Vineman 70.6 Half Ironman

To All, My late blooming athletic career is once again in full swing. Last weekend I completed my second 1/2 Ironmman event, swimming 1.2 miles, biking 56 miles and then running a half marathon. I managed to have a great time in the race for some reason, knocking almost 45 minutes off my last time to finish in a respectable 5 hours and 20 minutes. I didn't train that much, relying on my Spring Ironman in Arizona fitness levels to carry me through. Pretty much everything that could go wrong, did. Without a great sense of humor, all would have been lost.

The race was on Sunday the 22nd and we all drove up on Saturday, with the exception of Parker, who spent the weekend being shuffled from Nanny to Aunt Linda to Grandma.

On the Friday evening before our Saturday drive up, I was doing some fine tuning of my triathlon bike, trying to get the rear gears to shift a little better when I snapped a 25 cent spring and couldn't fix it myself. I brought it into the local bike shop Saturday morning. They tried for a while, but didn't have the right tool to fix it, so I decided at the last minute to just use my old road bike. I dusted it off, packed the car, gathered the family and headed out for the two hour drive up to Sonoma. Well, it was supposed to be two hours, but for some reason, everyone else in the world decided to go at the same time as we did. We crawled along for four hours. From the Benecia Bridge to Santa Rosa, there was bumper to bumper traffic. I'm still wondering where all this traffic was going, it's not like there is much to do in Santa Rosa and points north. I suppose the Charles M. Schultz Peanuts Cartoon Museum is a good draw and maybe the Boonville Brewery would pull in a car load or two, but there were literally thousands of cars littering the highway for 40 to 50 miles. Interspersed with the urban dwellers seeking solace among the redwoods up north were many high strung and well tanned triathletes trying to get to registration before it closed at 8:00 p.m.

Registration went surprisingly smoothly. I was checked, banded, bagged, t-shirted, and chipped in under 10 minutes. For those of you Vineman virgins, the course requires two transition areas. One is at Johnson's Beach on the Russian River near Guernville for the swim to bike transition and one is in Windsor at the local High School 10 miles away for the bike to run transition. Due to this splitting of the transitions, the race requires participants to prepare their T2 gear the night before the event. This poses a bit of a dilemma for those of us who over think what to have available for each segment of the race. I spent a good 20 minutes going through a mental inventory of things I would need for the run. Should I carry 1 or 2 Gu packets, hat or visor, extra sunscreen and what SPF, white or black socks, hair gel or hair spray, race flats or lightweight trainers, and the most crucial decision of all…should I change my blue sunglasses I use for the bike leg to a pair with a more neutral colored frame for the run because the blue frames may clash with the red Forward Motion Race Club (FMRC) logo on my hat?

After checking in, we drove to Santa Rosa for the team dinner. We met over 25 folks from the local Danville tri club for a wonderful pre-race pasta dinner at a local Italian eatery. The pasta was plentiful and the case of Chianti we polished off was quite tasty. After leaving the restaurant we headed back to Petaluma to find our hotel, better known as a place to stay for the night. With two twin beds, I somehow got to hang with Conner, who announced at 10:00 that he was not tired and was not planning to sleep that night. At 10:05 he was sound asleep, but continued to toss, turn and other wise disturb me until the three or four alarms went off at 4:30 a.m.

By 5:00 a.m we were headed off into the darkness to find Guernville and the beach on the Russian River. What was supposed to be a 20 minute drive turned into a forever drive as we all tried to meander into this little town and find a place to park. I was supposed to be off at 6:30 and arrived with a few minutes to spare. The start was the most disorganized thing I had ever seen. It appeared that this event, which had grown over the years form a small local thing to a big, national race, never lost its local flavor. Everyone arrived into the bottleneck at the beach with all their bike and swim gear as we were not allowed to check in bikes the night before. Dianne was awesome, bullying our way through the line so I could get body marked, find a spot for the bike, get the wetsuit on and get ready to jump in the water.

Because of the narrowness of the Russian River, the 2000 participants had to be divided into about 50 swim wave starts. Each age group had their own start time plus age groups with large representation were divided even further. For example, the 37 year olds had their own wave start and my age group 45-49 was divided into three groups, the young'uns 45-46, the mid-lifers 47-48, and the 49 year old geezers. Some age groups had even further definition with a separate start time for men born East of the Mason Dixon line between the hours of 4:31PM and 5:02PM on March 28th, 1952. Believe it or not, this wave had over 100 participants in it.

