Humbled

Race report from Ironman Chattanooga 2018

Another triathlon race season comes to an end.

I became a three-time Ironman when I crossed the finish line at Ironman Chattanooga this past September 30. I’m extremely blessed to have accomplished this feat and owe so much to my family and teammates who have helped make this possible.

I’ve waited a few weeks to collect my thoughts about this race. Immediately afterwards, I was disappointed in the outcome, to say the least. Not so much with the time on the race clock (because every race is different and difficult to compare), but with my ability to rise to the challenge. Chattanooga’s heat and hills on the run course were my biggest obstacles and I just don’t feel I handled them as well as I potentially can.

However, to say this race was a failure would be unfair. I executed my race plan to a T on the bike by staying conservative and I still set my Ironman bike PR by nearly 24 minutes. My training this year has been as consistent and intense as ever. I’m running faster in my workouts, my power threshold on the bike is rising, and my swim is gradually coming into form. This race was just hard, and I could have easily dropped out at the halfway point when the race started to overwhelm me. I let some negative thoughts into my head. Sometimes I had to walk. But I kept going. I didn’t quit. And as the sun went down, I rediscovered my heart and my legs and I finished strong.

So, now that I’ve had time to reflect, I’ve came away with a few lessons that I’ll try to take with me into next season.

Expectations are dangerous

Though I wouldn’t go so far to say that I expected to post a certain time or come in a certain place in my age group, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was hoping to beat my results from Wisconsin last year. This, despite knowing that the course, the conditions, and the competition were completely different; these are all things out of my control. Wisconsin has a relentlessly difficult bike course and a relatively flat run. Last year at IMWI, the weather was absolutely perfect for me. Chattanooga’s bike course is no cake walk, but compared to Wisconsin, it’s much faster and more forgiving, but the run course is *brutal*. So, there’s really no comparison for the age group athlete.

Though my run is greatly improved, I’m far from an elite distance runner, so, if I’m being honest with myself, I just haven’t yet developed the fitness to hold up over an Ironman distance in Chattanooga conditions. At Wisconsin, the cool weather and mostly flat course allowed my body to continue pushing through the run. To expect the same of my body at Chattanooga may have been premature.

For this race on that day, my hopes for performance didn’t quite line up with reality so I’ll try harder to adjust my expectations to match my fitness with the conditions in the future.

Sharpen my nutrition plan

It’s fair to say I don’t fully understand my nutrition needs for long course racing. I did create a nutrition plan with expected calorie and sodium intake and mostly stuck with the plan on the bike. My plan is based mostly on my training knowing what I feel like I my stomach can handle. This plan is more precise on the bike when I’m trying to complete a math problem. On the run, I’m just trying to hang on and taking what I can. so whatever I had planned prior to the race is mostly forgotten as I enter survival mode. For this race, I didn’t really account for different needs created by the hot conditions either.

I’m not sure what the solution is yet, but I have a feeling my race performance could have been better with a more well-informed approach to nutrition. Time to read up in the offseason.

Limit stress race week

Just to make it to the start line of an Ironman, healthy and ready to race, is a special thing. It requires a lot of hard work. For many of us, it requires support and sacrifice from our loved ones. It also takes some good fortune.

In my case, this included having a spare rear wheel in town and a phenomenal family, who rushed it to transition mere minutes before the last call for the race start. I’m grateful to have discovered the problem with my original wheel in time. I’m grateful to my family without whom this all wouldn’t have been possible. I’m grateful to Cassie, the amazing volunteer who lent me her cell phone and stayed with me for over a half hour while I waited, and to the bike mechanics who switched out my cassette and pumped up my tire while I got myself together.

If the swim hadn’t been cancelled, it’s possible I wouldn’t have discovered the mechanical issue until it was too late and I would have been out of the race. The rolling bike start gave me just enough time and I got to experience being, *literally*, the last one to get on the course. It may not have been the start I had in mind, but seeing the C26 crew on my way out helped remind me to have fun and it ended up being a great day.

While this ended up being a great story, it was very stressful. That was a good hour-plus of me scrambling to get my bike race ready, pretty much up to the last minute before the course closed. To be honest, this stress could have been avoided. It largely reflected my hectic week leading up to the race, which included caring for my two-year old while traveling and keeping my family happy in less-than-perfect housing a few miles from the race venue. I could have done a lot better at being organized upfront and having a contingency plan in place—already thinking about improvements for next year.

Because: sports

My senior year in high school, my soccer team made it to the Virginia high school state championship game. We were a small school—there was only one prior state championship in our school’s forty-year history at the time—so it was quite an accomplishment to have made it this far. We lost 1–0 to our rival. We were a good team and played valiantly, but we just didn’t quite play at the level we needed to win. And that happens in sports. Sometimes, to have our best performances, things just need to come together. We can control some of the factors, like our attitude and execution, but much of it is beyond our control.

I just don’t think I had “it” at Chattanooga. I was as fit as I’ve ever been coming into the race, but just didn’t peak on race day. The fact I didn’t perform to the best of my ability doesn’t diminish the progress I’ve made in training.

I’m proud of my effort, not only during the race, but throughout this whole year. All this while dealing with stress at work and life in general. Chattanooga may have humbled me, but that’s a good thing. It keeps me hungry.

Jan Frodeno, perhaps the greatest triathlete of all time, recently said, “Progress is not linear.” Though I got knocked down a bit and didn’t get any closer to the podium, I believe this season was a success and I’m excited to build on it for next year.

So what’s next? Well, I’m already signed up for my next Ironman race: I’ll be at Ironman Lake Placid on July 28, 2019. You can follow me on my triathlon journey here.