RACE REPORT: IRONMAN FLORIDA 70.3 - Start with the Heart (2024)

RACE

OK, so obviously a lot of lead up to the main event… so let’s get down to business, shall we?

Ironman Florida 70.3 is a very tough, very fun race. According toRunTri, it boasts one of the longest average race times of all 70.3 events, primarily due to its possession of the second slowest run average on the entire Ironman circuit- behind only Philippines and tied for second with Singapore. As with those Southeast Asian races, it’s the conditions that distinguish this race from all others, with race temperatures reaching mid-eighties on the bike and topping out in the low-nineties before the average age-grouper finishes. Hey, it’s Florida. It’s summer. It’s hot. It’s humid. What do you expect?

As mentioned previously, the primary advantage of this race is its convenience. It’s easy to get to (Orlando), with lots of options for rental cars, lodging, restaurants, grocery stores and all the other amenities. It’s close enough to Disney World to be family-friendly, and close enough to Central America and the Caribbean to attract lots of triathletes from that area. The race site is remarkably easy to navigate, find parking, and get into and out of. In that respect, it feels like a much smaller, more local triathlon for most folks. Florida brings in some strong age groupers from south of the border- no surprise there. Otherwise, it’s your typical WTC experience.

The expo and registration are well-supported and well-attended. The professional interview panel is also popular and interesting. The race itself seems to attract a strong field of pro and elite athletes and the weather is generally pleasant, if slightly warmer than I’d like. In this day and age, that seems to be the status quo for virtually all Ironman events, especially at the half-distance.

Ironman Florida 70.3 isn’t the best race I’ve ever participated in, and I probably won’t come back- if only because of the distance from home. However, I’m glad I did it- placement on the calendar suits a lot of triathletes revving up for full distance races in the summer and fall, and it’s one of several WTC events in the Southeastern United States- including New Orleans (April), Raleigh (June), Augusta (September), and Miami (October).

The race’s main highlight is a fast, fun and smooth bike course. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it has some of the best pavement I’ve ever ridden on ever. The road is protected and safe, and aid stations are adequately positioned and staffed. It does have a lot of turns, which I personally dislike because of my terrible bike handling. The elevation variety is slightly above-average, but feels worse because much of it comes early on the back half of the split.

I’d say that the swim was probably the lowlight of the race. Most Ironman races have at least one aspect that is not ideal- a discipline, route or obstacle organizers have to work around to take advantage of other enjoyable aspects of the race. I won’t name names, but almost every race has them. For Florida, it’s the swim.

Lake Eva, the small body of water hosting the swim course, has seen better days. The old lady is dirty and extremely low, and you can tell by the rings surrounding the residential property around the lake. Boat ramps have attached extensions so that they’re not suspended in mid-air. The middle of the lake has an island that is growing dangerously larger every year apparently. The water is so low that a thin land bridge connects the island to both sides of the shore, despite what the Ironman map says.

The swim retains very little redeeming quality except that it’s adjacent to Lake Eva Park, which is an otherwise great venue for a race or any event. You can’t quite touch the bottom, but you feel like you could probably stand up in several spots if you needed to. I wonder how many more years Ironman can continue to use this body of water, as its retreat seems almost irreversible. The course design is a victim of this issue, and results in a fairly tough, bruising swim for MOPers like me.

The run course is average in all major aspects- beauty, challenge and logistics- as you essentially just wind through some middle- and lower-middle class neighborhoods in three loops. The course is well-supported with supplies and personnel, and the multiple loops do provide plenty of opportunity for friends and family to cheer on their athletes.

It’s organized well as all WTC races are, and I really can’t knock anything about the set-up. Transitions are in a parking lot, with plenty of bathrooms for participants and spectators alike. The Lake Eva complex is a wonderful resource for Ironman, and provides tons of athletic amenities like basketball courts, tennis courts, playgrounds, indoor facilities for emergency triage, open spaces for the expo and finish line festivities. All in all, an event with little that I can criticize.

Swim

Despite all its flaws, Lake Eva has a generous beach for spectators to watch athletes begin their journey. Which is good, because my age group and Men 30-34 had lots of time to spectate- about an hour. Normally, this is the point of the report where I complain about being in nearly the last swim wave in every IM 70.3 race, starting near or over an hour after the pros. I won’t go there this time, and even the reference retires with this report.

As the men and women professionals exited the water, I noticed that their swim times as a group were definitely slower than normal, which didn’t surprise me. (What surprised me is that I’ve been in the triathlon game long enough to actuallyrecognizethose kind of things. Seriously, what MOPer thinks, “Wow, the pros are a couple minutes off their average today?” Scary stuff, folks.)

