike made a spectacular comeback in Texas, taking full advantage of the hundreds of miles of not much of anything on the outskirts of the Woodlands. The first 30 miles of the bike are relentlessly flat, before some gently rolling hills poke out of the National Forest. Driving the bike course, my mind pretty effectively dulled after mile 60. Sufficed to say the course is mostly flat with a number of very gentle climbs. And it all looks pretty much the same.
The worst part of the course was the fact that the wind was backwards. You get to enjoy a 3 mph tailwind during the first 40 miles of the bike and fight a 10 mph headwind for the last 45. For the first two hours, I feel like I have wings. Keeping my easy Ironman rhythm, I’m averaging right at 20 mph even after hitting the rolling hills. My speed oscillates from 16 mph climbing the hills (and coming out of aero for the first handful of times) to 28 mph shooting down the other side of them. I kept clipping away the miles and checking my average speed. It’s very easy to break up the miles when you’re doing 20 mph; the math always works out very easily. It’s 3 minutes per mile, and the numbers almost always end in a 0. So for the first few hours, I was in pretty good spirits.
I didn’t have enough Infinit to get me through any significant portion of the bike, so I brought energy bars to do the job. Unfortunately I had dropped 2 hours worth of food in the first 10 miles, leaving me to more or less depend on what they had on course. The Ironman Perform has caused me problems in the past, but seemed to be keeping just fine so far. I know Bonk Breakers are relatively inoffensive, but I don’t get my paws on one until the 2nd half. So I basically subsist as long as I can on what I’ve managed to not lose and just rely on the course after that. What’s the worst that can happen, I throw up? Ha! That’s a funny story I’ll get to in a minute…
The food I am able to take in is either too much too quickly, or in the moment unfamiliar to my body and I can’t help but notice a side stitch for the first hour and a half on the bike. Side stitches on the bike are kind of a fun experience. On the run they’re so debilitating, so painful as they’re being constantly tossed around and re-aggravated. On the bike you barely notice that it’s there. Just a bit of tension in the side, but it never really hurts worse, makes you want to stop or even slows you down; you just kind of take a casual notice to it and keep going. I cross the mile 40 marker in 2:00:04 and turn out of the tailwind.
The forest is pretty cool, giving us not only something to look at but quite a bit of shade for a little while. While the roads were kind of intimidating in a car, being on a bike and having relative certainty no cars would appear around the next bend was quite exhilarating whipping around the turns and taking full advantage of the flat terrain. At the start it appeared to be a good mix of farmland, forest and state highways. Things were happening pretty quickly until mile 40. They slowed down to what they probably should have been thereafter. After one of the bigger turns I saw Gant on the side of the road. I didn’t have much time to think about what had happened, but I later recalled that he routinely races without any tubes or bike equipment of any kind. Maybe he learned a lesson sitting on the side of the road out there. From the look of the time and average speed of his first bike segment it looks like he spent a while out there…
The stretch from 50 to 65 is kind of hard to recall. I lost track of the turns, more or less completely forgot where I was at any given time. I definitely couldn’t remember where Special Needs was. The gels I had packed weren’t providing too significant a carrot to chase, but the Delta E could not get here fast enough. It’s brutal stuff to take down, but I eagerly squeeze out every last drop when I finally get my hands on it. By this point, around mile 60, I could feel my energy levels drop off in the first significant way. To be honest, 60 miles in was farther than I expected to get before having to dig a little bit. I got as mentally strong as I could before the turn at mile 65 into 25 miles of direct, non-interrupted headwind.
I broke this section up into 5 five-mile stretches, each one getting me marginally closer to T2. Not much to be said from here on in. Where I had earlier averaged 20, I was now doing well to hold much more than 14. A 10 mph wind doesn’t seem like much, but it was on the back end of an increasingly hot Ironman bike ride. My back, butt and knee are getting sore and I just finished up the last of my earlier purchased food. One of my goals was to pee twice during the bike ride and again in Transition, so I was glad to have to stop around mile 75 to do so; this means I’m not dehydrated to the point where I can expect system shutdown early in the run. Each 5-mile patch passes slower than the last, but I finally make it to mile 90 and turn out of the headwind into a somewhat headwind. Essentially, it’s into the wind all the way back. Mentally I broke around mile 85. I just didn’t care about time too much anymore. For the first time in my Ironman life, nausea started to creep up during the bike. I tried to induce vomiting at the last aid station to no avail. Guess we’ll have to save that for the run.
