The Context
To understand where my head was at for this race, you need to know two things:First, I had bilateral bunion surgery in mid-September. And, due to the bunions and related foot issues that led to the surgery, I hadn’t run more than 12 miles in a week since Memorial Day 2018. To be clear, between the injury, the surgery, and the time it took to rebuild my run fitness, I wasn’t doing anything that resembled normal run distances for seven fucking months (during which I was miserable and cranky and it’s a miracle my husband and kids put up with me). By January 1st, I could finally run 6 miles, but my weekly volume was barely above 10. Which gave my coach not even 3 months to build my long run, my total volume, and some speed before Oceanside. Not ideal, especially given that I insisted on being conservative with the ramp up so that I didn’t create some new injury. Coach absolutely did punish me enough in training that I developed some decent fitness, but there was just not enough time to get totally back to where I’d been the year before.
Second, I was a total shit show on the bike. More specifically, my head was so fucked up about the bike that a week beforehand it crossed my mind (fleetingly, cuz I’m no quitter) to bag the race altogether. On race day, at about mile 25 on the bike, it crossed my mind (fleetingly, cuz I’m not gonna choose to DNF) just to hop a sag-wagon back to transition. And no, I haven’t always been this much of a mess.
Last summer, the same time that my foot was acting up and I was barely running and so was already a cranky-ass bitch, I had some problems with my bike. It started when I was coming down a road steep enough that it involves some switch backs with guard rails and I was working hard to control my speed. There was some weird squeaking or squealing noise while I was braking, and I instinctively knew that if I put more pressure on my brakes I was going to endo. Oh, and there is a stop sign at the bottom of the road that you really need to stop at. So, yeah, I was a fucking panicking. I did manage to stop, about 30 feet above the stop sign where there was a bit of a shoulder for safety, and my back tire did pop up enough to land me in the gravel, and it took a few minutes to get my heart rate out of let’s-call-911 territory, but I stopped. It was an absolutely terrifying experience.
So fast forward through 2 months, several trips to bike techs who sanded my brake pads, and even replaced my brakes altogether, and told me that I was absolutely fine ... except that then I’d go ride my bike and it would be fine for an entire ride or for the first 90 minutes of the ride or maybe just the first 5 minutes of the ride, and then I’d be right back to realizing that additional brake pressure would be super no bueno, and oh yeah I’m approaching a red light on a downhill. I threw in the towel on my bike when coming to a gradual stop on flat road caused my back tire to pop up so severely that it launched a water bottle and my bike computer said it was going to text my emergency contact because it detected an “incident.”
Luckily I had brought a chaperone with me for that particular ride, since I was already a total head case, and he was kind enough to ride back to my car and come pick me up. I was not riding that damn bike again till I was convinced it was fixed. And thanks to a few very diligent bike techs, they figured out that the problem was actually tire size - I was riding on 25s, and the bike was spec’d for 23s, and so as the tires got worn over time and warmed during rides they would expand. And then, when the front forked bowed just a fraction of a millimeter upon braking, the tire would rub my frame and squeak and squeal and the friction was very, very no bueno.
At this point, even though intellectually I understood that my bike is fixed, I was still absolutely terrified to ride the damn thing. But it was also mid-September and I was about to head in for foot surgery, so I hung up the bitch and tried to shelve my scary thoughts of steep mountain descents and squealing brakes (or squealing rubber-meets-carbon or whatever).
So now it’s January. My heart still raced and nearly leapt out of my chest every time I thought of riding my bike, but I had signed up for this damn race so apparently I would have to figure out a way to ride the fucking thing. Thankfully, the D3 Multisport mental skills expert actually has a miraculous PTSD protocol that he and his team are about to roll out nationwide (I swear they are going to change the world with this!), so I sat down with him for an hour, and I’ll be damned if the heart-pounding didn’t vanish.
But given that we had a relatively bad winter here in Colorado, I only got one outdoor ride in before Oceanside … two weeks before the race. (Which is clearly not to say that I didn’t get in any bike training. Coach punished me on the regular with nasty bike intervals and long rides on the trainer. Thankfully I really, really like my trainer.) I’ll spare you the blow by blow of that one outdoor ride, but I will say that I did bring chaperones, and they were incredibly kind and patient with me and how irrationally timid I was on each and every downhill. I’m so glad I got that ride in, and it was a good first step in rebuilding trust in my bike, but I wasn’t yet back to my normal self.
I was able to sneak in one last session with Will pre-race, and once again he was incredibly helpful. In fact, thanks to him I was remarkable calm from the time of our session right up until the night before the race. At which point I got all twisted up in my head again, and would have loved to have had some legit reason not to ride my bike. But I didn’t, and so I decided to turn on auto-pilot and showed up at the race start as if I was ready to go.