Florida 70.3 provides one of the absolute toughest swim and run combinations on the planet. (This is compensated by a screaming fast bike course.) The primary reason for the swim in my estimation is the course. As previously mentioned, it’s hot, low and dirty (I know, I know.. that’s what she said.) As a result, Ironman has gotten quote creative with the design: instead of a giant loop, rectangle or out-an-back pattern like almost every other venue, swimmers traverse a giant “M” clockwise. Seriously, I’m not making this up! It’s stupid!

Because of the "island" in the middle (don't believe the map- it connects), the swim is confined to a lake within a lake. You have to give WTC credit, though- they’ve succeeded in utilizing almost every available inch of water they have available in Lake Eva. And they also promote the "M" as if it was designed this way on purpose. As a result of the goofy design (Goofy? Orlando? Get it?... Ya, I should probably keep working my day job...), swimmers have to deal with not one, not two and not three turns- like most other races- but six turns! It's felt like a small maze.

And veteran triathletes know that where you have turn buoys, you have traffic- not just in the turns themselves, but also in between- because nothing prevents necessary separation of a field of 1000+ swimmers like continual stopping, paddling, turning and sighting. So in general you’re gonna’ have more contact and more anxiety during your swim. And the murky water does nobody any favors.

Of course, the third cause of a slower swim is that the water is warm, like approaching 80 F, so there was no chance of wetsuits at this race- this was the first time ever I didn’t even bother to pack mine. I went with the TYR Torque Elite swim skin instead, which I found online for half off earlier this spring. The Elite is really the poor man’s swim skin- it doesn’t have nearly the fabric quality of its expensive older brother, the Torque Pro, but it does compress your body junk enough for some hydrophobicadvantage, and frankly I really enjoy “the squeeze,” in a Temple Grandin sort of way.

And who doesn’t like to be wrapped in nylon and spandex?

Exactly- I’d wear this thing to bed if I thought it could put me to sleep faster (It won’t, I tried. And if you died in your sleep, people would talk.)

Anyways, I knew I had an okay swim because I was in the midst of the bumpin’ and grindin’ (what I call the swim scrum of MOP MAMILs) the entire time. On the surface (pun), I was able to stay below the 45 minute race average: 39:39- for a 2:03/100 m average. That was disappointing, since I’d put together a consistent string of low 1:50’s in my last year of half-course races. But the culmination of the three main swim features- heat, visibility and navigation- exposed my weaknesses and left me in the middle of the pack entering T1.

The Ironman website for the race promotes, “The M-Dot swim course, in particular, receives rave reviews from athletes.” Ha-ha. Either I’m taking crazy pills, or these people are high. The only thing rave-like were all the bodies around me waving their arms (minus the glow sticks.) Because they also claim “the water is clear” on the main site, I have to wonder what planet they’re living on.

Transition 1

This race was the site of one of my worst transition experiences on record, with nothing and no one to blame but myself. And that was unfortunate, because I believe transitions are great opportunities to manifest true race intelligence. First off, I almost got on my bike with my swim skin still on. Ya, I know, genius. I had worn mine at IMSJ in March and in a several training sessions leading up and things had work swimmingly (okay, I'm done. Seriously.) But the run from swim to T1 in San Juan was crazy long, like 500 meters, so you had lots of time to relax and focus.

I believe the primary impetus behind my error was the fateful decision to wear calf AND arm sleeves on the bike and the run. This would ultimately serve as THE critical mistake of the day, but we’ll get to that later. (One bonehead maneuver at a time.) So I knew when I committed to wearing both sleeves that I would need to apply them first thing to avoid trying to pull them on later- over socks, watches, etc. So I was completely focused on the sleeves, and once those were on, I graduated to the shoes, the helmet and the sunglasses.

Not so fast. I was successful at applying the dual sleeves quite fast because I roll them up in advance and then basically roll them on- up the arm and leg- to avoid a lot of costly adjustment later on that might cause me to face plant into a bush while on the bike. But their distraction caused me to completely forget I was still wearing the swim skin until I had already unracked my bike and started sprinting away from my rack. I also threw up upon exiting the swim, because I had taken in my fair share of the dirty lake water.

I had probably run about thirty yards from my bike rack before realizing my swim skin folly, and immediately stopped, positioned my bike against a random rack, pulled the swim skin off over the shoes and then ran back to my transition spot to drop it off

I probably gave up a couple minutes in T1 because of this mistake. Oh well, worse mistake have happened. Lesson learned. I’m kind of the king of lessons learned.

NOTE: One of the coolest things that happened to me at IMFL 70.3 occurred in transition, and will be appreciated by any veteran triathlete. It was such a wonderful surprise that I was certain it was a precursor to an exceptional day. When I showed up at transition, on race day, I discovered that by absolute chance I had been assigned a bike rack section that just happened to run adjacent to a sidewalk connecting the two levels of transition. The walk was composed of a slab of concrete, surrounded by grass and a tree.

