Week 6 Wrap-Up

It was a little rough getting back into the swing of things after a week off, but Monday morning found me in the pool trying to get back into a routine. For the most part, it was a routine week—with Steelhead coming up on Saturday, I didn’t push things too hard, but I did bag a swim workout on Thursday—figured that was a safe bet. I also took the opportunity to take Tack into the Bike Shop for a pre-race (and pre-IM) tune-up—I knew I needed a new chain and wanted to have them check out the brakes and derailleurs with my Zipp wheels. Friday afternoon, I took off for Benton Harbor, Michigan—the site of the race—to check my bike in and check out the expo. I ended up meeting up with Jeremy at the expo—after waiting way too long to work on lodging, I ended up basically begging Jeremy to let me crash in his hotel room, and he graciously agreed, so it was good that we met up. We listened to the pre-race talk, walked around a bit, and tried to figure out how to manage the swim start, which we found out was literally a jump off the pier into Lake Michigan. The best strategy we could come up with was to wear our goggles under our swim caps and hang onto them as we jumped into the lake to make sure they didn’t come flying off…not much to start with, but it worked. After dropping our bikes in transition, we headed to what I will not-so-affectionately call the roach motel…aka the EconoLodge. The good news was that it had two beds so I didn’t need to crash on the floor…but it was, without a doubt, the nastiest hotel room I’ve ever had to stay in—peeling paint, mold in the bathroom, incredibly poor lighting and general sketchiness. We ditched our stuff and hit Panera for dinner, then found a grocery store so Jeremy could load up on his pre-race morning essentials of yogurt, bananas, cereal, and milk. After a stop by Dairy Queen, we ended up back at the roach motel and attempted to sleep—not an easy task when you’re afraid of whatever might be growing on or crawling under the bed.

Thankfully, we had a very early morning as we both wanted to get to transition early, so we minimized the amount of time at the roach motel. We crammed our stuff into our respective transition areas—with 1600 competitors, we didn’t have much space available, and I had a space hog to my left—my lucky day—and got ready for the race. The weather was awesome—not even remotely as humid as it was at Muncie and quite a bit cooler, but that swim start still had me worried. We met up with Sue, Michele, and Erin and headed down to the swim start via shuttle buses to warm up. Sue, Erin and I were all racing Athena, so we were in the very last wave—plenty of time to ponder the jump from the pier into the lake. It was a pretty wild start—literally a ~6’ jump straight off the pier and into the lake while trying to avoid jumping on the person who jumped off right before me and trying to keep my goggles on. In hindsight, I clearly should have plugged my nose in addition to holding my goggles—I think I ended up with about 10 gallons of Lake Michigan water up my nose as I started to swim. It was a little hectic, though—for the first time in a long time, I had a little bit of a panic attack as I started to swim, but thankfully that faded quickly as I settled down to get the swim done. I remember thinking the buoys would never end, but eventually they did end and I came out of the water with a pretty decent swim time—even beat Michele (who was in the wave right before us) out for a 4-minute lead.

I had a tough time calming down on the bike—I meant to race similarly to Muncie and hold my HR steady, but I got a little fired up and started picking people off right out of the gates. After a while, I came to my senses, backed off, and settled down to enjoy the ride. About 25 miles into the ride, I started playing a game of cat-and-mouse with a woman named Nancy—only to have her draft off of my for most of the remainder of the ride. USAT rules mandate that you keep a 4-length distance between you and the person in front of you and that you pass within 15 seconds—Nancy clearly didn’t care as she would pass me, then decide to sit up on her brake hoods or take a nice long drink of water. Then, when I passed her again, she’d stay on my wheel for several minutes drafting off me, then do the whole thing again. I caught up with Michele (finally) at about mile 54 and she even commented about Nancy’s drafting—then made it her goal to beat her on the run as she was in Michele’s age group.

After a quick port-o-let stop in transition, I headed out on the run…true to form, a bit too fast, but such is life for me, I guess. I caught Nancy (my drafting “buddy”) before mile 1 and didn’t look back. I kept to my Muncie plan of running from aid station to aid station—and it worked out quite well. I even met another Kraft guy (an engineer at the Chicago bakery) as I made my way through one of the stations—random, but cool. Unfortunately, my pace at the beginning ended up catching up with me a bit toward the end via a killer side stitch that slowed me down dramatically at about mile 11.5. Michele caught up to me at about mile 12 and talked me through it—we ended up running the rest of the race together and even did a ridiculously cheesy hand-hold thing as we crossed the finish line. Even with the side stitch, I ended up with a 5:34 race—I was pretty pleased, even though I came in second for the 39 and under Athena division—still 6 for 6 for hardware for the season, but now only 5 for 6 for winning…but I’ll take it. Jeremy had a sub-5 hour race, which is awesome, and Sue, Michele, and Erin all turned in solid races, too. By and large—good day.

After a quick stop at Starbucks, Sue, Michele, and I headed to LaPorte to round out another weekend of IM training. Michele and I sucked it up and got in another 4-mile run Saturday afternoon when we got back—not pretty nor painless, but we got it done. We managed to put a hurting on a super yummy pizza and all fell asleep watching a Rambo movie on TV—such is the life of the IM training crew. Sunday morning we hit Pine Lake for a nice long swim—sans wetsuits as it was balmy. The swim went well and was probably pretty close to race distance—not a bad way to start the day. After a long transition to change and eat, we took off for another flat recovery ride through LaPorte county, following basically the same route we took after Muncie. I clearly didn’t push it too hard—my average HR was a whopping 65%--but it felt good to cap off the week with a solid recovery effort and some good conversations with my training buddies. It was weird to leave, though—after all of the time I’d spent in LaPorte over the summer, this was the last time I’d be there for the year—truly the end to Camp Ironman, and a bit sad…

Here’s the roll-up for the week…

Swim: 4:02:52 / 10600 meters
Bike: 8:55:35 / 168.92 miles
Run: 4:32:12 / 28.61 miles
Total: 17:30:40 / 204.15 miles