Ironman Coeur d'Alene - TriathlonFull Ironman

Not at all what I was planning based on training, but I was conservative and tried to avoid any mess which means I swam around a lot of people. Came out of the water feeling great. I did get knocked in the face by someone rounding turn 2 on the second lap. Knocked my goggles loose and they filled with water. Flipped on my back and drained it out pretty quickly but didn't get them sealed up perfectly again. They leaked a bit when I flipped back over so swam the last mile or so with water in my goggles. Not bad enough stop, just a bit annoying.

Contact doesn't really bother me so might as well swim the straight line and gain back that time.

was not in a hurry at all here. Things went smoothly.

Nothing - was ok. Might have remembered a towel for my T1 bag but wasn't totally necessary

Paced really well, never once felt like I was pushing it, but I could have pushed it a bit harder and not impacted the run. I kept power very conservative on the up hills, and pushed every downhill. Amazing to see just how well this strategy works. I would get passed by a dozen people on the up hill and catch almost every one of them on the downhill because I would pedal while most of them recovered. Felt great through the entire bike, although occasionally my stomach would bloat, so I would cut back on the water until it felt better. Might have been a little low on water intake, but seemed ok.

Push harder. I had a ton of training rides and data that said I could have pushed more, but I really, really wanted to run the marathon with a good time (good for me) and since I was keeping an OK time I biked under my goal power (but yet still walking way more of the run that I wanted)

started to feel a bit queasy in the tent so I picked up a roll of rollaids out of my bag before leaving.

Nothing. T2 is almost always straight forward.

Ugh. This started to suck almost immediately. Plan was to run very conservative for the first 30-40 min to see where my legs/stomach etc were. I started out well below my "easy" pace and felt ok, but started heating up almost immediately.

By mile 2 I just felt super hot. I ran from aid station to aid station pretty ok up until the first big hill. Walked the hill, ran down and started running along the lake at a much faster pace. I didn't even make it back to the city before my stomach totally went south and had to reduce myself to a walk. Any attempt at a run immediately got close to puking so rather than risk making it worse, I knew I had plenty of time so just walked along steady hoping my stomach would settle.

Was not better by the time I hit SN so I picked up the tablets of Pepto I had in SN - should have also probably grabbed the Advil but wasn't thinking correctly at that time.. Chewed through 2 of those but no relief through town. At this point I my mood was crashing - still a LONG way to go. The bad mood was probably from not eating, but food was not sitting well. This was probably the toughest part of the day for me. At about mile 14 or so I finally decided that perhaps coke would be a good idea. And boy was it. After the 2nd cup my stomach settled down a bit. Enough that I could manage to run again - at least for good stretches of time. Started into a 5min/4min run walk which worked out fine. When I did run I was able to get back to my goal pace, but since the 5/4 run walk was working for me I kept it up.

At mile 20 I grabbed some chicken broth and it's a little like the sky parted, angels started to sing and the sun came out again. Salt! I didn't realize just how sick of sugar I was by that time, if I could have carried the tub of chicken broth back to the finish line I would have.

The last 6 miles were a bit of a blur. Not that I was out of it so much, it was just a lot of rinse and repeat. Run/walk, coke/chicken broth. From about 2 miles In I ran almost the entire way in - that did turn my stomach again, right as we got onto Sherman Ave. That last 0.25 mile or so was hard to keep from smiling and puking all at the same moment :)

figure out what the deal was with my stomach. Nutrition and pacing seemed all OK based on training. What was different was perhaps the heat. I do all of my training in the mornings and here in Seattle that means 99.99999% of that is in 50F or less. I have never seen so much salt on my clothes or body as I did in that run. Will be fun to see the finisher pics. .

I'm not sure how much it was the coke, or just that the clouds rolled in and it cooled off enough that I started to feel much better as the run got later in the day.

Laid in the grass for about 5 minutes. Felt so good to be cool again. Ate some of the pizza and sat and BS'd with other athletes at the table


I might experiment a bit more with adding more salt to my nutrition, that and in my next one I'll push a bit more since I can now check "finished" off the goal list :)


First I should comment on just how COOL the people of CDA are. Starting from when I arrived in town people working at restaurants, grocery stores etc all wished me good luck. The race support though was most awesome. Loved the bands (bag pipes, rock and even a girl practicing her violin) through out the course was cool LOVED the neighborhood parties going on before you get to the lake path on the run. Those neighbors rocked - huge help in motivation,

Next the race organizers themselves did an incredible job. Never needed to ask for anything, everything was clear and well explained.

The course itself was awesome. Cold lake, hilly bike, and rainy runs along the water. Except for the temp it was PNW racing at it's best. I will so be back again

Finally, while I was way off goal and training paces - I won't complain too much. I finished. You don't quite realize just how hard an IM can be until you're out there and see people suffering. Plenty of folks had bad swims/bikes/runs etc, but every one of them were gutting it out.as best they can. I made the most important goal of the day - finishing. There's always next year to improve on that time.