To be brief (ya, right!), the location of the rack up against the sidewalk curb prevented race organizers from utilizing the opposite site of my rack for more bikes, thus decreasing the amount of bikes on my rack by half. So instead of the normal say, 12 bikes, we only had to split the area by six. For someone who's been squeezed into the tightest spaces imaginable in various triathlons of the past, it felt like I had hit the transition real estate lottery. While a few more bikes showed up before race start, this was the site that greeted me upon arrival:

I was like, “No way!” Every once in awhile, the tri-gods shine down on me, and I thank them for their eternal tri-blessings.

Bike

As mentioned, the bike course is the preeminent draw of Ironman Florida 70.3: very slick pavement, protected roads, and generous riding conditions almost guarantee P.R. opportunity. I, however, had one of my poorest cycling performances in years from a pure potential perspective, and I barely stayed below the overall average time of 2:53, itself one of the fastest averages in all of Ironman 70.3. I’m consistently near the top 25-30% of the field on the bike, so to lose so much ground there was frustrating. The bike ended up being my worst showing against the field, which has never happened before in a long-course race.

Unlike in past years, I really felt the wind on the bike. And I know this is gonna’ sound crazy and totally lame, but I’m almost certain it screwed us, and screwed us good. As we headed south on the front stretch, I felt it coming in from what felt like mostly SSE, perhaps 8-10 mph. But the first split is extremely flat so you couldn’t help but feel it was a fair compromise.

And of course, like an idiot, I decided it would be worth the challenge to get some tailwind as we navigated the back split up some hills and the steady ascent back to town. The worst, of course, is when you’re confronted with both wind and elevation and you possess the maturity of a teenager. As we headed back north, and I begin toslip, I was convinced the wind was now coming in from the west. But immediately thought impossible, right?

“You’re just soft,” I thought (and I am), but no lie as I reached the top of the northern straightaway, as you start a reasonable descent back to town, I looked up to see two flags at the turn blowing right in our face. We received a little benefit as we turned east, but within a couple of miles we were riding back into the west wind, and then the final ascent back into Haines City.

For all the geeks out there, I rode 2:49, at about a 20 mph pace and averaged about 160 W of power. Speed wasn’t bad, but obviously not the power output I was expecting for a half. What made things even worse was that my experience was very much a tale of two races, with the front split going fairly smoothly, followed by pure disaster on the back half.

The most aggravating thing for me was that so many race reports I had read earlier recounted an identical experience to mine: specifically riders pushing too aggressive on the easier early section, only to be punished on the back half with elevation, winds and heat. I had sworn I wouldn’t do that. As someone who sees himself as somewhat of a reasonably intelligent triathlete (ignoring T1 and the bike, of course. And the swim and the run), I had failed to heed multiple warnings and as a result enjoyed running right into a buzz saw.

So here’s the alibi, and I’m sticking to it. Here’s the reason my strategy blew up so spectacularly at Ironman Florida 70.3 2013. Listen up, children- you might learn something.

Earlier I mentioned how the sleeves would be my undoing on this day, right? So, I ride with power (we know this) and find it to be an incredibly valuable tool in my (slow) development in the sport. I had read with great interest Jordan Rapp’sinterview with Quarq about his win at IMTX the previous seasonand found it absolutely fascinating and telling. Besides the fact that his ride stats are frankly, ridiculous, he was also kind enough to provide a glimpse of his strategy and specifically what fields he displays on his computer. Now, inside the haus, Rappstar is kinda’ a turd, and deservedly so. And most of us know why, but if you don’t you should ask somebody. But regardless, the guy knows how to move around a long-course at a reasonable clip.

Quarq:The lap markers in your file are interesting. There are 13 in total. The first five are 30 minutes long, but then they become somewhat random – 10, 15 or 30 minutes long. What are they based on?

Jordan:I will always lap on the 30min, if I haven’t lapped before then. However, I sometimes lap for what I consider to be a decisive point - like when I pass someone and want to make sure I keep the power up after the pass. Or if there’s a climb (which obviously isn’t the case on this course). Or maybe if there is a long straightaway where maybe I think I can see the leaders and want to put in a surge to catch them. Almost inevitably - unless the topography shows a climb - I will have no idea why I pushed lap when I did. The one exception in this case is that lap at 105km. Sometimes, however, I’ll use a later lap button to reset the overall clock, so that I continue to work on a 30min base - for example, when I look at my clock at see a lap time of 5:05, I might know that I’m 3hrs, 35:05 into the ride because it’s very easy to keep track of how many 30min chunks I’ve done (7 in that example). That’s important because I use the overall time of the bike ride to guide my nutrition, so it’s important that if my lap clock gets out of sync with the overall clock that I work to bring them back into sync with each other when I can.

