Ironman Canada

Penticton, British Columbia

August 29, 2010

2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run

Going into this race, I was feeling sluggish, not super confident, injured, and did I say sluggish?

The swim started off with roughly 2800 people spread out across a quarter of a mile with plans to meet at the first buoy. I thought that since we would all be meeting there, I would at least get to the front of the line and have people pass me instead of the other way around. This idea popped into my head after speaking with a bunch of other better swimmers and it turned out only 1161 people beat me out of the water. This could have been due partially to my strategy of swimming in a zig zag pattern. Straight lines are over rated and I was very happy with my 1:11 swim which was a 7 minute PR from IM New Zealand and a 5 minute PR from Aquabike in July.

The bike is something that I have gotten progressively stronger on but multitasking is tough which has resulted in nutrition issues, cramping, throwing up… in previous races. I decided this time around to stay in Zone 2/3 (aerobic) so that I would have good legs to run the marathon. Riding conservatively was a very hard thing to do but I stuck to my plan even when people were passing me. That is until the rain started. I was really trying to keep taking in nutrition but when the rain/hail started with about 25 miles to go, I got so cold that I couldn’t stop shivering and was therefore unable to grab my water bottles to drink. Plus all my focus was on staying alive as I went down the backside of Yellow Lake at 30 mph in the wind and rain with both brakes fully engaged. Seeing 3 ambulances at the bottom of the hill wasn’t very comforting. I was hoping to ride at least a 5:30 but was happy to be off the bike in 5:39 and made up a lot of positions, 1162 to 407 and 131 to 54 in my age group.

When I ran into the transition tent, I wasn’t able to put my socks and shoes on by myself because my hands were frozen. Thank goodness for the volunteers! I was nervous starting the run since my legs started to tighten during the end of the bike but decided to just stick with the plan of running a sub 8 pace and walking each aid station. For the most part it worked on the first half with me crossing the ½ way point in 1:46. I quickly realized that the return trip started out with a hill and what felt like a nonstop headwind. My pace slowed a bit but I tried to just focus on drafting anybody who passed me. This worked perfectly as everybody I drafted, I ended up passing J I didn’t manage to keep up a 8 minute pace for the return portion but was happy with a 3:44 time which shot me up 140 spots to finish in 267^th place out of 3029. I passed 14 guys in my age group to sit finish in 40^th out of 247.

Overall, it was a great day with many friends finishing their first Ironman and others pulling of awesome finishes on a difficult day.

Bike Breakdown.

Run Breakdown. You can see how often I had to go to the bathroom… lots of stops

I feel the leadup to the race is just as important as what occurred during the few hours I was in the race. I had the responsibility of securing GGTC’s usual area at Lake San Antonio which meant going down on Tuesday with caution tape and ~50 tents. I spent Tuesday afternoon cordoning off Redondo Vista H with caution tape and setting up roughly 15 tents around the perimeter. I spent Tuesday night in a hotel in Paso Robles as I wanted a nice shower and also needed internet to work remotely Tuesday night and Wed. morning.  From Wednesday afternoon to Friday morning I proceeded to put up the rest of the tents along with help from another GGTC member. By the end of Thursday my back was in a lot of pain and I was nervous about how my race would go.

Fast forward to race morning and I know you’re not supposed to try anything new but a pretty girl said she would paint my toenails on Friday night and I let her. After talking to Steve I also decided to take more nutrition than usual as I’ve had trouble with taking in enough nutrition in previous races. In essence, I was thinking it was time to pee on the bike.

The swim starts and it feels like I’m in a pretty small wave. Right off the bat, the main pack is off ahead of me and I decide to try and stick on feet. My shoulder still isn’t 100% and my goal is to swim better than my crap time at Oceanside. I’m staying focused and making sure to stretch my arms when about 20 min. into the swim I feel a hand hit my foot and proceed to grab it and pull. Startled I look up and see a fast guy from the wave behind me. Overall swim was slow but I wasn’t expecting much. Time in water = 38:45

