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Wildflower Long Course Race Report

My plan was to go with a “more photos, less words” theme for this race report. But if you’ve been reading my reports over the years, you know that’s not really my style. So, it looks like you get “more photos, more words”. Lucky you!

One of the most exciting parts of Wildflower was that it was our first race representing the Pablove Triathlon Team in our new kick-ass kits. We also had Pablove stickers to put on our bikes and helmets but I decided to take it a step further and on Wednesday, I visited Brandon at Bolt Barbers for a little hair art.

That evening, I met Mike at his place, then we picked up Warren and got a send-off from his brother Ken.

Then we drove up to Paso Robles to spend the night at the Travelodge. I wouldn’t call the Travelodge a “dump”, but that’s not a huge stretch! My favorite part was the Spanish serenade we got at 6:30 Thursday morning from the dudes hanging out outside our room.

Once up we had breakfast at the Cowgirl Cafe in Paso Robles.

Then we hit Trader Joe’s for a giant cart-full of groceries.

And then we drove to the race site at Lake San Antonio. We walked around there for a little bit while we waited for Pete, Kimberly and Bruce to get in so we could get into the rental house. The race site was still being set up and there weren’t very many people around.

The house Pete found for us was great! It was about 20 minutes from the race and had amazing views of Lake Nacimiento.

Once we unloaded all our crap, Mike, Pete, Kimberly, Bruce and I went for a little hilly run on a dirt road just outside the housing development where we were staying. After making lunch, Mike, Warren and I went back to the race site to jump in the lake and paddle around for a few minutes in our wetsuits. The water felt great. A little crisp when we first jumped in but just right for a race swim. Then we went to packet pick-up and checked in for the race.

Thursday evening, we (and by “we”, I mean our resident chef Mike), cooked a big, delicious hungry-man dinner of grains, spinach and salmon. And then, well, in a house with six triathletes, it was bedtime.

Friday morning started with a bike ride on part of the race course. The ride went well and the few fast pick-ups I did felt great. I was feeling strong and fast. Friday afternoon, we went back down to the race site and walked around a bit before settling back at home for an early dinner of pasta, salmon, spinach and veggies. We spent a couple hours setting up bikes and getting everything in order for the morning.

Some of the Pablove stickers on my bike:

Warren’s all ready:

I fell right asleep and slept great. When my alarm went off at 4:30, I was mostly ready to get up and moving. Breakfast, a couple of trips to the bathroom, final gear prep and we loaded the car and were off. Getting into the parking area was really easy.

And we were in the transition area at pretty much exactly 7am.

We had plenty of time to get set up, go for an easy warm-up run and take a few Pablove Triathlon Team photos (I just noticed that I don’t have any photos of us in our kits. Bummer. That will have to wait until the official race photos are out).

The pro men started at 8am.  My wave was scheduled to go off at 8:30, so at about 8:10, I made my way down to the swim start.

(Quick interlude before I get into the race: I haven’t raced very many half ironmans. And my PR is still from the first one I did, Timberman in 2006, where my time was 5:12:19. It’s crazy that that is still my PR. I was self-coaching, just learning how to be an endurance athlete and did the race on my alloy/carbon Felt road bike with clip-on aerobars. I’m more experienced and more fit than I was then. But it’s still my PR. The main reason is that I just haven’t done the distance very often. In my heart, I was hoping to beat my Timberman time at Wildflower. In fact, I really hoped to do around (or even sub) five hours. That’s a time I have in me. But as you’ll see, it’s unlikely to happen at Wildflower and definitely wasn’t happening last Saturday.)

Finally, the race report begins. And unfortunately, this is also where the photos end. For now at least.

