Race report - Half-Ironman 70.3 Rev3 Cedar Point

On September 8th I raced Cedar Point Rev3 70.3 Half Ironman in Sandusky, Ohio. This was my second Half Ironman distance with first being Eagleman 70.3 back in June. The race was a 70.3 distance, including 1.2 miles swim (1.93 km), 56 miles bike (90.1 km) and 13.1 miles run (21.1 km). I finished with the time of 5:11:04. Total number of people participated was 706, including 104 in my age group.

This was my "A" race for the year and since it was my second 70.3 distance, I was better prepared mentally and physically. Full race results can be found here. Here is the analysis of my times:

Two weeks before the race I had cold with running nose and cough, but I trained thru it and ignored it since there was no fever and I felt more or less normal.

In preparation for this race I did bike chain cleanup. I also bought new Continental 4000s race tires and put them on both front and rear. These are highly rated and are puncture resistant. My old tires were the originals that came with the bike and they had over 3,000 miles on them with visible signs of wear.


The race was held at the Cedar Point amusement park and start and finish are right next to the park entrance with roller coaster and all the park fun going on:

Swim

The swim was supposed to be held in Lake Erie, but because of strong winds and high waves it was moved half a mile (or more) away from transition to the inner harbor on the other side of the island. The race was wet suite legal and water was relatively clean and not too cold. I felt pretty good on the swim and as always did not push very hard. However one problem was that I zig-zagged quite a bit and had to get back to the proper position quite a few times during this swim. I did practice sighting in the pool and do not lose much speed when I sight, but I did not do it often enough and I think this contributed to getting off course. I passed few swimmers and few people passed me.

The best thing was that this was a time trial swim start. In other words, we did not start the heat all at once, but rather walked at our own pace thru the timing mat - two people at a time and your time starts when you cross the mat. This made for a comfortable start and helped to avoid the mess. This race was a little bit unique for me as I was not as nervous as usual. For whatever reason I felt pretty good and relaxed, waiting for the start.

Things to do for the next race:

• Keep working on swim technique and speed (drills, intervals, etc.)
• Do 400 and 800 tempo swims (for this race I only did tempos of up to 200 yards)
• Work harder during the swim in the race. I took this swim at moderate pace, but could do better next time.
• Do dry and wet warm-up before the race start (this time I could only do dry warm-up).

T1

Because the swim was moved over half a mile away from the transition, it took quite a bit of running to get to T1 - all bare feet on asphalt. However my T1 time was better than top 5 overall finishers of the race (!!). This was the first time I used the service offered by strippers - those people do not dance naked, they rather take your wet suite off in a matter of seconds. I ran quickly to the T1 and got on my bike in no time. As always I had my shoes clipped on and this helped to save time in transition. Bare feet in bike shoes - as always. I never use socks on the bike in triathlon races, but I would use socks for the "pure" bike race if I did one. Since I do not have a road bike, I can't really participate in "pure bike" road races. May be it is time to get a road bike so I can do it? Something to think about for 2014.

Bike

Bike was almost as flat as Eagleman race with very few small hills on the way. This was my first race ever when I had heart rate monitor and GPS on me. Here is the bike report from my Garmin watch - click to open interactive dashboard:

Overall I felt very good on the bike and did not go all out - saving some steam for the run. I did do several long rides of 2.5 to 4 hours and it helped a lot. However 99% of my bike training is on my recumbent bike, not even on the real bike, so it is hard to compete for the podium without training on the real bike and without intervals.

 The wind at times was extremely strong blowing from the side and some times into the face, so the bike time is a bit slower than expected, but still better than my last race. Notice that the average RPM on the bike is exactly 90! I passed a couple of hundred people on the bike and about 5 people passed me. Loved it.

