I don't know about OD, because from my point of view, it seems extremely low compared to what I take during a 70.3. Granted I am a very salty sweater, but until I hit these quantities, I either failed during the run, or right after the finish line. My main cue that salt was the issue for me was that every single time, 2-3 cups of chicken broth would bring me back up instantly.

I'm just gonna list the electrolyte stuff I take and you do the maths...

I usually eat 3 Margarita Clif Bloks before swim start (those with 3x sodium). I eat the other 3 in T1.
I drink 1.5 to 2 bottles of Infinit during bike, plus one bottle of water (my formulation is geared toward Krusty Triathlete)
I take 8-12 saltsticks during the bike, depending on course. My bike times are 2:30-3:00 and I aim at 1 caplets every 15min.
During bike I eat "basic food" (usually fig newtons cookies, one every 20min) but at 2h I stop them, get another 3 Clif Bloks Margarita so I don't have too much solids in stomach for run.
Back in T2... another 3 Clif Bloks Margarita...
On the run I drink whatever is on course and carry Fruit3 bars - I take one, sometimes 2 depending on the day.

That's my N=1. When I upped my saltsticks from 4-6 to 8-12, I stopped having issues altogether. And there were some very hot races in there.

I'm not saying that is your issue, but you might want to "reconsider" that you OD'ed on electrolytes...

You say you kept your heart rate in line. To me that means that in training you did rides where you established that as some eart rate you could ride 56 miles, hold that heart rate, and take in X calories per hour. That's what keeping your heart rate in line means.

So for the moment let's say it was 145 bpm, 1.75 calories per pound of body weight per hour. If you are saying that you THEN went out yesterday, rode at 145 bpm, that the temperatures were hotter than normal, and your power was somehow higher than normal at 145 bpm; I am very very surprised.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that if those things were true, I'd be quite surprised; I'll add in that in 13 or so years of triathlon coaching with heart rate and power - I've never seen that happen.

As for the run, go back and look at what your heart rate was doing. If your heart rate was low when you felt like you just couldn't get it going - most likely low on nutrition - which goes along with what you said about not being able to stomach your nutrition.

If your heart rate was super high, probably the heat got you - which happens. It can be made somewhat better by being well hydrated, but not totally better.

As for what I think most likely happened, without knowing a thing about you, I'd say you pushed harder n the bike in terms of heart rate than was sustainable. As a result your stomach didn't empty at the normal rate, which in turn meant you absorbed fewer calories and less hydration than you had in training. And from there it was just a struggle to the end.

This seems much more likely in my experience than having your race ruined by eating too many salt pills the day before.

What was the temp during the race? It's June and depending on where you are the first hot days just hit. It takes time to get used to the heat. I'm from a hot humid state and it sounds like to me you go too hot.

After about 10 years in the sport, I come to learn a few things:
1. Expectations improperly set, not enough real world race specific data collected to set proper expectations.
2. Lack of specificity in training, ie. disconnect between how you trained vs. how you raced, example, including above, if you have done a bunch of 2x20mnin@FTP or around and are basing expectations off that, which really tells only one side of your fitness or,3hr power is another marker entirely, which leads to this question, how many sessions were completed that sound like this:
5-6x20min(5min)@IF .92, or 4x30min(5min)@IF .92, or 90-120min@IF.92 each followed by 45min-60min run at race pace
3. IF.92 for the ride is PRO material typically, what was the TSS from that intensity factor that you clocked in for duration of your ride, that will tell you how much you have overcooked it, typical wisdom is around 170 TSS if properly trained.
4. AP and NP spread of 4% indicate high VI, that will zap your legs, what was your VI?
5. UCAN, I am familiar, 3 servings at 190cal each, right? If so, that is too much per UCAN's own instructions.
6. "I had hard time downing it" sounds like to high level of effort for HIM, you should still be able to down sports drink during HIM with no issues if no heat or over exertion. Or you simply took in too much and overloaded your gut, entirtely possible. It is olympic where things get hard to down even at proper amounts.
7. Bloating is an indication among other things of loss of electrolytes. Loss of electrolytes feels like bonk, very little difference in how it feels.
8. Puffy hands and ankles are sign of electrolyte OD as you call it.
Oh and I have not even covered mismanagement of swim or lack of swim fitness.
These are just some thoughts I learned over 10 years of training and racing.

