Toss Back Tuesday - Timberman 2012

I found the race report I wrote for my experience at the Timberman 70.3 way back in 2012 that actually predates this blog. Without further ado, here's what I wrote about that then...

It’s been a long uncomfortable summer in New England.  When it wasn’t 90 degrees with 80% humidity it was 75 degrees with 100% humidity.  Training for my 5th 70.3 was an exercise in drowning in sweat 10 times a week.  Even the swims had me sweating as my body worked to shed the built up heat long after the swim had ended.  I chose a pretty aggressive training program for this race – 3 workouts a week in each discipline, plus a weekly bike/run brick, all at longer distances than I’d previously done in training.  The reason for all this sweat?  I was signed up for a race that has more than twice the elevation gain of the Pumpkinman (my previous best race), and a reputation as one of the hardest courses on the Ironman 70.3 docket.  I figured to show anything like a respectable time I needed to put in a lot of work.  So 119 days after the New Orleans 65.1(inside joke) and several demoralizing days spent riding mountains (oh so slowly…) it was finally time to put my work to the test and pit myself against the hills of Timberman.

My first hurdle came on Saturday.  As I was preparing my nutrition for the bike ride I discovered that I’d let myself get below my minimum required allowance of Perpetuem.  I only had 2 hours’ worth, and I was planning on at least 3 hours of riding.  After the blue streak got done leaving my mouth I decided I’d make do with what I had and make up the missing calories with some Chomps I had lying around.  I made sure to put them in my transition bag, stuck the bottles of Perpetuem in the fridge and went to bed.

As do most triathlon race days, Sunday morning came in at 3:30 AM.  It was an hour’s drive to the venue, and with transition closing at 6:45 I wanted to get there in plenty of time to get in my warm up run and swim.  It was dark as I rocketed up the deserted highways to Lake Winnipesaukee, and it was still dark as I sat in the (apparently infamous) line for parking at Ellacoya Park, but by the time I’d been directed to my spot (right by the swim start, about 4/10ths mile from transition) the sun was coming and showing a beautiful tranquil scene out on the water. 

The swim was a point to point course, laid out in 3 roughly equal legs - .4 miles out, .4 miles parallel to shore, then .4 miles back to transition.  Standing on the shore and looking at the yellow buoys marching out to the red turn buoy in the distance I was thinking “You mean you’re going to swim all the way out there, and then you’ll only be a third done?  What are you, nuts?”  The answer of course is yes, I am.  I must be or I wouldn’t be doing this for fun, right?

With my transition area all set up I took a 10 minute run down the start of the run course.  I was running at a pretty relaxed pace and was a bit surprised to see that I’d been hitting just about an 8:30 mile.  I wrote it off to adrenaline and the effects of the taper and more or less forgot about it.  I got back to my wetsuit just in time to hear the announcer point out that transition was going to close in 15 minutes and that all swimmers needed to be on shore within the next 25 minutes, so I pulled on the rubber suit and walked about half way down the beach towards the swim start.  I figured I’d strike out from there to the first of the marker buoys, but turned for shore after about 5 minutes and ended up with an uninspiring 10 minute warm up that only served to highlight my sore shoulder. 

After my last minute panic pee I stood around on the beach as the first 5 waves went off.  I chatted with a couple of my fellow age groupers, agreed that 140.6 is something only crazy people do (each of the three of us had a different discipline that made it seem ridiculous), and then it was finally time for the swim start. 

I had a hard time going straight in Winnipesaukee – I got pushed around by the waves, couldn’t see out of my goggles, and couldn’t tell where anyone else was going.  It turns out a lake that big gets some nice rollers like the ocean, but with shorter choppier waves, so I spent a fair amount of time trying to sight only to be tossed head first into the next trough.  Add to that the fact that I couldn’t seem to get away from one of my fellow age groupers who kept tossing water into my mouth as I was trying to breathe and it was not a stellar day for me in the water.  I was hoping to do better than my previous HIM PR of 42 minutes (in my mind I even whispered a sub-40 minute swim to myself), but instead I got out of the water at 44:30.  The good news is I beat 35 of my fellow age groupers.  The bad news is that I was in 140th place in my division at that point. 

T1 is always a mess for me, so I guess I’m not surprised it took 4:39.  Still, that didn’t include my usual post swim trip to the port-o-let, so it wasn’t as “fast” as it seemed.

I decided that I wasn’t going to let a poor swim leg spook me into trying too hard on the bike.  I figured that if I could get around the course in under 3 hours I was going to count myself fast and be happy with it.  My strategy was to maintain as close to a 90 RPM cadence as I could while not letting my heart rate get out of the 130s if at all possible.  The warm-up section of the ride went pretty well.  I was passing my usual complement of strong swimmers who can’t ride fast, watching some of the fast guys from later waves come by, and generally having a nice ride.  Of course both packages of Chomps that I’d brought slipped out of my shorts, and suddenly I was low on calories again.  Rather than stop and go back I decided to just take a gel from each aid station on the bike course.  That worked out fine.  I might work that into my nutrition plan for future races.