T2

T2 was good and smooth. I definitely wanted to put on my socks and this contributed to slightly slower T2 time compared to top athletes. However it was totally worth few seconds. Here is the picture of transition area as it looked before the race:

Run

The run during the Eagleman back in June felt very very hard, so I was curious to see how it will go this time, considering that I was running quite well in training and shorter races. I started out at the pace of 7 min/mile, then involuntarily slowed down all the way to the crawling 9 min/mile towards the end of the race as you can see in this Garmin report (click for interactive dashboard):

The run felt good until about mile 5 and then it started to get harder and harder very quickly. However the air was relatively cool and there was no sun, so I kept running. I did walk on most of the aid stations, but never stopped in between. It felt better compared to the run at the Eagleman, but was still a very very hard run. I could say I more or less fell apart on the run. I watched GPS and in second half simply could not hold the pace at what I wanted it to be. In training I can run 13.1 miles with 7:30 min/mile pace, but this race was a minute slower than that. My full marathon pace was 7:45 min/mile back in late 2011, but I ran 4 times a week then and only 3 times a week with lower mileage now. Could that be a problem?

Things to do to improve the run:

• Longer tempo runs - faster than race pace - repeats of 2, 5, 8 miles. 
• Tempo runs race pace for 10 miles and above.
• Increase long runs to about 18 miles (up from the longest of 16 miles and average of 13 miles I did for this race).
• Participate in run races - in the past 30 yars I have only done one run race - Lake Erie Marathon back in 2011. May be I should do 5K, 10K, etc. There are many races in the Pittsburgh area. Need to have a look and plan for it.

 

 Nutrition

For breakfast 2.5 hours before the start had half a cup of almonds, banana and orange, slice of bread with a table spoon of peanut butter and strawberry jam, cup of green tea and then sipped water. Had half a cup of apple sauce.

I had 1.5 bottles of Gatorade on the bike and about 0.7 bottle on the run (at aid stations). Took gels every 40 minutes on the bike and run. Did not have to use restroom during the race and overall nutrition seemed to work well.

Logistics

Drove from Pittsburgh to Sandusky on Saturday morning - took 3 hours to get there. Slept in the car at the RV camping site on the back of the Cedar Point amusement park. It only took 5 minutes from that camping spot to the race start by car. The camping site office folks said I can just use their parking lot for free. The only problem was that it was noisy with all the amusement park rides and stuff up until about 11 pm. On the up side, this small camping site has free shower room, toilets, etc. All clean and nice. This is where I took shower after the race.

Two night before the race I did not sleep (bummer - never happened 2 night before). The night before the race I could not fall asleep on my own (again!) and had to take a risk with one tablet of Melatonin - never used it before. With this I got about 4 hours of sleep and woke up at 6am. Felt good - no residual effect from the tablet, so will definitely use it next time - will take one tablet about 3 hours before bed time on race night.

Oh yes, got this medal at the finish line (both sides shown):

Training and taper

Here is TrainingPeaks report on the training leading up to the race.My annual training plan was auto-generated by TrainingPeaks.com. You can see training hours on this dashboard (click on the image for full size picture).

Trip to Bratislava, Prague, Budapest and Moscow

The past two weeks were really exciting! It was planned weeks in advance and I could not wait to start this sequence of "roller coaster" events taking me from one place to another in a crazy fast pace.

It all started on Saturday, September 7, when I drove to Sandusky, Ohio for the Cedar Point Half Ironman race. The race itself took place on September 8th (race report to follow later). After the race on Sunday, I quickly took shower and barely had time to drive to Cleveland airport to board flight to Vienna, Austria. I knew I wont break 4 hours at this race, so I had no time to return to Pittsburgh in time for departure. On Monday, from Vienna I took a taxi to Bratislava, Slovakia. Worked there on Tuesday - meeting IBM customers and partners, and had 2 hours to walk around the historical center of the city. This was my second time in Bratislava and I enjoyed it as much as the first time. The city center is small, but very pretty as you can see on these pictures (click on the image to open Picasa album):

On Tuesday after having worked all day in Bratislava drove for 4 hours to Prague (on 2 weeks old BMW X6 car owned by Martin - the local IBM sales rep). In Prague I worked on Wednesday running education session for IBMers and met one large IBM customer in the afternoon. Then on Wednesday evening flew to Budapest, Hungary and hosted education session for IBM business partners on Friday morning. I had 6 hours before my next flight from Budapest to Moscow. My new friend Balint, who is IBMer in Budapest gave an amazing tour of the city. Looking at these pictures I am sure you would agree that Budapest is totally awesome!

