Ironman Arizona - TriathlonFull Ironman

Ugh. This was a lousy swim in so many ways. Like any IM, the start was a washing machine, but this lasted FAR longer than IMLP did. I think it had to do with the fact that the swim start area isn't as wide as LP.

I couldn't find any good feet to draft off of and I was getting knocked around pretty consistently. I don't know what some people were sighting on, but it got pretty damn frustrating when they would swim into me, do it again on the next stroke, and then do it again. Hello?! There's STILL a body here.

I started giving nicknames to some of them. For a little while I was behind a guy I called "Bumper Boy". I swear he was swimming by feel. He'd meander to the right until he bumped in to someone. Then he'd meander to the left until he hit someone else. He just wobbled his way down the course, pinballing off the other swimmers.

Anyway. I was pretty disappointed coming out of the water in almost 1:19. That's 8 minutes slower than LP.

Don't know, honestly. I think one of the biggest factors is that I just couldn't find a good pair of feet to get on.

T1 was marginal. I got stripped coming out of the water and headed through transition. They make you run all the way down the length of bags and then back up, which confused me since I just hopped over the lines of bags to my row. Anyway. I definitely lost some time getting the bag open. They had attached some kind of tag to the string on the bag which wouldn't let it open easily. I never did find out what it was for, but getting a helmet out of a bag that it barely fit in to begin with is challenging.

I started the bike with no nutrition or hydration. I just waited until the first aid station to grab some Gatorade and put it in my cage. At then end of the station, I grabbed another bottle and drank a bunch of it down and pitched it. I only used a single bottle cage for the whole race.

The first lap was pretty good. The wind was relatively light so I moved along pretty well. The second lap, the wind had picked up a LOT. Somehow, though, I managed to go faster on the second lap than the first. I'm not sure how that worked out.

The third lap was tough, because the wind had picked up even more and coming back on the last leg was very mentally taxing. That was my slowest lap, but I still averaged almost 19.5 for the whole race. I imagine I would have been 10-15 minutes faster without so much wind.

I managed to pass nearly 800 people on the bike according to the results. That's an amazing number to me and it really doesn't seem like I caught up to that many bikes.

Just like IMLP last year, I think one of my big limiters was just lack of focus during training. I didn't get in enough long rides building up to the race. I talked myself out of workouts too easily when the weather was bad or it was cold and I didn't make up for it by hitting the trainer.

Good T2. Cruised in to the dismount line and hopped right off. Dumped the bike off to a volunteer, grabbed my bag, and sat right down on the grass to make my transition. I ran through the change tent, dropped the bag, and got some more sunscreen slapped on.

Not much.

I was defintely disappointed here. I really felt like I was prepared for the run. I had done a bunch of long 16-20 mile runs at a very nice sub-9 minute pace. I was doing okay for the first several miles.

About 5 or 6 miles in, my ankles really started to bother me and I had to take some breaks to try and get them shaken out. My first lap ended up a little over 10-minute miles.

The second lap started about the same until the first aid station. I was downing either pretzels and water or coke at each station. I grabbed some pretzels and ended up with a little piece tickling my throat and making me cough. With my upper body muscles still completely wiped from the swim, I ended up straining my back muscles coughing! I felt like someone had an iron band strapped around my chest. I couldn't take a deep breath. My second lap pace dropped to over 13-minute miles.

The third lap, my back started to loosen up and I was able to pick the pace back up. The pace for it ended up being around 10:30 for that lap.

Coming over the bridge for the finish of course got the adrenaline going and I ran in to the finish pretty strong.

I don't know what I could have done differently. The bike training I mentioned may have been a factor, but I was still bummed that I wasn't able to hold a better pace after some very solid run training.

After getting across the line, I got signed up for a massage. My parents went and got all of my transition stuff and my bike for me while I waited. After a quick massage, I was ready for some food and I had been dreaming about the In-N-Out burger every one talks about over the last part of the run, so we drove around a bit trying to find one. Before anyone asks, we couldn't easily get to the one on Scottsdale Rd (I think it was). We finally found one and it hit the spot. It wasn't out of this world or anything, but it was definitely tasty.

The next morning, I was actually feeling pretty good. We got up and got all of our stuff together, got the car loaded, and then hit the road about 11. I ended up driving the whole damn way. We got in to Austin at about 4 a.m., if I remember right.

Recovery has gone well. I was moving around really well by Tuesday afternoon. I even ran down 5 flights of stairs when we had a fire alarm go off in the building.

Now that I've finally gotten this race report done, it's time to get back on the stick and start building some speed for the shorter races coming up. I was really planning on running last night, but we had a series of very cool thunderstorms roll in.


In a word: training. I was doing well early on, but work, weather, and insufficient drive caused me to miss way too many workouts in the heart of the training. The one place where I thought I was best trained is where I ended up doing the worst. Of course, that was probably payment for the lousy training in the other 2 areas.

If I do another one (IMFL in '08, if anything), the biggest factor will be maintaining a good base all along. After IMLP last year, I didn't do anything for almost 5 months and had to start from way behind. If I keep from doing that, I should be much better off.


Any official IM race is going to be an event and typically well-run. My biggest gripe is the post-race area. Once through the finish chute, they direct you back into the Ironman village. They send you through a small gap in a chain link fence. The massage table is right in that narrow crowded area. That's great because you don't have to go far, it sucks because it become a huge bottleneck. They need to reorganize that area so it's not so narrow and crowded. It was nuts in there.