Here is the race report for my first 70.3. Ten months of training and, according to Training Peaks more than 1700 miles biking, 400 miles running and 65 miles swimming since January 1, and 18 months since that day in May 2015 that I finally decided not to die of "lifestyle" choices. Now I had one long race to cap it off and prove to myself that I could do what I had never considered possible for me.
PRE-RACE
Since I was going to be doing this race with Jeff (or, more accurately, considerably behind Jeff), I thought we would be better off renting a house for the weekend instead of getting hotel rooms. So I got a house on vrbo.com that was right near the swim start, for pretty close to the price of multiple hotel rooms. Turns out the house was literally right behind the swim start for the 70.3 course! I got up Thursday and went through athlete check-in at the Wilmington Convention Center. Check-in was intimidating. This was no local sprint or international distance race. There were many stages to check-in, gear bags for the bike and the run and a morning clothes bag, and a huge expo and race briefing, which I attended. I went home after blowing quite a bit of money on IRONMAN branded gear and I set up my gear bags and morning clothes bag.
Jeff arrived late Thursday night, so on Friday morning, we got up around 8 a.m. and did a quick 20 minute swim in the channel, across the current and a 20 minute bike. The current was so strong that it pushed us right into the pier. That would be interesting on race morning. Someone told us the current at 9 a.m. moves at 6 mph!
We then changed and went back to the Convention Center so Jeff could do his check-in and I could spend more money on IRONMAN branded gear while Jeff went through the athlete check in process. In the interest of full disclosure, I initially shoplifted the IRONMAN branded gear, as I got distracted by all the booths and forgot to pay. But after we checked in our run gear bags in T2 behind the Convention Center, I went back and paid. It's poor form for lawyers to shoplift. Then we swung by T1 at the Wrightsville Beach park and checked in our bike gear bags. I set up nutrition on my bike. I was now ready to race!
Friday night we went to a nice steakhouse and had a high protein and carb dinner. Later that night, my family and my friend Amy arrived and, after we calmed down my 8-year old, it was off to bed.
RACE MORNING
I got up around 6 am and had a breakfast of Kind Granola, milk and a banana. Tania tried to drive us to T1 to put our water bottles on our bike but due to the roads already being closed, we had to walk 7/10 of a mile and then walk back to the swim start, where we had planned to change out of our morning clothes and into our wetsuits. But when we got the swim start, we realized it was right behind the rental house. In fact, the guy with the bullhorn making announcements woke up Amy, whose room was in the back! We realized that instead of changing in the parking lot and using the porta-potties, we could just walk 30 seconds to the house and change there and use the bathrooms. It was the most relaxed race morning you could imagine. We went back to the house, used the bathrooms like civilized people and changed into our wetsuits. Verrah nice.
Tania, the kids and Amy joined us in the swim start parking lot and we had time for pictures and chatting before it was time to go into the starting corrals for our 9:02 a.m. swim wave start. I had a stinger waffle about 20 minutes before the swim start. They moved us through the corrals and into the water about waist-deep and then it was just a short wait for the air horn.
SWIM (1.2 MILES): 41:40 (2:09/100m)
The current was indeed strong and I finished the 1900m swim in less time than my last 1500m lake swim in an international. Still, I felt it was a challenging swim. I had not done any swim training in the ocean and the salt water environment definitely felt a lot different than lakes. The swim was in a protected channel so there were no big breakers but it doesn't take much of a wave to slap you in the face repeatedly. I remembered what a friend told me about ocean swimming: don't fight the waves, body surf the waves. So I did, and I was able to breathe smoothly in the hollow of my arm and I did NOT end up swallowing a lot of salt water (as feared). I am not a fast swimmer but I did feel well-trained for the swim from the hours in the pool and in Lake Norman and I swam over plenty of people who were doing recovery breast-stroke or treading water to rest. I even saw one guy clinging to a buoy. I just tried to stay smooth in the water, hug the buoys to my left and follow them to the finish. Finally, I was able to see the volunteers waving frantically on the pier at the swim exit and I swam to the nearest ladder and got out. I really liked having wetsuit strippers at a race! A volunteer asked me if I wanted to sit, so I sat on a mat and she ripped that wetsuit right off of me: another nice feature about an IRONMAN 70.3 distance race. I was pretty happy with a sub 42-minute swim, and started the long run to transition.