I had one bad moment where I passed a guy heading into a corner, only to find out it was a MUCH shaper corner than I expected.  I jammed on my breaks and had the outstanding sensation of my front wheel slowing faster than my rear (yes, I got a bit sideways).  Happily the other guy was both paying attention (he didn’t hit me as he very easily could have) and very forgiving (he didn’t call me any of the nasty names that had to have been going through his head).  I spent the rest of the day being very courteous about corners.  About a mile later I heard everyone’s favorite warning on the bike “that bad hill is coming up.”  

The Marsh Road hill on the Timberman course is also sometimes knows as the Marsh Road wall.  It’s steep.  Really steep.  And kind of long.  But the good news is that it’s early in the ride, and the hardest part is not miles long (I’m pretty sure it’s less than half a mile really).  So it takes some hard work, but wasn’t nearly the crippling effort that I’d feared it would be.  Of course that guy who was off the bike and walking up the hill would probably disagree, but I guess I’d put in enough time in the hills to make it doable.  The fun part about that kind of uphill is that there’s usually a nice downhill to go with it.  Unfortunately there were a lot of people on the downhill ahead of me, so I had to ride with one hand on the brake and was only able to get up to about 37 mph (I suspect I’d have been over 45 on that hill on my own). 

Getting over that hill put us in the next valley over.  From there it was about 16 miles of going 25 mph downhill, and that was awesome.  At just about the turn-around point I started looking for the next aid station because the port-a-potty stop I’d skipped in T1 was making itself increasingly apparent.  I put in a 2 minute biological breakdown, grabbed some additional clear water for my bottle and got back underway. I lost track of the turns, so for a while I was trying to figure out when we were going to join the stream of cyclists on the other side of the road.  It finally occurred to me that I must be on the return leg, and that the others were folks still outbound.  I was mostly surprised because I was expecting the trip back up to the lake to be a long uphill grind (after all that downhill), but really it didn’t seem bad at all.  Sort of a false flat, but not really a punishing slope.  Getting back over the hills was unpleasant, but there wasn’t the one really big hill.  Of course there was that one hill that made me say bad things when I saw it, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked.  The back side of that one had me hitting 46.3 mph and yelling "left" as I scooted by a couple of really fast guys.  They caught me on the next uphill, and I never saw them again, but that was fun.

The final run into T2 included about a mile of downhill in a “no passing” zone (where one guy just HAD to pass me).  Then it was a turn into the park and a straight shot into transition.  I looked at the clock and couldn’t believe it, so I checked the Garmin – bike split was 2:54:40, a 19.25 mph average.  With almost no trying.  I was completely flabbergasted and extremely happy with that effort.

T2 was another mess, and this is not usually the case.  I may have to do that ridiculous workout where I do transitions 8 times in 3 hours again before my next race.  Bike to run transition 3:15

My goal in all my training and race strategy was to run a sub-2 hour half marathon off the bike.  I felt like my energy level was great, my legs felt fresh, and I was able to settle into a nice relaxed effort almost immediately after starting the run.  I know I only checked my speed on the downhills (or something), but each time I looked the Garmin was reporting right around an 8 minute mile.  Probably the best part of the run was the crowd support.  The course goes through a nice neighborhood, and there were lots of neighborhood kids to high five.  If the first rule of endurance sports is to never pass up an aid station, then the second is to high five all the kids (so I did).  There was even a local hockey club doling out a snow drift they’d been stockpiling.  Yes, I ran about 3 miles with snow under my hat in August. The miles beeped by at a steady 8:30-8:40 pace for the first loop, and then started to slow on the second.  By the time I’d hit the far point of the course on the second loop I was getting pretty tired.  I popped the last of my electrolyte caps and started hoping I could hold on to a decent pace without cramping for the last 5K.  I could feel a couple of muscles thinking about seizing up, so I took the cautious route and walked up the last bit of the last big hill, and then just flowed down the rest of the course with only one small calf cramp right before the finishing chute.  The total time for the run, 1:56:38.  This annihilated my previous best by nearly 15 minutes.  

Overall I have to say I’m delighted.  It was a great race, on a perfect day, and I beat my previous best at the distance by nearly 7 minutes.  This on a course where I was going to feel really good if I missed a PR by “only” 10 minutes.  After my lousy start I managed to catch 60 men in my division and ended up 79th of 175 and in the top third of men overall.  I’m disappointed in my swim and also in my transitions, so I’ll have to work on that, but I definitely have to say that I raced the best race I could on the day in question.  Total time 5:43:42