Steelhead 70.3 Race Report and a big PR
Steelhead race report (with apologies for the length)
July 31, 2010
Overall time 4:48:43 (best time by 20 minutes)
Swim: 33:58
T1: 5:15 (oy, helmet disaster)
Bike 2:30:28 (22.3 mph, the fastest I’ve ever done ANY distance triathlon, even sprints)
T2: 2:05
Run: 1:36:57 (7:24 pace)
9th place in AG of 148
I originally tweeted that I was in the top 100 overall, but I found out later that this did not account for all the people who started after me. I ended up 133rd. They repeatedly announced 2400 participants in the morning, but there are only 1854 finishers listed. Sorry about that inaccuracy.
Prerace
This was my A-race for the summer. My goal all summer had been to break 5:00, having done a 5:08:xx at KS 70.3 in 2009. However, I had only discussed this in two places - on an Endurance Nation post where I brought up my race goals and got some good advice (Thanks Chris, Rich, Matt, Al, et al!), and I told my wife the day before I left. I didn’t tell my son, who accompanied me and volunteered on the course, and I didn’t tell anyone on our great local club (Triathlon Racers of Iowa). We sent a big contingent to the race. I suppose I should have more confidence.
Friday
Friday was my birthday and we spent it driving to the race. Christopher (my 15-year old son) and I were out the door by 6:00 a.m. or so. We were set to lose an hour to the time zone change, and had about a 7.5 hour drive in front of us, which meant that we were likely to get there about 2:30 p.m. The drive went fine, save for one bad traffic section near Gary, IN. Never did care for that town. :-) I made sure to have a big lunch and start drinking. Christopher started making fun of me for how often I wanted to pee.
We arrived at race check-in and there were two things that immediately struck my eye. First, the check-in line was LOOOOONG. And second, I was surprised how much it seemed like guys were preening and checking each other out. I hadn’t really picked up an “intimidation vibe” at a prerace checkin like that before. I tried to ignore it. After getting through the line, which moved fairly quickly, we poked around the small expo, and then went out to drive the bike course. [Christopher was volunteering at the mile 25 bike station, so he needed to see it too!] Our impression of the bike course was that it was pretty moderate. The road conditions were largely good, and the hills were smaller than the ones in our neighborhood.
As we finished going around the course, we drove over to a group dinner with the TRI Racers. It was a great social event (and my birthday), so that aspect was fun. I felt a little awkward eating almost nothing, but I got away with a modest bowl of (great) soup, a small part of my order of risotto, and a few spoonfuls of ice cream. Retreat to the hotel, take care of business, and get to bed.
Saturday morning prerace
Got up at 3:00 and I put down two bottles of Naked Smoothies, about 600 calories. We got going and got to the venue right before 4:30. Christopher went off on his bike to the check-in area to help with body marking, and I got there a bit later after re-inflating my tires and double checking a few things in my bag.
I rode my bike to transition. (This is a key point below...)
By about 4:40, it began to rain, and the transition area was not lit. I did find a good landmark to locate my bike and checked out which way I would be running in, and so on. This part went well.
However, I was disappointed with the race directors for not bringing in portable lighting. This was an unnecessary complication for everyone. I will admit I let this difficulty (combined with the rain) get to me. Between trying to stay warm, deciding how or whether to protect my shoes, etc., it threw me off mentally. I forgot to put the sticker over the gap in my disk cover. Eventually, I decided I just had to get out of there because the whole situation was making me tense. I put on my wetsuit for warmth, and walked down to the beach and the mile down to the start. This was a good decision for my mental health. I went through patches of sitting alone and trying to focus and others of visiting with friends or other races.
Nutrition Plan
I had done a lot of practice rides using the standard practice of a concentrated Perpetuem bottle and water, and they had gone fine, but I always felt like I got a boost if I actually drank something with simple sugars, e.g., gatorade. I had also done some rides with just gatorade endurance, and they went fine. After considering how few calories I wanted on the bike leg (up to about 500 tops), I decided to REALLY simplify my nutrition plan. I would carry two bottles of gatorade on my bike (~300 calories) and drink (most of) one of them in the first 10 miles, and get going on a water/gatorade mix for the rest of the ride. Getting through my two bottles and a bit more than one more handout bottle would be plenty of calories. On the run, I figured I could get away with 200-300 calories total (and take more if I needed). At about 50 cal per 8 oz, I would need 32-48 oz over the race. That averages out to about 3 oz per aid station, and that seemed very doable. So the run plan was just to take a good swig of gatorade and then a second cup of water to drink and/or cool myself. All Gatorade all the time. Pretty boring, but I wanted to simplify, simplify, simplify.