After that tour of the city, on Friday night I flew to Moscow and worked part of the week in the IBM office in the beautiful downtown while spent weekends with my parents. On Saturday we had 14 relatives who came to visit us. Some of these folks I have not seen for 18 years!!! Here are few photos from the mushroom hunt in Russia:

Came back to Pittsburgh this Monday and now back to work. Ohh well...

Race report - Sprint Triathlon in North Park, Pittsburgh (Janney and YMCA)

On August 11, 2013 I raced Sprint Triathlon in North Park. This is only 15 minutes from my home and back in 2011 this was my first ever triathlon race (photos here). I could not wait to see how much have I improved (hopefully) over the past 2 years as the course is exactly the same and represents a perfect way to measure progress. I won in my 40-44 age group (37 participants) and went faster than the first place in 35-39 age group (29 participants), which was a nice bonus. I was 14th overall out of 365 competitors. The official results can be found here: http://www.runhigh.com/2013RESULTS/R081113AA.html.

Comparing 2013 results to my 2011 race, here are the differences:

	2011	2013	2 year improvement
Swim (700 yards)	00:18:21	00:13:48	25% (4m 33s)
Bike (12.5 miles)	00:33:17	00:32:59	1% (18s)
Run (3.1 miles)	00:23:04	00:21:42	6% (1m 22s)
Total	01:14:42	01:08:29	8% (6m 13s)

I am quite happy with the result, however one major thing that needs improvement is the control of pre-race anxiety. We had a fun outdoor party in the backyard of our house the day before the race and the last guest left at about midnight. I went to bed at 30 min past midnight, but unfortunately I could not get any sleep that night. I may have slept for about 30 minutes total, but most of the time I just laid there with my eyes shut in bed and was thinking about the race, etc. This indeed is very annoying as usually I am a very good sleeper and it takes me two minutes to fall asleep on a normal night. The funny thing is that I do not normally get nervous before any of my customer meetings or other big events, except for races. I did not sleep at all before the Half-Ironman race back in June and now this repeated all over again. Must do some research and learn how to control my pre-race nerves - warm milk, boring book, meditation, may be even some mild pills? This has got to be solvable. Right after the gun goes off at the start of the race I am having a lot of fun and am loving it, but those nasty 15 to 20 hours before the race start are the worst part of triathlon - for me anyway...

Swim

We swam 700 yards in the outdoor 50 yards swimming pool in North Park. Had two swimmers on each end of the lane going counterclockwise. Total of 4 people in each lane. The faster swimmer goes first and the slower swimmer goes right after him. As time goes by, all 4 people swim in the same direction keeping to the right of the swim lane and passing slower swimmers on the left. I was passed twice by two faster guys, one of whom was Drew Sapp - the overall winner of the previous Sprint race where I was second overall. What are the chances of that happening that we both will be in the same lane on the same end of the pool?? Wow!! The water was cold and the swim was wetsuite legal. I decided to take my wetsuite the last second before I left home and was I glad I did! Not because the water was too cold, but because it helped me be so much faster in the pool. I may have lost only 10 seconds for taking the wetsuit off at the T1 transition, but I am sure it was more than offset by the speed benefit I got from wearing it. Lesson I learned from other folks - ALWAYS take your wetsuite with you no matter the race. I did not push all out on the swim since it gives me very little extra speed, but takes disproportionally more energy, so I swam with moderate pace treating it almost like a warmup. Perhaps when I swim better I can race swim part of the triathlon, for now it is a warmup for me and I do not feel I am racing it.