Quarq: Continuing the previous question, what fields do you have on your head unit? It sounds like you watch lap power at those decisive points.

Jordan: Primary screen is: 3sec average // Lap Average Power // Cadence & Lap Time. Secondary screen is: 3sec average // Ride Time // Avg. Cadence & Avg. Power. Tertiary screen is: Distance (I use this primarily to reference when I’ll hit an aid station, but also for some courses for when I’ll be approaching a certain climb or descent, etc).

Either you understand what that means or you don’t. But what’s most interesting is that Jordan totally ignores speed and some other metrics that most of us might think important. Further, he employs 30-minute intervals in his riding, primarily for short-term power monitoring purposes, which was a concept I was totally unfamiliar with.

It makes sense now, as anyone who rides with power knows that after about an hour, it’s almost impossible to make or notice major changes in overall power until it’s too late. When I finally understood this, it all suddenly clicked. Kinda’ like differential equations and fractals in college. So I figured if it was good enough for Rappstar, it was good enough for me, and so I’ve been training in his model ever since. Life (as it relates to cycling performance) is all about the 30-min interval.

When I review my files of the entire ride in WKO+, it’s not a pretty picture. Two metrics stick out: power and heart rate. Let’s start with the heart (sounds like a boy band lyric, I know.. when in Orlando...)

[Bonus Points if you picked up the Lou Pearlman reference without googling it!]

Heart Rate

Anyways, here’s my average heart rate for the six 30-minute intervals of my ride, with min/max for context:

What you don’t know is that I typically ride a course of similar length and difficulty with an average heart rate in the mid- to high-140’s. For me, anything that much higher (157-159 bpm) is Z4-ish stuff, absolute knocking on the door of sprint interval training.

What does that mean? Well, this means I basically rode an entire half-Ironman course at a physiological equivalent of a one-hour sprint interval workout with no run afterwards. Translation: I was “lighting matches” the minute I cleared the gate, thereby generating lactate like it was perspiration. I had burned through the entire box of matches before I even unclipped for the run. Kids, please don’t try this at home.

I have discovered that there are three primary causes of poor race performance in my book. (Or at least in my experience!) In order, the first is inadequate fitness. We’ve all been there- whether it was because we were inexperienced or unprepared, life got in the way, or we just got co*cky. I’m more than happy to accept that excuse when it’s warranted. If you're not under-trained once every couple of seasons, then you’re probably not pushing hard enough.HTFU!

The second most common reason is strategy. We just didn’t execute. I see thisa lot, especially in short-course. Again, this could be because we’re new to the sport and don’t understand the value of strategy- or that it even exists, we didn’t have sufficient training time available so we focused on fitness first- hoping to “wing it” on with our smarts- or we just got co*cky. Noticing a theme?

The third reason for disappointment is often equipment. The tools we use. Wheels matter. Carbon fiber matters. Nutrition definitely matters. We might have tried something new and untested- fuel, recovery technique, pacing, poorly-fitting kit, a wheel rental with an unaligned cassette- I’ve seen it and I’ve done it all. And at Ironman Florida 70.3 2013, this was my fatal downfall…

I’d run and ridden with sleeves before in a race without a major problem. IMSJ had been slightly problematic wearing arm sleeves on the run (I left the calf sleeves at home for that race), but I took them off halfway through and everything ended fine. I was undecided on whether the value of water retention exceeded the restrictions of compression.

But here’s the problem that ultimately broke me. I hadn’t been weight training nearly as much before IMSJ, for a variety of reasons. My arms and legs weren’t as large as they were this time, after a full cycle of resistance training and a full week of rest, and the super-compensation that comes with that.

As a result, the compression on both arms and legs was tight. My best guess is that they were too tight, but I wasn’t thinking about them at the moment. They were forcing blood back to the heartwaytoo fast, causing my heart rate to spike to unsustainable levels.

One might say this crude explanation is circ*mstantial. I respond by saying that no way my heart rate should ever reside 10 bpm higher than my average for that long. It wasn’t even that high a year before in Boulder, at much higher altitudes.

One might say that it’s just 10 bpm, who cares? I say go out and do anything- swim, bike, run, play tiddlywinks - for a couple of hours at Z4 (your near-max) heart rate, and then tell me 10 bpm doesn’t matter. If most Americans raised their heart rate that high for that long, they'd be in the hospital.

Power

We now know that power is the name of the game. It’s the alpha/omega of cycling, and really the only metric that matters when evaluating performance. And it won’t come as much surprise that it’s heavily affected by heart rate. So the numbers will perpetuate a similar theme. My training had indicated I had an FTP somewhere in the 210-220 range, depending on my ATL (acute training load) and CTL (chronic training load.)

