Great race report. Thanks for posting. I respect your introspection, humility and family focus and being tough on what you expect of yourself is not a bad thing. Best of luck in your future goals.

Whistler did not sell out last year. Currently I plan to be at both also!!! I don't turn off any sport at any time of year...I just reduce volume in all sports and I actually keep the intensity up in off season since my volume is low. It's fun to go hard and be rested for every workout!

I am looking forward to giving this a try. I have always had this nagging concern in the back of my brain that I train too long and as a result, too slow. I will be able to test it out!

If you don't mind, I will stay in touch, I may need some pointers on how to set this season up. I will PM you.

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Now you have a lot of base and can get plenty of fitness through intensity. If you don't believe it think of this for a second...Bradley Wiggins can be a 4000m pursuit gold medalist and a Tour de France winner. One race is 4 minutes, the other on 4-6 hours per day. Once you get much beyond 1 minute, everything else is from slow twitch, so you can get a lot of the way there working at a higher percent of your threshold. You may not accumulate as much TSS off an 8 hour training week in the off season as a 20 hour week, but you can make most of the physiological adaptation that you need off lower volume and high intensity and give back to your family and work. Then for a few weeks in the lead up, just jack up the hours. It is clear that your body is able to go for 9-11 hours so you don't need to rehearse that every week. Back in the day, Welch, Allan and crew all raced fast at short distance all summer and then spent late Aug and Sep on their Kona build. 6 weeks for a pro, 3 weeks for age groupers. Most recently, Gomez put the boots to all the IM guys at Tremblant. Not sure he could have done what he did to Kienle in Tremblant again in Kona with some more weeks of Kona specific prep, but the main point is that you can get really close to your personal potential on lower volume and higher intensity and then get race specific later. It's a better balanced life too. I think where guys go wrong (for the long term) is spend too many weeks per year on typical IM style training. I think you need to ration that out, especially on a multi IM year, if nothing else for your own personal sanity and health.

I'd have to disagree with you Dev, it seems to me Kona is harder than qualifying for myself. I've crashed & burned each time in Kona (except for ONCE), this time with what I believe the 3rd worst result of my life of 25 IM's. The vomitting, walking, just not able to get cool enough, results in backwards movement through the pack on the bike before imploding & walking a ton, just like last weekend. I've done all the heat training & research tricks in the book & still implode from heat. I'm thinking I'm just genetically built for cooler races. Either way, heat is my nemisis & Kona is the ultimate source of heat. The qualifiers...not so much, unless it is an April IM Arizona or something!

Now to bufit323--big kudos to you on making it to the Big Dance. It was a LONG race report like you said, so I'll tag mine onto yours...

I raced...
I imploded in the heat (again)...
I finished.
I will not give up trying to master my personal Kona demons & will keep on truckin' as long as I have breath in my lungs!
Two years to work on fixing any issues before I attempt again...
~Rocky M

If you don't mind me asking, where did you KQ?

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Great job! Gutting it out like you did speaks volumes for your character and probably a key reason you earned the right to race Kona. Mental toughness so often takes a back seat to physical strength. You've gotta have both and you've proved it.

Best of luck to you and your family!

I think it depends on your size and body fat percent. For smaller athletes, the Kona winds are tougher, but the heat is not that tough and since in Kona you don't have to race others and are just managing your own resources it is easier than a qualifier race where you are racing others in your age group too. Sure, Kona heat it slows small guys down, but less than big guys and once you get off Alii drive over Palani, the sun is less intense in the second part of the marathon. Now if you put a small athlete on a cold course like Norseman, it is another story

I agree, heat wasn't something I noticed on a race day in Kona. If anything, I thought it was cooler/less humid than much of my training here in Louisiana. As noted, I am a little guy too (barely 5'7" and 136 on race day).

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The more I think of it, make Texas your first shot. We get a "cool" day last year, and in my age group even with a 4:01 run I moved from 30th or so off the bike to 15th. Lots of guys slowing down on the run in Woodlands. There is around half a mile of shade per loop and the 95% concrete course also favours the lighter athlete somewhat. I am toying with the idea of IM Taiwan which should have similar (if not harder) dynamics vs Woodlands with more humidity and more hills and I have always wanted to explore the south of that island. The hard part is getting ready for an April 12th date...mid May is a lot easier. A lot of this depends on work and family obligations. Woodlands is an easy trip from here.

Congrats on persevering. It was good meeting you at the practice swim!

I, too, sense that you'll be back in Kona. And as someone who just did their second Kona after a disappointing first Kona, I can tell you that having experience in that race is really, really valuable.

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George D.
Canton, GA

Great meeting you George. It sure is a small world out there. Hope to see you again at the buoy, same time, same place, next year!

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I am all in on what Dev is "preaching". You will "need" way less base from here forward IF you reduce volume in the off season but not eliminate it. So you've done 4 straight years of IM? That was sort of the magic time for when I really noticed big improvement. As I enter my 40's I have continued to improve with far less volume season to season. I vote for Texas for a lot of reasons, one of which is proximity and the other is your size. If it is back to hot and humid, your size is a huge weapon. Good luck and yeah, great write up!

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Same time, same place, but not next year. :) I'm going to take a few years off from Kona, although I still think I have a few more things I can do better in that race. We need to rebuild the reserves (financial, motivational) before making another big push, and I was satisfied with my race enough to tide me over for a few years. Plus, the twins will be 18 months next October. Flying two six-month-olds to Kona was one thing, but I think that 18-month-olds would be really tough.

For that last reason, I think that Texas is a better next option for you than Canada. I sense from your report that you (like me) couldn't race without taking your family with you. Canada would be much tougher logistics with your baby.