The short version is I eventually outlasted the course and made it back to T2. The last 10 miles happened to be on the whitest pavement I’ve ever seen before, blinding me and probably most everyone else, but we made it back in once piece. Immediately upon hopping off my bike, the outside of both my feet were very, very tender, tender to the point to where I doubted my ability to run off of it. I did a bit of a jog-walk to the transition area and it finally alleviated. Taking my time, I dusted off my feet and changed into my run clothes.
The swim and bike are done. The realization that you now have to run a marathon is very often a crippling one, but to me I was glad to say that very little would be left up to chance from here. In the swim, you can get kicked in the right spot and break your goggles; you can cramp up and hyperventilate; you can catch an unwanted water bug and spend the rest of your abbreviated day puking up everything you eat. On the bike, you can blow one too many tires; you can snap a cable or break a chain; you can crash with another bike, or a car, or simply not pay attention and run yourself off the road. But on the run, not much can really prematurely end your day. So long as you have enough time and you’re smart with hydration, nutrition and temperature management, you can always keep moving. You can control it better.
That’s what I was thinking as I began my run. The only thing I deserve to do, the only thing I’ve ever really cared to do, was to finish. And, at this point, it’s just a matter of time.
Bike Time: 6:40:32 16.78 mi/h 91/160
First 56 mi: 3:07:06 17.96 mi/h
Second 56: 3:33:26 15.74 mi/h
The worst part of the course was the fact that the wind was backwards. You get to enjoy a 3 mph tailwind during the first 40 miles of the bike and fight a 10 mph headwind for the last 45. For the first two hours, I feel like I have wings. Keeping my easy Ironman rhythm, I’m averaging right at 20 mph even after hitting the rolling hills. My speed oscillates from 16 mph climbing the hills (and coming out of aero for the first handful of times) to 28 mph shooting down the other side of them. I kept clipping away the miles and checking my average speed. It’s very easy to break up the miles when you’re doing 20 mph; the math always works out very easily. It’s 3 minutes per mile, and the numbers almost always end in a 0. So for the first few hours, I was in pretty good spirits.
I didn’t have enough Infinit to get me through any significant portion of the bike, so I brought energy bars to do the job. Unfortunately I had dropped 2 hours worth of food in the first 10 miles, leaving me to more or less depend on what they had on course. The Ironman Perform has caused me problems in the past, but seemed to be keeping just fine so far. I know Bonk Breakers are relatively inoffensive, but I don’t get my paws on one until the 2nd half. So I basically subsist as long as I can on what I’ve managed to not lose and just rely on the course after that. What’s the worst that can happen, I throw up? Ha! That’s a funny story I’ll get to in a minute…
The food I am able to take in is either too much too quickly, or in the moment unfamiliar to my body and I can’t help but notice a side stitch for the first hour and a half on the bike. Side stitches on the bike are kind of a fun experience. On the run they’re so debilitating, so painful as they’re being constantly tossed around and re-aggravated. On the bike you barely notice that it’s there. Just a bit of tension in the side, but it never really hurts worse, makes you want to stop or even slows you down; you just kind of take a casual notice to it and keep going. I cross the mile 40 marker in 2:00:04 and turn out of the tailwind.
