Yesterday, I competed in the 2012 Half Full Triathlon in the "HalfRev Aquabike" division (I personally like when they call it aquavelo) and won 1st place! I will give the caveat that the aquabike division is usually small and this year seemed especially small, but I was still pretty happy and proud of my performance. The race benefits the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults and after two years where it was a relatively smallish local race underwent some changes. The organizers brought in Rev3 triathlon to help run things, which I believe increased the races exposure and added a pro field for the Olympic race and made the race the mid-Atlantic Collegiate championship. Then a few weeks ago announced that Lance Armstrong would race in the survivor wave, which really increased the race exposure. The race was held at Centennial Park, which is close to home and makes the logistics relatively easy for me. The "HalfRev" is a distance pretty similar to a half Ironman, but with a slightly shorter swim. It consists of a .9 mi swim, a 56 mile bike and a 13.1 mile run (which I fortunately didn't have to do). The pros and the college folks were all doing the shorter "Olympic" version, which was the same swim, but only a single lap of each of the bike and run courses.
Crash Preparation
Over the past few years, I've been very fortunate that my preparation has generally only been limited by my ability to plan and schedule workouts and find the time and desire to do them. I haven't spent any extended period sick or injured. About a month back, this lucky streak looked like it was coming to an end. I crashed my TT bike at 33mph when the front wheel hit something I didn't see (crack/pothole?) and slid down the road on my back for what seemed like forever. For those who think 33mph is an exaggeration, I point you at the GPS data: http://app.strava.com/activities/20499576. I feel very fortunate that I just slid and didn't get run over or collide with anything solid, but the accident definitely left its mark. I had road rash/gash on both shoulders and spots of road rash on various other places (hip, back, etc). After getting some awesome care from my wife (and some liberal use of tegaderm) I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was ready to ride again six days after the crash and swim again nine days after the crash. This left me a bit less than a month to try to get back on track with my training, which seemed to go well after this hiccup.
Joe the Roadie?
One other change that I made this year was to start riding my road bike a lot more often instead of the TT bike. In the past few years, I would guess I put in 90% of my miles on the TT bike. This spring I tried a crit, which involved training more on the road bike. Then this summer, I discovered a group ride called TMR (the morning ride) that fit nicely into my schedule and made riding the road bike seem like a lot more fun. This meant that I was usually doing two rides a week on the road bike and then maybe some weekend riding on the TT bike. Finally, add into this being a bit gunshy on the TT bike after the crash, where I think the inherently less stable setup of the TT bike was a contributing factor. Going into the race, I had some minor concern that all the time on the road bike might not translate to a good ride on the TT bike. On the other hand, I do all this to have fun and riding the road bike over the summer has been a blast.
Mileage
I'll admit this section is mainly notes for myself, although it may be of passing interest. Last year for this race I posted my "performance manager" chart and total miles. For comparison purposes, here are this years charts.
This chart shows mileage and total TSS (training stress score) over the last few years. What is interesting is that while I have done fewer miles this year, my TSS, which takes into account intensity is slightly higher. I think this is mainly due to my focus early in the year on shorter races where I focused less on total training volume and more on higher intensity training.
What to Wear?
After a beautiful week of weather, the forecast for race day was pretty miserable. The high for the day was predicted to be about 50 degrees with rain on and off all morning. This meant there was some hand wringing about what to wear for the race. Last year, we had similar weather, it was about as cold, but didn't end up being rainy during the race. I was not 100% happy with how cold I got last year, especially my hands. I had chosen not to wear gloves and could barely feel my hands at some points on the bike. This year, I decided I would at least bring a pair of full fingered gloves and see how I felt race morning. This kind of hand wringing about <50 degree weather may sound wimpy to some, but it is worth noting that during the race I saw three or four ambulances go by. While racing I assumed that this was due to crashes, but after the race talked with some race organization staff and they said about a dozen people were pulled for hypothermia and the ambulances were all for hypothermia. It may not have been arctic, but poor clothing decisions had consequences.
