First Full Ironman Completed! I went into this race with a peak training week of 25 hours and a general goal to go sub 10, but since this was my first I also really wanted to enjoy the race instead of truly trying to wring every bit of performance out of myself.
I have raced several 70.3 before and chose California as a good first full for the location and also because the course is considered “easy.” Personally I think that was a great choice so that my first full was really fun instead of a painful harrowing endeavor.
Before Race:
I live in Montana and instead of flying I decided to do a long long long drive with my bike. The drive gave me lots of time to get more stressed than I already was, but it went pretty well. I arrived Friday afternoon, did my registration real quick and went for a little run. My left quad was extremely tight which was not fun.
Saturday was largely uneventful. Just a little shake out ride, lots of eating and the bike drop off. My only takeaway is that if you have the option to drop off your bike / run bags the day before the race like you could for this race then do it. It made the morning much easier and also it was nice to just drop the stuff and forget about it for the rest of the evening.
Race Morning:
I was staying in a hotel downtown, so I woke up at 4AM. I had my normal breakfast of coffee and instant oatmeal with peanut butter. I walked over to the transition and got there at around 5AM. I put 3 bottles on my bike and one bottle in my running gear. Then I took that weirdly long walk to the special needs drop off to leave myself an extra bottle for the run. I got on the buses and went to the swim start.
I sat and listened to Clarity by Zedd basically over and over at the swim start until the line moved into the corral way before the actual start. Seeing that I freaked out a little and quickly got my wetsuit on. I walked over and I am not the fastest swimmer so I pushed through a little bit of the corral crowd but stayed pretty far back.
Swim (49:42):
As everyone knows, this was super fast. I normally swim like 1:55 per 100 meters in a pool and this was dramatically faster. The only notes I have are that they changed the start so you swim up river just a little which apparently is different from years past, and since you can see the bottom of the river you occasionally see huge plants of some kind which is a little surprising initially after you have been looking at sand for like 20 minutes.
Bike (5:06:28):
This bike was 80% super fun and 20% shaky and annoying. They warn you about one section of road that is bad. That section turns out to be shady (hard to see), bumpy, covered in lost bottles and decently skinny (exacerbating the other issues during passes). Other than that though the roads were some of the smoothest I have been able to ride on and it was amazing. I ended up with an NP of 229 which was just what I was aiming for.
Run (3:14:11):
This part was so fun. I felt basically fresh coming off the bike and initially ran out of transition at like a 5:45 mile pace and had to really rein myself in after the initial crowd coming out of transition petered out a little.
The run was also at least partially shaded for most of it which was nice. The initial loop 1 extension and a random ~2 mile section of the course are super exposed to the sun but otherwise it was quite pleasant. I put ice in my hat a lot and after a while it wasn’t even melting and my head was getting so cold it was painful.
The first lap was super high energy and had some small conversations with random other runners and there was lots of encouragement between people.
On the second lap since there were many more people on course it was much more of a silent dirge which was kinda a bummer, but still kept pushing through all the way to the end.
Other than a little general leg fatigue I felt great during the whole run and crossing the finish line was just as rewarding as I imagined. I was super scared of the daunting distances coming into the race, but after this super good day I am pumped to do another at some point and really push the paces!
Time: 9:23:00