Ironman 70.3 Vineman - Triathlon

The course was an out and back in the Russian river. Started out going upstream, but the current was almost non-existent so I didn't notice it one way or the other. Swim felt pretty good. There was a fair bit of contact in the first couple hundred meters but after that I found pretty clean water to swim in. Once we started coming up on other groups I started slowing down since I had to navigate around people who were swimming slow or walking. There were a fair number of people walking so I would come up on them pretty quick and sometimes have to slow way down.

Not much I would have done differently.

At the end of the swim I went to stand up and both hamstrings and both calves completely cramped up. It took me a little bit to get them to the point where I could stand on them. I think it is mostly due to the fact that I hardly do any kicking with the wetsuit on. I should probably change that. Getting the wetsuit off also led to a bit of cramping in my calves so that took a bit of time to work out as well.

Not really sure what I was doing for the whole time, aside from the wetsuit getting stuck for a few seconds everything else went pretty quickly. The run from the water was probably around 300-400m and my legs were cramping, so I may have been running slower than I thought.

The course was primarily rolling hills with a couple of decent climbs. Overall I felt ok, but I may have pushed the bike a little too much. Obviously, being in Houston, precludes my from hill work without driving half a day to find hills. I noticed that I had decent power spikes when going uphills. My tempo rides had been around 230W. It is easier in Houston to maintain a pretty stable 230W, so when I got to the hills I found it harder to hold myself back. Even though my average power through the ride was only 205W, I feel that my peaks may have put me over the top in terms of fatigue. On the one big hill (Chalk Hill) of the course I did a good job of keeping my effort in check and my HR only climbed to about 145, where it is usually around 130-135 for a tempo pace. My average HR for the course was 148, which I don't know if that was due to pushing too hard on the course overall or if it had something to do with my cold.

There were a massive amount of people that should have been getting position/blocking calls. I came up on people multiple times that took well over a minute to make a pass. Eventually I ended up just passing people who were passing other people as long as I didn't have to cross the center line while doing it. There were multiple times that I had to yell "on your left" 3-4 times just to get someone to move off the center or left side of the lane (some even while they weren't passing). It made it a little bit annoying to be in the second to last wave while still being a pretty strong rider. Although, it is nice to go through a leg and be passing people constantly.

I need to work on holding back on hills and just be ok with the fact that I am going to slow down. A lot of the rollers on this course I would just increase the power to maintain close to the same speed, this probably hurt me later on.

There was a huge backup of people coming into T2 and the chute was pretty narrow so I wasn't able to do my normal dismount. Plus, the day before, we walked the transition and the pavement was pretty hot so I was kind of hesitant to dismount and run barefoot across it after reading reports from IMTX. That said, I probably would have done it if there was nobody in my way and suffered/dealt with the consequences after the fact.

After dismounting there was a lot of congestion coming into the transition area and no real way to get around them. People were trying "on your left" to the people walking, but nobody would really move. I have a feeling it was a reasonably slow transition for everyone except for the front waves.

Nothing, it was a long day so I had no intention of getting all worked up about people walking slowly through transition.

I don't know where things went wrong, but they definitely went wrong. The first 6.5 miles were at my normal pace (8:20-8:30). I brought one gu with me to take midway on the run, the problem was that once I hit the midway point (about halfway through La Crema) I started having some serious GI issues. I had only walked the two big hills at this point. Then I had to start walking more. If I would walk more than 0.5-0.75mi I felt like I was going to shit myself. I stopped in the port-a-potty outside of the winery and got rid of some of it, but it never really got that much better. So my last 6.6mi was at a 12:00/mi pace which was kind of disappointing. I tried to run as much as possible through that last half of the run, but it wasn't too easy.

Ultimately I was hoping for 8:30/mi pace for the whole run, which from my training should have been doable. If I had been able to pull that off I would have been below the 5:30h mark that was my stretch goal.

Ultimately, it is what it is and I can't really do anything about it and am ok with how everything turned out.

I would not feel like hell during the last half of the run. The nutrition I took during the race was the exact same as I have done in all of the bricks I did in training, so I am not sure what caused the GI issues.

Sat down at the end for 10 minutes or so being diappointed and not talking to anyone. After I ran through it in my head I started to realize that there was no way I could have foreseen what happened, and I managed it as best I could. Then I did some light stretching and got something small to eat (chicken breast, canteloupe, strawberries, diet soda).


Almost shitting myself.


The volunteers at the run aid stations were amazing. I carried one of my bike bottles with me because I am terrible at drinking out of cups. Every time it needed to be refilled I would have the lid off on the way up to aid station and the volunteers would start pouring multiple cups of water into it before I even had to ask.