Race Morning/Setup
I got a good night sleep the night before and woke up around 5:30. My routine of morning rides over the summer has started to make that feel like a pretty normal time to wake up, so I felt pretty good. I made myself some coffee and headed over to the race. As usual, I parked in my super secret parking spot and walked the 5-10 minutes to transition in the dark. I got to transition and did my usual setup, pumping up tires, clipping my shoes in, etc. Through this setup the weather seemed quite nice and I was optimistic that we were in for a better weather day than I had expected. Still, I set out my "optional" gear of socks and gloves to be ready in transition. Right as they were closing transition at 7am, it started to rain and I started to doubt the weather. Next came the challenge of the waiting game. We left transition at 7am and wouldn't start the race till 8:45am. I hung out with my friend Dave who was starting in the wave right before mine and we managed to kill off 1:45. I wisely brought two drinks and some snacks to nibble on as we waited around. I think the per-hydrating helped (especially the coke). At 8:30, we watched Lance walk up with his entourage and start swimming.
Swim: 22:57
I remember from last year that the swim was the warmest part of the race. This year didn't disappoint. The swim felt great. The slightly cool water was just the right temperature for a wetsuit swim. My stroke felt smooth and comfortable the entire way; I felt pretty efficient, relatively fast without using a lot of energy. For some reason, I had a bit more traffic trouble than usual; for the first couple hundred yards I kept jostling with some other guy who was going about my pace but kept changing lines. I even had my goggles slightly knocked off, which was a first time for me. After considering slowing and drafting off the guy, I instead picked up the pace for a short stretch and dropped him. I then had another minor run in or two near a couple other buoys as the traffic pinched together and I passed people in waves ahead of me. My sighting went smoothly, so I think I didn't wander too much. After the jostling at various points, I made the decision to stay further left after the last turn buoy, avoid the crowd headed directly to the next buoy and take what I hoped was a pretty direct line to the finish. Its hard to say whether this helped or hurt, but certainly made for less traffic.
My results are pretty similar to last year, where I went 23:05. It is hard to compare open water swims (the setups can be different and the conditions can be different), but dropping a little time still feels good, even if it was just a few second. When I first looked at the results from the race, I was surprised to see that my swim time was better than Lance's (he is a very good swimmer), but subsequently, they corrected his time and he as expected beat me by a good margin (19:50). The current results make it a bit hard to search the overall results, they only show my place within my small division, so I'm not certain where my swim placed overall.
T1: 2:38
As I got out of the water, I had the happy surprise of seeing my family cheering me on. We had discussed that if it was cold and rainy they would skip the spectating. The run from the water to the transition area is a pretty long uphill run, which right after swimming feels like a mountain. I ran in the grass as much as I could to preserve my feet. During the swim, I had felt so warm and comfortable and the sky had looked ok-ish that I was considering going with the faster but less warm equipment options for the bike. When I got to my bike, I took off my wetsuit, considered getting my socks on, but decided not to, grabbed my gloves and stuffed them down the front of my tri-suit, put on helmet and sunglasses and took off. This made for a pretty fast transition. For comparison, Lance took 3:57, the winning relay team took 2:27 and all they have to do is hand off their chip.
My wife tried to catch a picture of me running out of the water, but I was apparently going so fast it was hard to focus. That's me with the bald head:
Bike: 2:38:05 (http://app.strava.com/rides/24288887)
Last year, my bike goal was 1st overall, which I achieved (remember, it was still a small local race last year). This year, with Lance doing the race, that seemed like a bit of a stretch! I had vague hopes of Lance+20min and had the more concrete goal of winning my division.
Things started off a little dicey, my flying mount went so so, I had a hard time getting my feet on top of the shoes (that has never happened before). Once I got past that point, things started going more smoothly. I got my feet into the shoes without any problem and started trying to settle into a good pace. My glove free hands felt fine at this point and I was optimistic that conditions would be good. After about 30 minutes, I had changed my mind. By that point, it had started to rain and I guess the warmth of the swim was wearing off. I was starting to have a hard time feeling the shifters and my hands were starting to go numb. I decided it was time to put on the gloves. That may have been the most challenging part of the race. My gloves are small and tight (by design) and when wet were really hard to get on. Add to this that I was determined to do it while in my aerobars so as not to lose time. After a heroic struggle, I finally won out and got the gloves on and faced the horrifying reality that they were wet and didn't really add that much warmth initially. In the end, I think they did help, especially when it stopped raining a bit and they dried out slightly, but it was a bit depressing at first.
