Double or NothingMan Race Report

Pics are here.

Race Format: 2 Olympic triathlons done back to back, where the order of the sports in the first is the traditional swim/bike/run, and for the second it’s bike/swim/run. This is the Saturday portion of Triple T, only for that race, you have a few hours between the 2 races. Between driving back and forth to the Y twice, and changing clothes every time I switched sports, I spent a little over 2 hours in transition, including a near-fatal Coke/Fuel Belt malfunction, which caused a delay of :45 between the last swim and the last run. Oh well. I won’t bother to list the transition times because they are just ludicrous. But, spreading the effectively 6 workouts with all that transition time made this plenty difficult, much like Saturday of Triple T, because you need to keep fueling during transition or else you risk a ginormous bonk.

I substituted 1500 yards for 1500 meters in the swim (my pool is SCY), got as close to 25 miles for each bike leg as I could, and replicated the Triple T run distance which is 6.5 miles per race. The swims were at the Y, the biking was done at home on the trainer, and the running was outdoors as out and back starting at home. With the outdoor temperatures what they were and the variation in the pool temperature between early morning (pretty nice) and afternoon (warm), another challenge element was added to the day as my body was forced to deal with big temperature swings.

Why? Traning for Triple T, and I must be psycho. While I never once had the thought, “Why am I doing this?” I did think several times, “I can’t BELIEVE I’m doing this.”

Executive Summary

	Race 1	Race 2	Total
Swim
Yards	1500	1500	3000
Time	0:27:52	0:28:10	0:56:02
Pace/100 yds.	1:51	1:53	1:52
Bike
Miles	25.04	25.05	50.09
Time	1:17:06	1:17:30	2:34:36
Avg. Speed	19.46	19.35	19.46
Avg. Cadence	95	95	95
NP	159	159
IF	0.7756	0.7756
TSS	99	99	198
Kcal	805	806	1611
Run
Air Temp.	30	40
Mile 1	8:51	9:05
Mile 2	9:18	9:25
Mile 3	9:27	9:24
Mile 3.25	2:17	2:22
Mile 3.5	2:07	2:11
Mile 4.5	9:22	9:16
Mile 5.5	9:09	9:26
Mile 6.5	8:48	8:46
Total Time	0:59:19	0:59:55	1:59:14
Overall Pace/Mile	9:08	9:13	9:10
Total Time	2:44:17	2:45:35	5:29:52

Last night

First, I have to tell you that doing a Sprint first thing in the morning and then not being able to drink a beer until much later in the day (with work in between) sucked. I always want a beer after a race, I don’t care how early it is, although I usually wait until at least 11AM, because, well, I’m not that big of a lush.

I ended up finally having a beer at 4PM after knocking off work. And then I went grocery shopping, and bonus, my buddy Lila, the booze sample lady, was there. So I partook of several samples of straight up rum, and a mojito mix. Even though all I had done was a sprint and then a :35 abs/core workout, I was tired and needed the painkillers!

I ate the filet part of a Porterhouse steak and a rather big pile of pasta with my walnut pesto sauce (I think the recipe is on the blog somewhere). I ate until I was quite full, knowing what I was doing the next day.

Today, Pre-Race

5:15AM

I woke up before the coffee pot (was set for 5:05AM), really about 3:30AM. Yes, I went and looked at a clock. I went back to bed, and within minutes, my body is telling me I need to go take care of something RIGHT NOW. It made me smile, because while what I’d be doing today is not a real “race,” my body and mind were taking it quite seriously!

I went and did my business (in the dark), and then got back in bed. I let my mind scroll a bit, thinking about what I’m going to be doing today, how nice it will be to get back in bed after I’m finished today, what I want for dinner, etc. Nothing truly stressful. But I knew my body and mind were ready to get up. When I got out of bed it was 4:30AM. Close enough!

I fired up the coffee pot and started putting together my clothing for the day. Even though I stretched well last night, my legs felt the effort of yesterday’s sprint NothingMan.

I had already made a plan as to where I needed to be when based on my anticipated speed, a little driving, and changing clothes. I chose all my outfits and laid them on the living room floor and took pics of them in case I didn’t get someone to take one of me in each one.

I almost should have consulted one of my infamous race checklists, but I have a lot of that stuff in my head now. I prepared all my race nutrition (fluids) yesterday. I pumped the rear tire of LGL on the trainer, placed the remotes on the stool next to her, picked CD’s to play while riding, bagged the clothes that I needed to take with me to the Y, and finally, sat down to have a few more cups of coffee.

Good thing I got up earlier than intended since there were quite a few things to do this morning! I just appreciate being able to relax a bit before a race, such as it is. I’ve watched other people getting ready in the morning of a race who have “the look” on their face the entire time. Well, yeah, I get “the look” at times, but anyone who has followed my training and racing for the last 2-3 years knows that I pretty much manage to keep things pretty light.

