Humbling First Full IM

I certainly agree with your conclusions and lessons learned.  Not having done either half or full ... I imagine the full is like doing 3 half's.  Many of your lessons apply to shorter races as well, wherein we all can do more with training.  Especially with time and distance to build ones base and depth. 

Keep it up ... I'm sure you'll do well with your next one.

Congratulations on finishing!

Most of your conclusions are spot on.  It sounds like it was a good educational experience.

One thing that you may not like hearing, though, is that Texas IS a rolling course.  If you do more races around the country, your perspective will change, and you'll realize that you're either blessed, or cursed, depending on your perspective, living in Florida where there are really only small hills to be found up on the panhandle, and everything else is a pancake compared to most places.  The consensus tends to be that a course isn't hilly unless the elevation change is in the neighborhood of 100' per mile.  For an IM, that would be closer to 10,000' of elevation change, not 3,700'.  To put it a little more in perspective, IMLP has 4,000' of gain per loop (x 2 loop course = 8,000' total), and most seem to consider it a relatively hilly course, but not brutally so.  Eventually, you may even decide that you like the challenge of some hills on the bike.  :-)

Given that you've only been doing this for a year, I think you did quite well.  Again, Congratulations!

Congrats on your finish.  12:10 is nothing to sneeze at for your first IM attempt, after only one year in the sport, on a course that isn't really super fast.  It was the North American championship, so the pro field was pretty deep...yet other than one guy going 8:07...a lot of the male pros were in the 8:25-8:30 range.  Including some guys like Ben Hoffman and Lionel Sanders.

I don't see it in your race logs, but what was your HIM time?  Was it in the 4:25-4:35 range?  Because that's probably what you would have needed to do in order to even sniff a sub 10 at IM Texas.  Especially since I'm guessing your HIM was in Florida where it's flat and times tend to be a a little quicker.  The course record at IM Florida is about 14 minutes faster than it is at IM Texas...just for some perspective.

IM Texas does indeed look like it's rolling as Don already mentioned.  I'd say 3-4k feet of climbing is a pretty tame IM bike course as far as climbing goes.  There are other factors that can make a bike course faster or slower...like road surface, wind, and heat though.  It's not just about total elevation gain.

I think you're beating yourself up because you might have had unrealistic expectations.  My guess is that a 11ish hour time should have been your goal, and you didn't come too far from that given this is only your first year in the sport.  My first and only IM was a 13:45...and my HIM PR is 5:17 on basically the exact same course.  It was done my 4th year in the sport...so just goes to show that you don't always have your best day during IM no matter how hard you train or how badly you want to do well. 

Again...congrats on your finish.

IM is a tough distance - you put all your marbles in one jar and hope it all goes well.  Just surviving it is always something to plan for  as part of your race strategy.  Performing is a much more tricky business. There are so many factors and especially for your first you just can't predict how your body will handle it. 

Don't let your times goals get in the way of what you achieved. Your time is really really good but in the end, your time only matters to you and if it is not good enough in your mind you can never really enjoy your accomplishment. 

Congrats on the IM! 

Sounds like you needed to spend a few weeks in in Clermont FL and ride the hills repeatedly.  IIRC you can do 3 loops up there for 100mi and get close to that elevation change.  Or get a CompuTrainer or similar trainer that allows you to ride courses with some simulation.

Either way I say you rocked it!

An Ironman is almost as much about execution as it is fitness.  You can fake your way through sprints, olympics, and often half irons on fitness alone.  You can't overpower 140.6.  Miscues in execution will certainly manifest into problems at some point.  That execution success and failure most often comes from the bike ride.  People bike too hard during that 112 miles.  Then they blame their nutrition or their fitness or sodium intake or whatever.  Slowing down really does wonders.  The root cause of the vast majority of IM blow-ups is poor bike execution.

It seems you recognized that you were overbiking early and adapted.  What you didn't realized was that you ran WAY TOO FAST for the first 20 miles of the IM marathon.  You thought 8:30-8:45 was easy pace, and maybe it is on a normal training day where you hadn't been swimming and cycling for almost 8 hours.  On that day and 8:30 pace was probably teetering on suicide pace.  You should've started 9:15 and picked up the pace every few miles if, and only if, you were feeling good.  You mention HR on the bike, did you have HR on the run?  If so, what was you HR looking like?  My guess is that 8:30-8:45 pace almost a zone higher than where you wanted it... and eventually you blew up. 

Texas is a tough course due to the heat and humidity.  It's overall not that intimidating of a course from a topography standpoint but certainly challenging coming from Key West.  I'd suggest never registering for Whistler or Tahoe if you think Texas is hilly.  You might think you're climbing Everest on a bike. 

To address your numbered points...

1. It is important to replicate race conditions as much as possible but that's often not feasible and/or impossible.  You have the heat and humidity part covered.  You can "simulate" riding hills on the trainer by riding in harder gears at lower cadence.  It's not the same but you have to play the cards you were dealt.

2. More experience and base endurance helps but it's not a be all, end all.

3. Kind of.  It's 2x the distance but also done at far less intensity (if executed well) than a HIM.  That obviously leads to more than double the time as your pacing is much slower.

4. See #2 but what was you weekly bike volume looking like?

5. Don't get wrapped up in the long run mythology.  I did IMAZ on zero run training in 2012 due to a foot injury (and still outran 70% of the field), did another three IM's in 11 months and my longest training run was 11 miles (and nearly broke 4 hours in the marathon).  I never once thought, "Damn, wish I would've run more long runs."  Run training is more about volume, consistency, and quality, than it is one long run.  A 20 mile training run is absurd in my book.  The recovery from that is probably too much.  Not saying to follow my 10 mile run example either but it worked for me.  Despite only doing 10-11 mile long runs, I averaged 40+ miles per week during peak weeks and ran 52 or 54 miles during my biggest run week.

6. Peeing on the bike does take some practice.

Good job regardless.  Learn from it.  Try a flatter IM next like FL or AZ for comparison.

I apologize for hijacking your thread, but I'm curious about this.  You thought you had a shot at 10 hours, but your HIM was just under 5 hours, making a 10 hour IM impossible assuming you raced the HIM and fitness was similar.  I'm not criticizing you or your coach.  I'm mostly curious about how other coaches operate.

Didn't you and your coach discuss realistic times and goals?  Did he provide a race plan for you that detailed how to execute the race?