I can share my first-hand impact that calorie deprivation did to me last month in a 70.3...

I usually aim to take in about 1,000 calories on the bike, and then go ad-hoc on the run with usually another 100 to 200 toward the end of the run to bridge the last few miles. My bike thoughtfully ejected both of my bottles with liquid calories, leaving me only 320 calories I had as backup on the bike. I got a few additional calories along the bike from Gatorade, but my bike enjoyed ejecting those bottles as well.

Anyway, I only ate the 320 calories on the bike plus probably a hundred or so from Gatorade. I got in a few more Gatorade calories on the run, but probably immeasurable. I biked to plan and was running on plan for about 6 miles. Then I totally faded hard and fast in the 6th mile and dropped about 2:30 minutes/mile. I ate my last 160 calories in mile 8 of the run, rinsed it down, and was able to speed up about 1:30 for the last two miles of the run. So, I finished at about 1:00 min/mile below pace on the last two, but I was sucking wind bad for about 5 miles in the middle.

So, at a glance, dying hard in the run at mile 3 seems early if you were below calories. My hunch it was a combination of everything: undertraining, heat, over-biking, and calorie deprivation.

Madison 70,3?

It's really easy. You over biked for the course and conditions. Hot, hilly and windy...88%AP and 91%NP of your FTP yesterday was suicide.

You don't need to look any further...seriously.

There's a saying.."you can't fix stupid"...I think it applies here..you're ride was stupid and you couldn't fix it no matter what your nutrition protocol was.

---

"Good genes are not a requirement, just the obsession to beat ones brains out daily"...the Griz

Honestly, I doubt you need to look any farther than the bold part. Making all the usual assumptions (adequate training, average weather conditions, accurate FTP, etc.), a NP of 92% of FTP is too high to leave enough in the tank to run well in a HIM. Keeping it in the low to mid-80's is where most athletes need to ride to set up a good run.

---

____________________________________________
Don Larkin
Reach For More
http://www.reachformore.fit/
USAT Lvl1 Coach, NSCA-CPT, NASM-CPT, BS Exercise Science

Based on your weather description, I am guessing you raced IM 70.3 Wisconsin (maybe not). If so, the heat was pretty bad and ate a lot of people alive on the run so I think that likely played a factor. My suspicion however is that if you rode .92 IF you over-biked and paid for it on the run.

That's waaay overbiking any 70.3 unless you're a 2:0x rider...even that's still pushing it. How many 70.3's have you done before? If it was up here in Madison, the heat should have been more of a reason to slow down. There's really no reason to look beyond the 92% figure.

You weren't electrolyte overloaded. It's pretty hard to do that with sodium.

UCAN? The 80 calories a serving stuff? 80% of 3 servings totaling 240 calories to fuel a 56 mile ride and be ready for a 13.1 mile run. Nope. No way. I do about 3x that for calories on the bike leg of a 70.3.

Or Eagleman. EVERYONE underestimates the difficulty of that race, because on paper it looks "easy".

---

____________________________________________
Don Larkin
Reach For More
http://www.reachformore.fit/
USAT Lvl1 Coach, NSCA-CPT, NASM-CPT, BS Exercise Science

I don't know your bike or run fitness, but I would say for most age groupers 92%NP would be overcooking the bike a bit. From what most have said on other threads a ceiling of 85% would be more in line. I have hit 83% and 85% this year in races and have had fairly decent runs. I could feel it in my legs that if I had gone harder, the run would not have been as good.
Just my 2cents.

The problem starts with overbiking. Then you were probably fueling too much on top of that (the amount of fuel you can digest goes way down when going harder). That's part of what made you feel sick later. And then overbiking PLUS overfueling = stomach shuts down because all of your potential digestive energy is going to your legs instead. So that gets you a double-whammy of feeling sick as stuff backs up. The triple threat that you probably added on top of that is it was hot, so you almost surely didn't drink enough water... to digest the too much fuel you ate... that was going into your stomach that was shut down anyway from biking too hard in the first place.

This is how you can get a low HR like you're underfueled, even though you fueled plenty. The reason you felt sick is you fueled correctly... for somebody biking slower and drinking more water.

The trick to beat this is to remember to slow down on hot days. Don't compare yourself to the efforts and times you did in cooler weather. Those are irrelevant. And don't compare yourself to people going faster than you - they are gonna get sick and walk. Think only of the final standings after the race is over and your place relative to the other people who managed to finish and ALL of them will have slower times than normal because of the heat. It's an unavoidable law of physics. The best marathon times aren't set in the Summer Olympics when it's hot. They are set in the winter when people can go harder and faster because they run cooler.

