One Long Race

It's the end of the day, and all I've done is raced and ate, and I am ready for bed. I guess that is to be expected for one's first Half Ironman.

I was pretty nervous leading into today, knowing that I had set high goals for myself and yet had not put in as much training as I would have liked to have done (it might have been nice to have run 21+ kms in training more than once before having to end a long race with that kind of run). Alt the same I was excited to get the day underway. Part of being excited led to very poor sleep last night, and it was tough to get up when my alarm went off.

Once at the race site I was rushed to set up transition, and I finished only about 3 min before the gun went off. Once the race started I fell into the groove, and despite having not quite as good a swim as I had hoped for (34:08 vs. 32:00) it was at least smooth and felt relatively easy. I came out of the water feeling good, and had my wetsuit top, goggles and cap off before getting to my bike. Everything seemed to be going well, and I was expecting a smooth transition. Unfortunately my wetsuit gave quite the fight as it seemed to prefer being attached to my body. And in the struggle to get it off I knocked my bike which caused my helmet to fall thus scattering my garmin and my race belt. Once I got the wetsuit off I started to put on my socks, which unlike my wetsuit seemed to want to have nothing to do with me. And despite having rolled my socks they still managed to get bunched, and I eventually gave up on fixing them and settled with having bunched socks. Following what was now becoming a theme for T1 my shoes, race belt and to a small degree me garmin all decided to be difficult. Basically for a transition that had started off so well, everything went wrong. And to top it off once out on the bike when I was getting into the rhythm of riding I discovered that my tasty carrot cake Cliff bar had decided to fall out of my tri-top pocket.

I didn't let that throw off my ride though, I pushed on and ate a power gel instead. I knew I needed to make time on the bike, but also that getting in nutrition and liquid was just as important. I stuck to a regime of eating one power gel per loop and drinking as much as I could without feeling like puking. It all seemed to work well as I put in the 8th fastest bike split of 2:27:58 and I came into T2 feeling well hydrated and as energised as one could expect o be after swimming 1.9km and biking 88km.

T2 was very unlike T1, everything went right, I came up to the dismount line with shoes off and standing on one pedal. As I hit the dismount line (still with speed from the bike I hopped off and ran down to my position at the bike rack, racked my bike, ditched my helmet, switched shoes and got out of there in 52 seconds.

The run was tough, and I expected it to be. I took water at every aid station and dumped it over my head, and only at the first one did I actually drink some gatorade, in doing so I was able to prevent myself from getting to hot or from being nautious from drinking on the run. But it was my legs that just did not want to run after already working so hard for so long. I did get into a rhythm after a few kms and was averaging just sub 4:30s. This lasted until about 15 km into the run, where despite having people to chase I was running out of gas. My pace dropped to between 4:40 and 4:55. I had been passing runners up until that point, but was re-passed by one and passed by someone else. Despite trying to pick up the pace my body just wouldn't let me. However, at the last km, after recently passing someone else in my age group, I heard them trying to regain their position. With only a km to go I was able to push the pace and keep my lead.

I am extrodinarily tired, but very satisfied with my first Half Iron. I finished in 4:41:39 placed 13th OA (including relay teams and elites) and 1st in my age group.