New Orleans 70.3

Holy crap, tri season really sneaked up on me this year. Since my DNF disaster at Vegas last September my head really hasn't been in the game. Training-wise I managed to string together a few 25,000+ yard weeks of swimming back in November/December, but then my shoulder blew up, taking me out of the pool altogether for a couple weeks and sharply limiting my volume thereafter. And then I got the flu in mid-January, which took me completely out of action for about a week and a half and felt like it took a solid month to really recover from. Our ass-tastic neverending Minnesota winter didn't exactly help things either. 

Luckily everything started to come around by about mid-March and I started to feel more like my old self again. Next thing you know it's last Friday and I'm pulling the old Ordu down off of the hooks in the garage ceiling for literally the first time since September, only to immediately disassemble it and stuff it in a bag for a Saturday morning pre-dawn flight to New Orleans and my first race of 2013.

So suffice it to say I was feeling rather under-prepared and my expectations weren't exactly sky high for this one. Basically as long as I made it to the finish line in one piece and stayed out of the med tent/hospital I'd be satisfied. If I got a Vegas slot I'd be happy. If I won my AG and/or went under 4:10 I'd be ecstatic.

The Pre-Race Jams

Hatebreed may be the quintessential pre-race jam. Knuckle dragging mosh riff after knuckle dragging mosh riff? Lyrics that are basically a more profane version of the motivational posters in your dentist's waiting room? A style that is self-described by frontman Jamey Jasta as "all pit, no shit"? Yes please!

Race Day

I somehow leveled myself into staying at the ridiculously overpriced host hotel for this one. While that's a bad beat for my wallet, it worked out pretty well for the pre-race logistics. I got to sleep relatively late and stumble downstairs to catch a shuttle bus out to the race start.

Since I had to drop my bike in transition the night before there wasn't much to do other than put some air in the tires, layer on the sunscreen, pull on the wetsuit and stroll on over to the swim start.

Swim

The swim started with the male pros and female pros going off as waves, with the rest of us going one at a time in time trial format starting with the relay teams. M35-39 was the second group in the time trial lineup, right after the relays, so I didn't have to wait around too long. It was first come/first served for the order within the age groups, so naturally as soon as they let our group into the corral just about everyone started trying to get to the front. I decided to deliberately hang back, figuring that all of the faster guys would be starting up front, so by starting in back I'd be sure that in "chip time" I'd be ahead of anyone I came across out on the course. By the time we settled into an actual line I was about 120 out of the 160 guys in the group.

Eventually I made it to the end of the dock, crossed the timing mat officially starting my race and jumped in. 

The water wasn't bad. I expected it to feel much colder. Since there were no warmups allowed I made a conscious effort to ease into a reasonable pace as opposed to my usual tactic of monkey spazzing the first couple hundred yards then blowing up. Soon enough I settled in and was steadily passing my fellow yellow-capped M35-39'ers and within a couple minutes started picking up the stragglers from the purple-capped relay group.

There isn't much else to say about the swim. I never came across anyone that made any sense to draft off of, so I just tried to keep my turnover high and work my way from one turn buoy to the next. When I got to the stairs leading out of the water I took a quick peak at my watch and saw that it was still reading 00:00. D'oh! Apparently I didn't hit the button on my way in. Seeing a 27:00 split at the end of the race was a pleasant surprise. That's a nice PR for me in a 70.3 swim and was honestly better than I expected given that I don't feel like I've been swimming all that well in practice lately, although I guess it's not that far out of line with the non-wetsuit 28:30 I did in Vegas last fall.

T1 was uneventful. I managed to find my rack on the first try and get all my swim gear off and bike gear on without tripping over myself.

Bike

This was the part of the race that had me a bit concerned going in. As previously mentioned, my tri bike hung neglected from the garage ceiling between unpacking it after Vegas and packing it for this race. I did one ride of ~2 miles the day before the race after reassembling it just to make sure everything was working correctly, then racked up and hoped for the best. 

That's not to say I haven't been riding, it's just that almost all of my mileage has been commuting on my cyclocross bike with big knobby tires wearing a loaded messenger bag and full winter gear (i.e. really slow), sometimes pulling Mikey behind in a trailer for extra slowness. I've always maintained that a Watt is a Watt, and that it doesn't really matter if you're grinding your way up a hill towing a trailer behind your steel-framed beater at 9mph or all dorked out on on your fancy carbon race bike doing 25+. Just get out there and give it hell on a daily basis and you'll be fine. I guess I was going to put that theory to the test on this one.

So coming out of T1 I executed my first flying mount of 2013 without falling over, got into my shoes and commenced giving it hell. I'm still one of those non-power meter using Luddites, so I settled into my "I left the house kind of late on my way to work and need to hustle if I'm going to make this stupid 8 o'clock meeting in time" pace and was pleasantly surprised to look down and see that it was netting me a ~23mph pace into a pretty stiff headwind. It will take a bit to recalibrate my brain after a long winter of seeing 15mph on the commute for that same effort. This was the first point that I stated thinking I might have a pretty good race in me after all.

