Analysis and looking forward

I’ve done some thinking about the Ironman and moving forward:

This year:

1. My cracked rib limited my ærobic work.

2. That meant I was doing the bike course’s many hills with my muscles.

For next year:

3. I need to bring my time budget down. My budget for into T2 was 9:45; if the race official had let me continue, I would’ve been more than an hour past that. If my budget had been, say, 9:00 (swim 1:45 + T1 0:15 + bike 7:00) I might have made it even with the cracked rib.

4. I need to get stronger for that course. Even with my 9:45 time budget and a cracked rib, I might have made it if the hills hadn’t trashed my legs so badly. On two hills of the 2nd loop (Old Sauk Pass and Midtown) I had to walk for a few minutes because my quads were cramping.

That means:

5. I need to improved my swim technique. Just that should take a lot of time off the top of my swim.

6. I need more bike training, especially in the Oak Ridges Moraine (which is very like the IM Wisconsin bike course).

7. I think I need more strength training.

At least, that's what I think.

Lessons learned from Ironman Wisconsin 2007

In the ten days since the Ironman, I’ve been thinking about what lessons I’ve learned. This is a little different from looking forward, another post I’ll do soon. This is about things I did, or didn’t, do that turned out good or ill. So here’s a cut at what these lessons were.

First, what did we do that turned out right?

1. We stayed in a good hotel. We didn’t “find” it; I reserved late, ’way too late, and the Ironman Wisconsin Web site found us the Staybridge Suites Hotel Madison East, which is a Six Continents/Holiday Inn brand I wasn’t familiar with. The property is an undistinguished box at the corner of City View Drive and High Crossing Boulevard. On paper, it looked ’way too far out of town, but it was a great hotel, really. We were so delighted, we happily booked there again for next year.

2. Do the one-day drive, i.e., through Chicago. On our last trip, we took two days and drove via Sault Ste Marie. Although the one-day drive is long—thirteen hours, even with minimal stops—there’s none of the hassle of checking into a hotel or a bed-and-breakfast, and it is quite doable with two drivers—and it makes us feel better about the time we take from work and our cats for the Ironman.

3. Stay five days and six nights. We drove to Madison on the Wednesday after Labour Day, and drove home the Tuesday after the race. It worked out very nicely, as follows.

4. Pick up my packet about an hour after pick-up opens on Thursday. When I went, 11 a.m. local time on Thursday, the line-up was short. The volunteer told me it was quite busy just an hour earlier. Going at 11 on Thursday meant that I got my kit early, but it didn’t take very long.

5. Spend the Friday before the race obsessing about my bags, and getting things I’m missing. You drop off your bike and the two transition bags the day before the race. Feeling I have a full day to lay out the contents of all my bags, and then to run around getting the handful of things I was missing, worked out really well.

6. Bring our own coffee for the in-room coffeemaker. I’m an early riser, especially when I’m in the Central Time Zone, and it was nice having a decent cup of coffee at 4 a.m. on race morning.

Second, what did we not do that I now wish we had?

7. On Saturday, don’t check in my bike and transition bags until I’ve done my “race prep” work-outs. I don’t think I was as sharp as I could’ve been. (Alternately, I could bring my road bike as well as my tri bike, but that seems like a lot of trouble.)

8. Do all work-outs Coach Steve sets, including the swims.

9. Bring our own food for lunch and dinner. The hotel’s complementary breakfast was perfectly adequate, and it was nice to discover Panera Bread, but my comfortable food would’ve helped me out in the pre-race days.

10. Use a big backpack for my morning stuff. It would’ve made hauling all that stuff around (wetsuit etc.) a lot easier!

11. Look at the picture accompanying this post. The lesson here is that when I see the race photographer, look like an Ironman participant! Don’t give the oh-I’m-about-to-have-my-picture-taken grin!

My Ironman Wisconsin

To put it shortly, I was pulled from the bike course 9½ miles from the finish at 5:15 p.m. local time. There was nothing grossly wrong—the cracked rib I suffered four weeks ago just prevented me from being highly ærobic—that slowed me down on the flats, and meant I had to power up the hills (of which, for those not familiar with the course, there are many), so my legs were trashed by the second loop.

The swim went according to plan. I know the triathletes who read this will find a 2:05 swim risible (there were only 29 swimmers behind me, I think), but I couldn’t swim in November ’05, and had not swum in open water until June of this year, so I’m very pleased to have had a pleasant easy swim. My technique, of course, is terrible, but that just gives me something (of many!) to work on for next year.

I left the water in great shape, shook Rob Beuthling’s hand, and had a good transition—no dawdling, and no hurry, just kept moving—though somehow it took 16 minutes.

