Half Ironman

This Saturday, I completed a half-Ironman training event near Lake San Antonio. It feels fantastic to get to this milestone. I've spent the past three weeks trying to recover from a nagging cold, which forced me to do very light workouts. That might not sound like a big deal at first, but here's an example of the impact of this. A couple weeks ago, the team had a "boot camp" weekend, which consisted of two 7-hr days of biking, running, and swimming. Meanwhile, I did two 30 minute workouts at a light pace because I literally didn't have the energy to do more. Missing three weeks is huge.

One of the nice things about this weekend was that the entire team went up and camped out together. This is one of my favorite things to do, and watching the stars on Friday night, I was reminded that I hadn't done it in a long time.

I was feeling mostly recovered on Saturday morning. The morning was beautiful and clear. Swimming the 1.2 miles in the lake was a different experience than my other swims. The water was warm and clean. This should have made for a relaxing swim, but I didn't feel as buoyant in the freshwater. This preyed on my mind during the swim, and I never really felt relaxed. The other issue was that I'm terrible about being able to sight in the water and figure out where I'm going. Seriously - I wind up swimming a LOT more than I need to because I'm constantly zig-zagging back and forth instead of swimming in a straight line. Eventually, I happily finished the swim - dead last in our group of 30 or so people. Need to get better..

I walked over to the transition area to change for the bike ride. What's funny is that after all this training, I still haven't figured out the right way to change my clothes over from the swim to the bike. Part of the reason is that I'm always the last one getting out of the water and can't watch other people transitioning! This time around, I grabbed my clothes, walked over to the bathrooms next to the transition area, and changed. I know some people wear their bike shorts under their wetsuit and then are ready to go once they get out - maybe I'll try that next time.

The bike ride was 56 miles long with a big hill around the 40 mile mark called "Nasty Grade". I felt slightly weak, but good for most of the ride. For the first time, I was very careful of my nutrition plan during the ride (solid food, water, and salt tablets) and as it got increasingly hotter (eventually up into the mid 80's), this made a big difference. The hill turned out to be tough, but short, and as I cruised down the other side, I was feeling pretty confident. Unfortunately, I could feel myself tiring during the last 6 miles and started wondering for the first time whether I was going to be able to do the run.

Coach Dan had suggested to me that I take it easy since I was coming off an illness. He specifically mentioned that if I didn't feel good, I should do the run the next day. As I took my first steps, I was thinking that running the next day was a pretty good idea. My legs felt heavy and totally unresponsive. There was a short rise coming out of the parking lot and it was so hard to get over that I started thinking "there's no way". If I couldn't run 100 yards, how was I going to do 13 miles?

As an aside, my observation is that I'm the only person on our team who ever seems to say anything remotely negative about physical obstacles. Or maybe even think anything negative. I'll say "Wow, this sucks" and everyone will sort of look at me with a blank expression on their face, probably thinking "Gee, listen to Mr Whiner over there." I've never been around people like this - even in the Army. These Ironmen/women are a different breed altogether.

Back to the run.... I soon realized that I could run when the trail was flat or downhill, but needed to walk when there was a hill because of the way my legs felt. So that's what I did for the first 7 miles. There were some other runners near me that were doing the same thing and this made it a little easier to deal with the heat and lack of shade. At mile 7, I stopped at an aid station where they had oranges, watermelon, pretzels, ice, cold water.... beautiful! After pigging out, I found myself starting to feel stronger, and picked up the pace very slightly. Still wasn't powering over any hills, but as I continued knocking off miles, I realized that I was actually going to be able to finish. And as I got to the finish line and received my medal from the dollar store (thanks Christina), I felt pretty proud to have gotten through a very tough day.

The next day I felt perfect - no sickness, no issues. Not even sore. Unfortunately, the next day, I had a fever and finally decided to call the doctor to see what was going on. It turns out that I have a sinus infection. Now I'm on antibiotics, but hopeful that this will finally get me healthy enough for the four month run-up to Vineman.