In the end, I may not have consumed more than 400 calories on the bike, but I kept doing it steadily, every few minutes, and there just weren't any issues at all.
The start and the swim
My focuses for the swim were the following:
- swim harder than I usually do. As hard as I can without losing form/control. "Don’t fall asleep" to paraphrase Al Truscott.
- Navigate well. Try not to sight much; try to let the other racers guide me. Try to go at least 25 yards per sighting when possible.
- Try to draft well without pissing off the guy in front of me.
I lined up nearer the front of the swim than my previous times would indicate. This was a conscious decision, since I didn’t want to have to clamber around a bunch of other swimmers if I was successful in going faster, and I wanted a chance to catch a good draft leader.
I was totally unaware of any current in the lake walking down, during warmup, or the race. A friend said he thought it changed, but that was news to me.
The swim was very straight, which was a huge advantage for me. I just hugged the buoys and tried to draft as much as I could. It turned out that it was less time than I would have liked. There was not so much “violence”, but there was a lot of nudging people off of other people’s feet. After the first half or so, things thinned out. I probably only had a draft half the time.
That I wasn’t sighting very much but stayed on course was testified by the fact that I physically ran into two of the buoys. Oops. :-)
Especially in the second half of the swim, when there were fewer people, I caught myself not going as hard as I wanted a few times. In retrospect, I attribute this to the whole issue of being a bit mentally out of it all early morning. It’s just a crude estimate, but I wonder if I could have gotten another minute out of the swim.
When I stood up, I was under 33 min for the swim. That was a big bolt of pleasure hand helped kick me up mentally. My official time was 33:58 by the time I got up to the transition area where the mat was.
T1
T1 was going great until....
I couldn’t get my helmet strap buckled without the strap going across my nose! This took me forever to figure out. It turned out that someone had pulled the strap in such a way that it slid from the left to the right side of my head (through the top of the helmet), thus making the whole strap totally “out of balance”. Between the general disfunction of having just gotten out of the water and the fact that my glasses were wet, hindering my vision, this took me FOREVER to figure out. I finally did, and got it straight. I am SURE I lost 2-3 minutes fussing with this. Ouch! Otherwise, T1 was fine.
[I don't blame anyone for doing this maliciously, but I also don't see how I could have done it, given that I rode my bike, and didn't do anything with the helmet except put it down. Someone (potentially me, I guess) must have moved it and accidentally jerked around the straps.]
Bike leg
Technical analysis. I set my overall PR by being able to swim and bike a lot faster without hurting my run. After testing and practice rides, I had decided to gamble a little and race as high as 83-84% IF for the main section. This would mean an easy period at the beginning targeting near 180 W, and then trying to hold 190 W or just over for the remainder. I had NOT anticipated being able to finish in 2:30.
My bike computer (a Garmin) had a flaw that I did not know about. A few weeks before the race, but after my testing, I had upgraded to the latest firmwear (3.2). After the race, I learned that this version was suffering from lots of data dropouts. The display simply didn’t update for several seconds. The speed and power would just remain what they were (not go to zero), but the distance also would not change. I had noticed the first phenomenon in training rides, but not the second, and I had misattributed the slow updating to a mapping function I was using. As a result, my Garmin showed distances during the race about 10% shorter than the actual distance! I thought I was having a “normal” day (i.e., somewhere around 2:45 finish), until I finally verified with other riders that the mile markers on the course were accurate. I only figured out what was happening in my post-race analysis. I also think this may have messed with the TSS/average power calculations.
During the first 20 min or so, I was being pretty conservative. I was intentionally working at high cadence. I remember seeing mainly 170-180 power, but my software is giving me an average power of around 165. I really don’t know what to believe. For the rest of the race, again, I perceived that I was seeing mostly in the neighborhood of 190 W, but the average (aside from the last mile or so, which is just around the transition area) showed only the upper 170s. At least the average moved up the 10 W I was shooting for.
Given these uncertainties, I do not know how to interpret the NP (178) and TSS data. Even adding 10% to the TSS (to account for the missing distance), it only came up to the low 150s. I can tell you it FELT harder than that. It FELT like I was riding what the computer was showing me contemporaneously for power readings. If the NP is off due to the data drop by about the 10 W it felt like, the TSS would be in a much more reasonable-feeling low 170s.
