2021 Ironman Atlantic City 70.3 Race Report
Background
After getting a Half Ironman PR at Poconos 70.3, I planned to head to SavageMan for a rematch against my brother, Chris. Given that course’s reputation, I head no expectation to PR there, but I was still looking forward to testing my fitness on the hardest Half IM course in the US and competing for a good age group slot.
Unfortunately a month before SavageMan was supposed to happen, the race organizers pulled the plug. They blamed road construction, but if you read between the lines, it seemed that they couldn’t attract enough competitors to cover their costs. There are fewer triathletes these days who are excited by 6,500 feet of climbing on a HIM bike course.
We scrambled to find a new race and landed on the Harryman Triathlon at Harriman State Park in NYC. It had a similar bike course and was only 90 minutes from NYC. Ideal. And then that race got cancelled.
Which explains how we ended up in New Jersey in early September at the starting line for IM 70.3 Atlantic City. Very few plans ever start with Atlantic City as the first choice. Their city motto could be “we’re always here if you need us”. And in this case Atlantic City was hosting a 70.3 race on the East Coast in early September that wasn’t cancelled, which made it uniquely qualified for our needs.
Our move to Atlantic City added another interesting wrinkle. The course was flat and fast, and for the first time in my triathlon career, I started to think about going under five hours in a Half Ironman.
Training
For most of my training for Atlantic City I was training for SavageMan. This impacted my bike training in ways that I’ll talk about below.
For this training race, I switched over to the 80/20 triathlon plan, created by Matt Fitzgerald and Dave Warden. The premise of this plan is that you should spend 80% of your time in each discipline doing low-intensity training and 20% at at high intensity. The define a middle zone between low and high intensity (Zone X) that you’re supposed to avoid.
For the 12 weeks between Poconos and AC I was doing between 11–15 hours of work per week, averaging 3 swims, 3 bikes, and 3 runs.
Swim
After being closed for almost two years NYC public pools re-opened in July, offering me an opportunity to actually swim before this race. Like most triathletes, swim training is my least favorite part of race prep, but I was legitimately excited to jump in the pool and get to work.
Over the three months between the Poconos race and Atlantic City, I was able to consistently swim three times a week. None of my swims were that long. I was averaging 2,000–3,000 meters per swim, but I was doing some quality sets and I could feel myself improving over time. Unlike cycling or running, where I’ve been at a pretty consistent level for the past several years, it was exciting to see myself improving so much in such a short period of time.
I was able to get a pretty clean read on this improvement thanks to some recurring time trials built into the plan. Every three weeks I was swimming a 400 meter time trial, resting two minutes, and swimming a 200 meter trial. Over the course of two months, I was able to improve at both distances.
- Swim 1 (July 3): 7:03/3:27
- Swim 2 (July 30): 6:52/3:24
- Swim 3 (August 20): 6:41/3:18
Given that I could comfortably hold 1:40/100m pace in the pool, I felt good that on race day, with a wetsuit, in salt water I could target a 30–32 minute swim, which would give me an 8 minute improvement over what I had done in the Poconos 70.3.
A few other notes on my training. This was the first year that I trained with the Finis Tempo Trainer. This is a device that you wear in your swim cap and can beep every X seconds. You can use it to either train to increase your cadence or to get reliable splits at each length. I used it to keep myself on even splits on my longer sets, and it was very useful. Sadly I lost it at the end of the season, but I plan to replace it next year.
A final note on my swim training. I did all but one swim for this block at McCarren Park Pool. Due to a “lifeguard shortage”, they only ever opened 2/3rds of the pool, and they never opened lap swimming. So this meant that I was swimming my 1:40/100m laps in the middle of hundreds of bodies. This meant lots of high speed collisions, but it made for some quality practice for the first 100m of race day.
