IM 70.3 Las Vegas RR

It is with great mixed emotions that I write this report.

As I have made clear, competing at the Worlds for the 70.3 distance was my big goal for this year, and I was successful in qualifying for it at the KS 70.3 in June.

The result of the worlds were...well...a reflection of my own stupidity.  Because of that, this race report will not have the normal feel of my others.

First, just a bit of prelude for those who do not know:  the Las Vegas course is very fair and challenging for a Championship course.  The bike is almost constantly up and down, with a net rise in elevation, since T1 and T2 are maybe 15 miles apart.  None of the hills is excessively steep, but it's pretty relentless. It's September in Las Vegas, so it's going to be hot.  The run is a three loop L-shaped course that is basically up for half and down for half.  It's not steep, but it's certainly enough for you to notice at the end of a race!

I felt physically prepared.  I had a good taper and good training.  Unfortunately, I developed a head cold in the couple of days beforehand, but it was not enough to keep me out.  I felt more or less under control with some decongestant and pain reliever.

On the one hand, I am very pleased.  I had a great swim.  My time of 37:xx with no wetsuit was quite comparable to where I have been in wetsuit swims previously.  I got out of the water feeling strong and ready to go.  I had gotten some prescription goggles so I could see better and this was wonderful.

The bike transition there is nutty-long.  I got going fairly efficiently and was happy enough.  There were aid stations about every 12-13 miles, and I drank 8 bottles over the course of my ride, seven of which were Perform, and one water.  I was in nearly the last wave, so the course was not crowded at all.  As usual, I got passed going uphill and passed people going downhill.  While I would have been happier with a little faster bike split, I was intentionally being conservative, knowing the run would be very hot and tough.  After about an hour on the bike, some of the people in my AG who passed me were coming back to me...so everything seemed to be going as per my normal pattern.

I got onto the run, and started to go.  It was hot and difficult, but I was going fine.  However, I had a malfunction with my Garmin.  First, my HR strap battery apparently chose race day to poop out.  Either that or I was dead sometimes, and crazily high on my HR sometimes.  This was frustrating, because I had planned to race by HR rather than pace, given the course and conditions...so I went to RPE, glancing at pace.  Secondly, I don't know exactly what I did, but I was using the watch in multisport mode, and it did not behave as I expected... it stopped for a while and I really didn't notice until I had no idea how much it had missed...so I gave up using it for distance.

I continued my run and passed a particular landmark for the third time, and turned in to the finish.  I raced very hard the last mile or so, and managed to out race a couple of guys in my age group.  I was really excited...even though I knew it was totally middle of the pack stuff.

But in the end, I discovered that I had skipped one of the loops somehow.  I still can't figure out how this slipped past me because I was counting the mile markers as I went, but I can't deny the evidence.  My finish time of just under 5:00 is unrealistic, and I am missing two checkpoints (there were two of them per loop).  I was in decent enough condition and would not have had any trouble finishing the race more or less at the pace I was going.

I have made an estimate of how much longer I should have been on the course, and it's about 40 minutes, meaning I should have finished in about 5:40.

The irony is that - maybe because of the late start and therefore higher temps - maybe just the luck of the draw - who knows... that time of 5:40 would have been very close to the 50th percentile "A-goal" I had.  (That would have required a much faster time in 2011)

I am, of course, really frustrated about this.  But it has given me a mission to accomplish for 2013.  I have unfinished business.

Pre Las Vegas 70.3 Training Report

I posted a report before my KS 70.3 and found it useful to go back to and think about, so I am doing the same again here.  The KS race itself was bedeviled by very tough conditions and a bad swimming incident, so my time wasn't where I wanted it to be, but (other than the swim thing), I had ultimately judged it successful, and I did meet my goal of qualifying for the WTC 70.3 Championships.

In retrospect, ideally, I probably should have taken a little more just plain time off after KS.  This would have shortened my training for LV (bad), but in the way things worked out, I felt pretty spent and slow in most of July.  (In August, things really started coming around better.)  That said, the family took a week's vacation in early July and starting AFTER that would have been too late.  As a result, it's hard to really say I did anything too terribly wrong given the circumstances.