Speaking of warmup - because I did arrive at about 6am and was almost the first athlete to arrive, I had run easy 1 mile warmup. This was the first time I had ever done any kind of warmup before the race. I think this was well worth it and need to do it more. However I only swam 100 meters warmup in the pool and I do need to increase that part of the warmup.

Bike

On the bike we did 12.5 miles - 5 loops in North Park around baseball fields with one seep hill and few rolling hills. I pushed almost all out on the bike, except this time I did not go all out on the big hill. I still pushed it, but saved energy for rolling hills. Biking felt good and I passed few people, however few people passed me - those must have been some of the folks from the top 14 group. Since I do not train with short distance intensity on the bike, I did not expect to have the best bike split anyway. What I got is pretty reasonable, however I was surprised that my bike split improvement over 2011 was only 1%. I was hoping it would be more.

Run

The run was 3,1 miles - almost all of it on the trail under the shade of trees with rolling hills and about 3 relatively steep hills.The run was pretty challenging and I pushed as hard as I could and kept thinking that I need to maintain high cadence. I did try to save some energy for the last mile and started increasing my pace towards the end and ran completely all out effort in the last few hundred yards. Nothing gives me more motivation than hearing finish line sounds or seeing it. One thing I need to learn better is pacing and more intensity in workouts. In training several times I did up to 7 x 800 yard repeats at about 6 to 6:30 pace with 400 yards recovery at 8:30 pace. Perhaps need to do longer tempo work. I only did a handful tempo run workouts this summer - for instance 5 miles at 7:30 pace. Need to improve pace on those and may be do 3 mile tempo runs?

Nutrition

Since this was a Sprint race I did not eat nor drink during the race, but had plenty of fruit and rice the day before. On the morning of the race I had a banana, orange, bread with peanut butter and 15 minutes before start ate 1 GU gel (100cal). This worked well.

Summary

Great race, loved it and it is always nice to win in my age group and some :-). Met my PTC friends and got more race experience. At the finish line I was nicely surprised that my wife came to meet me there - I did not know she was coming to the race and it was such a nice end of the race! I remember in 2011 when my whole family was cheering I pushed very hard on the bike - every time I passed by the place they were sitting and I think that really contributed to my fast bike split in 2011. This year with no "personal cheerleaders" I just went with whatever intensity I felt, except for those last 50 yards at the finish. Here are photos right after the finish.

Race report - Sprint Triahlon Race in Youngstown, Ohio on July 21, 2013

Yesterday I raced sprint tri event in Youngstown, OH. I won overall last year (last year race report here) and yesterday took second place overall. Here are race results (total participants 98):

(click to see larger image)

Yesterday I had the fastest bike split overall and compared to my last year race I have improved swim, bike, T1 and T2. However my run time was longer, but I believe this might be due to the fact that they changed to run course and some people believe they have made it 3.5 miles (almost half a mile longer than last year). I am pretty happy with the result, but looks like I have to really work on my swim if I want to win this next year. The guy who won 1st place this year is 23 years old and was a collegiate swimmer and now aquatics director at the YMCA :-).

Interesting week before the race

The entire week before this race I spent on a business trip in Northern Italy. I flew to Milan on Saturday and ran seminars for IBM as well as met number of customers in Verona, Venice, Parma, Milan, Florence. This past week I drove in a car total of about 1400 km and traveled on the train about 620 km.That makes it about 2,000 km in one week on the ground plus about 12,000 miles in the air. What is worse is that my hotel did not even have a fitness center :-(. On a positive side - there was a nice lake near the hotel and I was able to run three times last week. Three times in the morning I did 30 min cross training session inside of the hotel room (I pack rubber bands with me), but later during the week I found a fitness center and visited it once - so I was able to swim once for one hour and did 40 minutes on the bike. These were the only workouts last week. I guess you could call it "taper" if you wish :-).

