California 70.3

Despite the always cold water and frequently cold weather, I enjoy racing "Ralphs" as I will always call it, because it has great competition. This year was no exception, although the air and water temps weren't as cold as they have been other years.

Friday morning I went to the pool for an easy swim. Unfortunately, walking from my car, still half asleep, I slipped in some water from the lawn sprinklers at the Rose Bowl. I kind of did the splits and I caught my toenail on the concrete and tweaked my back trying to stay upright. Moments later when I dove into the water my back REALLY went into spasm.

I had to cut my workout short because it hurt to swim. I then had to bear with the pain while treating patients at work that morning.

After lunch Kylie and I headed to Oceanside to register for the race and walk around the expo. We were also able to chat a bit with a number of friends, including ironclm and a few slowtwitchers, MarkyV, and a couple friends of mine from Canada who Kylie had met at Cervelo brainbike recently, Tereza Macel and Chris Bastie.

Afterwards, I called John Martinez from Coastal Sport and Wellness to find a chiropractor to work on my back because it hurt any time I rotated my neck or upper back. His chiropractor was not in the office that day so he recommended Elite Care in Encinitis. Fortunately, Dr. Rich was able to squeeze me into their schedule and provide some relief.

We then headed to our host extrordinaire's John's house. We had a good evening hanging out and eventually heading off to bed.

After much tossing and turning I finally fell asleep lying on an ice pack. In the morning we got up and headed to the race site. I made the final bike preparations and rode to the transition area and got ready to race.

I was in an earli-ish wave so very soon it was time to head to the water. As a pleasant surprise the water wasn't as cold as anticipated so I actually didn't really need the neoprene cap I wore. I had also worn arm warmers under my wetsuit to help keep me warm on the bike. I didn't anticipate though, how heavy the arm warmers would be when they were wet. Despite my heavy arms I had a decent swim of 27:21.

After a quick transition I headed off on the bike. I wore my arm warmers, and a pair of 99cent gardening gloves on the bike and was never cold.

I had been wooried about large packs on the bike as the first three age groups were M25-29, M40-44 and M35-39. Fortunately, this was one of the lonliest rides I have had in a half IM.

Just before the tunnel I heard a noise as my water bottle containing my spare tubular, C02 and pitstop came loose. I stopped and grabbed it so no one would hit it and crash. Fortunately, just past the tunnel there was a tent belonging to our tri club Inland Inferno. I threw the whole thing at the tent and yelled for someone to take it home with them.

I continued along the the front side of the course and soon realized that we had a much different wind than normal. I was heading north at 27+ mph at an easy effort on low watts. Sure enough once we turned south onto the hilly backside of the course we had a headwind into our faces the whole way. I developed a couple shadows here that stuck with me for the rest of the ride but there were less people around than I had seen earlier in the course.

On Vandegrift where there is usually a big headwind it wasn't so bad this year. Overall I felt consistent through this ride. My average watts were 219 and my normalized watts were 237. Going back just now, I checked and my watts up to the first climb were 221 and 237NP, so I held exactly the same NP on the first and second half of the bike ;-) My time was 2:39 which was about 10 minutes slower than I expected due to the wind.

I got off the bike and immediately felt my run legs beneath me. I actually had to keep slowing myself down as I knew I did not have the run miles recently to hold that pace for 13 miles. Despite trying to get myself to slow down I knew the second half of this run would be tough when I went through the turnaround at 42 minutes - oops ;-)


The second lap did slow down some but the worst part was how sore my feet got due to the concrete surface combined with my wornout race shoes. I want to thank everyone who was cheering me on out there, you all helped greatly. I probably didn't acknowledge very many people on that second lap as I was digging down and focused on finishing that lap. Run time was 1:29.

Overall I went 4:41, about 4 minutes slower than last year but I moved from about 30th in my AG to 6th, showing how much tougher it was out there this year.

Kylie got a few great photos including the one above of me at about mile 7 and the one below where Craig Alexander had moved ahead of Any Potts with about half a mile to go before Andy outsprinted him at the end by only seconds!