---

----------------------------------------------------------
Zen and the Art of Triathlon. Strava Workout Log
Interviews with Chris McCormack, Helle Frederikson, Angela Naeth, and many more.
http://www.zentriathlon.com

Grand Rapids?

---

_________________________________
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

anywhere east of the rockies on the weekend?

---

They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

Yeah, I am with you but UCAN is different. It is taken differently and in far lesser amounts. They seem to provide lots of guidance as to how to take their product and it defers entirely from everybody else.

Thanks, everyone, for the great feedback! I was in MI yesterday for the Grand Rapids Tri. I certainly didn't intend to ride at such a high output, but due to a snafu on my part, the only screen I could see during the ride was my HR.

@Kevin:
My HR on the bike was perhaps a little high at times, but nothing egregious. On the run, however, it exploded. More than an hour in Z4+.

Any thoughts on how I can better prepare for the next hot race besides drinking a crap ton of water beforehand?

Bike: http://tpks.ws/NbXlH
Run: http://tpks.ws/RSdSx

The same answer that 99% of the people who think their nutrition was the problem get - you overbiked - 92% is too high. I also agree with the specificity of training, but I don't see many people doing 92%

I'm a former RCEP and worked under a hydration research grant. I don't care what UCAN says, that's not enough calories. His other postings made it sound like he did additional fluids and electrolytes so I can't comment there. I can say with certainty that his carbohydrate stores were absolutely shot by the beginning of the run with ~200 calories of carbs and riding near 90% for 2+ hours. You don't 'recover' from that from further exercise in the heat.

To the OP:. Read the above. Yesterday I rode Madison 70.3 at 75% ftw. I ride with and pay careful attention to my PM. On a very hilly course, and HOT, I rode a 1.01 vi. Spun my way up the hills chuckling at the knuckleheads pounding away passing me. I also cut my nutrition by 25%. I have an amazing coach. There's no way I would have cut back the power and nutrition that far on my own. For all of this I was rewarded with a top 20 OA finish.

Every single match you burn exceeding your target HR or AW for one millisecond is a match that is burned and you don't ever get back.

I have a question, that I put up in the past (never got answered). I had a similar case racing a tough Olympic. Due to a number of factors, like a bike adjustment delay, I raced like this:

1. Swim: 5am commute, no breakfast. I had a hot green tea. 8am, one GU gel before the 1/2 hr swim.
2. Bike: Definitely over-biked & due to cool conditions didn't drink more than 1/2 bottle of water over the 1.5 hours.
3. I was toast before starting the run, as if there was so much lactic acid in my blood - it was like I was drunk on the stuff. 1 gel in the run. Plodded around +/- 6min/km pace to finish.

My question is that lactic acid overload? And what is done about that?

---

Training Tweets: https://twitter.com/Jagersport_com
FM Sports: http://fluidmotionsports.com

100% agree.

I mean ffs, Lionel Sanders rode .88 at the Challenge Championship and that bike took him 1:56.

Your blood clears that stuff out pretty quick. Guys around here like Pickels probably know the exact processes off the top of their heads, but I don't remember much about it. I don't really believe that lactic acid plays any part in muscle fatigue during (mostly) aerobic exercise like any distance of triathlon. Lacate is used as fuel. Even more so in the muscles for aerobically trained people.

Anyhow, it's the very little fluids, electrolytes and calories that may have been to blame. I understand that guys/girls can pop out of bed and hit a 2 hour workout with nothing in their stomachs, but it's probably not a good way to hit peak performance. At my bodyweight and being a mediocre 2:1x Olympic finisher, I'm burning pretty darn close to 3,000 calories during one of those races. A lot of it is carbohydrate and even if it cool, I'm still sweating. I know we're not the same person, but if it were me that started on an empty stomach, over cooked the bike and took in very little fluids and calories while expending a lot of mostly carbohydrate stores, I would probably be focused on the fluids, electrolytes and calories. Hit me up via pm with any more questions.

88%AP and 92%NP, those are closer to my Oly targets than HIM targets

It's not nutrition. Very simple explanation: you raced too hard relative to your fitness, and this case, you clearly biked too hard.