Despite having been to one of the most historically dense areas of the world, I have not had any time to see Milan, nor any other cities listed above, except for 2 hours in Florence that I had before the train back to my hotel. Thanks to my IBM colleague who took me around the city for a beautiful walking sightseeing tour. You can see photos from Florence in this photo album:

(click on the image to open picasa album)

Unfortunately I did not have a chance to see Parma, Verona, Milan nor Venice since my customer offices were just barely outside of the city and I had no time to go see any of the touristic places. It was awkward to be within 10 km of Venice and not being able to go into town... Oh well, next time. However I did taste some fine Italian cuisine, including some *real* nice pizza in Milan, risotto with Parmesan in Parma, seafood pasta in Venice, and last not least, famous Florence's t-bone steak (see pics in the album above). All of these were super nice dishes, except for risotto. I now know what NOT to order :-).

In Florence I had a meeting with the oldest bank in the world. This bank is over 300 years old and they have mini-museum with financial records where this bank lent money to kings and alike 300+ years ago.

This past Saturday I flew back to Pittsburgh (about 14 hours travel time), arrived in the house at 7pm, ate and went to bed at 8pm and slept until 3am. Got up at 3 am, went to garage to pack the car with race gear, ate, woke up my older son Misha and at 5am we left for the race.

At 6:15am we arrived at the YMCA, both Misha and I setup our bikes. Misha was racing in his 14 years age group and won 1st place!!!

Swim

My wave started at 7:18am. The swim was 500 yards in the pool. I swam steady, but did not go all out as my all out translates into huge energy spending, but negligible speed increase. When I left the pool there were still few folks in it. Each lane had two swimmers and I left my lane before the other guy. If I am not the last out of the pool - I am happy :-). Being first out of my lane is even better :-).

N e e d   t o   w o r k   o n   m y   s w i m :-)).

Bike

The bike was 12 miles long with 80% of that in the nice city park on hills. I love hills on the bike!! About 5 minutes after I left T1 I saw a particular cyclist in front of me. That was the same guy who I passed last year in this same race (his name is Bryan Ridder). Last year we battled back and forth during the bike and I made few minutes on him on my bike split. This year it was even more interesting. We passed each other probably 10 times. I would pass him on the hill and he would catch up and pass me on the flat. This was very motivating and fun! Probably pushed me to get the fastest bike split of the day :-) However I must say that having only biked once in the preceding week made me not feel my biking legs as I usually do.

Run

Officially run was 3 miles long, but some folks with GPSs reported between 3 to 3.5 miles. The run course was different from last year. First 1.5 miles of the run are going up the moderate hill and feel quite hard. Then you make 2 laps on the track under the roof and from there it all goes down the hill. This year I felt a lot better on the run than I did a year ago, but now I wonder if that is because I did not push hard enough?

One problem was that some sections of the run were a little confusing and despite having many volunteers on the run course (thanks YMCA!!!), there were still few areas where I was not quite sure where to go and after having ran for a bit I would see the arrows on the pavement to reassure I was on the right path. Ouch... Later I heard some runners complained that they lost a minute or two because of this.

In any case, I do need to do more speed work and such. Run is the hardest part of the event for me and it is perhaps the most important for me at the moment. More important then the swim as there is a lot more time on the run compared to the swim. Plus I know how to improve my run, but I doubt I can make much progress in improving my swim by any significant margin...

Summary

Overall this was a great race and I enjoyed it. One of the most important things for me this time was that I was so busy with travel, logistics, etc. that I did not have much time left for pre-race anxiety.

The best part of the even was to have my son with me and even better - to watch him win his 1st place.

Photos from the race:

(click to open the album)

Race report - EagleMan 70.3 Triathlon - my first Half Ironman

Eagleman 2013 was my first Half Ironman race and it was a "B" race for me - I wanted to try it out and see what it is like to race this distance. 70.3 distance is Half Ironman distance and includes 1.2 miles swim (1.93 km), 56 miles bike (90.1 km) and 13.1 miles run (21.1 km). On June 9, 2013 I finished the race with the time of 5:20:32. Total number of people participated in this race was about 2200 and they came from 48 states and from 20 countries, including USA, Russia, Canada, Mexico, France, UK, Netherlands, Brazil, Ukraine, New Zealand, Belgium and few other countries.