That was my benchmark for this point in the season, and I went into Florida tapped into that. I was aiming for a negative split, or given the challenge of the back half due to terrain, close to an even-split (same time for first 28 miles as last 28 miles.)

I dialed in around 170 W of power right out of the chute, keeping things calm and under control for the first interval. I decided that was where I should be so I did it again (roughly) for the second interval. I was a little over 20 miles into the course by then and approaching the split. I was gonna’ crush the back half, I thought.

Then as we attacked the hills, the wheels just started to come off (figuratively, not literally). I was down to just a few matches, and didn’t even know it. I just knew I was working too little for the effect I was feeling - a very odd feeling, indeed. I didn’t even notice my HR numbers at all until the end. Even with the hills over the next two intervals (each 30 minutes and 10 miles), I only could produce an average of 165 W on the first, and then all the way down to 146 W on the second. Uh-oh. WTF!?!?

It was at this point that I knew that something was definitely wrong, but just didn’t know what exactly. The wind also influenced those dismal readings, but I’m rarely one to lean on that unless it’s just crazy strong (14 mph+). There had to be something else. So I initiated my “self exam,” where I start from the feet, and purposefully and methodically work my way up the body confirming that everything was functioning how it was supposed to.

Legs? Good. Back? Good. Core? Good. My gut felt okay, my aero position was appropriate, and muscles were fatigued but not strained. My wheels and gears were in proper alignment, and everything else seemed to check out okay. It was a tri-conundrum, for sure. I felt relaxed and loose, so I knew it wasn’t the taper. I just was lethargic, almost like I was some kind of sick. As such, I resigned myself to the idea that perhaps it simply wasn’t my day.

I really was in great shape for this race. The best shape of my life. (Maybe the novel I wrote preceding this report wasn’t perfectly clear on that.) And I had a solid strategy in place- even if it was only to cause some personal physical mischief just for the fun of it. I had a power plan dialed in and road-tested for a ride of this length from over a dozen previous race rehearsals. And I was healthy.

But in the end I blew it because I failed to account for a clothing malfunction that was reasonably untested on a more muscular frame, on a bike AND a run, and in quite hot conditions. (Texas had been quite pleasant this spring, so I was less prepared for the heat than I would have been a few months into the year.)

The sleeve-issue at IMSJ had been a warning I failed to heed on the run. And I’d be lying if I said I had had a ton of training with the arm sleeves on the bike. Although I’d warn them to run and ride separately many times in the past- including IM CDA 2012- it wasn’t a consistent piece of equipment in my arsenal. And as a result, I spent a beautiful bike ride slowly blowing up inside, furnishing lactate at an astounding pace and slowing sowing the seeds on my long-course demise.

And I would have an entire run for the consequences of this to play out in exacting measure.

Transition 2

T2 went reasonably smooth: no major surprises, no major mistakes. I didn’t forget to undress this time, so that was a positive. By the time I parked my rig, however, most of the rack was full, and I knew that wasn’t a good sign- most of my peers had already arrived and departed. I ‘racked and sacked’, which is my term for setting the bike on the rack and grabbing my zip lock bag of necessities for the run, something that I randomly picked up a few months prior from Chrissie Wellington on an old Kona telecast from back in the day.

I have (what I believe to be) a pretty pimp set up at home for my indoor bike trainer workouts. I have three computer monitors mounted to my wall in the pain cave. One screen displays the Computrainer software power application, while another streams Internet, television or movies. If necessary, I can hook the third screen up to the network to display my Endurance Nation workout protocol, or even a sporting event that I don’t really care about but want to keep up with big plays or highlights. So I can converse with people who spend their fall weekends with their television. And if I need to complete a ride and also be present for my online college course in the evenings (it’s a thrice-weekly three-hour webinar that is mind-numbing), I can do all three simultaneously.

This arrangement has been a great advantage because it provides me access to a full screen of ride data without going completely bonkers staring at a bouncing power curve. It also allows me to absorb an online class where only about half the material is necessary or new. And when there’s nothing going on- or sometimes even when there is- I can pipe in an old Ironman Championship replay on YouTube for inspiration (huge shouts out to some stud named UCAerospace2012 who has posted years worth of uninterrupted Kona coverage in HD quality!) I think I’ve watched Kona 2010 about two dozen times- the cinematography that year was surreal.

I just happened to be watching one year (2009 I think) when Chrissie comes roaring out of T2 with a Ziploc bag of her stuff and I thought, “Hey, that’s a pretty smart idea.” So now I just throw everything I can into my own medium-size “sack” and set it on top of my shoes in T2. Then, I can spend the first few minutes of the run unpacking it, like it’s a summer camp care package, minus the oatmeal cookie. I try not to get too carried away with it- I usually have some gels, some sunscreen and chap stick, my salt pills, a Stinger or any other supplement I might need. You never know what you’re gonna want at that point in the race.