My HR dropped from the upper 150s at the beginning to the upper 140s by the end in a very steady manner. I wasn't lolligagging, but I was in control. LT heart rate is in the low 160s for bike.
Cadence average was 98. 50% of the time was 90-100, 31% of the time was 100-110. This is higher than I've seen before, but I think some of that comes from my new compact crank, where I could really spin up hills and not drag down my cadence average.
Descriptive analysis. Unsurprisingly, the first 10 miles were very crowded. It was good that I had resolved not to go my full power during this time because it was very difficult to do so, between steering around people and various small obstacles. I was in the first male wave after several female waves, and I was gradually moving up through the crowd.
The hills at Steelhead are modest, but nonetheless, I was still losing ground going up them, compared to my contemporaries. I would catch them downhill and on the flats. I’m used to this by now. I got to see a few friends on the course, and I always like that. (Fortunately, I was passing them! Tee hee!) But the truth is that I’m not a very good friend during a race. I always give a good cheer for people, but I can’t concentrate on my race and chit-chat...I just go on.
For the first half of the leg, I found myself “racing” with a pack of 6-10 riders who kept making it their business to blow by me going up hill. Some of them were newbies to the distance (having overheard their conversations), and at least 2-3 were apparently roadies, based on their riding style. Two were people only doing the bike leg as a relay. This was pretty frustrating. It was a lot of mental work to not get caught up in their draft pack, but I also somehow sensed that I was a stronger rider that day than most of them. Not sure how. That said, it was often a fair amount of work to have to pass the whole group of them instead of one or two riders. (I was clearly going faster on the flats and downhills than their pack.)
At the first aid station, I had a bad experience. Volunteers were not very good at handing off, were running into the road, etc. I didn’t get a bottle of anything. However, it was only half an hour in, and the weather was not hot. I had plenty of fluid to make it to the second aid station, so I didn’t stop. At the second aid station, I got a bottle of water from my son (yea!) and stuck it in my teeth. I got a gatorade bottle from another volunteer and stuck it in my down-tube holder. Just as I was getting out of the area and was ready to get a water drink then pour the rest in my aero drink, the bottle broke! I was left with a bottle top in my teeth and nothing else! Another quick calculation: Still not hot. Next aid station in only 8-9 miles. Nutrition going ok. OK, I won’t stop again. But next time, I will take whatever I get first and put it in the down tube no matter what! Fortunately, there were no more mishaps, and I got my fluids safely from then on out.
The only other annoying problem was that my wet, old velcro of my bike shoes kept coming undone. Grrr!
Around mile 30, the course finally opened up. It was totally a pleasure at this point. The pack was still hanging with me off and on, but it had gotten smaller and the rest of the riders dramatically thinned. Finally, between miles 35 and 40, we saw a course martial. The pack was down to ~3 by then, and they passed me up a hill as a martial rode parallel with them for quite a while. I passed them back on the flat, and eventually the martial rode off without doing anything. They passed me one last time shortly thereafter, the unofficial leader kidding with me about how he wondered if the martial had been watching him. I mumbled something considerably more polite than I had been thinking, and broke a personal rule for a few min, putting some distance between them and me at about 200 W on a flat, and I don’t remember seeing them again.
Somewhere around the 2:10 or 2:15 mark, the ride was feeling less fun, more hard, and a bit painful. I knew I could hold it through 2:45 (if that’s how long I would be), and probably be fine to start to run, but I was glad - at least in those moments - I hadn’t pushed it too much harder.
I can’t recall exactly where, but there was one section of headwind in the last half hour. I figured I was doing well enough when it became clear that I was moving up through the field more than usual at this point. It looked like others were suffering more than me, so I figured I had judged things ok.
I did have one potentially important bike mishap. I was doing my standard stand-on-the-pedals-and-swing-your-leg-over dismount that I’ve done a million times. Standing on my one pedal, just about to step off, my pedal slipped out, and I went completely down within 20 yards of the dismount line. I got some scrapes but very quickly knew I was ok. A well-meaning volunteer picked up my shoe and wanted to help me out. I assured him (her??) I was fine, but s/he wouldn’t give me my shoe back for what seemed like an eternity despite me reaching for it! Finally, I just stopped and said, “Please give me my shoe! I’ve got to get going!” and I got to run into transition. In reality, this was probably less than a minute, but boy it felt like forever!
