Ford Ironman 70.3 California - 2008 (Page 5)

For those who are interested, Nytro usually hosts a Saturday Warmup Swim. The 2XU suit vendor is there with demo suits if anyone is looking for one. (I bought one that day after my suit ripped)

Nothing has been announced yet, but when it does, I will forward the info along. (My Tri Club is sponsored by Nytro)

This is a great way to get a feel for water temps and also to meet IRL a few of the kids who you will be racing with on Sunday.

Edited by WaterDog66 2008-02-15 2:52 PM

You guys suck! It's 20 degrees here and we are supposed to have freezing rain all weekend!! I have a good tolerence for air temp, so i ride in 20 degrees or less in just bike shorts for the legs. I usually only wear one under armor shirt and one long sleeve shirt over that and i'm good to go. Once it gets above 40-45 i wear shorts and a t-shirt!

I went to masters swim at lunch and it was a rather light crowd.....mustve been because it had just dipped into the 60's in OC......sorry...don't mean to pile on but I gotta justify my ridiculous mortgage and taxes somehow!

somebody here (iwanttotri?? ) is on base, either married to a marine, or is a marine, or....   Anyway, offered to accompany people on base for a ride of the course.  If you guys can swing that, that would be awesome

You cannot ride the course. Parts of it are off limits to ALL cyclists. You can, however, drive it in a car....I think. I'll find out

According to the Website, they are again allowing cyclists to ride from the front gate in Oceanside to Las Pulgas Gate. (This may change if there is another security alert I would guess) The part of the course from Las Pulgas to San Clemente has always been open to cyclists because it is not on base.

My suggestion was to just ride the front side of the bike course (~40 miles round trip) followed by a single loop of the run course.

If for some reason, an alert does happen and they don't let us ride the ~8 mile section on the base, the alternative is to ride the shoulder in I-5 to Las Pulgas. (I do this ride often) 

If there is a way to do more, that would be great, especially for the folks who have not done the race yet.

Edited by WaterDog66 2008-02-17 10:55 AM

I'll have to talk to Mr USMC when he gets home (he's surfing!). He has been riding back there for ages, and will know where you can ride or not.

Here is a link to the advisory:

http://www.pendleton.usmc.mil/scout/archives/releases/baseadvise/cycle.asp

As I recall, a security alert would alter this. (Forcing us onto the shoulder of the freeway)

Edited by WaterDog66 2008-02-17 11:05 AM

Okay, I just verified that Basilone Road is closed to all cyclists, including active duty military. This is where the return trip of the race will take place. I believe this is from Chrisianitos? back onto the base. I've been back that way on a motorcycle and could drive it, I just don't know the names of all of it. There's a Burger King by that area as well. But it's closed all the way back to the Air Station.

Hello BT'ers from SeeSharonTri --

I was enjoying reading your questions and advice about Oceanside 70.3. I did it last year, and plan to go back this year to better my time. I thought you might enjoy the race report I wrote last year for my marathon training buddies...

I did my second half-ironman distance triathlon yesterday.

Results first for you bottom-liners -- finish time was 7:55:45.
Swim -- 53 minutes 7 seconds for 1.2 miles in a calm ocean bay.
T1 -- 13 minutes 52 seconds (read farther for the reasons why this was so slow)
Bike -- 4 hours 11 minutes, 20 seconds for 56 miles (excuses see below)
T2 -- 4 minutes 53 seconds
Run -- 2 hours 32 minutes 36 seconds for 13.1 miles

Although my finishing time was more than an hour slower than my first half-iron distance tri back in 2005 when I finished 4th of 7 finishers in my age group, my finishing position in this much larger race was the same -- third from the bottom! Yes, I finished 46th out of 49 women in my 45-49 age group!

I knew I wouldn't be as fast this time because I didn't do as many long swims or bike rides, plus I'd ramped up my distances this time too quickly and paid for it with slight neck and shoulder muscle problems that I'm resolving with yoga and chiro visits.

But I learned a lot about doing this distance on a harder course, and gained additional respect for the full Ironman distance, deciding not to attempt it this year.

For the more patient of you willing to go along for a recap of my wild/mild ride, here is the more detailed version of the race.

I drove to Oceanside about noon on Friday, my tiny car loaded down with pre-race food (bananas, beef jerky, tuna, Gatorade Energy drink, Gummi Bears and 40 ounces of yogurt/banana/strawberry smoothie and an apple), my bicycle and other tri-gear.

