Liberty Half Iron

So I was back in action last weekend at the Liberty Half Iron.  Since Liberty is a Saturday race and BOUS was a Sunday, that left me with only 6 days to recover.  Normally that wouldn't be an issue as I'm typically feeling fully recovered from a hard Olympic distance effort within 2-3 days, but for some reason when I woke up the day after BOUS both of my calves cramped up and never really loosened up at all.  Hopefully this has something to do with the fact that it was so cold at BOUS and it's not just the new normal as I get older.  If that's the case my days of racing on back to back weekends may be over.

I've done Liberty twice before, in 2008 and 2009.  The last few years I've opted to race Trinona instead, but with out of town travel the previous two weekends I really didn't want to make it 3, and I've grudgingly come to accept the reality that I'm a better 70.3 than Olympic distance racer anyway.  So... eff it, let's fire it up for a half iron 6 days after BOUS and hope for the best.

The Pre-Race Jams

Warning... nostalgia trip incoming!

I remember going to my first "real" concert back when I was a 15 year old high school sophomore in Mankato.  Up to that point, the only live music I got to see was the shitty teenage bands I and my friends played in.  But on this day my friend Jeremy had a newly-minted driver's license and permission to use his parents' van, so a half dozen of us piled into said van and made the trek up Hwy. 169 to the promised land of Minneapolis and the legendary First Avenue.

We were going to see Helmet and Quicksand, who were (and still are) two of my all-time favorite bands, along with an opening act called Orange 9mm that I had never heard of.  When Orange 9mm took the stage I was blown away.  I had never heard anything that sounded even remotely like that.  During their set they tossed a bunch of promo cassette tapes off the stage and I snagged one.  This was the first song on it...

Normally I'm of the "disregard nostalgia, acquire new jams" mindset, but this shit right here stands the test of time and will remain in heavy rotation for me until I'm either dead or deaf.

The Race

Liberty always feels more like a travel race than a local race just because so many Canadians show up.  It's like they shine some sort of Canadian bat symbol (I guess it would be a maple leaf) up in the sky and every triathlete in Thunder Bay and Winnipeg immediately drops their hockey stick and their plate of poutine and heads south.

The thing about Canadians is that they are masters of public relations.  They have the whole world thinking they're all polite and mild mannered, what with their "eh's" and "aboot's" and socialized health care and all.  But I know better.  Canadians are vicious, ruthless bastards.  Their national sport is hockey...

And their whole country is overrun by bears...

BEARS!

You cannot possibly survive all that and winters that are even colder and drearier than ours and not be a soulless killing machine. So isn't just your ordinary, run of the mill local race.  This is a matter of national security.  I won't let you down America!

Swim

I think they said the water was 62F.  That sounded a lot worse than it actually felt.  It was actually quite pleasant once you got over the initial shock of getting in.  After about a 10 minute warmup swim I was comfortable and ready to go.

I lined up right next to my Canadian arch-nemesis Jon Balabuck hoping to be able to stay on his feet at least for a little while.  Jon has historically been a much faster swimmer than me so I really wanted to try hard to minimize the damage in the water and at least keep it close.

I had what felt like a pretty crappy start because after the initial chaos cleared out I saw about a half dozen guys in front of me.  In hindsight though I think I did OK and they all just went out unrealistically hard because by about halfway out to the turnaround I found myself in a most unfamiliar spot in the swim: LEADING THE DAMN RACE!

Jon was swimming directly to my left and there were a few guys not too far behind us.  I thought about dropping back to try and get on Jon's feet, but his fellow Canadian and eventual 3rd place finisher Patrick Peacock was already pretty firmly camped out there and I didn't want to drop all the way back behind him because it would have been way too easy to lose track of Jon from 2 spots behind, so I settled in and we swam the rest of the race directly next to each other.  I tried to throw in a couple surges here and there but never got more than a half body length for my efforts.

Before long Jon, Patrick and I made it to the swim exit together with Brendan O'Flanagan not too far behind.  The official timing mat was about 20 seconds of running away from the swim exit, so seizing my first ever opportunity to record a #1 swim split I sprinted up those stairs and was the first guy to enter T1.

According to the results 3 guys in the later waves beat me, giving me the 4th overall swim split, but digging a little deeper I can pretty confidently say that 2 of those are either timing glitches or guys who accidentally swam the Olympic distance course.  The 3rd probably legitimately outswam me, but whatever, simply not losing several minutes to Jon is enough for me to get excited about.  This was bar none the most fun I've had in a triathlon swim.  Actually having to think about tactics and pack dynamics makes the swim much more interesting than my typical practice of getting my struggle on by myself back in no man's land.

Bike

Jon beat me out of transition by a couple of steps, but as soon as I got strapped into my shoes I started hammering and made the pass as we were leaving the park.  I know on my best day I can count on him outrunning me by 5-6 minutes, and given how banged up my legs still were from BOUS I didn't expect to have my best day on the run so my best chance for the W was to go for broke on the bike and hope to build up a big enough gap to jog/shuffle/hobble it home in the latter miles of the run.  Fortunately I had actually been feeling pretty strong on the bike all week.  Everything seemed to be falling into place in the early miles of the ride and I steadily built up a pretty significant advantage.

I maintained a pretty high effort level for about the first 15 miles or so until I realized it was probably in my best interests to back if off a touch, but still kept up a good strong effort for the remainder of the course.

There isn't much else to say because I was pretty far off the front, so the only other racers I saw were either in the Oly or were on their first lap while I was on my second.  I'm happy to report that I saw zero squished turtles on the ride.  I've done quite a few training rides on those roads and typically you would see a handful of flattened turtles over a ride that length.  Hopefully that was just good luck and not a result of massive die off over the long winter.

I made it back to transition with a 2:09 split, although I heard the course was roughly a mile short so it would have been about 2:11-2:12 at full length.

Run

There's no way to sugar coat this one, it just flat out sucked.   A 1:27 split on that course in perfect weather is borderline embarrassing for me.  I haven't run that slow in a half in about 5 years.  Both of my calves cramped up at mile 1 and it never got any better.  I managed to average about 6:20/mi out to the turnaround, but as soon as I saw that I was ~10 minutes up I shut it down completely, slowed to about 7:30-8:00/mi and started walking through aid stations.  I'm not sure if that was the correct decision because it didn't really hurt any less than gritting out the 6:20's, but once you flip the switch and slow down like that speeding up again is basically impossible.

I managed to minimize the damage enough to keep the rapidly advancing Canadian horde behind me and eventually turned onto the gravel path that marked the last half mile to the finish, where I picked up the pace just a bit in order to not look like a total putz for the spectators at the finish line, then damn near collapsed as soon as I crossed the line in 4:07:37.

Jon was the next guy across the line in 4:11, meaning he put almost 8 minutes on me in the last half of the run alone, and Patrick crossed in 3rd less than a minute after.

I would have let the Canadian version of the CIA waterboard me with maple syrup for a can of Coke at the finish line, but there was none to be found in the otherwise excellent post-race food spread.  Jon was in the same boat.  Luckily, I had a couple bottles stashed away in my car and in an act of international diplomacy that will be studied by scholars for generations, negotiated the eventual withdrawl of all Canadian forces from the race site in exchange for one 16oz bottle of Coca-Cola.  You can go ahead and pencil me in for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize right now.