I think this is why there’s an adage that says it takes about 5 years to get Ironman “right.” For most people, it takes that long to be able to internalize all the little details that when once internalized, allow you to take the day as it comes and have a good performance. I’ve read other people writing about being worried that if they get fast that they won’t enjoy it anymore, and I think that’s total crap. I don’t consider myself fast, but I’m pretty good for my age group, and have won hardware here and there. I get pretty intense once it’s game on, but I always try and find ways to interject fun into things. I think that part of my secret is the ability to selectively tune out all the external stimuli. Think about it—for many people, racing is stimulus overload. You’ve got people crowded together, spectators, timing devices, weather, taper-induced paranoia—for a person who can’t tune out a lot of that stuff, it’s distracting.

If you’re familiar with the “flow” concept (see this book) and you understand the conditions required to enable it, then you approach every race, or even every training session as an opportunity to experience this most wonderful of sensations. You need to be proactive in order to experience flow—you need to have trained properly, have confidence in your training, be able to retreat inside your own head and enjoy being there, be concerned with only yourself and not your competition, and be adaptable. There are other things that come into play, too, but those are the basics.

Once you have all those skills, then you understand that it’s not necessary to have all that “actual race” stimuli around you in order to have a flow experience. This is why it’s no big deal for me to make the leap from actual race to NothingMan. Once you remove the externals from it, racing and NothingMan are exactly the same to me! And I think that’s the coolest gift I’ve given myself, since it’s representative of how I like to live my life now. Don’t get me wrong—I totally enjoy and suck up external stimuli as well (and am even known to dish it out quite heavily at times)—but it has its place and time, and more and more, I realize those are, indeed, very fleeting moments, and that where it’s at is inside my own head.

5:45AM I drank 300 calories worth of Ultrafuel. Yes, it made me gag.

6:10AM IT’S SHOWTIME! And it’s only 21 degrees (F) outside. Perfect! I brushed my teeth, put my contact lenses in, got dressed and off I went. The same woman who was there 3 weeks ago when I did a ½ NothingMan was at the front desk, and she was nice enough to take a picture. I didn’t even tell her what I was doing today—I don’t think she’d be able to comprehend it.

Since it was pretty early, there was nobody else in the locker room, so I headed out on deck and who should be there but AJ, the same guy who was at the pool 3 weeks ago when I did the ½ NothingMan. He recognized me, I told him what I was doing today, and he extended a hand out to shake mine. He was done swimming, so he took a great pic of me right before I got in to swim.

Swim 1

My swim pacing plan was, well, just swim easy. Don’t totally lollygag, because I have a schedule to keep.

The water was pretty nice, and I had a lane all to myself. I didn’t really think about much of anything while I was swimming (remembered to count laps, though), just sort of cruised along. At one point I’m coming to the wall and some man on deck about to get in thinks he knows me or something and he’s saying, “Good morning” to me, and I’m thinking what the fuck, but then I figured he must have spent a little bit of time gazing on my CRACKHEAD ass because he sure had a big smile on his face!

Other than that, the swim was quite uneventful. I finished, got out, and had the guard (same guard as 3 weeks ago for ½ NothingMan) take a couple of pics. Of course I had to have her shoot my butt with my custom CRACKHEAD on it. The guard commented that I had the coolest suits (well, yeah—Splish, baby!)

Transition 1

I took a leisurely shower, after waiting for the hot water to come on, and then got to changing into my clothes for the first bike leg. I asked a woman to shoot a pic of me, and she actually understood how to use the digital camera, which was nice.

Off to home to ride the bike.

Bike 1

My bike pacing plan for both bike legs was to use ½ Ironman watts. Since it was split into 2 Olympic races, though, that meant a :15 warmup easy, and then move right into ½ Ironman watts. Just like for ½ NothingMan, I was aiming for about 80% of FTP.

For the first bike leg, once I finished the warmup, I just popped into the BCR and stayed in the same gear the entire time. For some reason, it didn’t feel that boring since I knew I wouldn’t be on the bike that long and I was looking forward to running outside. I could feel the effort from yesterday’s sprint, but nothing too terribly bad.

Transition 2

I toweled off as much sweat as I could since I was going to be going outside and didn’t want immediate evaporation/cooling.

Before I changed into my run clothes, I checked my outdoor thermometer that’s in the shade to determine if I needed to change my original clothing selections. Yep. The weather forecast said it would get to the mid-40’s, but just before 9:00AM, it had only made it to 30. So I ended up dressing like the cat burglar.

Run 1

My run pacing plan for both run legs was ½ Ironman pace or slower. Really, I just wanted to run easy and not take any walking breaks. I totally achieved that for this run. Even though it was still chilly, the sun was shining brightly. I was happy the predicted wind patterns were holding, since I ran out against the wind and home with it.