T2
T2 was uneventful except for the small lakes that I had to pour out of my running shoes. There were a lot fewer bikes parked than there had been bikes missing when I had come into T1. I saw some friends (spouses of racers) and got to say hello. Things went pretty quickly.
By this time, I knew my real bike time, and I knew that as long as I didn’t blow up, I would make my sub-5:00 goal. I even knew I had a little room if I slowed down more than I wanted to. This was great.
Run
This course doesn’t look like much on the elevation profile, and it really isn't that bad. But it's not without features. There is one big hill at the beginning, and a smaller one you have to do twice. On bummer is that one of the major downhill sections is on a twisty walking path through the park, so you don’t (or at least I don’t) get to take advantage of it like I would if it were straight. I would not call it a hard course, but I would not call it an extra fast one either.
My plan here was standard issue EN stuff: First 3 miles easy. Next 7 was the “steady block” at MP, and the last 3 were to be where I would meter out everything that was left. Everything until mile 8 was to be to get me there in decent enough shape to deliver. I had my watch set to autosplit the miles and give me current and lap pace.
I ran Boston in 3:16 this year in even splits, which gave me a good handle on my REAL marathon pace (at least in April) of 7:30. My VDOT had improved marginally since then, but not dramatically. The official Daniels MP was 7:09. My plan was to race around 7:30-7:40 for the first three miles, and then see how I felt about getting up to close to 7:10 after that.
As is common I am sure, it felt much easier to fly at the beginning of the run than was wise to do. I kept telling myself “Discipline. Discipline.” The first mile had the one really tough hill of the course, and I still covered the mile in 7:36. For the next two miles, only the “Discipline” mantra kept my pace down around 7:20. Section 1 done.
Feeling good, but now I know I’m in a race and I’ve done a lot. Legs talking to me, but not shouting. Don’t screw it up. You want sub-5:00, now you have to do it. Broke Section 2 in to first four and last 3 mentally. It became apparent that to hit 7:10 would require an effort that felt risky. Discipline. Stick to 7:20ish. OK, well done. Three more miles until I’m allowed to go into the Dark Places if I have to. The box is one mile apiece now, with a bigger check mark at the 10 mile mark. Tick, tick, tick. One of these miles was mostly downhill and fairly straight section and was the fastest mile of the day. Now I’m at mile 10. It’s a bit hard to calculate because I didn’t have a total time split and didn’t know the exact time of my wave, but I am pretty sure I can even beat 4:50. Mile 11 contains the one other pretty tough spot on the run. I gave up 30 seconds here, doing 7:51. Grrr. In retrospect, maybe I could have eeked out a faster mile here, but it was respectable. Miles 12 and 13 were largely downhill or flat. I ran them well, but I wish I had found my last gear earlier. The last quarter mile, it was there - and freer/easier than it should have been. If I had just found it earlier, I think I could have held it. But this is a petty complaint. I almost took some fan's hand off high-fiving them within sight of the finish line - I knew I was under 4:50 and totally elated about it.
In the end, my actual run execution turned out to be about effort rather than pace in a sense. Aside from minor mile-to-mile variations due mostly to terrain, the run was evenly paced. But it was easy-pace, steady-pace, and meter-it-out pace from the point of view of my effort. Is that a problem with my execution? I’m not sure. My self-analysis is that my run’s weakness was not so much that the pace was even, but that “if I had only known” I might have pushed even a little harder. My heart rate was 155 ± a few beats and totally flat for all but the last quarter mile. (LT HR is probably about 168)
The result was fantastic. I had run my best half-split ever. If the run was not QUITE as fast as I had targeted, I had blown away my bike split and done some damage on the swim.
I guess I am officially a member of the JV now. I honestly believe that I left 5 minutes on the course due to errors (helmet???), lack of concentration, and the failure to understand just how well I was doing and what might be at stake. 5 minutes faster puts me in 6th place being better at execution without being fitter. If I calculate right, there should have been 4 slots in my age group for Clearwater and that puts me pretty near the roll-down bubble. For the heavy kid with the thick glasses whose official position in 5th grade basketball was “substitute” (strange what you remember...) and whose role on the high school swim team was to fill the spots in events that no one else wanted to do in order to get the team a few 4th or 5th place points, that’s getting pretty close to the pointy edge.
