One Week After – My Ironman Wisconsin 2009 Race Report Part 1

Now that my body feels pretty much healed up and my head seems to be screwed on straight, I feel like I can give a race report to the rest of the world that won’t make me sound like a whiney little biatch. Trying to look at it objectively, I did okay for my first time out. I want to thank everyone that gave me support – both financial and well-wishes – during the day.  I’m really lucky to know as many good people as I do, and the day only confirmed it.  I want to thank my family as well – without the help of both sets of grandparents the day would have been even harder for Tracy.  It was great to have my mom and dad around on the course, and Tracy was a real trooper.   She put up with the long training rides and runs, the going to bed by 8:30 most nights, and my general insanity the last few weeks into the event.  Love you, T!

I have to say one of the things that makes Ironman so much fun is just how significant each decision is during the day.  The only analogy I can draw to illustrate from other sports is in golf – you face decisions on where to push or place safe on most holes.  Your score on a hole will be very different if you decide to layup rather than drive over a river at 225yds, depending on how well you execute.   Most people should layup, but few do.  This leads to scrambling to save a score.

Now imagine that what you do on the first shot of the first hole will have a direct effect on ALL the remaining shots of the round.  That’s Ironman-racing.  And much like my golf game of old, I shot around “bogey-plus” for the day.  I got into trouble early, stuck to the plan to try to recover for about an hour, and then blew apart my day.  Once I realized what I had done I did what I could to make sure I’d be able to run the run – but this came at the cost of a slow bike ride.  In the end, I finished my first Ironman Wisconsin in 14:24.   My “C-Must accomplish-to-feel-successful” goal was to finish the race.  I didn’t tell anyone but Tracy, but my A-goal was to finish somewhere between 12:30 and 13:30. I knew it would take a nearly perfect day of racing for me to do that, but Endurance Nation’s execution training certainly provided me with the knowledge to attempt to pull it off.  Last Sunday wasn’t to be that day.

I’m going to cover Thursday-Friday in this post, and then Saturday up to the race itself in the next one. It just fits better that way.

I came into the week in a bit of no-man’s land. I’d been feeling pretty crappy for 3 weeks running, but just starting to get back to full-strength. This was unfortunate because it seemed like my biking power peaked the end of July and had fallen off by mid August. I was marking it up to cumulative fatigue, but after two mediocre race rehearsals I wasn’t sure what I was capable of doing during the race. My runs were holding up fine – slow, but still near the peak for the year. Now the cold had made me bag a few bike workouts into and during taper, which I was pretty sure wasn’t going to make me faster .I knew I could get through the bike but wasn’t expecting the 18+mph (~6:10hrs split) that I was after seeing my results YTD on my long rides around the end of July.  I had ball-parked a 1:30 total swim, 6:35ish bike (17mph), and a run from 4:30-5:00 as what I could expect for my effort.  I really didn’t know though since I’d never done anything this long before – no marathons, no half irons.

Thursday Night: In the following video the opening introductions were from the team dinner on Thursday night. I was in charge of organizing it and it took up more time than I expected. We ate outside at the Great Dane and I enjoyed two of their finest dark malt beverages with my meal.  Calories baby! I think most everyone enjoyed the night – if not they are more than welcome to try their hand at cat-herding by running it next year There’s a lot of cool race footage in there as well including some of this insanely hard-working fast guy that has shown me the template for success in 2012.   He earned his win through hard-work and dedication – congrats Matt.

After dinner I scooted quick so I could get back to Barb and Kevin’s.

Thanks again Barb and Kevin for everything you did during the weekend. I really appreciate it.

They were nice enough to let me stay over, and I didn’t want to keep them up waiting for me since I didn’t have a key.  (Thanks again guys!)

Friday: I drove on down to the Monona Terrace to get into the water to do the practice swim by 8:30am.  A bunch of EN’rs were there, so I swam with them.  I didn’t feel awesome, but the water was much cleaner and less stinky than the day before.  I forgot my watch but swam a 1.2 mile loop somewhere between 40 and 45 minutes.  That seemed like a good pace for raceday – in retrospect that wold have been perfect.  It was also the pace  I swam during the Madison Open Water Swim race three weeks prior.  Luckily, the drunk guy that drowned Tuesday night didn’t surface until Sunday after the swim – I was a little freaked that I’d be the lucky guy to find him.

We dried off and headed upstairs for the Four Keys Talk by Rich and Patrick.  I can’t be more plain about this – IF YOU ARE RACING IRONMAN YOU NEED TO GET THE DVD OR SEE THE TALK.  Period.  It’s common-sense information but nearly 95% of the people racing were doing the exact opposite of what they should on race day. It was cool to see how many people just walked by and stuck around to keep listening.  Eventually the Ironman officials “soft” kicked us out because a pro was about to have a press conference behind us.  There were probably 100 people at the talk by the end of it.

Of course, my red shirt didn't fit (I grabbed a kids large, no dice there) so I'm the Zen-master in the black in the middle.

Ended up going to lunch with Jesse and his wife, Josh and Tony at a random Thai restaurant on Willy Street.  I was a little nervous about spicing it up 48 hours out but the food was really good.  I love Thai anyway, and it didn’t disappoint.  Josh made a good call.   We walked back up to the Expo (I bought some cowbells), and then parted ways.  I checked into my hotel room and tried to sleep but it wasn’t happening.  I made sure to get off my feet and laid around waiting for Tracy to get into town.

That night, I skipped the mandatory meeting at the Terrace and instead had a wonderful cookout with Barb and Kevin/their kids/our kids.  They were great neighbors, and the kids had a good time playing with their old friends.  I’m glad we don’t have a trampoline though; they’d never get off of it.  I stopped over at the waterpark with the kids and then went back to the room to try to get my last good night of sleep.

This is where it sucked.  I couldn’t fall asleep – I think I finally did around 12:30.  I knew it was going to be my last night of rest so I just transferred all the anxiety forward.  Brilliant!