The forest is pretty cool, giving us not only something to look at but quite a bit of shade for a little while. While the roads were kind of intimidating in a car, being on a bike and having relative certainty no cars would appear around the next bend was quite exhilarating whipping around the turns and taking full advantage of the flat terrain. At the start it appeared to be a good mix of farmland, forest and state highways. Things were happening pretty quickly until mile 40. They slowed down to what they probably should have been thereafter. After one of the bigger turns I saw Gant on the side of the road. I didn’t have much time to think about what had happened, but I later recalled that he routinely races without any tubes or bike equipment of any kind. Maybe he learned a lesson sitting on the side of the road out there. From the look of the time and average speed of his first bike segment it looks like he spent a while out there…
The stretch from 50 to 65 is kind of hard to recall. I lost track of the turns, more or less completely forgot where I was at any given time. I definitely couldn’t remember where Special Needs was. The gels I had packed weren’t providing too significant a carrot to chase, but the Delta E could not get here fast enough. It’s brutal stuff to take down, but I eagerly squeeze out every last drop when I finally get my hands on it. By this point, around mile 60, I could feel my energy levels drop off in the first significant way. To be honest, 60 miles in was farther than I expected to get before having to dig a little bit. I got as mentally strong as I could before the turn at mile 65 into 25 miles of direct, non-interrupted headwind.
I broke this section up into 5 five-mile stretches, each one getting me marginally closer to T2. Not much to be said from here on in. Where I had earlier averaged 20, I was now doing well to hold much more than 14. A 10 mph wind doesn’t seem like much, but it was on the back end of an increasingly hot Ironman bike ride. My back, butt and knee are getting sore and I just finished up the last of my earlier purchased food. One of my goals was to pee twice during the bike ride and again in Transition, so I was glad to have to stop around mile 75 to do so; this means I’m not dehydrated to the point where I can expect system shutdown early in the run. Each 5-mile patch passes slower than the last, but I finally make it to mile 90 and turn out of the headwind into a somewhat headwind. Essentially, it’s into the wind all the way back. Mentally I broke around mile 85. I just didn’t care about time too much anymore. For the first time in my Ironman life, nausea started to creep up during the bike. I tried to induce vomiting at the last aid station to no avail. Guess we’ll have to save that for the run.
The short version is I eventually outlasted the course and made it back to T2. The last 10 miles happened to be on the whitest pavement I’ve ever seen before, blinding me and probably most everyone else, but we made it back in once piece. Immediately upon hopping off my bike, the outside of both my feet were very, very tender, tender to the point to where I doubted my ability to run off of it. I did a bit of a jog-walk to the transition area and it finally alleviated. Taking my time, I dusted off my feet and changed into my run clothes.
The swim and bike are done. The realization that you now have to run a marathon is very often a crippling one, but to me I was glad to say that very little would be left up to chance from here. In the swim, you can get kicked in the right spot and break your goggles; you can cramp up and hyperventilate; you can catch an unwanted water bug and spend the rest of your abbreviated day puking up everything you eat. On the bike, you can blow one too many tires; you can snap a cable or break a chain; you can crash with another bike, or a car, or simply not pay attention and run yourself off the road. But on the run, not much can really prematurely end your day. So long as you have enough time and you’re smart with hydration, nutrition and temperature management, you can always keep moving. You can control it better.
That’s what I was thinking as I began my run. The only thing I deserve to do, the only thing I’ve ever really cared to do, was to finish. And, at this point, it’s just a matter of time.
Bike Time: 6:40:32 16.78 mi/h 91/160
First 56 mi: 3:07:06 17.96 mi/h
Second 56: 3:33:26 15.74 mi/h
Ironman Texas: The Run
Conventional wisdom has a lot to say about “best laid plans.” My best laid plans, haphazardly concocted and thoroughly untested, unraveled in record time. What began as shooting for 1:45 per lap became walk 1 mile per 8 mile lap, which became walking ½ mile twice per lap, to walking ¼ mile every 2 miles to walking ¼ mile every ¼ mile to walking 1 min for every minute to pretty much just walking, all by the 2nd aid station. I tried inducing vomiting twice before I quickly deduced that I was out of options. Oh well, time for the Ironman shuffle. How long to I have ‘til midnight? 8 hours? Yeah, I’m not worried.