The Race
This race really wasn’t about the clock. It was about riding my damn bike and feeling like the athlete that I was spring of 2018, not the injured athlete who couldn’t run 3 miles or the post-surgery invalid who couldn’t even keep up with the silver sneakers on a stationary bike. I cared about executing first and racing second, and that showed in my times, which - with one exception - were all pretty sub-par for me. But as I tell my athletes, there are lots of wins out there that have nothing to do with the clock, and I did find some of those.The Swim - 38:33
T1 - 7:05
We will not speak of T1. I have no idea what took me so long, other than a total lack of urgency to start riding my bike.The Bike - 3:15:33 … And I Didn’t Die
It did occur to me that I was in all likelihood the only person on the course who’s goal was to survive the bike, in a very literal way. And I have to believe that my generally fucked up mental state is at least a large part of - if not the entire reason behind - why I was not able to produce any watts on the bike. I mean, it’s not like Coach didn’t routinely destroy me in training, and so I know that my fitness was there. But it was pretty evident 10 or 15 miles in that I was not going to put up the numbers that I’d trained for, but hey, at least I wasn’t going to over-bike it and trash my run.I had done this race in 2018 so knew a lot of what to expect on the bike course. As a result, I spent the first 30 miles mentally preparing for the 3 big climbs - and 3 big descents - that are crammed right into the middle of the course. I got better at using riders ahead of me to pace and anticipate what was coming on the downhills. I noted each and every time I successfully slowed my bike, and used that as evidence to build the case that I would be fine. I consistently reminded myself that the whistling of the carbon brake pads was normal, and that it did not signal danger of any kind. And yes, I did fleetingly consider the sag wagon at around mile 25, but there was no way that was going to be my story.
The first climb is a real bitch - a half a mile at some awful percent grade where even in my granny gear I’m just hoping to keep my legs turning over. I honestly was so grateful to crest that sucker that I decided I was totally willing to do the descent. And I did! I wasn’t terrified, and I paced off the dude in front of me, telling myself that if he could do it so could I, and I didn’t touch my brakes, and it was totally fine.
The next climb wasn’t as brutal, but the descent was the one I’d been dreading since the night before (or maybe for three solid months). It’s pretty steep, is apparently called Dead Man’s Curve (yup, that helped my mindset a TON), and has a strictly enforced speed limit - as in they DQ you on the spot - of 25 mph. I will admit that I was overly conservative, and rode the shit out of my brakes at 20-21 mph, but I wasn’t terrified, and I didn’t want to instantly wormhole myself into an alternate universe the way I had on my one outdoor ride two weeks prior. I was so proud of myself when I got down that hill!
Then one last climb, and a long gradual descent back to the flat road home. I was still pretty conservative on the downhills, and I didn’t really have that sigh of relief till I knew I’d finished descending, but I did it and wasn’t panicking and I do think I got a little faster as the descent went on. Best of all, I felt happy and strong that final 10 miles back to T2. I started to feel like myself again, putting a little more power in the pedals and passing people and actually smiling!
So, yeah, my time was stupid slow compared to last year, but I slayed some major demons out there on the bike course.
T2 - 5:12
Not as embarrassingly slow as T1, but nothing to brag about. Just happy to have gotten off the bike feeling ready to go, and not like I needed a few minutes to decompress from the stress of it all.The Run - 2:04:06!
I had some different demons to slay here. I knew I didn’t have the same run fitness that I’d had last year, but I also knew that the run is as much about smart execution as it is about fitness. I’d run a 2:09 last year off of great run fitness, because I’d started too fast and it became a miserable shit show of run-walk-repeat after about two miles. I was determined not to relive that experience. |
| Photo Credit: Paul Phillips/Competitive Image |
I stayed steady and comfortable through the first turnaround, just shy of mile four. I had stopped looking at my watch, because at that point I cared less about my pace than I did about feeling like I could hold my effort level to the finish. After the turnaround, though, I stopped holding back at all, and just ran. I focused on the course landmarks and just getting from one to the next. I ran steady and strong and still wasn’t looking at my watch. My quads were cranky going up hill, but I knew the burn would wear off if I was patient, and I knew I’d run feeling worse in training. And I was not going to give in.
At mile 9 my watch buzzed and I looked at my time and realized that if I held steady I might hit 2:05. Coach and I had agreed on that as a run goal, but honestly I didn’t have a lot of confidence in anything much below 2:10. Seeing my 9 mile time and knowing I was on pace for my goal gave me a boost of energy, and I dialed it up a notch. I was counting down the “hills” on the course as a way to define how much pain was left. I was counting down by kilometer from 5k just to feel like I was making progress. When I crested the final “hill” and had seven or eight tenths of a mile left, I knew I was home free. I turned it up that final notch to the finish, crossed the line, saw the 2:04 on my watch, and broke into my biggest grin of the day.