Swim:

The first few minutes of the swim were an unmitigated disaster. I dove in right behind the front guys and started swimming without too much contact, but pretty much right away I felt like I couldn’t breath. I tried slowing down my stroke, breathing more often, poking my head up a bit, but I felt like I was going to drown. This went on for what seemed ten minutes, but couldn’t have been more than one or two. I wasn’t even at the first buoy and I thought I might have go find a kayak and call it a day. Seriously. So I stopped and put my head up. I took a few deep breaths, cleared my goggles and started slowly swimming again. And somehow I found something of a rhythm. I don’t know what it was – I really don’t think I started off too hard.  Maybe it was because I wasn’t used to the wetsuit?  Thankfully, the rest of the swim was uneventful. I felt smooth enough and swam fine. I never found any feet to draft off for more than a few seconds at a time, but I was just happy to be moving through the water and breathing.

Swim time: 33:22 (354th overall; 1:43/100 meters. It wasn’t my best half iron swim, but I’ll take it)

T1:

I moved efficiently through T1. My wetsuit came off relatively quickly and other than a bit of a traffic jam at the bike exit, I barely remember T1. With some practice, I can shave time off this pretty easily.

Time: 2:37

Bike:

Ugh. The bike. My time (3:00:43) really disappointed me at first. I really thought I could do it closer to 2:40. I rode 2:50 last year at Oceanside and put a lot more time on the bike leading into Wildflower than I did last year. I know Wildflower is a harder course, but I still thought 2:40 was realistic on this course. In retrospect, I didn’t appreciate how hilly it is and there was no way I could have ever predicted the damn wind. (In fact, before the race, people were telling me that based on history, I should expect either no wind or a tail-wind for big chunks of the race…) It seemed like the only times there wasn’t a headwind pushing against us, there was a nasty cross-wind, threatening to knock us over. Battling the wind was exhausting and stressful and slowed me down a lot. There aren’t a lot of “flat” sections of the bike course, but there are long sections of the course where you should be able to get down on the aerobars and cruise. But on Saturday, being in aero meant getting pushed around even more by the wind and there were a bunch of times when it felt dangerous to stay on the aerobars. So I sat up, became a bigger target for the wind and slowed down. Dammit.

For nutrition, I had one super-concentrated 840 calorie bottle of Infinit on my downtube and the Aerodrink between my aerobars. I put one Nuun tab into the Aerodrink before the race. I took a sip of the Infinit about every 20 minutes and washed it down with water. I refilled the Aerodrink with water from the aid stations. The Aerodrink isn’t particularly pretty to look at, but it works. By the end of the bike, I’d nearly finished the bottle of Infinit and felt well hydrated.

Anyway, I got through it just fine. I felt good on the climbs and maintained a relatively comfortable level of effort. The long steep hill at around mile 41 (lovingly called “Nasty Grade”) was tough, but I just put it into a high gear and spun my way up.  I accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to get anywhere close to 2:40 and realized that my hopes of beating my Timberman PR were pretty much definitely dashed. I tried not to get down on myself but it was a struggle. I think I started losing confidence and that stopped me from pushing harder. Either way, I cruised down the hill into T2 and hopped off the bike, hoping for a good run.

Bike time: 3:00:48 (274nd overall; 18.50mph)

T2:

Fine, just fine. I should be at least 30 seconds faster, but again, transitions take practice and I haven’t worked on this at all.

Time: 2:28

Run:

When I started the run, my legs felt good but my head was still a little mixed up from my “disappointing” bike. Immediately after exiting transition, you run through a pretty big crowd. I got some nice comments about the Pablove kit and got a big shout from Kimberly.

I got to the first mile marker (mile markers? I missed those things racing ultras!) and looked at my watch. 9:23. Really? WTF? I felt like I was moving considerably faster than that, but I think the bike bummer caused me to think that running a 9:23 first mile was actually possible. I just stuck with it and kept moving my legs. I was running at a steady, relatively even pace, moving through people and not being passed by very many. The second and third miles came at 7:31 and 7:25 (full splits are below). I was taking water at every aid station – one cup in my mouth and one on the head. Mile 5 includes a long hill and I actually took a lesson from my ultra book and walked the steep parts. Miles 6, 7, 8 and 9 are rolling and cruise through the crowds in the campgrounds. This was my favorite part of the entire race. It’s a fast section of the course and the crowds provide a huge boost. I was feeling good and having a great time – smiling and shouting at people, cheering them on and generally having fun. I took my second gel at around the 9 mile marker. Miles 10 and 11 are an out-and-back where you go up a hill, down the other side, then back up and back down. I walked parts of each climb – probably not because I had to, but because I felt like that was a smart strategy. In retrospect, I probably should have been willing to seek a little more pain. It’s a cruise from mile 11 to mile 12.5 and from there it’s a steep descent down to the finish line. I still had good legs under me for that descent and passed a bunch of people.