I carry the bag out on to the course and just start jamming stuff anywhere there’s a spare pocket or opening. It allows me to be reasonably quick in T2 without forgetting anything, it keeps my transition area nice and clean, and it avoids needing a huge race belt or similar. And if my rack neighbor beats me back to T2- which is almost always- and decides to blow through like a hurricane and knock my stuff around- we know that never happens, right?- everything stays together. All this also forces me to fall into a slower pace coming out onto the run, which is extremely important, as we know.

Just an idea. ‘Rack and sack,’ it’s gonna be huge this season.

In the ‘sack’ this time, it should be mentioned, was Louis Garneau’s new endurance sports gel- aptly titledLG Energy Gel. Clever. The stuff’s really not that bad. We got a ton of it at the Kerrville Triathlon Festival last season. At first, I poo-poo’d it because LG is French, and well, you understand. (Just kidding. Most of my gear is French, or German.)

In addition, I never see or hear anything about it, so by deduction I just assumed the stuff sucked. But my good friends, Allison and Tim, claimed it was good and that I should give it a try. So I did. And I liked it. It’s less thick than its competitors and actually pretty tasty. It’s not too potent, and doesn’t make you sick like certain other brands are known to do. As we know, my day completely fell apart in Haines City, but it wasn’t because of fueling!

The stuff is solid. The chemistry seems legit, too. Give it a try, and let me know what you think. The French were right about Iraq. Maybe they’re right about this.

RUN

The IMFL 70.3 run course is not much to write home about. It’s three loops, with a good portion running parallel to or in the vicinity of Lake Eva, but not really. As most long-course racers know, Ironman maps are always a little squirrely, and in Haines City it neglects to show the fact that most of that view of the water is actually obscured by homes.

So you’re basically left just running down somebody’s street who lives on or near the water. As a three-loop course, you do get to run through Lake Eva Park and the finish line area multiple times, which is great for spectating. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad a bad course. It’s just not… spectacular.

The main feature of the run is definitely the imposing hill that meets runners immediately upon exiting transition. It’s only about 80 feet of rise from bottom to top, and it’s the only hill on the entire run, but it’s steep, you have to negotiate with it on each of the three loops and it’s a ball-breaker. At least I think it is. Where I’m from, all we have is hills. We’re either running up, or we’re running down. So I didn’t concern myself too much with it pre-race. But that was before I spent three hours in Z4! So I don’t really know what the full impact would have been on a normal day.

I suspect it would have been similar. I admit that I walked it all three times. And I definitely wasn’t the only one. At that point in the race- MOP time, for sure- I’d say 80% of the folks were walking or shuffling up the thing. It was mentioned in most race reports that in years past that there was not an aid station in advance of the hill. Somebody took heed, though, because now there is an aid station in between that is very, very popular.

Once you traverse Mr. Hill, the rest of the loop is pretty much smooth sailing. That is, unless your heart rate is still through the roof and you still haven’t discovered the cause. (Believe me. I know this heart rate theme is becoming tiresome. It was to me, too. But you’re already this deep into my report, so just suck it up. If I can suffer for five hours, then you can bear a few more minutes of tri-whining and rationalizing.)

Based on my training, I had conceived that I could potentially achieve a combined bike-run time of somewhere around 4:45. If I could keep the bike under 2:45, then I thought I could pull off a 2:00 run, or even slightly better. I aspired for more, but with all the experimentation I thought that was a reasonable floor. So when I failed to hit my bike time goal, the logical conclusion was that I would have the remaining matches to regain that five minutes on the run. Ya, well, that goal never had a snowball’s chance in hell.

The first loop just humbled me, and quickly informed me that a long day was about to get even longer. I was barely under 10-minutes miles on the first lap, and seriously ready to throw in the towel. We've all beentherebefore- it felt like I was on my last lap coming out of transition. All of my clever negative-split strategy was thrown completely out the window, not too dissimilar to my bike experience. And like the bike, the heart rate data tells the talequickerbetter than I could, even more unequivocally than the bike.

In a half-Mary of an Ironman, I can normally keep the first quarter of distance (5K) under 150 bpm at my natural run pace. From there, I’ve trained to allow myself to increase that to just slightly over- but anywhere in the 150’s is usually fine- for the next quarter. At halftime, I make an executive decision to either play defense for the third quarter (low-160's), or head for the pain cave early- tossing caution to the wind (high-160's)- all depending on my RPE and HR.

