Oceanside Race Report--finally!

Sorry to take so long--a lot of factors conspired to slow me down, but here it is:


2011 Ironman California (Oceanside) 70.3
2011 Race Report #1: April 2nd

Background

My first triathlon of the 2011 season and my 101st in my career. This is my second shot at Oceanside, having raced it in 2010 and qualified for Kona 2010 there. I’m back racing Ironman XC but know that I will not qualify for Kona this year due to the XC rule changes (no over 50 slot this year). This is also my first triathlon since Kona some six months ago.

My principal competitive goal in 2011 is to race my best IM ever at Ironman Arizona in November and in the process re-qualify for Kona. Since, IMAZ is over 200 days after Oceanside, I am not in Long Course shape on this April morning. I will not start IM specific training until August 1st—16 weeks in front of my 2011 “A” race.

I’m here racing with my long-time friend, Bill Price, who is doing his first H-IM. His family and Judy and Anders have travelled to cheer us on. Pre-race festivities included dinner with Heather Fuhr, Michelle Jones and Chris Leigh plus a breakfast with Jordan Rapp and Lindsey Corbin.

Since my principal objective was to finish safely and perhaps beat my time from 2010, I had very little pre-race stress. I slept well and did all of my usual pre-race activities, which I won’t bore you with in this report.

Race morning dawns a comfortable 58 degrees with an overcast ski and modest winds. The water is a very comfortable 62 degrees.




The Swim

The Oceanside swim is in the protected waters of the Oceanside harbor. I think it’s a relatively fast H-IM swim. The salt-water is buoyant and the breakwater does a good job of keeping the waters calm. There is always a lot of pre-race discourse about the cold-water but at 62 degrees, I think it’s just about a perfect wetsuit-legal swim temperature. With over 2000 competitors in a relatively tight swimming space it does get crowded and being in the 12th wave I knew I would have to wend my way through multiple prior waves of slower swimmers.

Last year, I was in better swim shape at this point in the calendar. I swam 33:07 in 2010 with an average HR of 152 bpm. This was good enough for 86 %-tile in my AG and 77 %-tile OA. Fitness wise, I knew I was slower this year but without the need to focus on qualifying for Kona this year, I though I could go a bit harder than the admittedly “easy” effort last year.

When it was time for my wave to go I swam the 50 or so yards out to the swim start and positioned myself off to the right by the boats. I settled into place with just 45 seconds until the gun and started my watch a couple of seconds later. The gun went and I saw that my watch was 27 seconds in and knew that I would need to adjust my future time splits by that amount.

I felt good and had plenty of clear water out to the first turn buoy, which I’d guess was about 300 yards into the race. As we turned NW out towards the breakwater wall, I tried to find feet to slot in behind. This proved to be a generally unproductive activity as I could never find a set of feet that were strong, steady and straight.

As I approached the 2nd turn buoy I began to notice considerable chop—something that wasn’t there in 2010. It wasn’t bad by any means but something that had to be managed.

I made the 2nd turn and swam straight into the chop—this definitely slowed things down (in fact my analysis indicates that the overall swim was about 30-60 seconds slower this year for comparable efforts due to the chop). I turned back towards home around the 3rd turn buoy and things settled down quickly. I was way off to the right—off the buoy line—by the breakwater wall and swimming all by myself. It was much easier to see this year as the sky was very overcast.

As I cruised towards home, I felt very comfortable but had the nagging sense that I wasn’t “humping” it. I felt like I should push harder but rationalized the thought away by reflecting on my concept of this race being a “spring training” , warm-up race.

Near the final (and only RH) turn buoy, I looked over and saw my bud Bill go streaming by. Bill is an outstanding swimmer and he had started a full 7 minutes behind me. I yelled to him and he lifted his head and greeted me. I also noticed that he was right on the tail of Kim McDonald, a fantastic swimmer and the guy that always qualifies for Kona in this race. It looked like Bill was going to slow down to say a few words but I yelled at him to go. Go he did and in fact ended up posting the fastest swim time of any M55-59 with something in the 27s.

I cruised on in and hit the timing mat with an elapsed time of 35:33. My HR averaged 151 bpm. Here is how 2011 compared competitively to 2010:

2010 AG place: 25/161 (86th %-tile)
2011 AG place: 36/131 (73rd %-tile)

2010 OA place: 507/2171 (77th %-tile)
2011 OA place: 689/2192 (69th %-tile)

This is, of-course, mildly disappointing. I knew I wasn’t in as good swim shape but I had hoped to swim harder and get a time closer to 34 minutes and even perhaps close to my 2010 time. This was wishful thinking as my effort in this race is best characterized as relatively uninspired. My tactical mastery of the course was poor. While the cost was only a minute or two, I have to give myself a pretty low grade on this swim. That said, I do have reasonably decent swim fitness to build on in the many training weeks that await me in 2011.

