Ironman Texas: Pre-Race and The Swim

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