Average weekly swim volume for training block: 5,016 yards/week
Bike
The SavageMan bike course is intimidating. Given the 6,717 feet of elevation gain and lots of technical descents, I decided that I would race it on my road bike. My hope was that I could climb more quickly on a lighter bike and descend faster with the handling of a road bike. This would make up for the final 10 miles where I’d be giving up an aerodynamic advantage.
So I put my P3 into storage and started doing all my indoor and outdoor training on my R2 road bike. As soon as I did my first quality session on the road bike indoors, I realized how much more powerful I was in my road bike position vs aero position on the tri bike. I was able to put out 10–15 more watts at the same perceived effort. I have a comfortable fit on my tri bike, but I’ve never been able to close the gap between my aero position and my standard position. So I was excited to race on my road bike and see what those extra watts could get me.
I had already built up a good amount of bike fitness for my previous race, so my main goal was to hold on to that for this race. I did this with a weekly rotation that looked something like:
- 1–2 recovery rides between one and two hours at <60% of FTP
- 1 high intensity interval ride of one hour with intervals at >100% FTP
- 1 long ride with race pace intervals for about three hours
Everything was indoors except for my weekly long ride, for which I rotated between Central Park and Prospect Park. Fun fact: by the end of the year, I will have ridden over 4,000 miles in my house or in the two parks closest to my house.
The long ride with race pace intervals was the key workout each week, and for the most part these felt good. For each of these rides I was spending about 2 hours at Zone 3, or about 180–200 watts, which is where I wanted to be racing my half Ironman. Here’s an example workout from Prospect Park where I was at ~182 watts normalized power over a set of 4x30 intervals.
It was around the time of this workout that SavageMan was cancelled. So we signed up for Harryman and headed over to Harriman State Park to pre-ride the course. Given that the elevation profile was similar to SavageMan, I was still planning to use my road bike for the race.
This was my first ride with Chris since the Poconos, and soon after it started I started to get worried about my chances. Because he straight up dropped me on each of the three big climbs that day. The climb at Harriman is steep and sustained, and I was pushing my heart rate up to 170 bpm just to stay close to Chris. I knew that I couldn’t afford to push this hard on a race day, so I decided that I would just have to let him go away from me on race day and rely on my run to bail me out.
Later than evening, we got an email telling us that Harryman was being postponed to spring. Which meant we were heading to Atlantic City. Which meant that I had no choice to get back on my triathlon bike. The AC bike course is one of the flattest in the world — the biggest climb is 25 feet above sea level. Given how flat and windy the course would be, there’s no way I could justify taking my road bike, even if I hadn’t ridden my tri bike in three months.
To make matters worse I had a trip to California planned two weeks before the race, and I wouldn’t have my tri bike available out there. So I had about four chances to ride my tri bike before race day.
The good news is that when I got back on the P3, I felt fast. I wasn’t able to hold the same watts that I could on my road bike, but this didn’t seem to matter. I went back to Prospect Park and did a test lap there. At about 10% less power than my road bike, I finished the lap almost one minute faster, for an average speed of almost 2 mph above my road bike. This gave me a ton of confidence before the race and led me to wonder if I had been making a mistake planning to use my road bike, even on a hilly course.
I came into Atlantic City at almost the same level of bike fitness that I had in June, but with a big question around my ability to hold my target power in aero position effectively for over two hours. I would need to hope that years of triathlon training could make up for my lack of recent time on the tri bike.
Average weekly time on bike for training block: 6:32
Run
Relative to the field, my run at the Poconos had been my strongest leg. I finished a technical and hilly 13.1 there in 1:37 which was the 19th best run of the day. Going into this training block, I felt good that I had a strong run base, and I would just need to maintain steady volume to perform well on race day.
My run schedule looked something like this:
- 1–2 easy recovery runs of 4–6 miles at 8:30+ min/mile
- 1 tempo/VO2 max run of 6–7 miles with intervals at 6:00–7:00 min/mile
- 1 long run of 12–18 miles at 7:30–8:30 min/mile
In order to get in my long rides on the weekend, I had to do my long runs during the week. Which meant a lot of runs that looked like the one below: up at 5 am, out the door at 5:11, and running the streets of NYC for three hours before work. I really enjoyed these early morning runs by myself. The dark quiet of early morning NYC in the summer is great.