Transition One

Pretty uneventful. I caught and passed my bud Bill who seemed to be intent on taking his time in T1. I took a total of 4:36 this year with an average HR of 157. This was good enough for 30th in my AG (78th %-tile). Last year I managed T1 in 4:19 with an average HR of 165. Not a big deal but my “dogging it” tone for 2011 seemed to be well established at this point in the race.

The Bike

Bike fitness wise, I entered this race considerably less prepared from a Long Course bike perspective. That said, last year I had ridden very conservative as I was pretty confident in my ability to snag a Kona slot with that approach. While I was definitely less LC bike fit this year, I have been working on my sub one hour bike ride speed and I thought if I went for it more this year that I might be able to replicate or even beat last year’s split.

I won’t go into a lot of detail on the course (see LY’s report for that) but over the first 24.5 mile-section it’s a lot of rollers and flats. A fair amount of turns. It’s a reasonably fast section of the course and I expected to average close to 23 mph during this section. Last year, with my conservative approach I had averaged 22.2 mph during this first section.

This year I immediately noticed considerably more wind. I kept looking at my SRM and thought that my power was looking good but my speed was low. I also felt “off”. I had a bad stomach and congestion for a few days before the race and I didn’t feel quite right. About 10 miles or so into the race we had a short out and back and I soon saw my bud Bill-just 30 sec or so back. This surprised me as I would have expected him to be 2 or minutes behind me. Either I was having a poor bike leg or he was over-cooking the early stages (or both as it turned out).

The wind continued and seemed to intensify and I hit the first timing point only averaging 20.52 mph—I was already almost 4 minutes behind last year at 24.5 miles in. I checked my average power and saw I was right on 200 watts—which puzzled me—I should have been going faster.

Next came the climbs and things steadily deteriorated. Going up the first big climb the winds were howling and I was reduced to crunching out a 6-mph grind. Some people were walking up the climb and it was clear to me that conditions were considerably tougher than last year.

I wended my way through the climbs and eventually started making my way along Basoline road. I felt out of it. I knew I was slow—really, really slow but for some reason it didn’t seem to matter. I saw a lot of draft packs and even that didn’t get me riled.

I was really focused on adequately hydrating on the bike—I think that will be a key for me at IMAZ—and I did a pretty good job as I peed at least 5 or 6 times during the ride. I might even have overdone it a bit.

Eventually I returned to the harbor and recorded a 2:57:33 split with an average HR of 146. In 2010 I had finished the bike with a 2:43:44 and an average HR of 148. Strangely enough, my average power last year was 174 watts and this year it averaged 202 watts. My cadence was 74 last year and 73 this year. Competitively I was 88th/80th %-tile (AG/OA) last year and this year I was a very disappointing 66th/64th %-tile.

What to make of this conflicting data? Here are my thoughts:

-Competitively this bike split was a disaster. Normally I’m in the top 5-10% of my AG and OA on the bike. Oceanside is not my kind of course with all of its climbing so I expect to do a bit worse than that but this year’s numbers were dramatically worse than last year. At the end of the day, from a competitive standpoint, I had a horrible bike split—probably the worse of my career.

-I analyzed competitors that rode in both 2010 and 2011 and discovered that most folks were 4-6 minutes slower (due to the wind I’m guessing). I was about 14 minutes slower so this explains only some of the time difference.

-My power was dramatically higher in 2011 than 2010. This is at first blush, satisfying as I had intended this to be so. However, this dramatically higher power raises the question of inaccurate power measurements comparing 2010 to 2011. This may be true but I have no way to know for sure.

-My guess is that the power measurements are in fact true. So why is my performance so much worse given the higher average power? I’m speculating here but my guess is that it’s a function of three things:
-I’m heavier this year than last year and this impacted my P/W ratio enough to kill me on the hills.
-My hip still bothered me this year forcing me to sit up and stretch quite a bit, and I was probably less aero on average (position wise) and this hurt me on the straights and descents. My highest speed this year was only 38.2 mph vs. 44.5 last year.
-I think I rode a very poor tactical race and squandered all the extra power I was producing—I just wasn’t into it this year. I also did not push any of the descents—I didn’t see the point of adding more risk to the ride.

So who knows for sure what really happened. All I know is that I probably rode close to the worse bike split of my career to date!

Transition Two

Not much to report here except that despite peeing as much as I did on the ride I still really needed to empty my bladder—one of my pre-race objectives to really hydrate on the bike was apparently met! I hit all four of the port-johns near the exit of transition—all were unlocked and occupied by other dudes of the same mind (or at least bladder).