Goals of running any significant distance melted pretty quickly. The same old problems coupled with a lack of heat acclimation and no training pretty much shamed me into walking right out of the gate. I wouldn’t say I walked the entire first lap, but I averaged around 12 min per mile, which is more or less equal parts walking a 16 min/mi and running a 10 min/mi. The nausea is still hanging around, but I’m not really afraid of vomiting, so I eat all the usual offenders in spite of it; namely more Ironman Perform and a couple gels. I run as much as I can, but quickly decide most of the reason why I can’t maintain focus for very long is because of the heat, which has climbed to mid 80s plus humidity. A lot of the reason why I abandoned the running so easily was because of the cost/benefit of running before sunset. I reasoned that waiting until after sunset would give me a better chance of gaining time for the same amount of effort. I was around mile 5 by this revelation and almost back to transition, so I adopted it. I did the jog/walk thing until I met Denise again, swapped my Newtons out for some flat shoes and started walking.
The run course is 3, roughly 8-mile long loops that are 98% concrete and 2% dirt trails, and I’m not even sure which is worse for running an Ironman marathon. Despite the run course captain promising us there were no hills, there is a very short but steep pitch up a pile of dirt at mile 1 and a gradual climb up a bridge at mile 2. Despite the fact that I’ve stopped caring and have already forfeited myself to walking for the next 3 hours, I was pretty impressed with the fan turnout. With a short course in terms of actual physical space, the spectators seemed to more effectively pack the course, making certain sections quite loud. I actually had a moment on course when I stopped and walked in front of a particularly loud cheering section for no other reason than because this cheering section occupied too much room. It was too long and I couldn’t make it.
Switching shoes made my feet feel quite a bit better, but also caused me to notice some of the damage of earlier in the day. The inside of my left knee was starting to hurt, and increasingly so. It’s hard to say to what degree I felt it on my first lap, but by the time I started doing running stints after mile 8, I found the pain to be stabbing and motivation-erasing. It was the kind of pain you usually don’t run through; the kind of pain that has been known to ruin your knees forever when you do run through it. Or that’s what I told myself at the time, at least.
Aside from filling you in on the wonderful cast of characters I talked to, which would almost certainly come off as boring, I walked just about all of the 2nd lap in 2:20, about 4:10 into the run. By this point, around 7:30pm I knew the sun would be going down soon. I still had every intention of doing some running on this third lap, but this knee is becoming problematic. I still can’t run on it, and I’m also now having stabbing pains in my left shoulder; no idea where those came from. So I allow myself another 2 hours of powerwalking down to mile 19 and Special Needs. Nearing there, I walked by Lake Woodlands for the last time and for the first time reflect that this is where this whole business started this morning. I think it’s a pretty cool thing to incorporate this as part of the race, to give a bit of context as to what I’m struggling for, what I’d been through so far this day and how little, relatively, I have left to go.
Getting to Special Needs, I pop and handful of NSAIDS and wash it down, as I’ve often considered doing but never actually done, with about a half bottle of Red Bull. I tried running pretty soon thereafter, but not only was the pain still there, but the Red Bull wasn’t very well de-fizzed. It takes a second of walking before it hits me. It’s a powerful numbing sensation. Where all I’ve felt over the last few hours is tiredness and pain in my knee, it’s like somebody turned down the volume on every sense I had. This drink I created… I call it the “just don’t give a fuck.” Because when you drink a JDGAF, you’re still in pain, still tired, still no closer to where you need to go. But you just stop giving a fuck about it.
I think now, finally, it was time to run.
I reset my watch crossing the mile 19 marker and treat the last 7 miles as my race, my portion of an Ironman that history will denote I have the capacity to control. My watch reads exactly 8pm, so the math is easy. I’ve got 1.5 hours until 9:30, 2 hours until 10. I can take it easy and finish in 15, or kick it home and finish at 14:30, or possibly somewhere in the middle. So I start running. The running stints start short and get longer; the walk breaks often and get less frequent. I’ve subsisted solely on Perform and cola since the start of the run, but now add water when I feel cramps start to come and chocolate chip cookies when I feel my blood sugar start to crash.