As I was training for this triathlon, I knew in the back of my mind that I would be doing the NYC marathon in November of this year. So, I started to throw in some additional recovery runs and add miles to my long run. This got me to over 40 miles/week in weeks where I was also swimming 6,000 yards and biking 160 miles. It was the most I’ve trained since doing Ironman Lake Placid in 2015.
Average run distance for training block: 30.8 miles/week
Taper
I planned a two-week taper for the race, with the first of those weeks in California. The week in California was a bit stressful from a training perspective. First, while I had a road bike available to train on, it didn’t have a power meter or clip on pedals, and so I wasn’t really able to get any quality rides in. Second, it got super hot. I was out on a recovery run one day and the temperature got about 100 degrees. I was used to training in humid 80 degree NYC days, but 100 is a new ball game.
I did my best to stay calm and get in the work that I could. The good news is that I had access to a nice pool with dedicated lap lanes. I felt like a king! In total I trained for about 10 hours the week before the race and did four easy hours during race week.
Race Plan
A-Goal: Sub 4:45/Top 100
Before AC, I had only ever raced difficult long course races. Here’s a list of all the long course triathlon races I’ve done: Lake Placid, ToughMan, Quassy, and the Poconos. The bike courses on each of these races are tough: anything under three hours takes some effort (six hours for LP). This would not be the case at Atlantic City.
Given the easy bike course, I thought that the following splits would be possible.
- Swim: 0:30–0:32
- Bike: 2:30–2:45
- Run: 1:35–1:40
Adding in another 5 minutes for transitions, sub 4:45 seemed difficult but possible. To do this I would need to have a solid swim, which I felt very confident in doing. I would need to set a massive bike PR, but that felt possible on such an easy course. And then I would need to have enough left to do a respectable half marathon. Again, this felt reasonable, as I have run close to 1:35 in several HIM races, although never after that fast of a bike split.
I took a look at previous years’ results and saw that a 4:45 could get me into the top 100 overall. It didn’t look like I would have any chance of qualifying for 70.3 World Championships, but top 100 in a field of over 3,000 seemed like a solid goal to shoot for.
B-Goal: Sub 5:00
Sub 4:45 felt like a stretch, but 5:00 felt like a safe bet. Even if I came in at the high end of my estimates for each discipline, I would still cruise in under five hours. And I was excited about this possibility. Sub-5 is a significant milestone for Half Ironman, and given the courses I had raced on, I had never really had a great chance at getting close to it. I knew I probably wouldn’t be back to Atlantic City or any course this fast, so it felt important to lock in this PR while I had the chance.
C-Goal: Beat Chris
I couldn’t imagine a world where I wouldn’t beat Chris. Chris’ big advantage for SavageMan and Harryman had been the climbs on the bike. For whatever reason, he’s just better at going uphill than me. Now that we had moved to a flat course, I had the upper hand at all three disciplines. My only concern was that I would beat him too badly and embarrass him so much that he would never race me again.
Gear and Nutrition
Swim
Swim gear was the exact same as the Poconos triathlon:
- Ten year old Xterra wetsuit
- Tinted Aqua Sphere Kayenne goggles
I’ve been wearing these in triathlons for ten years, and they’ve worked well so far. Although, I would like to upgrade my wetsuit at some point, as the current one is full of holes.
Bike
I’ve already talked about the road bike/tri bike situation, but there’s one detail I haven’t talked about: tires.
After my race in June, I took a long look at my race tires and realized that it was time to replace them. The four year old Continental GP5000s on my race wheels had gashes, abrasions, and every other problem you expect from a set of tires that hadn’t been swapped out over the course of hundreds of miles of racing.
Except, when I decided to race Savageman on my road bike, I decided I would just race on a different pair wheels and replace the race tires on my Zipp wheels in 2022.