The bike is where things get interesting. I decided not to race with technology at WF and so was basically pedaling hard but not too hard as to get out of breath. My goal in this race was to have a quality run. About 10 miles into the bike I’d had a gu, some jelly beans, carbo pro, and water. I took a drink from my carbo pro and proceeded to throw up everything I’d taken in. I stayed calm and focused on drinking water. I remembered hearing a pro talk about how he once got sick on the bike (or didn’t take enough nutrition) and ended up having a solid race. This thought held me over for about 10 more miles and then I started getting worried as I was still throwing up all over myself everytime I took something. I keep thinking that I’ll be fine once I get off the bike but could feel my strength weakening and then it happened. Halfway up Nasty Grade, a loud BOOM and my front tire goes limp. I curse all Gods and wonder where my good karma is from coming down early. I took my helmet off and in no rush went about changing the tire. At the time I was hoping that maybe the 7 min. break would be good for my stomach but soon learn that I am totally wrong. For the second year in a row Jim Perry rides by to see me in a pretty low place.  I reach the top of nasty grade and find that my mental and emotional self is a wreck as I’m now covered in my own puke aka gatorade, jelly beans, and brekkie, and worrying about my recently changed tire as I go down the hill. From mile 45 to 56, I rarely bothered to go into aero and coasted back into transition lost in thoughts of disappointment. A bike time of 3:12 wasn’t what I had planned on. It’s surprisingly hard to DNF yourself as it seems that everybody volunteering is a high school kid and cheering. I ended up going to the finish line area as a 9 year girl was finishing the mountain bike tri. I turned in the chip and walked to the med tent. A nice, older lady looks at me strange and asks me what’s wrong as I’ve got crap all over my body. I tell her that I’ve been throwing up on myself for the past 46 miles. She grabs my hand lays me in a bed and they give me an IV. After the first one is empty they decide to give me another. I’m basically sleeping as this all happens until the nurse drops IV number 2 on my neck from roughly 3 feet above. So at the end of Saturday, I now have a bruise that looks like a hicky and hot pink toenails.

Oh but the story doesn’t end there. On Sunday, I’m driving back to the Bay area and somehow a screw holding the alternator in place fell out and the van I was in overheated. Other than all that I had a great weekend… It was great seeing people over the weekend and I hope that I’ve gotten rid of all my bad luck and can focus on Vineman Aquabike and IM Canada.

Here’s the video of the day before the race.

California 70.3

Golden Gate Triathlon Club’s Expo where sponsors explain their services, raffle prizes are given out, snacks & drinks are consumed, and an all around good time

Oh GGTC, you’ve been good to me. Now it’s time I give back. Training for races is fun and all but those post workout drinks is where the glue is. You get a chance to take off the spandex, do your hair up, and meet people in an element where it doesn’t matter if you’re an elite, novice, or somewhere between. I promise that nobody will get dropped at a social I’m in charge of.

I’m all for really intense workouts but more importantly I need a place to recoup those lost calories whether it’s in the form of a beer, chocolate milk, or some sweet drink that the Sponsorship director hooks us up with.

As Social Director, I plan on putting in the effort I pour into my training into running successful socials, Wildflower Training weekend, year end parties, and so on. I plan on having an open ear to the types of socials you’d like and also the different organizations you’d like to have them with.

Being Social Director isn’t just about putting on parties and I look forward to applying the experience I gained from being on other non-profit boards such as being the Vice President and Treasurer of the JET Alumni Association of Northern California and from being an advisor on the Asia Society Young Professionals Group. Together I look forward to 2010 being a great year of successful races and memorable socials. It’s all about balance. I also plan on making more use of technology and social networks to:

- create GGTC promotional videos

- Create content for FB and our events pages

The Vineman 70.3 race report was tentatively titled, “How it all came together.”

I thought google mapping the directions up to my cabin was a good omen when the distance was listed as 70.3 mile. But that was before I actually started the race, which became “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

Expectations were set high for my last tri of the season but alas, a sub 5 half IM will have to wait until next year. My swim actually was good (for me) and I really enjoyed the 16 min. return portion of the loop after an agonizing 20 minutes going upstream. It was eerily quiet exiting the water as there were people lining up on both sides but not a soul cheering except my buddy Rahim who was surprised to see me strip my wetsuit off and throw it at him so that I wouldn’t get all my clothes in the swim bag wet.

My bike is something I’ve been working on quite a bit lately and it showed in my 56 mile split of 2:33. Anybody else lose a water bottle within the first couple of minutes? For me it was bye bye Carbo Pro but luckily I had 5 gels taped to my top tube along with a couple of salt pills. I was very happy with my bike but had to stop once b/c I thought I’d flatted but it turned out my back brake was rubbing and I was one of the lucky ones who went through the tree area before the fire dept. closed off the street for a bit. Towards the end of the bike my quads started to tighten up a little but I thought that it would loosen up once I started running.