I really do like the 3 loop run; it breaks the run up into more manageable chunks. By the time I had made the revelation to start running, it really seemed like time was on my side. Each running stint got longer and faster and I found myself passing more and more people. 9:30 seemed like a pretty significant stretch at mile 19, but by the time I had reached mile 23 it was all but sewn up. So long as I kept on pace, 14:30 was mine. And I kept on pace just fine. That usual combination of shooting for an arbitrary time goal and simply wanting to be off the damn course hurtled me towards the finish line as quickly as I’ve travelled all day.
I had my finish line celebration pretty well choreographed by the time I made it into the chute. Having banked enough time to really enjoy it, I counted on my fingers the number of times I’d been here. Wisconsin (1), Kentucky (2), Idaho (3), Florida (4), Texas (5)? Had I really done it? Was this all over, finally? I pump my fist in the air and cross the line to Mike Reilly saying, once more “Patrick Allen of Smyrna, TN… You Are An Ironman!”
Total Run Time: 6:04:11 13:54 min/mi
Lap 1: 8.4 mi 1:43:36 12:20/mi
Lap 2: 8.5 mi 2:16:05 15:58/mi
Lap 3: 8.6 mi 1:57:03 13:38/mi
Total Time: 14:26:56 93/160
This finish line is probably the sweetest since the first one. Because I know it’s my last one for a while. I’m not really tired in the usual sense, as I didn’t really push as hard as I usually do during these things. I was too tired coming off the bike and allowed myself a little too much walking to really leave it all out on course. Not that that was ever the goal.
I finish into the arms of the finish line catcher who has all the usual levels of extreme awareness. How are you? Are you okay? Are you going to faint? Are you going to have a heart attack? Do you need to go to the hospital? Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. Are you sure you’re okay? Because I’m here to help you if you’re not okay.
I’m fine, shit. Just leave me be. Do I look that bad? After she finally takes the hint and heads back to grab someone else, I peruse the athlete food, grabbing a burrito for later and downing some chocolate milk. I decide that I have the time and the motivation to go back to the hotel and shower before coming back to the finish line, so Denise and I head back towards the car. I fill her in on the early afternoon nausea that would never go away, and my repeated failed attempts to vomit it up. I tell her about the drink I created at mile 19 and how it let me borrow a new pair of legs. It’s not 5 minutes after we get out of the finish line area and off course that it finally happens. I’m able to stagger over to a bush and puke my brains out. Hurling again and again and again until my eyes water and I start to cramp. Puking up all that foul, rancid sugar, the 6 painkillers, the Red Bull, the chocolate milk and anything else that might have been sitting in there the better part of all day.
Well that feels better.
I end up just wiping my face off in the sink of a downtown restaurant. We hang out until midnight, I get my bottle of beer. It’s all very routine at this point. I’m glad I finished fast enough to do such things before midnight, but I still can’t give myself credit for a good race. It was just another Ironman. The fact that it doesn’t mean more than that is all the more reason why I shouldn’t be doing another one later this year.
So at the end of the day I’d say I’m satisfied with my race. I didn’t train for it, so it would be pretty irresponsible of me to say I’m upset that it didn’t go well. Conversely, I can’t say that I feel happy with how it went. If I had run the first 7 miles of a marathon and walked the last 19, it would be a terrible outing; I don’t see how walking the first 19 and running the last 7 is much of an improvement.
I’ve already decided I will do Ironman again. I’ll go as far as to say I’m eagerly awaiting my next one. But for now, I’m finished with them. I vow, here and now, not to return to Ironman until I’m ready for it. Ready to finish an Ironman bike in 6 hours, ready to do a marathon without walking. Ready to finish an Ironman before sunset. Ready to accomplish all the things in Ironman that have consistently been outside of my reach. How long it will take to get myself mentally, physically and emotionally ready for that is unclear at this point. But in the anthology of my life, I’m happy to finish this book and start thinking about what I want the next one to be about.
So until then, to quote Taking Back Sunday, don’t lose your faith in me.