The first loop ends with a fast long net downhill section. When I hit this point, I had to deal with a crowd of sketchy bikers, a few cars blocking the road because they weren't sure what to do, and the hardest rain of the day all at speeds that were 30+ mph at times. Since it was net downhill and I often couldn't pass, I was barely working at all and started getting really cold and for the first time (of what would be many) in the day started shivering, with my teeth even chattering a bit. It was quite the relief when I turned for the second lap and saw that the road was empty of both cyclists and cars. Unlike last year, where the longer race went first, the Olympic went first this year, meaning that the only people ahead of me on the second lap were people I hadn't yet caught doing the 70mile distance race. By this point, there weren't many left and it was often a few minutes between seeing people. I tried to warm up a bit on the first climb of the second lap (Mt. Albert) and realized that my upper legs were actually cold and way less responsive than I am used to. I am used to my hands or feet getting cold, but I can never remember my legs actually feeling cold while cycling.
The rest of the second lap was pretty uneventful, with the minor exception of a section right after passing a bus that was stopped right in the middle of my lane on a narrow back stretch of the course. After slowing down quite a bit to safely pass the stopped bus, I got passed by someone. I haven't been passed in a triathlon in a couple years (not because I'm the fastest guy in the race, but because I always start in the last wave) and the ego kicked in. After dropping back to satisfy the passing rules, I let ego take over and put in a nice hard effort to drop the guy. It actually felt pretty good to get working a bit harder and when I checked back, he wasn't anywhere to be found. I believe when I looked up his results that he was a relay with a swimmer who swam slower than I did, so he actually had made up a couple of minutes on me by that point and in the end finished with about a 1 minute better bike split. He also appeared to have been wearing much more appropriate cold weather gear (and advantage to not having to swim first I guess). The last major hurdle was the same fast long net downhill section that I had found so cold and scary on the first lap. This time was a bit better since there were no other cyclists, no cars (lucky) and it had stopped raining. It was still cold and shiver inducing, but at least it wasn't quite as scary.
Given the conditions, I was happy with my results. For comparison, Lance's split was 2:25, so I beat my vague goal of Lance+20 (I suspect Lance took it easy due to the conditions, not wanting to crash, etc). It looks like my bike split was 4th overall, behind Lance, the relay guy I mentioned earlier (2:37:03), and the 2nd place overall guy who did a 2:36:50 (I might have missed someone, the results don't make this easy to search for).
Post Race and Award Ceremony
After the race, I packed up my stuff, got some of my clothes on (stored in a plastic bag so they were dry!) and walked over to the finish area to collect my medal, shirt and some food. While waiting in line for the food, it was pretty clear I was still cold. Thirty minutes or so after finishing while standing in line waiting for food, I was still shivering, my teeth were chattering and some girls in front of me in line asked if I was ok. I felt fine, relieved that it was done and glad I was in warm clothes and knew I was only going to get warmer. I also checked my results at the result tent and saw that I was the only finisher listed so far for my division, so I was pretty sure I had won. I called home to see if everything was cool at home for me to stay for the awards and then checked in to find out what time they would be. The info desk admitted they were running behind and that the awards would be sometime after 2:30. At that point it was about 12:15, so I decided to just bail and go home. I've never stayed for an award ceremony and it looked like I wouldn't see this one either. I went to transition, grabbed my stuff and started walking back to my car. On the walk back to my car, I walked along the finishing stretch of the run course and cheered on folks as they went by, including the fairly famous dude who won the race (but was stone cold serious looking when he went by).
After getting home, showering, helping take care of the kids a bit, etc, I talked over with my wife going back to the race. This turned out to work pretty well with our schedule, one of my kids was at a birthday party, the two younger were napping, and the fourth was excited to come along and take pictures. So my daughter and I headed back over to the race to catch the award ceremony. After a fair bit of waiting around, I got to participate in my first awards.
Conclusion
It was a tough day, but a great race for me. I had some good splits for each of the legs, won my division, raced with Lance, etc. As usual, I like to compare my times up to the run to play pretend about how I would do if I could run (yes, it is a fantasy that will never happen and doesn't take into account saving energy for the run). Lance's total time up to the run was 2:48:59. The next fastest guy's total time was 3:02:38, and then my time of 3:03:39 would have been next. So even though my division was small, my times were pretty decent.
Also worth noting that the race was very well run and organized. The swag was good and I thought everything ran smoothly and professionally. Much thanks goes to all the volunteers and race organizers who dealt with the tough conditions and made the race possible.
EDIT: Some photos of Lance
A friend showed me some pictures he got of Lance climbing "Mt. Albert", a short but steep climb on the course. I currently have the Strava KOM on that climb, but Lance doesn't appear to have uploaded his ride yet. I'll admit it, I'm a bit worried...
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