This was a great event, but there were few things that did not go as I planned them. More on this later. Full race results can be found here, but here is the analysis of my times:

Swim

Looking at the data above you can see that my swim is lagging - 58% means slower than average swimmer in this race. The race was wet suite legal this year and I did wear mine. At the start line of the swim (see virtual line between two buoys)  I started on the very right hand side - out of the main crowd.

I did not go hard at the swim - kept moderate pace thru the whole thing and did sighting every ten or so strokes. Did not get hit hard by anyone, but there were many times I got touched or pushed by those who was passing me. I did pass few folks myself (yay!). Water was not clear and you could not see anything just few inches deep into the water. The last leg of the swim went parallel to the shore line and it was shallow - you could easily stand on the soil and be shoulder deep in the water. You can see some folks are in fact standing or walking on this last leg of the swim.

Things to do for the next race:

• Learn better swim technique
• Do longer tempo swims (for this race I only did tempos of 100 yards)
• Work a bit harder during the swim in the race. I took this swim a little too easy.
• Get new anti-fog goggles for the race (mine are two years old and fogged too much)
• Get the wet suite on me at least 10 minutes before the wave start (I finished getting into it about 30 seconds before start - ouch...)

T1

Transition worked quite well, but it was very muddy because it rained hard two days before the race. The run from T1 to the bike mount was almost like a swamp. Perhaps I should have carried my bike in the air, instead of rolling it on that mud. I did keep my bike shoes on the pedals and ran bare feet and then mounted on the bike at the exit. This was easy to do and worked well - it always does.

Things to do for the next race:

• Run a bit faster before and after T1
• Put a lot more sunscreen on myself before getting into the wet suite -  and need to consider doing more sunscreen after taking the wet suite off? Not sure what is the best practice there...

Bike

The bike course was almost totally flat. Pavement was pretty good most of the time and in some places it was excellent new asphalt. Traffic was on the road, but police kept control of the traffic and every intersection and they did a great job at that. 56 miles was one big loop out and back from transition area. Aid stations were setup very well and nicely equipped with water and Gatorade. You throw your bottle away and they give you a new bottle of either water or Gatorade Perform. I carried two bottles with me on the bike, but could have carried only one to save weight since I knew this was a well managed race. In a not so well managed one will need two or three bottles on the bike. I went with moderate pace since I did not want to go all out and not be prepared for the run part. Initially passed a lot of older age groupers, but later those 30-40 folks passed me. Some with very high speed (I almost wondered if those were pros doing second lap :-).

For this race I only wore a watch and decided not to take GPS nor heart rate monitor. I wanted to go by perceived exertion and overall it worked for me. This was a practice race anyway. One big problem was that I have trained 99.99% of the time on my recumbent bike in my office at home and have only ridden bike with wheels ONCE since September 2012. This means that for the past 9 month I have not sat on the bike saddle, nor did I practice aerodynamic position, nor did I do intervals. All I did for 9 month on that recumbent bike was steady state - anywhere between 150 to 220 Watts between 1 hour to a max 2.5 hrs. This made me sitting on the saddle very uncomfortable and I was constantly shifting my butt back and forth, up and down to avoid sore spots...

Overall I felt very good on the bike for the first 2 hours and the last half an hour got progressively harder and I feel like I probably dropped some speed.

Things to do for the next race:

• Ride real bike at least few times before the race
• Do tempo and intervals on the bike above race pace, not just steady state
• Do long rides on the bike up to 3.5 hours

T2

T2 worked well as well. I decided to put my socks on and it took some time. It was very muddy and I am glad I had a towel in my T2 to wipe mud off my feet. I am glad I did not forget to bring a race belt this time.

