Not every race can be perfect and
my latest Ironman 70.3, St. George Utah, was far from perfect. Maybe I was
distracted by school and moving out of my house or maybe it just was a bad day.
Regardless of why, St. George did not go as I had planned. I will talk about my
day of suffering and how it felt.
The
week leading into the race had been a little crazy spending most of my time
moving out of my student house and back home. When I got to St. George I had an
amazing home stay with Kirk and Charity Nelson. They own a bike shop called IBB
Cycle. Kirk gave my bike a nice tune up. I was blown away by the incredible
landscape of St. George and was feeling very good and ready to race.
On
race morning I had my usually breakfast of oatmeal and eggs. I was feeling a
little nervous but nothing out of the ordinary. When I got to the race site I
set up my bike and did a 20min jog to wake myself up. I was able to get in a
20min swim warm up. The water was cold, about 15C but nothing to bad.
The
swim was the best part of the day. I had a good start and quickly moved myself
into the draft of the main group. I worked my way up through the group, looking
for Tyler Butterfield. I knew that he was right around my level in swimming, and
if I could swim with him I would be in a good position. I found Tyler about
800m into the swim. I settled in beside him and started to look around to see
if I could move up the strung-out line of swimmers. I saw that a small gap was
opening up and I knew that if I could close it I would be with the lead group. I
put my head down and went for it, but after about 400m of holding the same
distance to the main group I started to lose ground. At about 1400m a group of
3 people, including Tyler, caught me. I jumped on to the back of the group and
followed them for the rest of the swim. I had a 24:53 swim, about 1:40 down
form the fastest swimmer. This was the closest I had ever been to the front of
the race out of the swim, and I was very excited to be in the race.
When I got onto the bike I could
see the main group up the road climbing the first big hill. I thought to myself,
You just need to close that gap and the
race is on. But I was not feeling great on the bike. I told myself that I
had to just bike a little harder at the start to try and get in contact with
the lead group. I pushed about 10 watts more then I was planning to. Things
were going well until about 30km into the bike. I was holding a good power
numbers but I was not bringing anyone back. Then things just started to fall
apart and I started to struggle just to hold good power numbers on the flats of
the bike course. I was doing OK on the hills but was dead on the flats. At
about 45km into the bike Trevor Wurtele went by me. I thought to myself, Try to hang in with him, you should be able
to ride at his level, but that was not the case. I held on to him for about
5km then he was gone. At 70km there was a big hill and I was out of it, just
trying to keep my head in the game. All I wanted was to go was go to sleep.
I
started to get tunnel vision and all I thought about was, Keep your legs moving and get to the run.
By the time I got to the run I
was out of the race. I went by Paulo who shouted, ‘Just finish it.’ That is
exactly what I did, I just ran. It hurt see such slow numbers on my GPS watch,
but I could not go any faster, I was spent. At every aid station I got as much
water and Gatorade as I could because I was cooking, out on the run, in the
Utah heat. When the race was done it was a strange feeling. I was not happy,
but not sad, just tired and ready to move on.
I will take everything I can from
this race. It is time to get back to work and prepare myself for the next
races. I will be staying in California for a month working with Paulo and
preparing for 5150 Mt. Trembant, June 20 and Challenge St. Andrews 70.3, July
5.
Huge thank you to: C3, Kinetico, Royal Containers, Caledon Hills Cycling, Cervelo, Saucony, Nineteen, Awake Chocolate, Compressport and my parents.
