Stefan Reiter - IM 70.3 Salzburg -
Pre-Race
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Friday afternoon: Arrived @ race venue 2 days early and did registration immediately. Nothing special - business as usual 
Saturday: Carb-Loading Day! Had a huge breakfast at around 7:30 than headed out with my buddy to drive the bike course by car to check out corners and pitfalls. Came back at 11:00 perfectly timed to race briefing followed by a pretty huge lunch. Did the bike check-in in the early afternoon followed by a little bit of chill-out ending up having a pizza for diner at around 7pm. Went to bed at 9pm as usual.
Race-Day Morning
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Woke up as normal at around 6:00am but managed to find another few minutes of sleep Had an impressive apple-sauce breakfast 3h before race-start improved by a spoon of PowerBar Recovery powder, 1 tab of BCAA and a banana.
No rain at this time but it rained during the whole night and we had around 12degC.
SWIM - Planned sub 0:35 / Achieved 0:33:03
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It was a wet-suite swim as the lake had only slightly above 19degC and it was still cold outside. Started in the second wave at 10:10 but only had about 3-5min for swim warmup which is a little bit too less for me. Struggled the first few minutes with my form and also the other athletes were fighting each other terribly - not a very nice swim till the end.
T1 - Business as usual but somehow my wetsuit wouldn't slip over the timing chip ... lost around 30sec here to get that straight without damaging any of both items
BIKE - Planned sub 2:20 / Achieved 2:13:56
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THIS WAS THE BEST FUCKING RIDE I'VE EVER DONE IN MY WHOLE LIFE! It was raining hard at that time and there were a LOT of people out on the course having a LOT of slippery corners. The course is pretty flat having only about 320 height-meters each round so the speed is pretty high at all times. I really slowed down at every corner just to stay safe of not having an accident! Was riding at about 75-80% for the first 20min then started my fueling plan (1xgel or half-powerbar each 20min). At the same time I ramped up to my desired power output level of 85-87% which I was able to sustain until the end of the bike split easily!
Averaged at about 86% having a VI of 1.03 which is pretty low when I now think of all the corners ...
THIS WAS THE FASTEST BIKE SPLIT OF ALL AGE-GROUPERS AND WOMEN-PROs! Only 13 PRO men managed to ride faster 
T2 - Still astonished about my bike-split time I lost focus a little and ran by my slot by a few meters. Lost 10-15 seconds just because I wasn't focused!
RUN - Planned sub 1:30 / Achieved 1:26:10
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I really tried to follow my race plan running the first 5k at 4:30/km but all the spectators pushed me forward so my pace was at around 4:17/km. I felt pretty good at that point and turned up the volume to my planed race-pace 4:05/km. I did take a gel after km 10 with a sip of water. This was working good until km 13 where everything started to get HARD so I slowed down a little to a pace of 4:15/km because I knew there's still a huge way to go. From 13 to 18km I really just focused on my "suffering-self" ... it helped me a lot thinking of all my other hard long runs I did in the past so managed to get to the last turn-around at km18. At that point I wasn't sure I could hold onto that pace until the finish line and the crowded road wasn't an advantage for a nice time at that point. I kept pushing myself and I was lucky to see some other guys having 3 arm-band (like me) so I knew I have to out-run them NOW and don't give them a chance to draft me.
I passed the last one only a minute away from the finish line which gave me some kind of super-boost
Summary - finished after 4:21:26 and placed 4th in my AG only 50s behind 3rd (3 slots for World Championship)!
Drove home early but WC wasn't a topic at all for me ... now I know that one of those 3 guys dropped off the WC so I would have got the slot ... who cares - I got the fucking best bike split and that's everything I care about 
Comments
... yes you are absolutely correct about my "bad" swimming - I really need to focus on that during the winter. A buddy of mine - he's an impressive swimmer and just did the 1.5k @our local olympic distance race slightly below 18 minutes - already offered me he want's to work with me on that issue.
I need to say that I'm not that disappointed about my swim-split because I KNOW I'm a bad swimmer as I started swimming just a few years ago but anyway you are right - this one is my "Show-Stopper"
@Paul - No I didn't do anything else except following the Advanced plans here ... and to be honest I wan't even able to hit all the hard bike WKO in the Half-Ironman plan (same applies for the long runs).
@Cary - I will most likely start there again next year so maybe will see us there