This is how I found myself, the week before the race, making desperate calls to every bike shop in Brooklyn, asking if they carried 23mm racing tires.
Over the last decade, skinny tires have gone out of style. The skinniest that most bike mechanics in Williamsburg will even talk about is 28mm. I literally had one guy laugh at me when I asked about his selection of 23mm tires. The close I got the race, the less willing I was to swap out the tires…there are many horror stories of guys changing their tires the day before a big race only to get a pinch flat. But the alternative of riding 50 miles on very worn tires seemed just as bad. Two days before the race, I was able to track down some Vittoria Corsa 2.0 tires at Sun & Air bikes in Brooklyn. Bonus: tan sidewalls.
The rest of my setup was the same as it had been for most of racing career: Cervelo P3, Zipp 404 wheels, Ultegra Di2. I would keep the 11x32 cassette that I had swapped in earlier this year in preparation for a hilly season. Swapping it out was too much of a pain, and I never run out of gears when going fast.
For nutrition on the bike I would do one bottle of Maurten 360 and 2–3 gels.
Run
I was keeping the same Endorphin Pro shoe that served me well in the Poconos earlier. This gave me an extra boost of confidence that I would be able to put in a fast run.
For nutrition on the run, I had one caffeinated Maurten gel and one uncaffeinated Maurten gel.
Race Day
Pre Race
Chris and I got to Atlantic City the night before the race. I had been a couple of times before when I first moved to NYC, and it seemed like very little had chanced in the past ten years.
We got a solid Italian dinner at Angelo’s Fairmount Tavern, waited in line at Harrah’s for an hour to check in (Guns N Roses were in town), and were in bed by 8:30 pm that night, lulled to sleep by the muffled sounds of DJ Pauly D, 20 floors below.
We were in transition super early and set up was smooth. I was nervous that the bike on the rack looked a hell of a lot like mine. It wouldn’t be a fun day if either of us grabbed the wrong bike, but hopefully the disc wheel in the rear would help us both find the right bike in the heat of the moment.
Chris and I paced around nervously for a couple hours and then headed over to the swim for a 7 am start.
Swim
The swim start was a self-seeded group start. You got in line next to a sign with your projected swim finish time and would go off in groups of 5. Chris and I stood at the front of the 30-minute group and were at water’s edge a couple of minutes after 7. They counted us in and I jumped into the water.
And on to something sharp. The landing area where we jumped in was shallow and jagged and my foot landed on something that it wasn’t supposed to. Many years ago something similar happened to me at Quassy 70.3, and I had finished the race with a red sock that used to be white. As I started my swim at AC, I hoped that this injury wasn’t severe and that the bleeding would finish before I got out of the water. Thankfully it did, and this mishap didn’t play a role in the rest of the race.
The first half of the swim was amazing. My watch tells me I swam the first 800 yards at 1:20/100 yards, which is probably overstated due to GPS inaccuracy, but I was still moving just about as fast as I had ever done in a triathlon swim, while my HR and breathing felt very under control.
Then we hit the mud.
There are very few sights as disturbing in Ironman racing as when, in the middle of the swim, the person 10 yards in front of you stands up and starts walking. Because you are either racing against Jesus or you are about to hit mud.
As it turns out, it was low-tide, and this race is not usually done in the fall, and a bunch of other reasons I forget, but the point is that 1,000 yards into our swim, we were in knee high, muddy water trying to figure out how to most wade through the muck as fast as possible.
I was wearing my HR monitor during the swim, and you can see the effect that this unexpected run had on my HR. I went from a steady heart rate of 150 to my lactate threshold HR within a couple of seconds. As any experienced triathlete knows, your HR surges when you quickly move from swimming to running. To do that in the middle of a lake, in thick mud amplifies the impact.
The water for the next 500 yards was about two feet deep. I decided to start swimming again, but in such shallow, muddy water, I struggled to find my rhythm. Aside from the unique opportunity to practice my high elbow pull, there’s nothing about this part of the swim that I enjoyed.