Goals of running any significant distance melted pretty quickly. The same old problems coupled with a lack of heat acclimation and no training pretty much shamed me into walking right out of the gate. I wouldn’t say I walked the entire first lap, but I averaged around 12 min per mile, which is more or less equal parts walking a 16 min/mi and running a 10 min/mi. The nausea is still hanging around, but I’m not really afraid of vomiting, so I eat all the usual offenders in spite of it; namely more Ironman Perform and a couple gels. I run as much as I can, but quickly decide most of the reason why I can’t maintain focus for very long is because of the heat, which has climbed to mid 80s plus humidity. A lot of the reason why I abandoned the running so easily was because of the cost/benefit of running before sunset. I reasoned that waiting until after sunset would give me a better chance of gaining time for the same amount of effort. I was around mile 5 by this revelation and almost back to transition, so I adopted it. I did the jog/walk thing until I met Denise again, swapped my Newtons out for some flat shoes and started walking.
The run course is 3, roughly 8-mile long loops that are 98% concrete and 2% dirt trails, and I’m not even sure which is worse for running an Ironman marathon. Despite the run course captain promising us there were no hills, there is a very short but steep pitch up a pile of dirt at mile 1 and a gradual climb up a bridge at mile 2. Despite the fact that I’ve stopped caring and have already forfeited myself to walking for the next 3 hours, I was pretty impressed with the fan turnout. With a short course in terms of actual physical space, the spectators seemed to more effectively pack the course, making certain sections quite loud. I actually had a moment on course when I stopped and walked in front of a particularly loud cheering section for no other reason than because this cheering section occupied too much room. It was too long and I couldn’t make it.
Switching shoes made my feet feel quite a bit better, but also caused me to notice some of the damage of earlier in the day. The inside of my left knee was starting to hurt, and increasingly so. It’s hard to say to what degree I felt it on my first lap, but by the time I started doing running stints after mile 8, I found the pain to be stabbing and motivation-erasing. It was the kind of pain you usually don’t run through; the kind of pain that has been known to ruin your knees forever when you do run through it. Or that’s what I told myself at the time, at least.
Aside from filling you in on the wonderful cast of characters I talked to, which would almost certainly come off as boring, I walked just about all of the 2nd lap in 2:20, about 4:10 into the run. By this point, around 7:30pm I knew the sun would be going down soon. I still had every intention of doing some running on this third lap, but this knee is becoming problematic. I still can’t run on it, and I’m also now having stabbing pains in my left shoulder; no idea where those came from. So I allow myself another 2 hours of powerwalking down to mile 19 and Special Needs. Nearing there, I walked by Lake Woodlands for the last time and for the first time reflect that this is where this whole business started this morning. I think it’s a pretty cool thing to incorporate this as part of the race, to give a bit of context as to what I’m struggling for, what I’d been through so far this day and how little, relatively, I have left to go.
Getting to Special Needs, I pop and handful of NSAIDS and wash it down, as I’ve often considered doing but never actually done, with about a half bottle of Red Bull. I tried running pretty soon thereafter, but not only was the pain still there, but the Red Bull wasn’t very well de-fizzed. It takes a second of walking before it hits me. It’s a powerful numbing sensation. Where all I’ve felt over the last few hours is tiredness and pain in my knee, it’s like somebody turned down the volume on every sense I had. This drink I created… I call it the “just don’t give a fuck.” Because when you drink a JDGAF, you’re still in pain, still tired, still no closer to where you need to go. But you just stop giving a fuck about it.
I think now, finally, it was time to run.
I reset my watch crossing the mile 19 marker and treat the last 7 miles as my race, my portion of an Ironman that history will denote I have the capacity to control. My watch reads exactly 8pm, so the math is easy. I’ve got 1.5 hours until 9:30, 2 hours until 10. I can take it easy and finish in 15, or kick it home and finish at 14:30, or possibly somewhere in the middle. So I start running. The running stints start short and get longer; the walk breaks often and get less frequent. I’ve subsisted solely on Perform and cola since the start of the run, but now add water when I feel cramps start to come and chocolate chip cookies when I feel my blood sugar start to crash.
