EagleMan Ironman 70.3 Triathlon - Triathlon1/2 Ironman

cpjohnson was our swimmer. he is amazing and put over 5:00 on the closest team.

konichiwa was our cyclist. it's insane how good a cyclist he has become in just a few years and tore up the course. he had a faster ride than any 2006 relay member.
unfortunately for us, the national mountain biking champion of bermuda showed up and posted a 2:09:02 (26.2 mph). that is fast enought to beat all but one of the professionals and pretty much ended our hopes of first place.

nervously waited for tim to come in, put the chip on my ankle, and took off

my plan on the run was to hold 7:00/miles until the turn around and then give it all i had left on the return. for the first half, i used my gps in order to keep the pace steady.
my legs felt great, but my stomach was tight and my hr was immediately high. it went straight to ~170 which i can normally hold for a 5k, but way too high for the start of a half marathon. i stuck with it and told myself to just hold on until the turn around.
about mile 5.5 i saw the 1st place team's runner coming back into town. he was looking great, so i knew i was racing for 2nd place and a pr. no problem. we came to show what we could do and having the bermuda national relay team out there didn't change that. we cut :45 minutes off the best team in 2006 and i hoped it would be enough for 1st, but i can accept that it wasn't.
i finally made it to the turn around. i tried to turn it up a little, but nothing really happened. maybe this is what happens when you pace correctly or maybe i was missing something. not really sure. the whole run my legs felt like i was running marathon pace and my heart felt like i was running 5k pace.

usually this is the part where i can start to feed off other runners, but it doesn's work in a relay. instead of getting energy from passing people, you have this strange feeling like you are somehow cheating. i was flying by people, but of course i was, i didn't just ride a 56mi. time trial.

i was able to get some energy from kristin cheering me on, seeing heidi cruising comfortably to the female relay win, and some other bt'ers out on the course. that got me to the final turn where i could hear the crowd and know my family and friends were close. the eagleman finish is one of my favorites. you can hear and see glimpses of it from a distance, but there are very few spectators outside of the finishing straight. it is around a tight corner at the end so when you come around at full speed, it is kind of an explosion of people that is really cool.
i sprinted it in and broke my goal of 1:30 by a nice 20 seconds.

warm up more and try to relax before the start.

stretched and cheered people on. got some food and watched heidi come in and win it for the women. they had a great effort out there and it was very cool to see them win.


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race was great as always and the conditions were even good this year. the one problem is that we stayed for the awards which were the most unorganized event i have ever seen. they started an hour late and went for several hours!!!! vigo (race director) needs to work that out. the traffic home from there is always terrible too.