To make matter’s worse, I looked to my left and saw a familiar beard on the person swimming next to me. Somehow, just like at Poconos, Chris and I were pulling in to the swim finish next to each other. This was bad news for me. I had trained way more for the swim than Chris and had expected to build a 2–3 minute cushion going into the bike. I put in a surge, but it made no difference. We finished our swim within seconds of each other.
The only good news was that, despite the chaos, I had come in at 32:26 — within my goal range. I had swum the tangents of the course very well, and the strong first half had helped me bank time for the second half. And while the mud had frazzled me in the moment, it didn’t feel like I had burned too much energy getting through it. I managed a quick transition and got ready to start cycling.
Stats for the swim:
- Average pace: 1:30/100 yards
- Average HR: 151
- TSS: 64
Official swim times:
- Tom: 32:26 (172/1,629)
- Chris: 32:24 (166/1,629)
Bike
I’ve talked a lot about the AC bike course without getting into a lot of details of it. Well here it is.
You start on an airfield on the outskirts of Atlantic City, do two loops through the suburbs and the heart of AC and then do one more loop through the suburbs before ending back at the airfield. The whole thing is as flat as a bike course can be. The longest climb is a 25 foot climb up a highway overpass. Overall the road quality is good with a lot of the race happening on highways. As a faster cyclist, one of the bigger challenges is that starting on the second lap you are passing the field for the rest of the race.
My plan was to try to stay in aero and hold 180–190 watts for as much of the race as possible. I had held similar power levels on my long training rides in Prospect Park and Central Park, so I didn’t think that this would be too hard since I had put in a good taper going into the race.
As I started riding, however, 180–190 watts didn’t feel great. At this point, I’ve started to get a feel for what a smart effort in a half-ironman feels like, and I found that anything over 170 watts didn’t feel like it would lead to a good run. The good news is that even at these lower watts I was easily holding 21–22 mph. The wind was strong today, but it was coming at us mostly from the side. And I was able to stay aero for pretty much the whole ride. I would estimate that I was in a full aero position for 90–95% of the ride, so even at a very low output of 160 watts I was still at 2:40 pace.
The whole ride was consistently mediocre for me. I put my head down and spent my time navigating between hundreds if not thousands of slower age groupers. There wasn’t much scenery to check out so I mainly stared at my numbers and wondered (1) why I wasn’t able to push harder and (2) how the hell I was going so fast at 160 watts.
My biggest concern was that I hadn’t seen Chris the entire ride. He had gotten through T1 faster than me, and I hadn’t seen him on any of the many out-and-backs on the bike course. There was a terrifying possibility that he had put in a heroic effort on the bike and built a ten minute lead on the bike.
After 56 miles on the bike I started to wonder where transition was. It turns out that AC 70.3 throws in a free bonus mile at the end of the bike and calls it part of T2. This would add over three minutes to my total time and make sub 5 harder than I had expected. I was starting to get a little worried about my B and C goals.
Looking at my final stats for the bike, I think I was overly conservative. I’m used to 3 hour bike splits. The extra 30 minutes on the bike means that you need to put out less effort so that you still have something left for the run. My TSS (total effort) for the bike section was 138 which is firmly in the “left something on the table” section of the chart below. So, in future flat races, I will know that I can push at a more uncomfortable pacing, knowing that I will be off the bike faster.
Stats for the full ride:
- Speed: 21.4 mph
- Average power: 159 watts (180 goal)
- Normalized power: 166 watts (180 goal)
- Average cadence: 84
- Average heart rate: 150
- TSS: 138
Official bike times:
- Tom: 2:36:07 (138/1,629)
- Chris: 2:31:44 (88/1,629)
Run
Thanks to the world’s longest transition, I started the run with about 3:19 on the clock. This meant that my sub 4:45 goal was out the window, and I would need to run a solid 1:41 half marathon to break 5. I had done this in my past four half ironman races, so I felt good about my chances of pulling it off. But I also knew how much each of those races had hurt and how much I would need to focus for the next hour and a half.
