Getting Real

About three years ago I posted about the anxiety I was feeling as I headed into my first-ever 70.3 race. Probably based on the name “Anxiety”, it’s become one of my most popular posts on the site. I expect the things that I talked about then ring true for a lot of athletes.

Years have passed and I’ve had some great successes and some borderline failures. Fortunately, none of those have included a DNF (voluntary or otherwise) but I did come away from a race or two feeling like I did a pretty lousy job of preparation. That lead me to hire a coach and things have been going very well ever since, but there is, of course the lingering question about how I will perform less than 19 days from today.

To a great extent, this is a leap of faith. Granted, I trained last year on his philosophy of intensity over volume and that lead to a significant PR in at the 70.3 distance. Coming off a fairly lackluster 2013 there was a lot of room to improve, but I think finishing the distance in less than 6 hours is a pretty respectable performance—more so for someone in his mid to late forties.

A benefit I had last year that I have not had in 2015 was doing other races leading up to my “A” race. In hindsight, it might have been wise to do a race or two, but I really wanted to focus all of my energy on not only completing an Ironman, but doing so at or faster than my goal time of 14 hours. As a result, my only gauge on performance has come from workouts that are not exactly what I’ll be doing on race day.

That said  it’s time for me to take stock. With less than three weeks to go, there are not a lot of improvements to be made. Rather, I’m now focused on maintaining whatever readiness I’ve achieved to date.

Swimming

Never say never goes the old saw so let’s say that I am more than 95% confident that the swim is going to go just fine. Yesterday I swam 5800 yards over a two hour period. I got pretty sick of being in the pool but my energy level never dropped to the point of wanting to stop. I was focused on getting that big swim workout done and out of the way. I’ve only been in the open water twice this year (though there are two more to come) but both times I was swimming at a pace of 1:30/100 yards. Slow that down all the way to 1:45 and I’m still exiting the water in an hour and fifteen minutes. Even an hour and twenty would be fine with me. More importantly, I think I’ll exit with lots of my energy still intact.

Biking

This one is still a bit of a mystery. I did a long ride over the July 4 holiday of 80 miles over four hours though the first 25 miles of that one involved a lot of downhill. The mostly flat remainder went pretty well but I also got off the bike pretty tired. 

As I’ve done long rides around my neighborhood, climbing hills has been easier and easier and I do feel like I’ve got both good strength and good cardio endurance. What is still unclear is just how much endurance I have. It would be less than ideal to go for 80 miles and then have my energy levels drop out for the remaining 30. And lost energy would be a very bad omen for the upcoming run.

My main strategy will be to gauge how I feel during the ride. In other words, if I’m pacing for around a six hour ride and I feel good, fine, but if I start to sense much fatigue after a few miles of this, that’s a clear sign to back off and keep things steady. The Boulder course rolls a lot, especially on the first two laps where you climb a decent hill between miles 15 and 21 (first lap) and 56 and 62 (second lap). Both of those efforts are rewarded with sustained descents so I’m hoping that will equate to recovery. Two shorter but steeper hills await starting at miles 90 and 95.

As I’ve said, I’m a decent climber and I do a lot of it during training, but whether I’m truly ready or not won’t really be known until the last miles of the bike.

Running

That fist 70.3 taught me a thing or two about running and the lesson has been repeated every time at that distance since: no matter how optimistic I am about the run, things tend to go worse than planned. A classic example of that was last year’s Harvest Moon race. I had never been more prepared to go run 13.1 miles off the bike. My legs were a little spent from all the hard work during the ride, but I kept a respectable pace going for 8 miles but then my legs and lungs started to give me trouble. By the time I had reached 11 miles, walking was happening as frequently as running. I was fortunate to have banked enough time during the first half that I only missed by goal time by 8 minutes, but even today, I’m dissatisfied with how much it hurt. But it really hurt.

I’ve done a lot of running at both long distance and high intensity and I do feel like I’ve got a big base of endurance, but then again, we’re talking about hours out on the course and some of it will very likely be in high heat.  I think I can establish a rhythm at a slow pace and hold that for a while. I’ve got a fairly detailed plan of attack, but history has taught me not to rely on that too much.

A more detailed race plan will be posted closer to the big date.

For now, thanks for reading!