First IM experience was very positive overall.
I flew into Louisville from SD on Wednesday and stayed with my girlfriend that lives in Richmond Ky that evening. I went on a 2 hour easy ride on Thursday to keep the legs loose and check race setup. I drove into Louisville Friday and went through the packet pickup, expo and met with some buddies. Everything seemed organized well enough and i had no issues.
Saturday i lounged around, turned in my bike and bags around 4pm and went out to dinner and tried to sleep.
My friend and i were not familiar with the TT style start and we ended up walking a mile from the swim start to find the end of the line. We were both not pleased with the format since we would have no idea where we stood against other AG competitors and we both like the mayhem of a mass start.
It took about 40 minutes from the start to enter the water.
I am not a fantastic swimmer and have put almost no time into it this year. I’ve touched the water maybe a dozen times since BLST 70.3 so i just went easy and cruised in at a 1:17. Felt good going on the bike and rode on HR, i raced Lake stevens two weeks ago rode at 155-160BPM and was able to run alright off the bike so i just cut 10-15BPM off of that and decided to see how it would go. This is the first year i’ve started biking consistantly (120-200 MPW avg) and have done only one 100 mile ride this year, but i’ve done several 3.5-4 hour rides so i felt semi-prepared. For nutrition i mixed two bottles of 8 scoops of EFS, one on the bike and one in SN bag, one PBJ in SN, and i began with one Nutella sandwich and powerbar.
I ate the power bar out of T1, mixed the EFS concentrate into the aerobottle and sipped as i went along. At 20 miles i ate the nutella, picked up SN bag on the first loop since i foresaw bad crowding on second loop and just jammed the extra sandwich in the jersey. Ate a gel at mile 55, PBJ at 85 and went through 1 and 3/4 of my EFS mixture, about 2000 cals on the bike. I biked a 5:15 and felt pretty good going into the run.
I Did not have any lofty goals going into the run. Some of you have probably ran more in a week than i have in most months this year since i’ve struggled with various injuries since recovering from a hip fracture. I wanted to run a Sub 4 Hr marathon and not walk at all. I ran off the course and just took coke and gatorade endurance at the aid stations.
First half i did in about 1:50, felt fine and ran at 145 BPM. I started losing my legs at mile 16 and by mile 20 i was hurting pretty bad. Hr dropped to low 130’s and i was doing the old lineman shuffle for the last 10k. Finished the run at about 3:55 I had nothing left to give coming across the line and finished in 10:35, 8th in the 18-24 AG. Thrilled with the experience and i look forward to actually training next year. I’d like to seriously attempt to qualify in 2010. The third place athlete went a 10:20 in my AG IIRC and the last slot rolled to 6th i believe.
I’d like to think with some good swim and run training i could go under 10 a year or two from now, but only time will tell. I’ve run sub 3 marathons when i was healthy in years past and imagine if i swam it might help a tad. My stroke mechanics are decent, i swam fairly competively when i was 15-17 in high school. In the last 5 years i have not swam seriously at all. Longest run this year before this race was the half’s at LS and BLST. I was very underprepared.
Awesome day, lots of fun and enjoyed every minute of it.
-Brian