They had Marines from Camp Pendleton keeping everyone but registered athletes out of the registration building under the Oceanside Pier. Inside, they make sure you've paid your USA Triathlon dues, they check photo ID, they make you sign multiple waivers promising not to sue Ironman, the city or the marine base, and they even WEIGH you. Geez! I guess that's important to get a baseline weight for people who get too dehydrated to finish the race.

Then they give you a nice little Ironman backpack, an Ironman swim cap color-coded for your swim wave start, Ironman race numbers for your body and bicycle. I've never been to an "Ironman" branded event, but take my word for it, they stamp it on everything. Outside in the souvenir tent, which is open to all, they had tons of IM-branded stuff -- racing gear, pencils, bike stuff, even a dog leash. I couldn't resist the $8.50 Ironman 70.3 coffee cup, my first truly unnecessary new purchase of the year.

For me, there's no such thing as a quiet evening the night before a long race. I am the queen of futzing, trying to eliminate everything that is not necessary and to have everything perfectly organized. So even though I had done all that the night before when I packed my bags, the gear all exploded from my luggage when I got in the hotel and I re-organized it all again.

My last pre-race ritual is to paint my fingernails. When I ran Pacific Shoreline for time, my first self-competitive marathon in years, I painted them black for fierceness and hit my goal time. For this race, on an admittedly light training base of several dozen 1-hour rides, one 45-mile ride, six mile-plus swims and two marathons, I knew I was likely to finish at least a half-hour slower than my previous half-iron distance tri, so I chose a light coral-pink color. Not so fierce.

All the racers had to park about a mile away, load their gear into a backpack and walk or ride their bikes to the transition area on Oceanside Bay. It opened at 4:45 a.m. and I guess I arrived by about 5:15 a.m. The pro men were to start their swim at 6:40. My wave including 20-something women and late 40s women was set for 7:25 a.m. So I knew I had plenty of time to lay out my gear, hit the bathroom lines several times (seriously -- for those of you who have had gastro-intestinal issues during races, this is the one tip that I cannot stress enough) and do a few warm-up jogs to raise my heart rate.

Finally, about 7 a.m. I was ready to go put on my wetsuit, but the guy guarding the gate in the transition area wouldn't let about fifty of the athletes get to their bikes until the pro men were out of the water and had run past. People whose start times were nearing started getting antsy. I snuck around a back way and ducked between a few gear tents to get back to where my bike, wetsuit and run gear were waiting.

By then, it was 7:10 a.m., about 53 degrees and I was too chilly to get my two-piece wetsuit on. I have practiced this several times, but not when my hands were not working well. I got the bottoms on, but the sleeves seemed to have shrunk! Finally, this nice young Marine volunteer came over and helped me get it on, just three minutes before my wave was about to begin. I had to run along this narrow passageway filled with hundreds of women competitors in the different waves to get to the water. It was so strange to excuse myself past a crowd of women, all in black neoprene, first in green caps, then blue caps, then red caps, and so on.

I got in the water, and my suit was so snug, I was not at all cold in the 58 degree water. My feet and hands quickly got numb, but I guess the face doesn't have many nerve endings, so it didn't feel too bad. The horn went off and we were all swimming. I started in the back, and nobody was rude or violent, so it went well enough. I passed one woman who was dog paddling as she got through what she said was a hyper-ventilating attack, but one of the lifeguards was watching her. Although I was never afraid or insecure being in the water, it was difficult to do the crawl continuously, so I took frequent breaks doing the breast stroke or backstroke. But I can't kid myself, 1.2 miles is a loooong swim. Several different color of swim caps from later waves overtook me during the swim.

When I finished and started walking up the boat ramp, I got woozy and had to lean on the seawall for support briefly. Luckily, I had done some research about long distance triathlons and knew that was not an uncommon reaction to standing upright and trying to run after a long swim, so I wasn't overly concerned. But I wasn't going to run along this long half-carpeted corridor just to make a faster transition. So I walked, carefully, trying to hold to the side of the lane so the faster runners could go by. As I walked, looking down, I realized that lots of competitors, in an effort to strip off their caps and wetsuit sleeves, had also stripped off their green security wristbands, and several had dropped their goggles. Well, I'm not proud. I arrived back at my bike rack with five new pairs of goggles to donate to a kids triathlon charity this Christmas!