In the fourth quarter, it’salwaystime to get tough, get focused and drop the hammer. It’s an Ironman for chissakes- you never know when you’ve raced your last. So HTFU I figure. That means knocking on the door of 170- full out, Olympics-style sprint to the finish, taking out as many suckers as you can. (For me, that's usually a couple dudes and somebody running in the neighborhood for leisure.)

Because the run course was composed of three laps, I adjusted my intervals and re-established my strategy accordingly. But the same concept remained. Here’s my HR data for those three laps. Bonus points if you can see the problem:

Can you tell what happened?

I’ll tell you what flippin'happened. As I completed Lap 1 and passed the finishers chute, there wereplentyof runners heading in for the victory lap. And I got mad. “What.is.going.on?” I thought. This was supposed to be my coming out party (ha-ha!) The race I finally reached my potential and broke through 5:15. Where did this thing go wrong?

So I started doing some thinking. I started asking questions, because as most smart people know, it’s not the answers people learn that are the secrets to life, it’s the questions. Smart people don’t only have great answers, they usually ask great questions. Socrates. Newton. Einstein. Jobs. Yoda.

Asking great questions accomplishes several things [snooze alert…] First, you have to be aware and embrace the value of questions. Our culture is failing for many, many reason, but one is that nobody asks big and impossible questions anymore. Part of that is because things with screens on them are always there to give us the answer, but I digress.

Second, questions force us to be humble. Asking a question forces one to acknowledge that they don’t know. It’s rare that I ever hear anyone ever say I don’t know anymore. And I livepastthe edge of civilization, so that’s telling. Our politicians always have a sound bite. Our business leaders do, too. If they don’t, they get fired. Lots of talky, talky, but nobody knows sh*t. And don’t even get me started on the youth.

Third, questions give our brain a workout. When humans graduated from books and radio to television and then computers, a part of our brain stopped engaging- probably in the vicinity pretty close to our imaginations. We stopped imagining whatLord of The Ringslooked like because Hollywood CGI showed us. We stopped scaring the crap out of ourselves a little when Stephen King and John Grisham’s characters stopped looking likeweimagined and started looking liketheyimagined.

Did you ever read the bookIt? I couldn't sleep for days. Then the movie came out made-for-TV, and ruined the book for life. And I think a part of our brain died in the era when screens became ubiquitous. This is why a movie is rarely ever as good as the book. Except for theTwilightmovies, which were great if only because I knew they would end sooner.)

In Al Gore’s excellent book,The Assault on Reason, he spends half the book trashing George Bush, which is great. But he spends the other half exploring this topic in detail: where individualsreceivedata “but they cannot send content,” thereby causing us to bypass reason and eliminate original thought. Our brains no longer have to chew because we’re all eating liquids mentally. I recommend picking up the book half-price somewhere- the man has enough private jets and mansions by now- but the point is that questions are good.

Wow, I’ve really gone off topic. Thank God for the Internet, where you can pull that kind of junk and get away with it.

I believe questions also force people to concentrate, something we don’t do very well anymore in this culture of distraction. The whole country’s gone ADD. Questions can produce singular focus on wherever we choose to direct our minds. Whether that beAngry Birdsor 150 lonely blog posts (and counting, biaaaatchs!)

And lastly, questions empower us all to solve our own problems. We live in a society where multiple generations have become dependent on other people and things to solve their problems: the government, the courts, illegal or prescribed substances, television and other trivial distractions- a self-medicating culture. In some ways, we’ve lost our spirit of self-sufficiency. For a large portion of the population, it’s a skill that never developed and will never exist.

Well, until the Great Reset, anyways. But that’s another blog, and another post.

So, where were we? Questions. Right.

So, as I’m crossing over the mat at Lap 1- seeing folks finish, getting mad, I’m asking myself why is my heart rate so freakin’ high? It’s never been this high? And it’s been this high all day? Am I developing some sort of sickness or disease? Am I having a Greg Welch moment?

I feel fine. My muscles- which usually exhibit the first signs of breakdown- are also fine. My mind is (cough, cough) sharp- but sliding rapidly (where’s the fake co*ke, yo?!) I’m clearly not exerting myself based on my runspeed. So what could it be?

Well, I focused on my heart rate. I asked, “What accelerates my heart rate?” Excess speed, excess adrenaline and time on the course are traditionally the only catalysts I could think of. But that’s obviously not an issue fifty minutes into the run. So what else? And then it hit me:

The sleeves. They’re squeezing mymassivearms (Joking… It’s triathlon. Nobody has massive arms!) And my legs, too! Could they be cutting off circulation and forcing the blood back to my heart way too fast? Stroke count and blood volume are probably through the roof, too! No wonder, moron!