I said the heck with it and exited T2 with a transition time of 2:36 and an average HR of 141bpm. I was 2:22 last year with an average HR of 151, which is another indication of the lack of stress I was applying in this race. I was 26th (81st %-tile in my AG). I was leaving T2 with my cumulative time already past 3:40 and knowing I was guaranteed a pretty unsatisfying final race time.

The Run

My principal focus as I exited T2 was on finding a place “to take a leak”. I finally found my relief shortly before the mile 1 mark in an unoccupied Porta-John. I spent a solid (and very satisfying) 30 seconds or so in there and then set back out on my way.

I clocked an 8:58 and an average HR of 150bpm. I decided that there wasn’t much point of running hard and that I would try to average 9 minutes or so as this is what I hope to be able to run at IMAZ in November. This pace felt pretty reasonable and my next two miles were: 8:59 (153) and 8:56 (154).

At the turnaround just past 3 miles I noticed that I had been running into a headwind and with the change of direction it felt easier to run. I decided that felt pretty decent and that I could probably pick it up a bit. I set an upper limit of 160 bpm on my HR and picked it up a bit. The next four miles were:

Mile 4: 8:40 (155)
Mile 5: 8:39 (158)
Mile 6: 8:47 (156)
Mile 7: 8:38 (155)
A couple of other notes about these 4 miles. I saw my bud Bill somewhere between 4 and 5 and he looked good and in good spirits—I was thrilled as it looked like he was going to make it, after just 3 months of training. Just past mile 6, and before crossing the bridge back towards the transition area, I saw Anders who had driven down from Manhattan Beach after his last day of work (and the associated festivities) the day before—he was operating on 2 hours of sleep. After the 1st lap turnaround, I saw him, Judy and the Prices again and they cheered me on. Anders asked how I felt and I said fine—I was just cruising 8:30-9:00 minute miles and I told him I’d probably do a 5:40 (yuch!). He offered encouragement and off I went to grind through the last 6 miles.

I was surprised to clock a 9:01 (154) in mile 8. It felt like I was still working as hard as before but I recognized that sign when your pace and HR begin to fall. My legs were suddenly very heavy and my left knee began to ache a great deal (time for more Syn-Visc injections—it’s been 8 months).

Despite this, I tried to pick it up in the 9th mile and was “rewarded” with a 9:29 (151). At that point, I realized my lack of Long Course training was now becoming evident and I set it on cruise control:

Mile 10: 9:45 (150)
Mile 11: 9:37 (150)
Mile 12: 9:43 (147)
Mile 13: 9:37 (152)

I jogged across the line with a run split of 1:59:50 (60th %-tile in my AG, 53rd %-tile OA). My total race time was 5:40:09. I was 45th in my AG (66th %-tile) and 801st OA (64th %-tile). It was my second slowest H-IM (out of 15)—only the suffer-fest of Eagleman 2008 was slower.

Judy was there to give me my finisher’s medal and she and Anders accompanied me into transition and then down to the harbor edge where I waded in to cool down my legs for 5-10 minutes. We all went back up in time to cheer Bill in just below his time goal of 6 hours—a great debut H-IM for him!

Post Race Observations

- This is a disappointing race ultimately. I knew I didn’t have the LC base training under my belt, but I still thought I would go faster—I thought maybe as fast as 5:10. Competitively, I was very mediocre as well.
- It’s been a while since I had a good H-IM. I haven’t been under 5 hours since 2007 and my 4:43 at White Lake that year seems like a distant memory. I really need to turn in another “fast” H-IM and I’ll be anxious to do so at Steelhead in August.
- I finished the race and had a great time. That is something I do really appreciate and don’t take for granted. I know there are a lot of people who can’t do what I did today so I’m thankful for the experience and all the support of my friends and family. A couple of days latter, Anders and I climbed Mt. Baldy together (6.5 hours, 4000 feet of vertical, 13 miles). I’m pretty sure I was “slow” there as well but no one was racing us and I took simple joy in an objective met and a job well done. I recognize that while I have definite competitive goals that I’m striving to hit, I have to just appreciate what I’m able to do on any given day—even if it is a lot slower than I would like.
- I didn’t pay tribute to my father as I crossed the line. This year I am dedicating my season to his memory and I felt like his memory deserved a better effort from me—which I will deliver in my next race.
- I do think I have a pretty decent fitness base despite my performance here. I was pretty sick for the next 10 days after Oceanside so this probably impacted my performance. I have a lot of work to do but I don’t see any reason why I can’t be pretty competitive this year—at least by the summer.
- I have some equipment stuff to take care of. I chose not to use my disc because it seemed to have a slow leak in the tubular tire on race morning. I probably need to be refit on my bike. I need to get my knee re-“lubed” and I’ll need to keep rehabbing my left hip.

Onward and Upward!

Life Me Up. Let Me Go.