The AC run course heads from the airfield straight to the AC boardwalk where you do a couple out and backs before finishing with a 100 meter sprint on the sand. By the time I got off the bike it was already warm, probably in the low 70s, and the temperature was climbing quickly. By the end of the race it would be over 80 degrees. This would end up making this one of the hardest half ironman runs I’ve ever done.
The other major factor was the wind. The 15–20 mph gusts were blowing strongly from South to North, so depending on which part of the out and back you were on, you would either have a massive tailwind or feel like you were running into a wind tunnel.
The course started with a half mile out and back on the airfield which gave me my first chance to see where Chris was. By my calculations, he was about half a mile ahead of me, and at my current pace that meant about 3:30. As he ran passed I flashed a big smile and mimed a shotgun aimed at him. The message was clear: I’m coming for you.
My plan was to head out at around 7:10 pace for the first six miles and see if I could pick things up in the second half. Even if I only held 7:10, that would bring me in under 1:35 and secure my sub 5 finish. Based on what I knew about Chris’ running, I also felt good that this would be enough for me to win the overall race.
The first 3 miles went well. I was able to hold 7:20 pace, slightly slower than expected, but at a heart rate of 161. I knew that I could sit at 170–180 for the last half of the race, so I was hopeful that once I got down to boardwalk I would be able to pick up the pace.
But it was getting hotter and windier. When I got to the boardwalk and turned right, I felt a blast of hot wind and realized that the lack of shade or any form of protection from the wind was going to make this a brutal 10 miles. For the next two miles, I was running into a powerful headwind, feeling glad to hold on to 7:30 pace. I felt less glad when I got to the turnaround and saw that Chris was still a third of a mile ahead of me. In five miles, I had gained less than a minute on him. He mimicked a machine gun as he passed me.
At the turnaround I was eager to switch from headwind to tailwind, but I quickly realized what an important role the wind had played in keeping me cool. I quickly went from uncomfortable to feeling like I was going to have heat stroke. A mile later when we turned right onto a pier, I was deep in my journey to the dark place. Chris was too. When we passed each other, there was no miming of shotguns or machine guns. We didn’t even acknowledge each other’s existence.
Checking my watch I could see that Chris was 0.25 miles ahead of me. In other words, in half the race I had closed half the distance to catching him. At this rate there could be a photo finish involved. It sounded very painful in the moment, and I tried not to think about it.
Instead I got back on the boardwalk and continued to suffer. By mile 7 my heart rate was at 170 and my pace had slowed to 7:40 per mile. I was still on pace for sub 5, but now that was looking like a tight squeeze as well.
Thankfully at this moment, I remembered the existence of ice. It had been a while since I had raced a really hot race, so I had forgotten how incredible it was to suck on an ice cube between aid stations. Thankfully a volunteer at mile 8 caught my attention with their cup of ice and got me back on the ice train. The relief was immediate. I was able to get control of my heart rate, breathing, and emotions and make a plan.
My plan for the short term was to catch Chris. At this point, I could see that he was about 400 meters ahead of me and slowing down. At mile 9, I put in a small surge and pulled up next to him.
“Let’s go! We can finish this together.” I felt like we could both have a better finishing time if we pushed each other for the last four miles, but he was spent. He waved me on to finish without him. That part of the race was over.
But there were four miles left to run and sub 5 still on the table. I knew that around mile 11.5 I would need to turn around and head back into the wind. When this happened, it was even worse than I expected. My pace slowed to 8:00/mile even as my heart rate continued to sky rocket.
On the plus side, I did the math and 8:00/mile would still bring me in two minutes under five hours. I knew I was going to suffer, but I could handle 15 minutes of suffering. As I made the last turn to the finish and sub 5 hours was assured, I had one of those rare, great moments in endurance sports when you realize that you are going to achieve something special and you get to enjoy yourself while you do it.
