My trip to Boise for the Ironman Boise 70.3 was a lot of fun, baring the 6 and half hours spent racing. I went out with my coach Mike Ricci and some
D3multisport (that work for you, Mike?) teammates on Thursday and we had fun hanging out in Boise. The motto for the weekend was, "I'm not worried, it will all work out" (followed closely by "Now what?") and it did.
Our group stayed in the Hampton Inn, a far cry from my Super 8 days of yore. Our hotel was a block from the finish and was chosen for that reason with care by those that make such decisions. I just followed along. Here's the view from my 6th floor room:
Turns out Boise is brown and arid, like Grand Junction. And if my room faced another direction, I could have seen the capitol or part of the race course. As it was, there's the gas station. The other block was a small downtown area like Pearl Street with restaurants and shops.
We were able to do athlete check in on Thursday afternoon and still had time to eat at Bonefish Grill and visit the Boise State blue football field. Hell, I'd never even heard of the Blue Field before this trip, but there you go. It's blue:
We ate a very late European dinner at an Italian restaurant, which had slow service but good food.
D3 buddy Liz found me a roommate that I didn't meet until Boise, but it all worked out. Doreen and I both like to sleep cool and we didn't spend too much time in the room anyway.
On Friday we drove up to the lake to get our bikes from TriSport Express. We had been anxious to see our bikes ever since we found out that the "system" used involved a U-haul, a 2x4 and a piece of styrofoam, but it all worked out. We took a short ride to make sure everything was running smoothly, then checked out bikes into transition. We weren't allowed to swim in the lake, but Liz and Jay put their feet in and assured me it was cold. I took their word for it.
We had a quiet afternoon so I was able to hook up with Vickie at a coffee shop right next to the finish line.
In the afternoon I also sorted all my gear. Race numbers with names!
For dinner we had pizza at Protos (really, who knew where was more than one in the world?) and then ice cream at Ben & Jerry's, where I watched my coach Mike Ricci consume an entire pint of Everything But The. For real life. And he had the fastest race time of our group, so maybe I just need to eat more ice cream.
Saturday was the longest day in the history of the world. Boise has a
unique start time of 2:00 pm (the only explanation we got was that when they ran it at a normal morning start the first year, there were no spectators at the finish) so we had the whole morning to kill. We ate a normal breakfast at the Hampton (which had those awesome industrial waffle makers) and then sat. Liz, Jay and I decided to drive to the start at 11:00 (with Liz's husband taking the car back) instead of riding the $8 shuttles. Unfortunately, the race directors wouldn't let us as close as the shuttles and we had to park at the bottom of the dam and then walk a mile up a dirt path.
We sat in the shade and ate our pre-race bagels and peanut butter:
There's the top of the dam, where the bike comes out and where we needed to be:
And here Jay, Liz and I are, at the bottom of the dam (I swim with Jay and Liz on Fridays, except for Mike I met the other D3 athletes for the first time in Boise):
Walking up the trail to the race start, Liz looking back saying, "Why the heck are you so slow?"
At the top, we were body marked before going into transition:
This race had assigned spots in transition - I liked that better than the first come first served of most races (which rewards people who like getting up at 4am). The racks were in numerical order and had our names and numbers on our spots:
Here's our team before the race, happy and smiling.
The race started at Lucky Peak Reservoir, here's the start of the swim course:
And the end of the swim:
After we checked into transition, there was still about 90 minutes before the race started. I sat in the shade and drank water and gatorade. I was in wave 6, about 17 minutes after the pros went off but 30 minutes before the last wave.
The swim was very cold. The official water temperature was either 59 or 60 degrees, but that was near the shore, it was colder in the middle of the lake. I broke one of my race rules and used new equipment during the race - neoprene booties. And I didn't regret one second of their use. My feet didn't get cold, and it didn't hurt as much to run through parking lot transition area. As for the swim itself, I thought I was swimming ok. I found some people to draft off and I had a steady rhythm. It was windy and after the first turn the water got choppy. I also seemed to have trouble staying on a straight course so I ended up sighting more, which I know slows me down. I really thought I was going to do the swim in 36-37 minutes and was shocked when I looked down at my watch and saw 41. I think that I must have swam at least 200 extra yard going wide on the course.
T1 was was pretty long, there were about 1200 competitors and lots of bikes. Unlike most transitions, all of our bike gear had been stowed in a bag, and all of the swim gear had to go back in. There were two transition areas - the first up at the lake and the second down in town. Volunteers took our bags back to town so we wouldn't have to come back up. I jogged through transition and tried to be quick but was again surprised that it took me 5:00.