I passed a couple guys from my AG within the first 5 miles, then a couple relay riders in the next 5 and it was all open road in front of me until I saw the pros coming back the other way around mile 20. 

The course is an out and back and we were pushing a solid ~10-15mph headwind on the way out. It is however, pool-table flat with very few turns so I was able to stay aero the whole time and keep the average speed respectable. After making the turn and picking up the tailwind I started passing a few of the female pros.

My nutrition "plan", to really stretch the definition of the word plan, was to eat one gel at each of the 3 aid stations and grab bottles of water once I ran through the 2 bottles of sports drink I started out with. For whatever reason that left me really bloated and gassy by about mile 30. I even puked up a little bit of gel at one point, but my legs still felt fine so I was able to keep up the pace. Luckily everything started to normalize by about mile 45 and I was able to keep riding strong all the way back to transition for a 2:13 split, which is way better than I could have reasonably expected going in, so no complaints there.

T2 went off without a hitch, although I was surprised to see one bike already racked up not too far from me. It couldn't have been a relay because they were all the way on the other side of transition, so it had to have been another M35-39'er. That was surprising because I thought I was keeping a pretty good lookout at the turnarounds and thought it was nothing but relays and pros out front. Oh well, either I catch him or I don't. One foot in front of the other either way.

Run

Immediately upon leaving transition I was passed like I wasn't even moving by a couple relay guys, who were considerate enough to clearly identify themselves as relay runners by wearing splits and singlets. I did my best to ignore them and set off at my own pace.

And now the TMI/gross part. I'd been feeling kind of like I had to pee since about mile 45 on the bike, and I'm not above pissing all over myself on the bike, but it never got bad enough to have to take action. Once I started bouncing around on the run, however, I really didn't have much of a choice anymore. I had already left the transition port-o-pots behind and I didn't feel like stopping anyway so I figured what the hell, may as well let it fly on the run. I figured pissing on the street is pretty much standard operating procedure for New Orleans anyway, right? So if you've ever wondered if it's possible to take a piss while running a sub-6 mile... yes, yes it is.

My now piss-soaked self reached the first mile marker in a nice brisk 5:43, which is unsustainably fast for me, so I made a concerted effort to pull it back a  bit.  I covered the next mile in 6:03 and settled in at 6:19 for mile 3, which actually felt reasonably comfortable.

Somewhere between mile markers 3 and 4 I caught up to the owner of the mystery bike in T2 and we exchanged pleasantries as I went around for the pass. I built maybe a 20 second gap by mile 5, but some combination of him speeding up and me slowing down had us running together by mile 7. We ran together for a couple miles and actually chatted a bit. Turns out his name is Shane Niemeyer and he has a pretty interesting life story. At around mile 9 Shane became bored with my company and dropped the hammer on me and started to pull away. Lucky for me he had divulged that he was 4th into the water in our group, meaning he had at least 3-4 minutes head start on me. That gave me the luxury of keeping my own pace and not having to try to respond. By now my stomach was once again protesting the crap I'd been stuffing into it. It likely would not have gone well had I tried to counter his move.

I managed to keep plugging along at ~6:20/mi and eventually the gap between us settled at ~30 seconds. Somewhere very close to the end, like mile 12.5 or so, Shane actually stopped and was bent over grabbing his ankle as I ran past. Talking to him after the race, apparently it occasionally pops out of joint and he has to manually jam it back in. Gnarly. He eventually got it sorted out and re-passed me in the finish chute, but by then I was feeling pretty secure for the AG win knowing that I started so far back.

Post-Race

Since I forgot to start my watch before the swim I still didn't know what my final time was. Eventually I made my way over to the results tent and got my printout saying I did a 4:05:52. Given the lack of preparation I would have been very happy with anything under 4:15, so to come in almost 10 minutes ahead of that and win my AG by a healthy margin is nothing short of amazing for me. I guess that's why we race instead of just comparing training logs and calling it a day.

Winning my AG conferred upon me the privilege of signing up for the 70.3 World Championship in Vegas this September. Of course, being that WTC is very much a for-profit concern they need their money up front. So after walking back to the hotel to retrieve my checkbook I approached the Vegas signup table to claim my slot. As we were completing my registration the girl behind the table said, "I'm going to need one more thing from you." "Ok," I said, "What do you need." She said, "I'm gonna need about tree fiddy." It was right then that I noticed the WTC representative was actually 8 stories tall and from the Paleolithic era.  That damned Loch Ness Monster had tricked me again! "Dammit monstah! I ain't givin' you no tree fiddy!" I yelled as she swam off into the distance.






Some of you reading this are probably productive members of society and as such do not waste enough time on the internet to understand the whole Loch Ness Monster bit at the end. It's from South Park.  Lrn 2 internet.  The fee to register for Vegas happens to be $350 and I couldn't resist.