The wind was rather biting on the way out, but I knew I’d be fine on the way back. Nothing of note happened during the first run except for the fact that I peed behind a dumpster at the grade school 2 miles from home. The run felt pretty good, and my legs still felt pretty good except for a little residual soreness from yesterday’s sprint.

Transition 3

Changing into biking clothes for the second time (this was my shortest transition—about :15), I was well aware that things were going to begin hurting for real rather quickly.

Bike 2

While it was pretty easy to settle into a good easy pace for warmup, my quads and calves were really starting to talk to me. And they were not saying nice things. It was something like this:

Quads: What the fucking hell what kind of race is this? It’s not even a duathlon, fuckhead, where you run/bike/run. What the hell is bike/run/bike?

Calves: You stupid motherfucker. All of our fast twitch fibers are toast. Good luck putting out any semblance of watts.

One of the things I expected was that on this second bike I would have muscle fiber recruitment issues. What I mean by this is that depending on what watts you are trying to hit and how fatigued you are, you will have different gearing/cadence preferences, and I believe this to be caused by selective muscle fiber fatigue. At least I find this to be the case for myself. So in this situation, where I’ve already biked at a respectable effort and run, I’m finding that the gear I want to be in is not the same one I was in for Bike 1. That’s OK, though—it just means I will need to mix up gears so that I’m able to force different muscle fibers to be recruited at different times so some get to rest while others are working. I find this to be true primarily for my calf muscles. I can “feel” a particular wattage/gearing/cadence combination in my calves—my quads could care less.

So I ended up doing 6 repetitions (10’ each) of an up and down ladder, moving up in gear and watts and then back down. This seemed to keep my calves happy.

I am so amazed that my first and second bike legs were so incredibly close to one another in time and all other measures! I didn’t know it until I finished everything for the day, because all I cared about on the second bike was hitting 25 miles, and then I hit a split on my watch and got the fuck off the bike! I was looking forward to swimming, since I hoped that by swimming with a pull buoy, my legs would get a little bit of rest. Besides, having done Triple T last year, I knew that there was no way I could kick in the pool after what had gone on before—I would cramp up something severe—mainly in the calves.

Transition 4

I don’t remember much of this except it involved stripping off my bike clothes, putting on a swimsuit, putting clothes on, getting in my car and driving to the Y. AGAIN. Once again, I conned an innocent bystander into taking a pic of me in my swimsuit. I don’t know—you be the judge—but I think I look kind of pumped up in the second suit. Been using lots of muscles, I guess!

Swim 2

Now I was going to be swimming with lots of people in the pool at mid-day. Fuuuuuuck. When I got on deck, I had to decide which lane I was going to invade and force the current population of 2 swimmers to circle-swim. I chose the slower lane, because I know the really fast guy in the other lane, and I didn’t want to mess up his workout, and besides, I’d be passing the 2 guys in my lane.

Well, these 2 men didn’t quite understand the concept of circle swimming, and it took about 500 yards for them to sort of get it. One of the guys had asked me initially to go in a different lane, and I told him I was sorry, but this was going to be my lane. I could tell he didn’t like the fact that I was swimming faster than him and constantly passing him. Oh well, get over it.

My arms did not feel at all fatigued while swimming, and the pull buoy was a nice touch. The water was pretty warm, but even still I felt fine aerobically.

Transition 5

When I finished and got out, I was starting to simultaneously look forward to my last leg of the day but also realize it was going to be difficult and probably painful.

I took a nice, long, hot shower, and even spent a few minutes in the sauna because I figured it was still cold outside, and now I’d be transitioning from a pool to outdoor running, and that could make for some uncomfortable core body temperature gymnastics. So I tried to get myself warmed up, because even though the pool was warm, it still probably depressed my core temperature a bit. My normal oral temperature is 97, so it’s easy for me to become hypothermic, and I didn’t want that happening.

Shuffling around in the locker room and changing into running clothes was not enough to reveal the state of my legs. It wasn’t until I got back home and negotiated some stairs that I knew what was in store.

Once again, I checked my in the shade outdoor thermometer and it had only made it to 40 degrees. Crap! Oh well, so I grabbed some alternate tops and went with my sushi toque instead of a regular running hat.

I took off, and the fuel belt bottles are leaking all over the place. I guess the big bottles didn’t fully defizz or something. No matter. I went back in the house and poured 12 oz. worth into a small Gatorade bottle and went back out after changing from blue gloves to pink ones that I had worn in my full NothingMan last fall. I suppose I looked pretty goofy with the sushi hat, black and blue tights, a blue top and pink gloves! But hey, I’m Crackhead, people, and at this point I don’t give a flying fuck what I look like.

