The Road to IM Louisville 2018 (aka My first Ironman)

So I am resurrecting the blog to tell the tale of the road to Ironman.  Originally I was planning to doing a full Ironman this year, for my 40th birthday.  Last fall my coach was brutally honest with me (I guess I pay him to be that on top of the other things) and said I wouldn't be able to make the cutoffs, especially if anything went wrong (which is likely).  So I decided to postpone until the 10th anniversary of my diabetes diagnosis since this is why I started all of this in the first place and take three years to train hard and get faster.

In January I started the serious training.  My running coach became my tri coach, and I started working with a swim coach.  Training intensity picked up and my bike rides went from rides to training.  I had to start doing them on the bike trainer instead of a spin bike or stationary bike.  I HATED the bike trainer, but I needed to suck it up.  Sometime in the spring I found someone selling a better trainer for a really great price and snagged it - made life easier.  I was swimming two days a week instead of one.  And I was only running two days a week.

In February I had a BodPod done to get an accurate assessment of my body fat percentage.  Turns out my scale is pretty accurate on the body fat (and weight), which was good and bad.  I wasn't shocked by any of it.  But with the concern of a few that my body fat is over 40% and the risk that posed (risk of what - diabetes? - already there) I decided to start working with my sport dietitian on a regular basis to lose weight sustainably.

March brought reaching a pretty significant half marathon running goal - I finally broke 2:30 in the half marathon at Dallas Rock & Roll.  Then in March I successfully paced 2:45 at the Carmel half marathon, faster than I have paced before.  In May I made the 2:30 goal "real" by doing it a second time.

I tried riding the Muskoka 70.3 course on a bike trainer in April and found out I have a LOT of hill work to do.

So...that brings us to the first tri of this run...Bonkers Tri at Four Winds Resort on Lake Monroe.  It was in the upper 40s for the whole race with winds gusting to 40 mph.  Here's the race report:

Lesson 1: Bring my own breakfast.  The restaurant wasn't serving breakfast until 7 AM and their service the night before (though pleasant) was slow enough to make me question if I would make the 7:45 race instructions meeting.  So I concocted something from the snack shop, which had limited choices in anything resembling healthy.  I had a granola bar and two packets of peanut butter crackers with two bottles of water and a terrible cup of coffee.  Numbers on everything seemed to look ok (not great, but my options were bad)...

Lesson 2: Get in the water before the race starts.  Even with the wetsuit it was heart attack cold.  It took a bit to process the panic and get moving well.  The swim course had been modified because the beach is under 6' of water and it was now a long out and back.  I did a decent job of spotting and was hanging with the group on the way out (not all the way to the turn, but close).  Then the turn...and into the waves.  The wind had picked up significantly and the water was very choppy.  I stopped and was treading water and seriously considered waving over rescue.  I did some forward moving skulling action with my head above water to move for quite a bit.  I was burping to the point of nearly puking and painfully remembering why I don't eat peanut butter before a race.  Closer toward the beach (maybe 300 m out) I started swimming again and was fine.  The official swim end was way up the hill going into transition, but I lapped the watch coming out of the water (under the arch) and it was 45 minutes.  My Tri Indy swims have been 53 and 55 minutes and Muncie was 52 minutes.  So this is actually one of the good things.  With the wetsuit and when I was swimming well it was good enough that even with the really bad patch my time was better.  I can't control the weather (hence chop) but with more OWS time maybe I can learn to swim through it better.

Lesson 3: Train hills.  Lots of them.  On the bike.  This course is ridiculous (but Muskoka will be too).  I walked hills on the bike course for the first time in a tri.  I wasn't the only one, but still.  [and walking in tri shoes is much harder than the mountain shoes were]  My bike was much slower than even I could have imagined a "bad day" being.  10.7 mph...not pretty.  The gusty wind didn't help, we had ~25 mph gusts pretty often and I got blown around a bit in the more open areas, but this is where being bigger and on a heavier bike doesn't hurt.  After the race I was talking to the RD...he won't ride the Oly/Half course because the hills are too much.  He says it is a course to survive.  I suppose I did that, I finished it.  I was BRILLIANT to pack and wear a wind resistant cycling jacket.  My legs were cold at the beginning of the bike but ok after that and I kept my upper body from freezing with the jacket.

[The top female averaged 16.9 mph on the bike, second 14.4, everyone else under 14]

Lesson 4: Work I've been doing on running has paid off.  My run was one of the more shining moments of the race despite the big hill in the first mile and I really had to pee the entire time.  It was my fastest 10K in a tri.  I have been averaging 13:20-23 and I averaged 12:59 (probably faster - check the Garmin in TP and see the T2 note below) running some negative splits in this race even after the rough ride (big downhill near the end helped too).

So the numbers...

Swim 48:05 (this includes the long uphill trek to transition)

T1 3:09

Bike 2:18:43 (ouch)

T2 the timing system dumped all T2 times into the run

Run 1:20:27

Total 4:30:26 (ouch)

10th/last female, 1st/only AG, 30/31 overall

On a different course with different weather it may have been a better day.  Looking at the pieces it is really only the bike that was terrible.  The swim wasn't as good as we expected, but it's getting better and I stayed in (2 years ago I think I would have DNFd).