T1: 11:26
This was a long and complicated transition. It was at least a quarter mile run across and down the street to the transition entrance. Once there I had to find my bike gear bag, which was actually easy to find as the bags were all in order of bib number and surprisingly did not get mixed up in the chaos of transition. I ran with my bag to the change tent and enjoyed the first seated clothing change in my short triathlon career. I have never had a change tent before. I put my swim stuff on the chair to my right, my bike gear bag on the chair to my left and put on my socks, shoes (with toe covers already installed) and bike jersey. It didn't feel cold enough for arm-warmers, leg-warmers or full-fingered gloves, so I left those in the bag. I put on my regular cycling gloves, sunglasses and helmet and put my wetsuit, goggles and swim cap in the gear bag and tossed it to a volunteer in the tent and ran to get my bike. My bike was all the way at the end of the last row, which made it easy to find. then another run, with my bike, down transition and out onto the road by the mount line. It was a long transition with a lot to do and a long way to run!
BIKE (56 MILES): 4:01:22 (13.92 mph)
If I could use only one word to describe the bike course, I would say "windy". If I could use two words to describe the bike course, I would say "very windy". If I could use three words to describe the bike course, I would still say "very windy" but add an expletive in the middle. And it was easily more than 65% headwind. The ride out of town was tough. The ride on Hwy 17 and I-140 was tough. I got yelled at by a few motorists who were stuck in traffic at a dead stop while the police let the cyclists through onto the turn off. That was fun. Also, despite the billing as a pancake flat course, there was about 1,200 feet of climbing, which was not awful but I didn't see anyone making pancakes out there either. There was one bridge that was a pretty steep climb. One guy who passed me on the bridge said "flat course, eh?"
But then when we turned on to Hwy 421 eastbound, we had a delightful tailwind. For 4 miles. Then I saw the turn-around cone and thought "uh-oh". The ride westbound on 421 was not delightful. I saw speeds so slow, I though I was back in June 2015 when I could only bike 20 miles with copious breaks. And I was pedaling my butt off. I finally remembered what my friend Steve told me on one long ride in hilly Union County ... keep a high cadence and a low gear and spare your legs. So I did, but I was getting nervous about how slow I was going. My goal of finishing the bike in 3:40 was quickly disappearing into the (head)-wind but there was nothing I could do. I was still pretty sure I could hit a 4 hour time for the bike if I could really boot it with the tail-wind but I had no idea how fast that tailwind could take me. I saw Jeff somewhere around mile 25 and he was already on the other side of the highway heading back in. Good for him, I knew he was crushing the bike and would have a great time!
One thing that went perfectly on the bike was nutrition. I had 500 calories of Tailwind in my bottles, all of which I finished and 3 stinger waffles and 4 Huma gels, which I alternated every 7-8 miles. Right after the half-way point, I stopped at the first water stop and took 30 seconds to refill my water bottles. I had more Tailwind in my pockets but felt I had enough calories with the stingers and gels for the last 20 miles of the bike. Once again, the volunteers were amazing and both my bottles were filled in no time. The volunteer said the turn-around is only 3-4 miles down the road and then I would get the tailwind. Well, the turn around was about another 7-8 miles down the road and I was getting really annoyed. Where is that turn-around? I demand it NOW! Well, demanding that the race gods produce a turn cone didn't seem to work so it was a tough slog through the next miles until FINALLY I saw the cones funneling us into the turn. I have never been more happy and relieved to do a 180 in my life.
As frustrating as all the headwinds were, the tailwind was just as ridiculous, but now in my favor. I skipped the next bottle stop and I had 14 miles of straight cycling with a heavy wind at my back and I was hitting speeds on the bike that I do not possess in these legs. At one point I was on a false flat downhill in my biggest gear going 24 mph at MAYBE a 50% effort. I was climbing at 18 mph and hitting 20-22 mph on flats. I felt that the 5-mile splits per my Garmin were good enough to get me in at pretty close to 4 hours. When I came to the turn off from hwy 17 to 74 and across the Cape Fear River I knew it would be close. I rolled in to T2 behind the Convention Center in just over 4 hours, which was well within the cutoff time and would give me 3.5 hours to complete the run. I was relieved. The bike cutoff was 2:36 p.m. and I rolled into T2 at 1:56 p.m. The tailwind did its job.
As frustrating as the headwind was, I was happy with how I managed it once I remembered to just treat the wind like a hill and use small gears and high cadence to spin through them. I was grateful for all the rollers in western Union County, where I did most of my long rides, as the hill training definitely helped with riding into the wind. But all the same, I had to burn a lot of matches on the bike and that would cost me a lot on the run.