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George D.
Canton, GA

Yep, and the last two have been on what I would consider as an AGer to be very large volume. This last build was 20 hours per week for a few months (and that is a true 20 hours of Swim Bike Run, no BS time for driving to/from or anything like that).

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One of the changes that I am trying to make in order to lessen my wife's burden with all this is that she is off the hook for races. If she would like to come, I want her there, but there won't be any expectation and certainly no guilt if she and the baby support from afar.

That said. Texas would probably be the easiest thing travel wise (even easier than driving the crew to IMFL). I think I could drive to the Woodlands alone with my car load of crap and my bike and then a few days later, she could hop a 1 hour flight with the baby and a diaper bag and nothing else and I could pick them up with all the excess baby stuff already in the car/hotel.

I really think that would be easier than loading up the family truckster with the three of us and driving to Panama City, and the flight thing really doesn't work at IMFL because of lack of a large airport in proximity.

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My 2 cents worth as someone who has been in this sport for a long time with family. Take your family to 1 IM race per year max. Frankly standing around for 10 hours tracking your athletes with screaming kids, in the sun with loud music and a zillion people to navigate around is not fun. I would suggest making your qualifier race no family where you focus on the business of qualifying and not family....just go in and out like a business trip. They can watch you online and to you there is no real difference the day of the race if they are on the side of the road or online. Qualifier race is no recreation, just business.

Take your family to a race that is more like a holiday, where the only day focused on you is race day (which is kind of impossible anyway, but you can try) and put their plans generally ahead of pre race workouts etc. My 2 cents.

My main point is families only have so much "endurance" to get through all this too. You don't want them to have to light up too many matches too often, because after that the match box is empty, and if it is, the athlete no longer gets to play this sport. I'm up to 27 IMs in 23 years. My family life is far from perfect (most would say it is out of whack with normal families, but it works for us), but I have seen lots of guys come and go burning out their families with this stuff and if the family is burnt out, there are no more IM start lines.

Having said that, Texas has a good set up for families and it is close to you, so you have to decide what is important for your family life.

That's good advice. I would only add that it depends on your family dynamic (which can change over time). Right now, I can say with confidence that my wife wants to be there when I do the big races, and I want to be there for hers. We're talking about my doing a marathon in February, and she's not really happy about the possibility of her not being there. As our twins get older, though, this may change. We'll see.

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George D.
Canton, GA

Great write-up!

Have to admit I felt a tear welling up when you talked about all the support you've gotten from your wife. I just finished my last race of the year yesterday and I think of the extra stuff my wife has had to deal with so I could train and I'm blessed to have somebody like her in my corner, supporting me 100%.

I say that to say, make sure you tell her how much it means to you. Hope you crush it on your next trip to the island.

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Great race report...I was hoping to catch up with you soon but glad to hear the bike issue was just something mechanical. We were tracking you and Barry and I actually thought you guys were running together, which I thought was kind of funny. You and I share a certain affinity to speak like an angry sailor and inject an F word wherever possible, and it got me thinking of how Barry was handling that =).

I've been blessed to train and race with some great athletes down here and you're right up there at the top of the list. Not just how you race, but how you approach the sport and everything it encompasses. You understand you have to be balanced. Personal life, family life, your career but then find the time to train like hell so you can give each race the effort it deserves. Congrats again man, truly inspiring considering all you've been through the last couple years.

Congrats! You should be very proud of your accomplishment, even more proud that you persevered thru some big raceday challenges. Also, thanks for the very well-written race report, one of the best I've read.

My wife is a unique breed. I could give a million examples, here are my two recent favorites:

1 - when she saw me at the finish line flying this flag which thanked her for getting me to and through Kona, her first statement was "but you ruined your awesome Kona finisher photos with that thing."

2 - after we figured out how we are going to proceed with this training stuff. I thanked her for keeping me in this race. I thanked her a lot. She told me that if I didn't stop thanking her, she was going to reconsider our plans!

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IM Boulder. I didn't think the stomach issue could get worse than that race (200+ with stomach issues...possibly bad water/e-coli). Then Kona...3rd worse IM of my life. Time for a year off & figure some things out...

Paul/Dev, I was quite a bit behind this time, small and larger athletes. I'm 5'9-5'10 & about 148 lbs when race day arrived. I even use a regular vented helmet rather than an aero helmet just to keep cooler. Arm coolers, etc, visors...ice in the hands, in the shirt, elsewhere, 4-5 cups each aid station, just for cooling in addition to the nutrition. I'm usually feeling the heat upon climbing up to T1 in Kona...low heat tolerance which is not good if you want to ever do well in Kona. Some thrive in heat (more than don't)...it just doesn't feel natural to me on anything above 72 F. I did see Ben Hoffman with that cooling neck pack--haven't seen that before. I would think I'd melt it all by 10K though & it would be near boiling. I lost count how many gals that were chicking me, but more than that, how many really old AG'rs were ahead of me (grandpa age). Yep, I think I may have the record on ST for the most consistent number of implosions in Kona. At least I'm consistent! Heat sucks...unfortunately it is part of triathlon or we'd be ice skating!

Thank you so much for the kind words. I have really come to love this sport and the biggest regret that I have is that I don't do it in a more sociable fashion. I sure would love to make more time to train with everyone else around the area, but it is so difficult coordinating the family/work/training schedule for one person, I can't imagine making it all work out so that multiple people could do stuff together frequently.

I am grateful that at least via the internet and the local race circuit that I have been able to connect with awesome folks like you. It definitely helps keep the motivation high!

We will be racing together again soon I hope. This time I will try to beat that pink helmet out of T1!

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