Run 2

There’s a ¼ mile hill right from my house, and oh boy, I could feel it in my legs. I just thought to myself that I should keep up an easy shuffle and not worry about it. The run course at Triple T, while hilly (3.25 miles up and then back down) is at least on trail, so since I was running on asphalt, it just added to the pain on the day. But I expected it, so too bad. The pain will stop when I’m finished!

At this point I was a little pleased with myself for having completed what was already done. I don’t know why, but there’s just something perverse about doing this all by yourself and not giving a shit that there are no spectators. It reminded me that yesterday when I was talking to the woman at the front desk of the Y, she had asked me who was going to time me. I just showed her my watch! Like is it really that difficult for a person to wear a watch and hit splits? I guess it must appear that way to some people.

Side note: It’s 5:30PM and I am JUST NOW drinking my first post-race beer. What is wrong with me? I’ve already wasted several valuable hours where I could have been taking in painkiller.

After that ½ mile uphill, the road (after a left turn) flattens out for the remainder of the first mile, and this was highly appreciated by my now fucked up legs. On the plus side, my hip flexors weren’t cashed like they are in an Ironman marathon, but still, this was a bizarre workout no matter how you cut it.

The next ½ mile is still flat, but there’s hardly any shoulder on the road, so I’m a bit careful here because some cars just don’t like giving me any berth. But that only lasts for about ¼ mile and then I’ve got a nice, fairly wide boulevard-like road to run on. After ½ mile, there’s a ½ mile uphill. It’s a gentle grade, though, but at this point, anything non-flat is a little hard. Still, I’m not giving in to that little fucker in my head that’s telling me to walk. Nope! Not yet.

Mile 3 begins with a very short uphill and then the rollers begin, but the primary direction is down. At least downhill running is not feeling bad, and I’m very grateful for this. I ran on a mix of sidewalk and asphalt, as the way back on this mile has a nice shoulder where I can stay off the sidewalk totally.

The ¼ mile to get to 3.25 miles is uphill again. Damn it! Oh well, I need to keep keeping on, and no walking. And I know once I’m at the top and turn around, I’ll have the wind at my back. The headwind seemed stronger on Run 2 than Run 1, but now the sun is up higher, so as soon as I have the wind at my back I begin to notice how sweaty and disgusting I am.

The ¼ mile run downhill was nice. Now it’s time to take it up the butt on the 1-mile climb. At this point, I do not wish to be bothered or annoyed in any fashion. I saw a woman with a baby stroller ahead of me and it annoyed me. I saw men casting into a retention pond and it annoyed me. I saw a man walking a dog, wearing running clothes (and yet I could tell he wasn’t a runner), and letting his dog take a shit on some lawn and he didn’t pick it up. Since I was annoyed, I called him on it. He lied and said his dog didn’t do it. Lying motherfucker. The dog shit was almost steaming.

But then I realize the reason I’m annoyed is because of all the climbing, and before I know it, I’m to and past Shannon (fucking) Lakes Road, which signals that the worst of it is over. I don’t feel that bad because now I am heading home, and the pain will stop.

When I finish this mile, I’m surprised I didn’t run it much slower, because I certainly felt like I was running in slow motion.

The next mile is gently downhill for ½ mile and then it flattens out (reverse of the out part, see?). When I do training runs, I typically charge the 1-mile uphill and then I slow down on the downhill. Odd, I know, but at least today, I was pacing the uphill section properly so I didn’t have that problem.

All is about to be good with the world because I’ve only got 1 mile to go. It isn’t really sinking in all what I’ve done today—I just want to be done. With about ¾ mile to go, what song should come on the radio but “Footloose.” Well, you know what that means. It means I must do some fancy footwork. And I did. And I didn’t care how it looked to anyone since, well, as you know by this time I’m deep into Nothingness and it’s all in my head. I was actually happy for the chance to do a little dancing and that I was able to do it!

The last .4 mile starts a gradual downhill until I get to ¼ mile from home which is all downhill. Now I’m feeling pretty good because it’s all going to end.

Transition 6

OH YEAH, BABY, I’M DONE!!!

My first thought was that I am sick of clothes. I stripped off everything, and just sort of walked around naked. I wasn’t cold, and I wasn’t really hungry, either, because I had fueled really well in terms of calories And since I had been running in cool temperatures, I didn’t stink like I do when running in heat. So I rinsed out all the fucking bottles I had used, and then I took a nice shower, and all I could think was how many showers did I take today? For all I did, it was just 3, so no world record was set on that account.

But now I am still all wired from all the caffeine I took in today, but I feel really great. I mean, what the hell! I did it, I did it in style, and now it’s time to take some recovery (and more painkiller). I definitely had a lot of flow time today. I let my transitions be transitions, and when I wasn’t doing that, I kept to my planned race pacing. Can’t do better than that!