So off the bike I went and before mile one, both my quads and hamstrings cramped up so much that walking became an issue. I contemplated DNFing but as it was a nice day and I knew that the under 29 females would be on their return trip on the run, I decided to give walking a go with the hopes of jogging as my legs loosened up. I ended up doing this awkward shuffle over the next 12 miles as I popped salt tablets like candy. It was awesome to see so many PacBikes & GGTC athletes and Thank You for the cheering and motivation as you passed me

This race was my hardest tri in 4 years as physically and mentally I was spent. I managed to run through the finisher’s chute due to all the cheers but as soon as I finished I collapsed with cramps from my groin down. It must have been a funny sight as volunteers are trying to move me out of the way while people cheering were yelling at them to spray water on me and massage my legs. I don’t really recall too much of it but after about 10 min. they carried me over to the med tent. So that’s how my 2009 tri season ended. It’s been great and I look forward to challenging myself next year and hopefully breaking the elusive 5 hour mark. I ended up doing the race in 5:26. I’m exhausted and will now focus on a couple running races for the rest of the year. In Oct. I will be doing the Chicago Marathon and in Dec. the NorthFace 50 miler.

Inspirational movie on Ironman triathlete Jason Lester

INSPIRE

Yesterday was my 3rd race in 3 weeks and I definitely wasn’t looking forward to waking up at 4:30 am again. I wasn’t in a huge rush to get to the race as I heard that we would have a PacBikes’ (team I race with) rack but apparently we didn’t so Chris and I set up next to each other. I thought that was smart as I knew that his bike would be gone which would give me plenty of room to get my wetsuit off and have a quick transition. After spending 24 minutes in the water I finally made it ashore along with some fast women and slow 24-29 year old dudes. One thing that got me riled up was that somebody had tied the balloon that i had on the rack to my bike so that when I started running with my bike along came the balloon. I ripped it off and proceeded to get a slap in the face from the headwind that I wasn’t expecting. Two weeks ago a group of us rode the course and at the start was a very nice tailwind. Oh well, I buckled down and managed to get the bike course done in 1:03 which rocks considering I was having shifting issues. As soon as I started the run I could tell that it was going to be tough. My lower right back area started cramping (as it did last week also) but thinking that all I had to do was run for sub 40 min. then it would all be over. I proceeded to get the first 5 km done in about 20 min. and then everything went to shit. My stomach started cramping and the miles never seemed to end. A couple of older (35-39) guys passed me and I tried to keep up but at mile 6 I figured out that the race wasn’t almost done and started to have some “wall” issues. It was supposed to be a 6.2 mile run but due to mismarkings, the final distance was closer to 7.4 miles. The run ended up taking me 48 min. It was really awesome seeing friends on the course and I really pushed myself to not only catch up with my Chris but also not get caught by Jim or any of our fast pacbikes women. In the end I finished the race in 2:19 which was good enough for 9th AG, 61st OA. I look forward to having it all come together at Vineman.

On June 7, I competed in the Anchorman Sprint triathlon which consisted of a 3/4 mile ocean swim, 9 mile hilly bike, and a 4 mile trail/road/sand ladder run. There were only roughly 150 participants of which about 80+ were men. This is really one of those races where I wish I could swim faster. The swim wasn’t as well organized as you would hope which resulted in some people missing the last buoy and reaching land before they were supposed to. It seemed like everytime I breathed on my right side I saw somebody running on the beach prematurely. Instead of cutting a line straight for the beach, I decided to make my way around the third buoy which seemed to take an eternity. I don’t think my swim time would have improved much but that could partially be why I ended up around 66th out of 80+ dudes. Once hitting land, we had a long 1 mile transition run in which I probably passed 15-20 people. Some people chose not to have shoes waiting for them and paid for it as the gravel was not feet friendly. The 9 mile bike is literally over a hill and back twice. I knew the course well and had been doing quite a few hill repeats in the weeks leading up. I passed a lot of ppl which made me feel good and also seeing so many familiar faces during the ride as it was 2 loops was encouraging. Probably the biggest encouragement was Andreas, another guy on the Pac Bikes team, coming up from behind and telling me to start pushing it. This was I was starting my 1st loop and him his second. The bike went quick in 30 minutes which was good enough for 6th fastest time. As I started the run I was nervous about my calf as I had cramped it during a training run a few days before. I decided that I would just push myself and if it cramped, oh well. Lucky for me, I was very familiar with the course and decided not to take it easy on the sand ladder. This proved a smart move as I caught up with a few guys during the last 2 miles. My time of 31 minutes was the 4th fastest time on the run. Overall, I was 14th and 2nd in my age group. There were some organization issues with the race but overall it was great to see so many friends racing and cheering. I look forward to seeing how I do this weekend in Holland, MI at another sprint triathlon. Hopefully the shorter swim, longer bike and run work to my favor although I will be renting a road bike instead of bringing mine.