Now THAT'S a transition area.
T2: 8:08
A huge race means yet another huge transition area. The start of transition was great. I didn't even have to rack my bike. A volunteer grabbed it from me and ran off, while another volunteer shouted out my bib number from my helmet sticker, while yet another volunteer grabbed my run gear back and tossed it to me as I ran into the change tent. I stripped off my bike jersey and shoes and put on my t-shirt, visor, running shoes and race belt. I had a handheld water bottle that I had filled with 200 calories of Tailwind powder and I filled it with water at the exit to the change tent. Then it was another long run through transition just to get to the official race course start. The official start was not well marked so I ended up starting my Garmin on run about 0.2 miles too soon, an issue that would psychologically plague me for the entire run.
RUN (13.1 MILES): 3:12:01 (14:39 mins/mile)
The run was tough. I knew that the run would be tough. My longest run in training was 10.1 miles and it didn't come at the end of a 56 mile bike. So it was not a surprise that the run would be tough. But I was, indeed, surprised by how tough the run was. A half-marathon is no joke and the wind on the bike course took it out of my legs before I even started mile 1 of the run. Fortunately, after 4 hours on the bike. I was so relieved to be standing up again, I was in a good frame of mind to start the run and was hoping for a solid 2:45 - 3 hour half marathon.
My lower back was pretty sore for the first two miles, but after that it calmed down a bit so I was able to focus more on the soreness in my legs. Then, the soreness in my feet grabbed most of the attention and the run turned into a contest about which part of my body would whine the most. (Spoiler alert: my legs won!)
The first 2 miles were on the boardwalk to Front St. and then up Front St. in downtown Wilmington. The crowds were great, I was off my bike and I was running... slowly, but still running. The aid stations were spaced about a mile apart and the plan was to run from aid station to aid station and take time to fuel and hydrate. I did stick to that plan but my running was much slower than I had anticipated and hoped for. So I settled in for a long half-marathon.
The good news is that the aid stations were amazing. They were all organized the same way: water/ice, gatorade endurance, coke, snacks (chips, pretzels, bananas, oranges, grapes), coke, gatorade endurance, water/ice. At first, I stuck with water, Tailwind from my handheld bottle and the 4 huma gels that I had with me.
Mile 3 was a stretch through an industrial area to the park around Greenfield Lake and then miles 4 through 6.5 were in the park around the lake, and then miles 6.5 to 10 were back around the lake and out. Jeff saw me around mile 3, when he was on the other side of the cones heading back in. By the time it registered though, we had already run away from each other, going in our opposite directions. The park was flat, warm (but not hot) and long. the miles were slow here and I started to take in solid food and coke at the aid stations. The coke was great, went straight to my head (as hoped), and the pretzels and chips were easy carbs and also good and salty to replace the salt I was sweating out. When I passed the 6-hour mark for the race I started to feel the overall fatigue but still had just over 2 hours left on the run. I had to just stay in the moment, and concentrate on getting to each aid station, and that got me through the toughest middle miles (5-10) of the run. My feet really started to hurt as I had foolishly decided to run in my racing shoes instead of my ultra-cushioned Hokas. Lesson learned. Half marathons are no joke.
By mile 9, I thought if I can only get out of the park and back to the crowds on Front St. I will be okay. So one mile at a time, one aid station at a time, I made it back out of the park, down the lonely stretch of the industrial area and back to Front Street. When I passed mile 11, I knew I was going to finish and lost it for a bit. I skipped the mile 12 aid station and ran down Front St and back to the boardwalk. Then I saw the finish line but I had to run away from it for a very short stretch to a turn around into the finish chute. Tania and Amelia saw me and shouted out, and after the turn around I stayed right for the finish line, while people doing the full iron distance would stay left for their second loop of the course. The runners who could see the finish line but had to head out for loop 2 were some of the most unhappy people I have ever seen.
The finish chute was a bit of a blur. I high-fived Josh and Tania as I ran by. Mike Reilly announced my name and said "way to hang in there Aaron and get it done!" And then I was done. 70.3 miles in 8:14:37 and not dead last in any category. I was quickly surrounded by volunteers who took my timing chip strap and gave me my finisher's medal and, a trademark of the race since it was Beach 2 Battleship run by SetUp Events, my finisher pajamas!
It was a very long journey to 70.3 and I was happy to be finished and very happy to finally be off the course.
So, so glad to be at the finish!
Couch to 70.3 in 10 months.