LongHorn Triathlon Festival - Ironman 70.3 - Triathlon1/2 Ironman

Garmin had the swim at roughly 1.04 files or 1831 yards. Which works out to be 1:56 /100 yards.

Really didn't feel I had that great of a swim at the time, for some reason I find it harder to navigate with the buoys to my left. So felt like I was always struggling to stay on course.

When I looked at my garmin and saw 35:XX I knew the course was short, I had been seeing pretty good improvement in my pool swim times here late in training, but I knew that 35 minutes for 2100 yards in open water was not reasonable. But even going by my garmin distance I did pretty well for me in the swim.

As others have pointed out the run from the water to transition was pretty long, plus the transition area was huge, compared to other races I have been in. So it took a little time to find my bike, plus the ground was mostly dirt so then had to take time to clean my feet off before putting bike shoes on. Also it was pretty crowded trying to make my way out of T1, would have like to at least jog out but to many people in front of my walking and no easy way around them.

I did better than expected on the bike, I did a 3 hour bike split at PrairieMan but knew that this course would be tougher with the hills, and with the wind forecast I was just hoping to be better than 17.5.

With my swim time, I knew that if I could just finish the bike in 3:10 I would then just have to hit 2:10 on the run and still have a remote chance to break 6 hours. So coming off the bike at 3:09 I was feeling pretty good about my chances.

This pretty good feeling would be gone shortly ...(see run)

Was a bit winded in T2 due to the massive hill at the end the bike course. That hill really hit hard. So I walked with my bike back to my rack area.

Here is were it all falls apart. Within the first 1/2 mile of the run I started to get symptoms of GI issues. Hit the first porta-potty I came to and just hoped that the issues could be resolved with one stop. But unfortunately, my run turned into simply surviving to the next porta-potty without soiling myself. This went on for the entire 13 miles. If I walked the GI issues seemed to subside a little, but would return as soon as I started to run again. So thats how a hope to hit 2:10 in the half mary turned into a 2:52 suffer fest.

I assume the GI issues were left over from the stomach virus that I caught on Thurs. before the race, because my nutrition was the same I have been using for months on my long rides.

I guess one consolation is that even if I had not had GI issues I am pretty sure I would not have been able to make the 2:10 on that run course anyway. I had the mistaken impression that the run course was flat except for Quadzilla, which is not the case.

I really had hard times on the run of both of the HIM I have done, really starting to make me re-think plans of doing the full at Redman next year.

Didn't really do any warm down, found the wife in the crowd went and gathered my things from the transition area and started the long walk back to the Expo center to start the trip back to Frisco. Was feeling pretty disappointed in my performance and just wanted to get home.


GI issues.


This was a great race, the only negatives were the traffic jam getting to the race site that morning. Which I am sure will be fixed for next year.

And the run course, not the difficulty, but the sucky surface, the dirt trails were very uneven, and some sections had large rocks, these sections of the run course were a twisted/broken ankle just waiting to happen.