IMAZ - Race Day

Wow - what a long day.

Well - there's more to my race report than just that. It'll be long so get comfortable.

First - congratulations to all the Boston runners -all with sub-4 marathons in terrible weather. Won't be hearing "too cold to run" from that group ever again.

Saturday night saw an early dinner with plans to turn out the lights at 8 pm. Well, I got a little too interested in the book I'm reading and went until 8:30. I called the front desk, requested a 4:00 am wake up call and then set the alarm also. Can't be too careful. Good thing the bladder alarm is reliable because the alarm didn't go off and the call never came. I woke up at 3:45 closed my eyes again and then it was 4:05. Got up, made a latte (of course) then went down for breakfast. Saw my way to clear then had a little more breakfast. The hotel had a shuttle to the start so I was on my way at 5:30.

The start area had tons of people - 2100 athletes and twice that in supporters and volunteers. I found Glenn and checked in with him on how he was doing. Then we saw Raf from the NB team. He was in crisis mode - seems he forgot his wetsuit at his friend's house in Scottsdale. Even if he was able to get in touch with them and they drove his wetsuit to the start, they wouldn't have made it in time. So Raf was trying to psyche himself up into a no-wetsuit swim. He was more worried about treading water for the start (IMAZ is a deep water start) than anything else.

I suggested we walk over to the expo area and see if the Blue Seventy guys were there and if they had any demo suits he could rent. No luck - they were already packed up and gone. But the Trisports tent was open selling last minute gear items. We asked if they had any demo suits available - nope, but they did have some trade-in wetsuits. The guy said we could look through them and find one to use. The first one he pulled out was a TNT ORCA suit that fit him perfectly. Raf was now one happy triathlete. It had to be a good karma thing to pull the TNT suit out of the bin and have it fit just right. Raf had a good day from there on out.

I got my wetsuit on and we walked over to the start. The pros went off at 6:45 but they started letting in age groupers at 6:30. I didn't want to sit in the water for 30 minutes so Raf and I sat on the edge until about 6:50. The actual start is about 100 yards from where we jumped into the water. This gave us a nice warmup. I wanted to start towards the back on the left side. The swim start was not as chaotic as IMCDA - a good thing - no getting kicked in the head, nobody swimming over the top of me - not much of a washing machine at all. Probably because I started pretty far in the back and it's a wider start.

The swim is one loop so the turn wasn't too congested either. The downside was we started out to the east - right into the rising sun. I couldn't see anything, there was no way to sight on anything but other swimmers. I'm sure I zig-zagged a lot but made it to the turn and welcomed having the sun out of my eyes. I tried to focus on my stroke, front quadrant swimming, and maintaining my glide (sound familiar?). At one point I noticed my left hand doing a weird flipping thing as I started my recovery with that arm. I realized I wasn't finishing my stroke at all and was just flopping my hand forward. So I worked on that for a bit and tried to stay focused.

The very best part of the swim and probably the entire day - getting out of the water and not being dizzy or nauseated at all. This was huge for me considering at IMCDA I had a 30 minute T1 trying to get over the dizziness and stop throwing up.

Swim - 1:26

I took my time in T1 (13') and then headed out to my bike. They had us put all of our bike gear in the T1 bag so there was nothing by our bikes. They made us all go out the center aisle but a volunteer got my bike off the rack and brought it to me. That was cool.

My bike plan was to take the first loop very easy and then try to push it a bit more on each following loop. Going out was fun - I was cruising at 20-24 mph, not pushing at all. Made it to the turn around in just over an hour and then headed back. Holy crap - I've never ridden in that much wind before. My speed dropped quickly to 12 mph. Someone said later the wind was gusting to 40 mph. At about mile 30 I heard "On your left!" and saw Michael Lovato riding by me. Then I thought, hmm, he had a 15 minute head start on the swim, probably did it in about 50 minutes and my swim was 1:26 - so I figured he had about an hour head start on me and it took him 30 miles to catch me. Well, really to lap me but I held him off for as long as I could.

Morty didn't show up until mile 80. I had to stop and massage my foot it was burning so bad. Then at mile 100 I had to stop again and massaged the foot. Morty is a Morton's Neuroma in my right foot. The nerve behind the 3rd and 4th toes gets inflamed then burns then cramps to the point I can't move it at all. So stopping and massaging it was perfect. I had one bad cramp in my right thigh but was able to stand up and stretch and finally it went away.

On the Beeline Hwy part of the ride we were pretty much out in the desert. I kept hearing a muffled pop like someone in front of me or behind me blowing a tire. Or worse, something subtle going wrong with my bike. Fortunately it was neither- there was a gun range off to the right and it was just target practice I was hearing. But it fooled me each time I went by it.

The wind made the ride very difficult. Not only taking away much needed energy but very de-motivating as well. So I just got into aero, looked at the ground in front of me and pushed on.

Bike - 7:10

Second best part of the day - getting off the bike and actually feeling like I could run. My plan was to run 4 minutes, walk one. This worked great for me. I'd pass people while running then watch them go by me while I was walking then I'd catch them again. My quads started hurting around mile 16 then really started hurting at mile 20. So I walked for a bit longer, tried to do a 4 run, 4 walk for about 2 miles. At mile 23 I decided to run again. I found it easier to run uphills and walk the downhills. Just the opposite of what others were doing. The course wasn't really hilly - just the bridges over the river - but I ran up and walked down. Then I saw mile 25 and felt good enough to finish running the last mile. It was great to cross the bridge and be able to take the finisher's route instead of the loop #2 or #3 route. I had to do that twice already watching others finish as I headed out for another loop.

Run - 5:30

Overall - 14:24

So all in all - a good day. No flats, no falls, no dizziness and #4 IM is in the books. I really am a "Back of the packer" and feel pretty damn good about it.

Thanks again for all the support and good wishes.

Stayed strong, went long-
Dan