Stats for the full run:
- Pace: 7:38/mile
- Average heart rate: 168
- TSS: 140
Official run times:
- Tom: 1:38:44 (72/1,629)
- Chris: 1:46:10 (83/1,629)
Official overall times:
- Tom: 4:58:13 (72/1,629)
- Chris: 5:00:55 (83/1,629)
Evaluation
I’ll finish with an evaluation of the race course and my performance.
The Course
Swim: Well, this was definitely the worst swim course I’ve ever done and that includes the time in Quassy when I stepped on a piece of glass and cut a deep gash in my foot. The start was a little rough, but the mud really ruined things for me. I’m not sure what I would have done if I were the race organizers…it seems like there might not have been any good options. I’m glad they didn’t cancel the swim, and I didn’t get any major illnesses from the swampy mud, but those are the best things I can say about this one. (Score: 3/10)
Bike: From a sight-seeing perspective, this bike course doesn’t offer much. There isn’t a lot of fan support either, and you end up having to pass a lot of slow riders. But it’s fast, clearly marked, and well-supported. For anyone in search of a PR, this is probably the best bike course in the country. Just don’t get forget that bonus mile at the end. (Score: 7/10)
Run: Running on the boardwalk was cool. There were lots of spectators and lots to look at. Running on the pier was cool. I’ve never raced on a pier. The heat and wind made this a uniquely challenging run, but there was plenty of support on the course. The first three miles were nothing special, but the finish on the sand was a cool touch. (Score: 7/10)
Logistics: Like any Ironman branded race, this one was very well-organized. Packet pick-up took about a minute, check-in was super easy, and everything was well marked with plenty of helpful volunteers. Not sure this is the worth the $100 premium that Ironman charges compared to all other races, but it does make racing way less stressful. (Score: 9/10)
Overall Score: 26/40
My Race
Swim: If not for the mud, I think I could have PR’d. Given the conditions on the day, I was happy to finish in 32 minutes. (Score: 7/10)
Bike: I continue to struggle on my triathlon bike legs. Even though I finished this bike leg 20 minutes faster than any other half Ironman, I should have been at least 5–10 minutes faster on this course. I’m spending 6–8 hours a week on a bike, which should be enough, but my FTP has been flat for the past five years even as my running has gotten much faster, and I’m not able to even hold power numbers that I should be able to hold given that FTP. I think that the two year regimen of all indoor cycling has led to some half-hearted workouts and my last minute switch to the tri bike didn’t help, even though I never felt particularly sore or stiff on race day. (Score: 6/10)
Run: My run time of 1:38:44 isn’t in my top three fastest runs, and this was definitely the flattest run I’ve ever done. But the 80 degree heat and 20 mph winds made this one of the hardest run I’ve done. I passed dozens of people on the run and finished strong in my goal time. (Score: 8/10)
Execution: I followed my race plan and got an important goal in the books. My nutrition was really solid, I never felt hungry and didn’t have any stomach issues. My pacing on the swim and run were just right, but I might have left some time on the table with the bike. (Score: 7/10)
Overall Score: 28/40
In conclusion
Let’s take a look back at my race goals:
- A-goal: Sub 4:45/Top 100 NOT ACHIEVED
- B-goal: Break 5 hours ACHIEVED
- C-goal: Beat Chris ACHIEVED
While I did finish in the top 100, I’m not going to give myself credit for the A-goal. I was over 10 minutes slower my time goal, and a Covid depleted field made it much easier to get a higher placement.
It’s not clear if sub-4:45 (or faster) is ever in the cards for me, but I’d like to try. I’ve gotten faster most of the years that I’ve been doing this sport, and it feels like I keep finding new ways to improve.
After the race I gave a quick call home to share the good news.
And then I made a quick stop at Wawa for some gross post-race nutrition.
I didn’t have much time to rest. My next stop was the NYC Marathon.