So I removed the arm sleeves immediately. And I stuffed them in the back pockets of my sexy spandex tri shorts. I would have done the same with my calf sleeves as well, but I was afraid if I bent down to do so, I might never get back up. Many folks know what I’m talking about here: sometimes it’s so difficult to remove them that my arms start to shake and cramp. So I resigned myself to run without the arm sleeves and just see what happened. Well, of course the hill came, and frankly that sucked. Just like the time before. I don’t even remember much of it, just the same trail of tears everyone else was suffering through.

But what do you know? As soon as I started down the hill and towards the back half of the loop, guess what started to happen? My heart rate came down. Not all at once and not significantly. But by the time I rounded Lap 2, it was obvious that something was changing inside. No, this was not a late onset of puberty (I wish!) My heart rate was starting to fall dramatically.

Here’s my heart rate chart again:

As a disclaimer, this story doesn’t end with me recovering and then sprinting the rest of the race. When you burn matches to the end, they don’t re-light. They’re toast. And so are you, my friend. But it’s obvious that when the sleeves came down, so did the bpm. And while the damage had been done in terms of lactate production (the clock had struck midnight a long time ago for this spandex-clad Cinderella), there was no doubt whatsoever that the seeds of my demise resided in those sexy white arm coolers.

Don’t get me wrong. I can make light of it now, but when it became fully apparent what I had done, I was pissed off. This was probably more related to passing the finish line the second time and seeing lots of less-fit people finishing before me. There was definitely some bitterness toward what might have been. So I took out the arm cooler sleeves from my sexy spandex tri shorts, right there and then, and I threw them in the trash right by the beach.

I said (to myself), “I’m done with you Zoot arm cooler sleeves. You will haunt meNO MORE!”

While that felt good, I realized I still had one more lap, and it was brutal. Even at the time, part of me felt like it was a necessary step to teach me the lesson that I was meant to learn on that day. Sometimes you have to physically hurt to truly absorb a life lesson.

But another part of me said, "Dude, seriously. Let's get this !@#$ over and get a pizza!"

I had a job to do, and that job was toshufflerun one more time around that cheesy course. Up the hill. Through the neighborhoods bordering the shrinking lake. Past the gangsters drinking OE on the patio listening to Keith Sweat and wondering what all these pasty crackers where doing on their street.

And I finished.

I wasn’t happy. I was sorely disappointed. I had come a long way and failed in most of my process and performance goals. But it was just one in hopefully many long-course races in my career. There would be other (better) days, no doubt. I decided that while it was certain I would take with me a deep and permanent conviction never to ever wear sleeves a triathlon ever again, I would hopefully also remember to ask questions when things aren’t going the way they should.

Hopefully, I could begin to ask these questionsearlierin the process next time- not at the end- thereby avoiding a lot of unnecessary and painful suffering.

Damn you arm sleeves!

So where does that leave me? Well, as I alluded to earlier, I was upset about the poor race performance- both immediately following the race and for several weeks after. I went through all the typical stages of grief as usual. I askedwhy did this have to happen to me?and other what-might-have-been-type questions for far longer than necessary. And then finally, I reflected on the experience and asked what could be positively derived from the entire episode.

When I asked those good proactive questions, I came up with some decent responses. I learned something, so that was something. I suffered mercilessly, and if you know me you know I get off on the pain. I explored and conquered some dark places emotionally during and after the race, and ideally added a new layer of toughness to my toolbox.

In all the insanity, I totally forgot to mention that I brought back the infamous women's sunglasses from IM CDA 2012, and am pretty sure they're here to stay as long as they'll let me. That was huge, they're becoming like a security blanket.

So chick sunglasses? In. Sleeves? Out.

And let me tell you, performing a 3-4 hour Z4 workout is going to produce a ridiculous effect on your performance and physiology. Once my body (and heart) recovered from the beat-down, the super-compensation cycle went into overdrive. The race was probably the greatest thing that has ever happened to my training.

We all know how I feel about elevated heart rate. After power on the bike and pacing on the run, sprint interval training for anything (in multisport, regular sport or life) is THE secret to success: doing something really, really hard for short periods of time, with reasonable and appropriate recovery breaks. You can apply that principle to anything- your job, your family, your fitness and your social connections, and success will be the result, I firmly believe that.

So the effect of my IMFL 70.3 "workout" has launched me into a completely new tier of fitness that I could never have achieved otherwise, making old workouts much easier from that point on, and allowing me to push my physical, mental and psychological limits even higher. When you look at triathlon as a journey, with races just brief benchmarks toward a much larger goal, you can ignore the costs and stresses involved in performing poorly at a destination race and keep it all in perspective.

At least that's what I (keep) telling myself. Every year. Sometimes twice a year.

So perhaps that's the conclusion of this story. A nice happy ending, all wrapped up like a 30-min sitcom.

EPILOGUE

As mentioned before, I’m also done with that stupid bike box. I&rsqu