Ironman Florida Report

My triathlon focused season started a year ago with Phuket 70.3 and ended yesterday with Ironman Florida. No, Florida does not look like that, the photo is from Worlds in Vegas in September. This was my third time doing Ironman Florida, I love the race here, yea it's getting crowded, there were 3000 registered. The weather leading up to the race was dominated by superstorm Sandy, even though it passed a couple of hundred miles away. The gulf was wild all week, red flagged, race day was still fairly wild, big waves and swells, race organizers must go through some agonizing times allowing 3000 racers, probably 1000 first timers into the open water.

Swim time of 1:24 was about what I expected, thankfully uneventful. The T1 and T2 set up for this race involve a lengthy run through the hotel banquet rooms so an 8 or 9 minute transition is not so bad.

My excellent coach, Scott Curry and I had talked about a race plan, I wanted to try to beat my PR set here in 2007 of 11:50. With that in mind I went too hard at the beginning of the bike leg, by the end I was fairly toasted, 5:38 bike, decent time and kept me in line for my PR. One of the pros set a bike course record of 4:04 so conditions were great for racing. A little bit hot but not like Vegas.

Started the run with my PR in mind, 2 miles into the run I knew it was not to be. Found myself walking and needed to rethink my strategy, actually the strategy was now to run from aid station to aid station. So the next 5 hours or so was just that, I really did not have the run fitness. I used all of the awesome mental training that Scott had given me to get me through. End result was 12:45. Decent placing in my age group, 34th.

Big thanks to Scott for getting me through the year, helping me with things that happen to a 55 year old body and working through a couple of times where my motivation to train had gone away. 

Thats right, I'm going there now.