Thanks to so many of you who helped me get here.
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Comments
PS - You may want to drop this in the Race Reports section
" I ran them well, but I wish I had found my last gear earlier." Completely understand with this sentiment and end up thinking that more than I'd like. Still, way to knock out the goal while still thinking you had more!
My heart sank for all your Steelheaders when I woke up at 2AM Saturday (in Chicago) and heard how hard it was raining. I figured it would get across the Lake just about the time the race started. Glad it cleared up later on.
Is your son a triathlete too?
Anyway, since then, he started doing sprints when he was 12 and did his first Olympic at 13. Last summer, he did a 2:20 Olympic at 14. This summer, he's focusing on those super-short draft-legal races they have for teenagers. Probably smart. Next year, he's talking about going longer again, because he'd be at the bottom of the draft-legal age group. He's running CC in the fall again for the high school, having gotten below 18 min last Fall as a freshman. His best triathlon ever may have been a 2.5 hour sprint in a story I'll tell some time. Can you tell I'm proud? :-)
We're going to USAT nationals next week for him to participate in. (We have family in the area.) The week after that, we're going to do a HIM as a team. He's going to swim and run, while I do the bike. Then a couple sprints as we ease into his soccer and CC in the fall.
Within yards of the finish. :-)
Birthday present to yourself: New bike shoes and a headlight.
WOW - First off, you should be very proud of this result - ear to ear grinning about it, man.
You can nit-pick half a minute here or there with your helmet issue, but execution wise, what I see is that you got out of the way and let your body do the work.
Some thoughts about what your might take away from this, regarding race execution: (1) It's quite common that your times will be best if you don't really know you are time wise. I see the dropped power and distance data, the confusion about what your eventual bike time might be, to be good things - you just biked at the pace you knew you could hold, and let the result take care of itself.
(2) Light on calories in an HIM is a good thing - the sooner you finish, the less important paying close attention to pouring in calories becomes.
(3) Your observation about your run - "my actual run execution turned out to be about effort rather than pace in a sense. Aside from minor mile-to-mile variations due mostly to terrain, the run was evenly paced. But it was easy-pace, steady-pace, and meter-it-out pace from the point of view of my effort. Is that a problem with my execution?" - jibes with my experience. I find that I usually have even mile splits, and achieve it through a "feel" of working my way from a "too easy" pace through to about a 10K effort level from start to finish. I don't race with a GPS or an HR (although I train with them). I try to accomplish exactly what you report you experienced, by using perceived sense of exertion, and find that my per mile times (which I record on my little Timex) come out pretty even from start to finish after discounting for terrain differences.
If the last 3 miles felt like the last half of an open 10K effort wise, you did not leave anything in the bank. There may have been opportunities to achieve a 4:45, but, seriously, your race was just about perfection IMO.
(4) Oh, and anxiety before the start may also have provided a little turbo boost to your swim - extra epinephrine is a good thing! I'm always looking for a reason to get mad or anxious at the start of the race, feel a little nervous.
Congratulations on a superbly executed race, and a great PR. Is there an IM in your future? Do AZ in 2011 with the rest of us; you can be flirting with 10:00 there.
I had been pretty intentional about low calories. I drank the kook-aid on it being more risky to have tummy issues with too many than to bonk with too few, given the ease of getting more. I'm pretty sensitive to how I feel if I get a boost from calories, so I figured that if I really felt that, I'd know I needed a little more.
On next year, I am really starting to think about what my goals for next year should be, and I haven't settled on them. Frankly, this race was eye-opening. I don't want to seem immodest, but I don't feel like I've topped out; I think there's room for improvement in every area of my racing. Focus on HIM distance? Maybe an early-ish HIM and an IM?
If I do (my second) IM next year, it pretty much can't be AZ, unfortunately. I will have kids aged 10,10,and 16 in 2011, and I'm heavily involved in their Fall soccer seasons. Plus, there's a major grant deadline in November, and my semester runs from late August to December. So all this means that trying to do peak training, then spending a lot to travel in November is not a good idea. In all likelihood, the best choice from a "Life" perspective would be to do IM WI again. It's close enough to drive, and early enough in the Fall that I'd be just finishing the peak training as school and soccer start again. And I can get away for one long weekend in September pretty easily. That timing would probably let me focus on KS 70.3 in early June as a solid race as well. (It's also easily drivable, but in the other direction.)