A nice volunteer helped me get my wetsuit off, and I took my time to dry off and get going on my bike. I knew from the weather forecast that temps would rise into the mid-70s, but I worried I might get cold riding right after getting out of the water. So I had brought a feather-light bike jacket to wear over my tri-top and bike shorts. I was glad to have it, keeping it on for more than two hours of my ride.

In the first quarter-mile of the ride, the course takes a very steep sudden uphill. As I started challenging the hill, I realized two things: A woman wearing one of those aerodynamic space-age time trial helmets on a bike that's worth about the same as my car had fallen over on the curb farther up the hill. Second, I was in too high a gear for this hill and would probably damage my gears if I tried to drop them with so much strain on the chain. But if I couldn't get my feet out of my pedal clips I would fall on my side just like the elite biker chick. So while I still had some forward momentum, I kept my wits, twisted my shoes out of the clips and walked my bike up the hill. Where a photographer captured me in full-inaction. Oh well. Safety first.

The ride out along the beach was really beautiful, hundreds of riders passed me and I was fine with that. After about 20 miles, after passing through Camp Pendleton and past the San Onofre power plant I crossed over I-5 and was on the inland, hilly and windy portion of the race. How bad were the hills? A competitor whose brother is a Marine said that when they hike the big hill with packs, they name it Mount M.F. That was the second hill that I walked. It had to be nearly a mile long. It was so long, I took off my bike shoes, hung them from my handlebars and trudged up in my stocking feet. By then it was getting warm. That was when my feet finally un-froze and the jacket came off.

There were more hills. On one, I was again in too high a gear, dropped down too quickly and caused my chain to drop off. So I stopped to re-chain the bike. I walked another hill, too. But then we got some really great downhill runs. By the time I passed the three-hour mark on the bike, I was feeling far stronger than before, even with a headwind, and finished the bike leg in 4:11.

As I ran my bike through transition, I was surprised by how many competitors cheered for me. I was obviously a couple of hours from finishing, and they were all hanging around wearing their blue Ironman finisher t-shirts and Ironman finisher hats and medals. But they were very sincere in cheering me on.

The run doesn't really compare to a marathon. It was two loops out and back, so we saw the same water stations and spectators four times. It was nice to see my hubby Dave at the beginning of the second lap. He had taken the train down from Pasadena to see me finish and to drive me back. The water stations were great. They had water, Gatorade Endurance, cola, bananas, oranges, gels, cookies, and ice. Some was along the beachfront and strand, about half was beach houses on both sides. Expensive real estate.

I finished feeling good, and was surprised that my run pace was 11:39 per mile. I would have thought it was much slower. I wore no watch. My regular Nike watch stopped working in the ocean, and I decided I didn't want to know what my heart rate monitor watch was going to say on the run about my condition. So I left it behind and just walked and ran however I felt. I probably ended up doing something like a 3:1 run/walk for the half marathon.

The finish was fun. Lots of people line both sides and applaud you as you finish, and the announcer calls out your name, hometown, and occupation.


That's the end of my report... In June, I decided I wanted to do the full, and have registered for IM CDA, and am about 18 or so weeks from race day. Much better trained, too, doing really tough mountain rides. I set a PR today at the Palm Springs Half Marathon, going under 2 hours for the first time, and it was my fastest time since 1993.

Anyway, y'all have fun at Oceanside. Terrific race!

Sharon McN

I've hit a low this week in my training. One of my training partners wife just had a baby and the other one is sick. So i have been very unmotivated this week. Especially with the wind chill in the negatives. How's everyone else doing?

I have no clue if my training is going well or not....I am running as much as possible during the week but those are 4-5 miles or less at a time. I am trying to make it to masters three days a week and that feels pretty good. I am doing my best to get the big mileage on the bike on the weekends, last three weekends i made it about 35 miles and had horrible tire problems (getting new ones today). My plan is to get three more really strong weeks in before chilling out for the final couple. I am gonna do about 50-60 on the bike on saturday and 10-13 run on sunday and then a distance based brick weekend, long bike w/ about 45 run on saturday and then short bike w/ long run on sunday....or I have the option of doing a sprint club race...any thoughts....thinking distance is more important at this point.

again i really have no clue if I am prepared or not. I have no illusions of a strong finish time. I really just want to finish and enjoy myself and be happy with the fact that I can do something like this withoin an hour of home. Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcome.

That sounds pretty good, just make sure you are ready for it. If you ramp up to quick with tons of mileage you might hurt yourself before the race.

Is anyone up for a BT meeting on Thursday or Friday or even race day? I'll be flying in around noon on Thursday March 27th.