Dress Rehearsal

The weekend just gone was the 2011 Taupo Half Ironman.  This was a big deal for me in a lot of ways.  Firstly it was a big race and very much beyond anything I had done for over 20 years.  It was also held on the same location as the real deal next March so it was good to get a feel for the course.  As an indicator of how the training has gone it would pretty much prove what my feelings were prior to going in. 

The weekend started off flying out from Melbourne with bike bag in tow.  A hearty breakfast in the first class lounge was a great way to start and at least allowed me to ignore the normal airline slop on board.  Then a quick call in to Mt Eden Cycles for supplies on Friday morning before the flight to Taupo.  Best bike shop in Auckland if you ever need it.

The Taupo weather was fantastic on landing and my fears of shivering through the race seemed baseless.  Friday afternoon was spent re-assembling the bike, registering at the event centre, and general nervous  nothingness.  Jim & Anne, the in-laws, were very accommodating with running me back & forth to the race and putting up with getting woken at 5:00 am on race day.  This was another concern for me, to fly in pretty much at the last minute and have to get up at the equivalent of 2 in the morning Brisbane time to try and get the body moving.  In the end it was not that bad and a reasonable sleep was had.

Anyway to the race.

After a lovely day on Friday, the next morning was cold and drizzly.  I had worked backwards from the race start, accounting for race briefing, transition setup, eating, driving and so on.  I was a bit lucky because I didn’t pick up that transition was closing at 6:00.  I walked in with six minutes to spare, so a bit of a rush but it all worked out.

After race briefing the time had come to get in the water.  It sure was cold but the wetsuit seemed to be doing its job.  This was my first real swim in it and thankfully it worked out ok.  The swim went reasonably well, I always knew that I had not done enough training in the swim to push for a time but also knew that the distance was not really going to pose a problem.  The franticness of it all was something I had forgotten about with knocks to the head and people swimming straight over the top of you.  Even so the swim was pretty comfortable and even though the time, officially 35:03 was slower than I wanted I was never going to push too hard so early on.  Happy so far.

The next stage of the race, which took me by surprise, is the transition from swim to bike.  Now obviously this has to happen, but at Taupo it involves running maybe 400 metres in your wetsuit, across a ribbon of fake grass on asphalt.  Before being aware of this extended run I had expected transition to take 2-4 minutes and ended up taking seven.  So while I wasn’t panicking there were an extra 5 minutes on the clock.

So onto the bike.  The weather is still cool, it is just after 7am after all, and there is still sporadic drizzle and even rain to keep the temperature down further.  At the last minute I had chucked a thermal top into the bag and so that went on before setting off. The ride goes out to Reporoa and back, and apart from the initial climb out of town of about 100m is reasonably flat.  Again I was trying to not push too hard too early here and a number of riders passed me, many of whom I would pass again as we all came back into town nearly 3 hours later.  It was a bit of an eye opener to see the number of packs that seemed to be pretty blatantly drafting (slipstreaming) as they went past.  There were also plenty who got nabbed by the marshals for a 3 minute stand down so there was some justice.  I found the ride to be my best segment of the day, helped a lot by finding a good layout for the aero bars and thus able to spend long stints in a very comfortable and efficient position.  I had set a pretty mild benchmark of 3 hours, or 30kph,  for the ride and managed to beat that easily in 2:48 for a 32k + average speed, I was pretty happy at that point.  Hydration and gel intake was pretty much OK, perhaps some more water would have been ideal.

The run was always going to be the toughest part of the day, and so it proved.  The day was warming up by then to add to the difficulty.  Heading out on to the run I was feeling pretty good considering I had been out there for over 3 hours already.  After the first lap it seemed that I would run about 1:44 which would have been a good time.  As it turned out the second lap is where it all started to come apart.  On this lap I dropped 12 minutes compared to the first lap and spent a bit of time walking.  It started off with walking through the aid stations to make sure I got fluids in, but then became a bit more frequent.  After having a mental estimate of finishing in 5:20 after run lap 1 I found myself calculating with about 2k to go that I was now not going to make 5:30.  So a quick cup of coke from the aid station and set off to try for my original target time.  The end result of pushing pretty solidly was crossing the finish line in 5:30:05 and I was pretty happy with that in the end.

 I found the whole day to be pretty tough, and the thought of doing twice the distance is pretty daunting.  Although 4 days later and not feeling so washed out, I can be a bit more positive.  The best thing from the day was that it reinforced all the feelings I had regarding where my training was at.  Swim OK but need more distance, Bike comfortable, and the run well short on distance and so it proved.