I cycled down the helix and got out on the course. It was pretty clear early on that something was wrong. I hadn’t done any hilly cycling since I’d cracked my rib, and the constraint it puts on deep breathing was a real problem—hills became weight-lifting exercises, and I’m a pretty heavy weight. :-)

Anyway, it was a long day on the bike; by the halfway point I knew I’d miss the cut-off, but I wanted to finish the bike even if I was going to be marked a DNF. The official who took me off disagreed; I knew I could’ve just taken off my chip and bib and continued as a civilian, but I was, basically, in a good mood and didn’t feel like arguing. The other 4 competitors and I in the van had a good chat, and shared a couple of beers(!) on the drive back to Monona Terrace.

UPDATE: Here's a screen shot of my official results:


After rendezvousing with my family (the only real frustration of the day!), we walked to State Street Brats for (what else?) brats and beer, and watched the run competitors come in. I was more than a little envious, of course, but content with my fate. I’d known that my rib was going to be a problem, and it really points to what I need to do.

I trained for this race from pretty much a standing start in late June ’06. Now I have another 12 months, and what I expect will be a bunch of shorter triathlons, in which to chop chunks of time off the swimming and cycling, and to get even stronger and fitter. I had trouble fitting in all the work-outs Coach Steve wanted me to, but I was getting better and better at it. Another year to “learn to train”. I am very much looking forward to getting back to training!

Thanks to everyone—the Tri-Deads, my family with their e-mails and phone calls of support, and my friends and other supporters.

Liz, my daughter, gave me bottomless emotional support, even from her three-month exile in Canada’s Yukon Territory—and spent only two days in Toronto before driving to Madison to be with me!

Mona, my SO, put up with my ceasing to be a full member of our household as I trained—and is supportive of my doing more next year!

Coach Kelvin Landolt taught me to swim, an accomplishment of which I am proudest at age 53.

Coach Steve Bentley brought me to the start line of an Ironman with confidence.

And my friend and colleague John Boguslawski talked me into the whole thing in the first place!

Wisconsin Ironman bike route

The loop is done twice.

What is the Wisconsin Ironman?

I'm stealing the description from the Ironman Web site. It says that the University of Wisconsin is a party university:


That's funny, I thought of them rather as the Cement Canoe champions of North America. First you swim in Lake Monona, which is too small to be more than slightly choppy...


Go on a large, two-loop bike race through the green fields of Wisconsin...


Finally, there's the run...


If you survive that, there's Beer at the Finish! Or we'll go to State Street Brats.

“Pre-op”

That’s the Holland Orthopædic & Arthritic Centre of the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre on Toronto’s Wellesley Street. It’s where I spent two hours Friday morning in the mandatory “pre-op” for March 6’s arthroscopic partial meniscectomy. A clerk asked me questions and filled out a form, I had an ECG done, and then I saw the anæsthesiologist who confirmed that, yes, I was healthy. The heartrate on the ECG was slow, my b.p. was 124/73 (that’s good, right?), and there is, basically, nothing wrong with me. :-)

The news buried in this post, of course, is that I’m having surgery.

I haven’t run, really, since mid-January ’06. I’ve done various work-outs, “probe runs” (as Coach Pimm called them) of one or two miles, and just accepted the pain. By late fall ’06 I accepted that the problem wasn’t going to go away with non-invasive physical, chiropractic, or shiatsu therapy (though each has its virtues). My family doc requisitioned an MRI, which I got in early December. The result: a “small radial tear of the medial meniscus body”. (Also “severe chondromalacia patella”, but that’s the subject for another post.) So my family doc referred me to a specialist, an orthopædic surgeon. That was December 4.

In mid-January I called my doc. Any progress? Well, no; it would be months, perhaps eight months, before I saw the orthopædist. Eight months! What about my Ironman?

I spoke to my doc, and she said she’d “grovel” (her word), and the next day or the day after I got a call from the ortho’s office: I had an appointment for the next week. It was the day I was booked to return from Los Angeles, but I resched’d my flight to return over night (I ended up flying on a late and nearly empty flight from Los Angeles to Boston and then taking a little EMBRAER jet to Toronto.) Dozy, I saw the ortho. He recommended no surgery—unless I wanted to run. Yes, I did.

So they put me on the cancellation list—and less than two weeks later, I had my date.

I know it’s odd, but I’m excited at the prospect of surgery!

The one negative, if it is a negative, is that my schedulaholism cannot be satisfied. I have my March work-out schedule, but it’s not much more than Coach Steve’s wild guess as to what I’ll be able to do. The ortho will talk to me after the op, and we’ll take it from there. I’m kind of hoping I can go to the triathlete swim training class three days later and do some work-outs with a pull-buoy between my thighs, but, sigh, we’ll see!