(As it turns out, I didn’t hit the “lap” button on my way out of transition, so that 9:23 was T2 plus the first mile of the run. This makes much more sense and I’m surprised I didn’t figure it out during the run.)

Run time: 1:40:48 (131st overall; 7:41/mile pace)

Total time: 5:19:58 (26/212 age group, 142/1240 male, 152/1667 overall)

I crossed the finish line feeling good. Maybe too good. Don’t get me wrong, I was very very happy to be done, but I felt like I still had juice in my legs.

After I finished, I ate about a dozen fresh strawberries and waited for Mike, Pete and Warren to finish. We went and stood in the lake for a little bit to “ice” our legs before going back to transition to change out of our kits. Then, it was a giant ice cream cone, a 10 pound burrito and some garlic french fries while we sat on the grass listening to some live music and re-capping the race.

Post-race reflections:

My race result was completely “decent”.  I didn’t PR the distance or any individual leg of the race. On the other hand… well, I could make excuses until Wildflower 2012, but I won’t. I finished strong in my first real race since my surgery last September and, even if my time wasn’t what I’d hoped for, I did relatively well against the field. For example, I thought I could do a 2:40 on the bike. But if I’d done that, my bike split would have been the 30th fastest among age groupers. I don’t belong there! I also don’t think I should have been 274th, but I need to recognize that not achieving my goals wasn’t a “failure”. I underestimated how difficult a course Wildflower is and let the winds on the bike get to me psychologically.

The other big “error” I made is a hold-over from my year of ultramarathon training.  Coming back from surgery and my hip pain and with ultra training on my brain, I spent nearly all of my training time in the sort of “middle” training zone. (I wrote about exactly this before the race.) Consistently working moderately hard, but rarely doing anything too intense. That was a good strategy for 100 mile ultra training where long-sustained steady effort is required and it was a good strategy for recovery from surgery/injury because I didn’t want to re-aggravate any injury. But it doesn’t work so well when I want to push myself in a race. I walked steep hills at Wildflower even though I was feeling good enough to run them. That’s what you do in an ultramarathon because feeling good on a hill at mile 10 has nothing to do with how you’ll feel at mile 35 or 65 or 85. But when the run is only 13.1 miles long, I could have and should have pushed harder the entire time. I think that I’ve just forgotten how it feels to go “hard” and was too scared that if I found that zone I might fail altogether. So before I take on any other challenges this summer, I need to incorporate regular speed and threshold work into my training.

During and after the race, people commented on the fact that I was smiling and happy during the run. I love having that reputation, but maybe I should work on smiling a little less – not because I’m unhappy but because I’m working too hard to be that happy!

A couple other thoughts about Wildflower. The race is really well organized, especially when you consider how big it is and how remote the race site is. The volunteers at the expo, along the course and at the finish line were great. A bunch of the volunteers on the course commented on our rad pink and grey Pablove kits, which was fun. Running through the spectators in the campgrounds was a blast! I’d do the race over and over again just to have that experience. I’m not sure if there will be a re-match for me in 2012, but I wouldn’t count it out just yet.

mile 1 – 6:55
2 – 7:31
3 – 7:25
4 – 8:01
5 – 9:51
6 – 6:24
7 – 7:06
8 – 7:52
9 – 7:09
10 – 8:35
11 – 8:40
12 – 8:14
13.1 – 7:08