Run

Run is always the hardest part of the triathlon, but this one (despite being totally flat and not very hot - about 75 F) - this was very very hard for me. I felt like my run totally failed in this race as I expected to run at least my marathon pace (7:45 min/mile) - considering this was half-marathon distance, I was hoping I could maintain such pace, but due to an injury 7 weeks ago I dropped run volume and intensity and suffered badly on the run in the race - not being able to go faster. The good news is that my foot did not cause any troubles and at least I ran pain free. Hopefully I gain back my speed for the September Rev3 race.I literally ran like at no time before - from one aid station to the other and walked every one of them (ouch!). Back in 2011 during the marathon I did not walk once. This race was very different. I felt like somebody pulled be back and did not let me run well. It was hard to move legs. Did I go too hard on the bike? Not sure. I do not think nutrition was a problem either. I just felt like I was finishing marathon from the first mile of the run. I ran with slow pace more or less fine (it was hard, but not too bad), but had absolutely no strengths to increase the pace. It finally got harder in the last 4 miles where I walked three times - about 50 yards each time (on top of walking aid stations). I consider this run to be a total fail and most likely cause is the lack of volume and intensity in the last 7 weeks before the race.

Things to do before the next race:

• Need to increase run volume and intensity in preparation for the next Half Ironman race. I am thinking to adopt marathon training schedule from Hal Higdon (have not decided which one to take, but I want to keep it to 3 times per week - perhaps 4 times).

Logistics

This race was in Cambridge, MD and I drove 6 hours from Pittsburgh with a friend of mine (his name is Roman too :-). He took every one of these pictures.

I just realized that I do not have one picture of Roman from this trip - he was behind the camera all the time :-(. We camped next to the high school and there were about 50 other tents setup there.

The weather was nice and everything would have been perfect, except for the fact that I simply could not sleep all friggin night. Damn nerves. Some folks say meditation may help - will need to try it next time. Not having sleep all night does not help. I felt well rested on the morning of the race, but I suspect it could have been even better if I slept. I got off bed at 4am and started packing tent, ate, went to the restroom three times (on top of two gazillion times the day before). We left camp site at 5:10am, drove to the middle school where we took the shuttle bus to the transition area.

Transition area was very well marked.

 View on the Chesapeake Bay.

 

Do you see Andy Potts in the photo above? He won 1st place overall. Super nice guy - I saw him the day before at the expo. At the podium you also see Greg and Laura Benett, Mirinda Carfrae (she cramped and DNFed), Meredith Kessler (she crashed and DNFed) and few other folks.

 The night before the race we were required to setup bikes, but the rest of the transition stuff would be setup early morning.

At 6:30am they finished body markings and at 6:45am the first wave of pros started the race. My start was 7:30am. The hardest part is waiting for the start. Need to learn to control emotions. The second hardest part is waiting in these long lines for the toilet use. I went another two times right before the race, but the good thing - did not have to use toilet during the race itself (yay!!).

After the race was over we got together at the PTC tent, ate, relaxed and lied to each other about the race. :-)

Nutrition

For breakfast I had orange, peanut butter sandwich, few almonds, water, few pieces of honeydew.

Had one GU gel 15 min before the race start, was sipping water and Gatorade for 2 hours before the race start.

On the bike I ate one almond bar 20 min into the bike and then ate total of three GU gels evenly spaced. Total fluid intake was about 30 to 36 oz of Gatorade Perform.

On the run I drank water, Gatorade and Coke every one to two miles. Total fluid intake on the run was about 30oz.

No stomach issues, but I got tired of Gatorade taste.

I think overall nutrition worked well and I am not sure if anything needs to change - perhaps carry my own drinks on the bike and find something better than Gatorade?

Pre-race taper

My annual training plan was auto-generated by TrainingPeaks.com and it called for 16 hour sof training two weeks before the race, 9 hours of training one week before the race and 6 hours of training on the week of the race. I followed that. Had total rest from sport on Friday and Saturday. Did absolutely nothing that would increase heart rate. Here is what my dashboard in TrainingPeaks.com looks like today - see red mark - that is the day of the race: