I Am Ironman! B2B Very Long Race Report

Nearly 600 wetsuit-clad athletes are standing on a North Carolina beach, hopping around both from nervous energy and because of the cold sand beneath all the bare feet.  It is five minutes from the start of the Beach to Battleship full distance triathlon:  2.4 miles of swimming followed by 112 miles of cycling and then 26.2 miles of running.   Everyone is at their peak fitness, having trained for many months to be prepared for this.  The majority of the field is comprised of first-timers for Iron distance, and is 70% male, 30% female.  The swim is set to start at 7:30 am, a mass start, meaning all the athletes will charge into the water at the same time.  People are jockeying for position, the strongest swimmers up front, people who hope to just survive it in the back.  Conversations are happening about the water temp, perfect at 71 degrees, and equipment issues, often expressed as hopes for goggles that don’t fog and swim caps that don’t peel off.  The speakers are turned on and the anthem is played.  And then Eminem’s Lose Yourself is pumped out (nice choice, race directors!), and everyone breaks into smiles and head bobs.  It’s time to begin.

 

I’m among these people, and before I describe the day, I have to talk about what it took to get there.  Friends who have done Ironmen have told me that you are an Ironman by just arriving at the start, because getting through the training is far more challenging than the race.  When I decided to do this, I felt ready for the physical difficulties the training would pose, but looking back I was either blindly naïve or willfully ignorant about the emotional challenges.   For the past few months, my life has been work or train, and nothing else.  My house was a mess, my mail was out of control, I haven’t watched television, read a book, gone to a movie.  At times, I’ve squeezed in a visit with family or a dinner with friends, but each time I was secretly stressed about time, because there simply wasn’t enough of it.  Through September, when I was training for 15-17 hours a week and working more than 50, I felt like everything was slipping out of control, and I was failing at all of it.  Work was overwhelmingly busy with emergency after emergency.  Every bad workout was loaded – how can I run a marathon after 114.4 miles when I could barely get through 10 miles of jogging on a hot day?  I was completely physically exhausted from the never-ending string of super-early mornings that do not suit my natural sleep tendencies.  Each day that passed it became harder, but as each of those days progressed I felt I had invested too much to walk away. 

Jack Braconnier, my absolutely brilliant coach at Walton Endurance, talked me down from the ledge more than once.  His coaching gave me the confidence to look past the struggle and simply stick to the plan.  And while September and early October were crushingly brutal, it was also the time period in which I got to see the results for the first time.  One of the final weekends, my “epic weekend,” consisted of a 3800-meter swim on Friday night, followed by a 104-mile pre-dawn ride on Saturday and then an 18-mile run on Sunday.  To that point, those run and swim distances were to be the longest of my life.  In the pool on Friday night, I was struck in the last few laps by how good I felt, as if I could keep going.  And then the next day on the bike, part of the City to Shore ride into Ocean City that I’ve done in the past (albeit a shorter distance option), I charged the two bridges at the end that I had always suffered through like they were wind-free flat roads.  And during the 18-mile run I felt so strong I went out of my way to add a nasty hill at mile 13.  A week later I beat my marathon personal record by more than seven minutes at the Chicago Marathon, and I felt like most of the race was easy.  I couldn’t believe what I conditioned my body to do.

Race week itself was rough.  Some very significant issues with my family surfaced.  Work was crazy.  Also, health issues for my dog, Sadie, became very apparent, which terrified me.  I was not in a good frame of mind.  I decided that I was allowed to worry about all of that until Friday, the day before race day.  Starting Friday morning, I would push all of that out of my head and be completely selfish and race-focused.   As stressed as I was about everything else, I felt ready for the race.  Every once in a while I had what I called a “holy shit” wave when I realized what was ahead of me, but I was confident that all of my hard work meant I was prepared.

The good news was that the weather was expected to be perfect, sunny and in the low 70s, and both Wrightsville Beach and Wilmington were beautiful.  And so it was on race day.   When I charged into the water that morning, it felt fantastic.  It was warmer than the air, and between the buoyancy of the salt water and my wetsuit, I almost felt like I was hovering above it.  I typically panic quickly after I hit the water in a tri, but this time I just felt really good.  I started slow to get my bearings and kept building through the swim.   The 2.4 miles were easy, both because of my training and because of the strong current pushing me toward the finish.  When I got out of the water, I looked at my watch and realized the swim took me 1 hour and 12 minutes.  My best tri swim this year was 48 minutes for 1.2 miles, so this seemed amazing to me.

At B2B, one of the places in which you pay for the helpful swim current is in the 400-yard hike to T1.  I was not fast at all with the process of getting from swim to bike with the clothing change and porta-john stop.  When I exited the tent, I realized that while my swim was good for me, it wasn’t good.  My bike was very lonely, because almost all of the other bikes were gone.  At least it was easy to find. 

My strategy for the bike was simple:  1) take the first half easy and push it in the second half; and 2) eat and drink a lot. After a lot of trial and error in my training rides, I had settled on a combination of Smucker’s Uncrustables peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, honey stinger bars, honey stinger waffles, bananas and gu chomps for bike nutrition.  I decided that I would have to have some kind of nutrition at least every 10 miles to try to get the calories I would need to survive this. 

The ride was tough.  It was flat, but windy.  Flat sounds great, but it also means you are peddling for all 112 miles, since you don’t get the break that a good descent will provide.   The first 30 miles were a bit of a battle, because the athletes participating in the half-distance event started to catch us (they started later, but had even a stronger swim current).  The first group of these athletes passed well, but some of the next group seemed to go by a little more recklessly (e.g., while I was being passed properly by a few cyclists on the left, one zipped by on the right without calling out his passing, a big no no for this ride).  Indeed, I saw one wreck about 50 meters in front of me when a rider hit a traffic cone while trying to pass another rider.  Because I was passed so frequently and closely, I was nervous about grabbing my water bottle and my aero bars, because I can still get a little wobbly when I do either.  The half athletes split off at about mile 40, and I continued on to the rest stop at mile 55 that had our special needs bags, which contained the stuff we had stashed before the race that we might want to access at this point.  To the lady who gave me her extra packet of chamois butter – thank you.  I paid that forward by giving another woman some of my Tylenol.  I spent 10 minutes at special needs, stuffing all the food I could manage into my system, and off I went.  

At mile 56, I checked my watch:  3 hours, 30 minutes with the stop.  My goal for the bike was to break seven hours, so it was time to drop the hammer.  This is where it got fun.  As I picked it up, I started dropping riders all over the field.  I, on my little roadie with regular wheels, chicked lots of guys on top-of-the-line tri bikes with $3000+ wheel sets.  Yes, I hurt – I was achy in lots of places, but nothing that slowed me.  The worst pain was in my girl parts ( I need to change saddles, I think) and my feet.  The headwinds were tough, but I tucked into aero position and punched through them. 

This is when I realized that an Ironman is a lot like bipolar disorder.  One minute you are miserable and you hate the world, the next you are ecstatic because you see yourself getting through it, and that finish line fantasy becomes more tangible with each pedal stroke.

My final bike time was 6:48.  This means I did the ride in negative splits (the second half faster than the first) and easily cleared my goal time.  And I felt great!  Hardly spent at all.  After another eternity in T2 changing into my run gear and enjoying the perks of a real bathroom with sinks (T2 was inside the convention center), I took off on the run.  At this point, it was nearly 4:00 in the afternoon, and I had been racing for eight and a half hours.  My goal for the marathon was to complete it in less than six hours, but I was hoping to hold it to under five and a half. 

The run course was lovely.  Wilmington, NC, is a great town, and the volunteers along the course were some of the best I’ve ever encountered. The course was two loops, and it wrapped around the waterfront and through a park.  There was an aid station every mile, stocked with sports drink, water, pretzels, cookies, donuts, pizza, oranges, bananas, chicken broth, Pepsi, Vaseline, electrolyte pills, and lots of other helpful stuff.  I ran at an easy pace until each aid station came into view, and then walked through each, grabbed some stuff and walked a bit after.  This had me at about a 12-minute mile pace, which is what I was hoping to maintain at least to mile 20.  I felt really comfortable, which surprised me.  The course was confusing (again, this is where the volunteers were excellent, and essential), but it didn’t feel like a lot of distance. 

At 6:30 pm, I was nearly halfway through the run and still feeling good, though my stomach was starting to send some error messages.  I collected my glow necklace from a volunteer (they asked the runners still going after dark to wear these) and kept moving.  The halfway point was both fun and bad.  The bad was that at the turn you could see the finish line (so tempting to just turn there!), but the fun was that all of the spectators for the finish line were there cheering us on. 

As I was heading into the aid station at mile 18, my legs started to feel a little wobbly, so I grabbed a banana, some broth and some Pepsi at the stop.  I ran for a bit and realized my stomach really was not happy with that combination so I had to incorporate some more walking. While walking, my legs felt very unsteady.  This was the only point in the entire race in which I was concerned I might not finish.  I knew mentally I could get through the rest of it, but I worried that my legs would just give out.  Walking for a while helped, and at mile 19 I decided to try to run to 20, and then reassess. 

I hit the timing mat at mile 20 and looked at my watch.  I realized that if I could do the remaining 6.2 miles in under an hour and a half, I could break 14 hours for the race.  Of course, it took me quite some time to figure this out, because it is hard to do math in your head when you are so addled you can’t correctly spell “cat.” 

Breaking 14 hours in an Ironman for me was incomprehensible.  My evolution of thinking about this race went from “I could never do it at all even over the course of days” to “I just want to finish before the 17-hour cutoff” to “maybe I can break 16 hours” to “I think if I have a great day I can break 15 hours.”  Sometimes I fantasized about a sub-14:30 race, but I pushed that thought out of my head because I didn’t want to be disappointed at the finish if I couldn’t achieve that. 

I knew that if I ran, the inevitable and increasingly lengthy walking breaks would not be fast.  I also knew that I am capable of power walking at a very strong and consistent pace, even when really tired.  I decided to switch to power walking, and I maintained a bit over a 13-minute pace all the way to the end.  In those last 6.2 miles, I passed a lot of people who were doing the run/walk effort I had considered, which seemed to validate my decision.

The last miles clicked by quickly. I was focused and determined.  I wanted that finish and I could smell that sub-14. 

I headed into the stretch along the waterfront that I knew would take me into the finish.  A volunteer yelled out “a quarter mile left”!  I turned the corner and there it was – the giant “FINISH” banner.  A huge wave of emotion hit me and I almost started crying.  But then I checked myself, because I didn’t want to cry.  I wanted to roar, and I wanted to run to the finish.  And as I started to do both, all of the spectators along the way broke into huge cheers.  I came up to the line and saw the race clock:  13:53:05.  The clock, for months my worst enemy was now a source of elation.  I flung my arms up and screamed some more.  It was a rush of the most intense feelings: amazement, disbelief, jubilation.  I was an Ironman, I did it well, and I felt tremendous.  If this was not the biggest moment of my life, it was certainly in the top five. 

 

In the days since, I’m still riding the buzz, and I’ve had some time to reflect.  This was a life-changing experience.  I wrote a post recently for the ACS Determinators’ blog about achieving things that I previously thought were impossible.  There has always been a voice in my head saying “you can’t do this.”  During the 13 hours and 53 minutes of this race, however, my inner voice had a different message:  “you’ve got this.”  I wanted it, I worked like hell for it, and I took it.  I am an Ironman, and nothing or no one can ever take that away from me.

 

The P.S. to this is now that I’m a few days out from the race and have studied my splits (1:12 swim, 6:48 bike, 5:27 marathon and 25 minutes of total transition time), I’m starting to see the places in which I can shave time. The obvious place is transition, since during B2B I had enough time there to watch Ghandi, the director’s cut.  But I also think there’s room to grow on both the bike and the run.  I hope to do another one, if I can find a way to train for it without risking my livelihood.  If so, Jack - you better be ready, because there’s no way I’m doing this without your masterful guidance.