BlogApril 6, 2009 Oceanside 70.3 update What a weekend! Quite a group from Tri-Scottsdale headed over to Oceanside for the Ironman California 70.3 over last weekend. Everyone seemed to have a good time, including myself, despite not getting the result I had hoped for... Adam Gugick and I drove over Thursday for the Saturday race. We stayed in the Corona Del Mar condos overlooking the transition area, which made a normally logistically challenging race morning, a lot more simple. Saturday AM was chilly with a light wind, the water was supposed to be frigid. As it turned out the day was warm and pleasant, not even much wind. The week leading up to the race I wasn't sleeping very well and had been feeling physically a little tired. Thursday night after we arrived in California I slept 11 hours! This is unusual for me and I was hoping perhaps this would get me back and feeling strong for the 6:40 AM Saturday race start. I got in the water with roughly ten minutes before the race was to begin. Cold, but not too bad. I lined up to the far right next to Andy Potts and David Thompson. The gun fired, we were away! The swim was clean for me, no lost goggles, not getting smacked in the head, nothing like that. I figured I had a decent swim and knew that I was probably in the second pack. Upon exiting the water, I saw the clock read something like 25:25 and I figured that was ok. Nope, the lead group had gotten out in 22:30 with Potts another minute in front of that!!! This wasn't my best swim, despite thinking it was ok, not sure where I messed up. Maybe next year I'll start to the inside and jump into the "washing machine" of a bunch of people going hard all at once off the line. Onto the bike, I saw Rutger Beke powering out of transition. He put twenty seconds into me right away and I knew that if I hoped to get back into the race he was my ticket, the train was leaving the station! I bridged up to him and rode about 15 bike lengths behind him for the next hour or so. Apparently, Ronnie Schildknecht had also been in our swim group and he had moved through transition much more quickly than us. Beke left T1 so hard because he was chasing Ronnie, and once he realized he wouldn't catch him he backed off and went his own pace. I never saw Ronnie. Beke and I caught probably fifteen people, lots of big names, I was feeling strong! At the first turnaround I saw that we were pretty far back of a charging Bjorn Andersson, but there were more good guys right in front of us. Nearing mile thirty we caught a group containing Lovato, Rapp, and Thompson. About then I knew we were going to be hitting some hills and my legs were tired, so I ended up tailing off the back of this group with Rapp as Beke and Lovato soldiered on. Rapp, Thompson, and I caught a pretty big group of 4-5 at the top of the second hill and with about 15 miles left those two put in a big surge. My legs were pretty rocked, and I reacted late. I rode probably 100 yards behind them for the rest of the way. At some point, Rapp dropped Thompson and he entered transition a little out of sight. With a couple miles to go Jozef Major and some other dude passed me, the first time I got passed all day. At this point, I could tell I was going backwards and running on fumes! Onto the run, it was out and back twice. There were four sand sections on the beach of about a quarter of a mile each, they made it challenging. The first 5k out I was running ok and probably on about 1:18 half marathon pace, on the way back I started to have some troubles and just went into survival mode. On the way back out the second time things didn't get much better until I neared the far turn with 3.5 miles left. At this point, I just locked into about 6:00 mile pace knowing that there was only pride on the line and that I had better finish strong. I finished in 4:10, getting passed by Greg Remaly on the finishing straight. The field was stacked, congrats to Matt Reed for winning with a closing run of 1:11, shoot! I planned on entering this year a little behind fitness-wise compared to years passed, and that's about what my form showed in this race. Not a big deal, I had hoped to swim better as swimming will be important in the shorter events I do this year but I won't worry about it too much, time to get back to work in the pool. Congratulations to Billy Dean Johnson, John Dean, John Poisson, Dan Beaver, Zachary Kepes, Adam Gugick, Andrew Schear, Stephen Stromberg. and probably some other guys from our group I'm forgetting. Everyone seemed to have fun out there and finished an awesome half Ironman! See everyone at Wildflower Half! Cheers, Lewis « Back to Blogs |
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