I really do like the 3 loop run; it breaks the run up into more manageable chunks. By the time I had made the revelation to start running, it really seemed like time was on my side. Each running stint got longer and faster and I found myself passing more and more people. 9:30 seemed like a pretty significant stretch at mile 19, but by the time I had reached mile 23 it was all but sewn up. So long as I kept on pace, 14:30 was mine. And I kept on pace just fine. That usual combination of shooting for an arbitrary time goal and simply wanting to be off the damn course hurtled me towards the finish line as quickly as I’ve travelled all day.
I had my finish line celebration pretty well choreographed by the time I made it into the chute. Having banked enough time to really enjoy it, I counted on my fingers the number of times I’d been here. Wisconsin (1), Kentucky (2), Idaho (3), Florida (4), Texas (5)? Had I really done it? Was this all over, finally? I pump my fist in the air and cross the line to Mike Reilly saying, once more “Patrick Allen of Smyrna, TN… You Are An Ironman!”
Total Run Time: 6:04:11 13:54 min/mi
Lap 1: 8.4 mi 1:43:36 12:20/mi
Lap 2: 8.5 mi 2:16:05 15:58/mi
Lap 3: 8.6 mi 1:57:03 13:38/mi
Total Time: 14:26:56 93/160
This finish line is probably the sweetest since the first one. Because I know it’s my last one for a while. I’m not really tired in the usual sense, as I didn’t really push as hard as I usually do during these things. I was too tired coming off the bike and allowed myself a little too much walking to really leave it all out on course. Not that that was ever the goal.
I finish into the arms of the finish line catcher who has all the usual levels of extreme awareness. How are you? Are you okay? Are you going to faint? Are you going to have a heart attack? Do you need to go to the hospital? Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. Are you sure you’re okay? Because I’m here to help you if you’re not okay.
I’m fine, shit. Just leave me be. Do I look that bad? After she finally takes the hint and heads back to grab someone else, I peruse the athlete food, grabbing a burrito for later and downing some chocolate milk. I decide that I have the time and the motivation to go back to the hotel and shower before coming back to the finish line, so Denise and I head back towards the car. I fill her in on the early afternoon nausea that would never go away, and my repeated failed attempts to vomit it up. I tell her about the drink I created at mile 19 and how it let me borrow a new pair of legs. It’s not 5 minutes after we get out of the finish line area and off course that it finally happens. I’m able to stagger over to a bush and puke my brains out. Hurling again and again and again until my eyes water and I start to cramp. Puking up all that foul, rancid sugar, the 6 painkillers, the Red Bull, the chocolate milk and anything else that might have been sitting in there the better part of all day.
Well that feels better.
I end up just wiping my face off in the sink of a downtown restaurant. We hang out until midnight, I get my bottle of beer. It’s all very routine at this point. I’m glad I finished fast enough to do such things before midnight, but I still can’t give myself credit for a good race. It was just another Ironman. The fact that it doesn’t mean more than that is all the more reason why I shouldn’t be doing another one later this year.
So at the end of the day I’d say I’m satisfied with my race. I didn’t train for it, so it would be pretty irresponsible of me to say I’m upset that it didn’t go well. Conversely, I can’t say that I feel happy with how it went. If I had run the first 7 miles of a marathon and walked the last 19, it would be a terrible outing; I don’t see how walking the first 19 and running the last 7 is much of an improvement.
I’ve already decided I will do Ironman again. I’ll go as far as to say I’m eagerly awaiting my next one. But for now, I’m finished with them. I vow, here and now, not to return to Ironman until I’m ready for it. Ready to finish an Ironman bike in 6 hours, ready to do a marathon without walking. Ready to finish an Ironman before sunset. Ready to accomplish all the things in Ironman that have consistently been outside of my reach. How long it will take to get myself mentally, physically and emotionally ready for that is unclear at this point. But in the anthology of my life, I’m happy to finish this book and start thinking about what I want the next one to be about.
So until then, to quote Taking Back Sunday, don’t lose your faith in me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