I continued to follow the general EN plan, but made a few adaptations.

• I continued to swim more than called for (with the ACAC masters group) through the end of July. After that, I shortened the swim workouts down to the hour range, but usually had more than 3.  (And I swam on my own, as the club was off for a month.)
• I was unmerciful on myself in maxing out the number of full 2 hour (or even a little longer) runs possible, of course keeping it to 1 per week.  I got to 2 hours faster than my plan called for and stayed there longer.  However, I did not push the speed on them as much.  For these, running the time at a decent pace (no collapsing allowed), no matter the conditions, was the major goal.   I have no proof, but I have a general observation that it feels like I do better with some overdistance training, even if it means sacrificing a little of the "quality". 
• In my Pre-KS report, I noted that I was ok with the threshold running, but that I was really hurting in the MP and HMP running.  Those paces seemed like way too much work compared to how long I should be able to run them.  In July and August, I sacrificed a fair amount of (50%?) of the threshold pace running in favor of longer HMP-MP segments.  This had the predictable affect of making that pace easier to hold; I probably threw away any chance at getting any faster in a 5K sense, but I really thought this was closer to race specific effort, and I wanted to do even a little better running in LV than I had at KS.
• I had faced a bit of an "intensity burnout" earlier in the year.  For this round, whenever that would start to come on for the bike (which is where it usually happens for me), I would still push the watts expected (maybe even a few more), but do it sitting up rather than in aero.  This relieves the quads for me, but let me get the aerobic work in and get in my race pace (~80-85% FTP) work without having devastated legs.  Only time will tell, but I have felt very good about this.

As noted earlier, July was pretty discouraging.  Nothing was ever over target, and often things were a bit shy of where I'd want them to be.  It was also a crazy busy month for the family and at work, and this may have contributed to fatigue, etc.  However, as August matured, I really started feeling more workouts coming together.

I write this with just under a week to go before the race while in the midst of taper.  Total volumes for the weeks starting July 2: 8 (4 vacation days), 10 (2 vacation days), 15, 14, 11.5, 15.5, 15.5, 11.5, 10, (and this is race week).  So I've put in my time.  And the 11.5 and 10 hour taper weeks have been still hard... no just giving into exhaustion and limping into the race.

I normally have pretty wild oscillations of feeling good and lousy during a taper.  This has been considerably more mellow along those lines.  I have not had any workouts recently that just dragged or where the quads just moaned as they often do.  Is this luck or being a little fresher?  Again, I can't prove this, but I think it may be being a little fresher from easing off the bike a touch as described above.

As a result of these modifications, I basically think I gave away my opportunity to get inherently faster during this two month buildup for LV.  However, what I think I got in return was the opportunity to build where I was to a much more solid level.  My testing numbers would cease to be artifacts of a particularly strong effort/day.  I am hoping that the small gains I might have made are banked against a much greater "insurance" against the day being tough.

I should ultimately comment that another rationale for this modification of my KS prep was that the LV race is KNOWN to be one in tough conditions.  I know it's hilly, and I know it's going to be very hot.  I do ok in hilly, but I'm not the greatest in hot.  So building up the foundation has been meant to be a bulwark against the fact that I may be running in 100 degree heat.  I'm not going to be running 6:45 equivalents on the hot hills in all likelihood, so let's get tough for what I am capable of.  Or so I rationalized.

I probably qualified in the bottom quarter of the field.  I have looked at the times from 2011, and that does seem realistic, to the extent that I have to guess what the effect of the heat is on people.  The 50th percentile of the 45-49 age group was very close to 5:10.  I've done 4:48 on a pretty flat course and 5:0x a couple of times on the KS course, but not sub 5:10 in that kind of brutal heat.

Being realistic, I should be pleased if I place in the second quartile (from the bottom) in this race, and that will be my "B" goal.  My "A" goal will be to be in the top half of the field.  That is, I believe, a very significant challenge, without being an utter pipe dream.

Wish me luck.