Timberman - Half Iron - Triathlon1/2 Ironman

Meh. I felt like I was swimming pretty well most of this swim, but the time was way slow - I was five minutes faster at Mooseman this year. There were a lot of suspicions about the measurement of the course today - the race start was delayed for almost thirty minutes while they were trying to figure out where to put the buoys. I was pretty disappointed when I hit the beach and saw my time, but tried not to freak out about it (I had planned for 40 minutes for the swim PLUS both transition) even though this was not a great start to the day.

I did get to have a good "putting life in perspective" kind of moment during the swim when I passed Dick Hoyt pulling his son in that raft they use. Wow.

Decent T1, considering how huge the transition area was.

Good, but not great, ride. I beat my goal (20 mph), so that's good. The first part of the bike leg is quite hilly, so I knew that my average speed would be pretty low when we hit the flatter section (Rte. 106). At the turn onto 106 my average was 18 mph, but I think I did pretty well in staying focused. Started really cruising on the flatter sections, and by the turn around my average was up to 20.6, which I thought was great because it felt like the wind had been more of a headwind to that point (other riders thought so too). We were wrong - very, very wrong. We made the turn and immediately realized that we would have to fight an increasingly strong, gusty headwind all the way back. I had a few moments on the hilly parts late in the bike course when I started getting demoralized, especially when I saw my average drop back to 19.7, but I managed to pull it together and ride pretty well the rest of the way and end up with a decent average. Unfortunately I knew that if I wanted a real shot at breaking five hours, I would have to pick up some more time than I did on the bike.

Great moment during the bike - I passed by this old man standing in front of his house, who, with a great irish accent, yelled at several of us "move it you bastards, you ain't got all day!"

Maybe drink a bit more, given the cramping I started to feel on the run. This was my first race using carbo-pro, which worked well, but I don't think I drank enough water with it.

Another good transition, considering the size of the area.

Came out of T2 showing a time of 3:31:11. Thought to myself, "if I can have one of the best runs of my life, I still have a shot at sub-5 hours". So I took off pushing pretty hard, wanting to see if I could click off a few 6:30 miles early on. Umm, nope. Hit mile 1 around 7:15 and started feeling crampy in my quads. Took lava salts at the next aid station, which helped, but I still couldn't seem to get any mile splits under 7 minutes. By mile 4 or 5 I knew that the sub-5 goal was not going to happen, but I still kept pushing trying to make up some time on Jeff (Jackemy), which I did, although not enough time (he ended up beating me by just under two minutes). By mile 10 I was pushing hard just to try to beat my Mooseman time (5:07), but I couldn't hold the miles fast enough to do that, hitting several miles closer to 8 minutes.

Pizza, oreos, pretzels, chocolate chip cookies, Jordan's black raspberry ice cream.


Timberman is a great race. Things did get off to a late start today, but other than that things went very well. They seem to have thousands of volunteers, and you lack for nothing on this course.

Even though I didn't beat my goal, I feel like this was a really good effort and probably my best half IM yet. The time was slower than this year's Mooseman, but given the swim time discrepancies I really wonder if this wasn't longer. I felt like I raced well and kept well focused today. I'm happy with my placings as well - top 15% overall, top 20% in my AG, and top 10% for the run. Plus I finished 50 minutes faster than when I did Timberman in 2005. I also apparently could have had a slot to the 70.3 Championship based on my time today (I had already decided against doing this anyway).