The bike was brutal, no two ways about it. We had a vicious wind the whole way. I heard someone say that there were 35 mph gusts but I don't know if how accurate that was. All I do know is that if I were doing a training ride in that wind I would have turned around. When we had a cross wind it felt very dangerous, there were times that I was sure I was going to be blown over. And the headwind was relentless and demoralizing. I didn't watch my speed but kept my eye on my power numbers and did what I could. My normalized power ended up at 139, I was shooting for 135-145. On a non-windy day that should have put my bike around 3 hours. As it was, I did 3:18.
In addition to the wind, I had some sort of weird glute muscle ache in my left cheek. Every time I pushed down on the pedal with my left leg my entire butt cheek hurt. My average cadence was around 80rpm and this lasted about 2 hours, so that was roughly 9600 stabs of pain. I've never experienced this before, I don't know if I was cramping or seizing, but I can say that it was NOT FUN. I think my low point came around 2 1/2 hours into the bike. I hadn't been watching my odometer but I was looking for the mile marker signs. I was expecting to see mile 50 soon and was crushed when the next sign was only mile 45. I was also lead to believe that the last 15 miles into town were downhill. They might have been, but they were also mostly into the wind it did not go quickly.
The nice part of about the run was that it was on a bike path next to the river. Most of the course was shady and flat. But the run was also tougher than expected. I had hope to run under 2:15 and my coach thought I should be able to run 2:10, based on my Canyonland's time. But folks, it turns out that there is a huge difference between an open half marathon and a half-Ironman marathon. When I raced Canyonlands, I felt really good for the first 8 miles. Then I started pushing it around 8-10 miles and then really hit the gas for the last 3. Conversely, my very first step at Boise was stiff and painful. I took the first mile easy and my legs loosened up a bit but then I started getting a stomach cramp. I had the cramp for at least 40 minutes, sometimes running with my fist pressed to my gut to help alleviate some of the pain. At some point I ran past a guy puking and I had to put my fingers in my ears to not start gagging myself.
The aid station were about 3 minutes after the mile markers so I walked 30 seconds at each mile marker and then walked through the aid station. I took something at each one, whether it was water and gatorade or flat coke.
Boise was a 2 loop run, which is good and bad. The good part is, you do get to try out the course for the first half, so you know what to expect the second. The bad is that before you get to the first mile marker, you see mile 7. And you realize that even after you run the first loop, you still have 6 freaking miles to go on the second and it seems unbelievably daunting. And at the end of the first loop, you get to run through the gauntlet of screaming spectators cheering you on to finish and then at the last minute there's a fork in the road and you are running back the way you came, not to return for a long long time.
My longest mile split was at mile ten. I was supposed to be following my 5/5/5 half marathon plan (run easy for the first 5, a bit faster for the second 5, then pound out a 5k). And I realized that I had nothing in the tank for a 5k. I took a walk break at a non-designated time and seriously considered walking the rest of the way. But then I thought of all the people tracking my race and didn't want them to see my pace slow down that much (there were timing mats out on the run, though apparently the website didn't show any splits). So I put my head down and just concentrated on not walking.
Mile 10. Or just a random walk break:
I had a decent pace on the last mile but my quads were so sore that I almost collapsed at the finish. My feet were also tender, but luckily not blistered. My run time - 2:22:50, about 7-12 minutes slower than I had hoped. That put me at a total time of 6:29:25.
After the race we had to get our gear from transition and pack everything up so we could drop our bikes off. After a shower I felt better, if still incredibly sore. We got our bikes taken care of, then had the post race meal of sliders or pizza (sliders please!) and then went back to Protos for beer. At that point it was after 11:00 and I did get a slightly better perspective that there were people still finishing. Now
that's a long day. I tried to go to bed around midnight but apparently when you don't have much caffeine on a daily basis and then suddenly have 2 cups of coffee and 6 caffeinated gel shots and do a tough race, it's a bit hard to sleep. I lay resting but not sleeping until about 4am, and then was up at 7:00 to eat breakfast and get ready for the flight home.
So, if I could look at this race objectively I could say that even though I hoped to do it 30 minutes faster, it was a tough day and I did what I could. I did take over 7 minutes off my run from the 5430 Long Course and while very sore and tired, I am not injured. But it's hard to look at this objectively with Wisconsin looming only 3 months away. One of my first thoughts after finishing this race was, "How the hell am I going to do TWICE this distance????" At least I wasn't the only one. One other team D3 member is signed up for his first Ironman in 6 weeks and said the same thing, and he has 9 half-Ironman races under his belt. But as he said, he's told too many people about his race (and I chimed in, "I even have a BLOG!") so one way or another, I'm racing Wisconsin.
The primary reason I've done this race the past two years is that as a mentor, I get my entry fee comped. And when you are looking at nearly $100 a pop, that's a good deal. But I think I may keep doing it because it's so nice not to race in Boulder all the time. Racing at home, I get my butt kicked, every time. People in Boulder are scary fast. But it turns out that compared to the average woman, I'm a decent triathlete. And I like feeling good once in a while.