Swimming in the Russian River is always an interesting experience. The race director always points out one of the unique aspects of the Vineman swim course. The swim is probably one of the safest swims in triathlon. The director always says at the pre-race briefing "if you get into trouble during the swim…stand up!". Actually, the swim start is about 6 feet deep, but then gets shallower as you crawl upriver. One of the FMRC guys commented that when he finished the race he looked down at his fingernails and realized they were caked with black gunk. Either he was doing oil changes on the bike or he was scooping out river mud with each swim stroke. One of the team felt he could run faster than he could swim, so he did a slow jog downstream after the turn around. Typically a triathlon swim course is a triangular or rectangular affair. The Vineman swim course is more of a spastic snake shape twisting and turning every which way for 1.2 miles. Not that I swim a perfect straight line, but trying to keep to the right of the buoys was quite the challenge.

I exited the water onto the "beach" although I've always thought for a place to qualify as a beach there were certain requirements like sand, waves, seaweed, bikini babes, and those little flies that always seem to be buzzing around your head. I was dismayed to find out that no one was there to help me pull off my wetsuit. Having been pampered at my last bunch of Ironman's, I was shocked and and had to think about how to get the darned thing off without looking like a complete fool. I found my bike amid the other 2000 bikes and performed my T1 ritual of rolling in the mud trying to get my suit off, bike shoes on (whoops forgot the socks!), putting my race number belt on, ripping my race number off the belt accidentally and then strapping on the brain bucket. I remembered to stuff my wetsuit, goggles, and swim cap into the official Vineman Ironman 70.3 approved T1 swim gear transition plastic bag otherwise my wetsuit would have been relegated to the heap-o-crap at the end of the race. I found out from Dianne later that they forgot to start the clock with the first wave of people, so my time out of the water was a littler faster than it appeared.

I bolted onto the bike course only to find that something was rubbing and I wasn't going very fast. Three stops later I finally figured out my back tire was not aligned and quickly made an adjustment. A few minutes later I went to do a quick check of my heart rate and pace and realized I forgot to turn it on. The bike leg was fairly uneventful except for the flash of light and the vortex of wind as 20 year olds blew by me. Pit stops consisted of Gatorade and Powerbars. For those who have never had a Powerbar in the heat of day, I can only say that they become a gooey mess and are impossible to get out of the wrapping, let alone eat. Volunteers at the stations obviously had the problem figured out and unwrapped the bars, tore them in half with their hands and then let the pieces dangle in the wind hoping riders would cruise by and grab them out of their hands. I'm not generally a picky eater, but the thought of those bars melting in the volunteer's hands was positively the most repulsive thing I've seen in a long time. I doubled up on the Gatorade, as did everyone else I saw. Being in the 2nd of 50 swim wave starts, there wasn't much evidence of racers to come that were going to be littering the course. There were reports from those that left after me of seeing the usual flotsam and jetsam associated with the bike leg like water bottles, spare tubes, spare tires, Gu packs, and a bike shoe or two, they also spied one helmet (where was the owner?), a floor pump, a disk wheel, and one of those mini kegs Heineken is making now. Not sure if the keg fell off a bike or out of a race officials car, but it was empty, so someone was having a great time on the bike course.

T2 arrived very quickly, so fast that I thought maybe I had missed 15 or so miles of the course. I racked my bike, clipped my heart rate monitor/GPS on something and sent pieces flying everywhere. I removed the remains, threw it into the bag and ran out of transition. The run course, like the bike course, was open to cars, and so they had blocked out a small two feet wide area for the 2000 of us to run on the shoulder of the road. I quickly realised the problem of a narrow shoulder on an out and back course. Those speedy folks ahead of me were heading back to the finish. We were all assigned the same two foot wide space. It was comical to watch runners coming at each other trying to determine who was going to dodge left and who was going to go right. I spent the last 10 miles swerving around people. Of course all water stations were on the same side of the road and runners collided reaching for water and gatorade. The course was pretty hilly. I hit a low point around mile 8 runing through a vineyard when the 90 degree sun was bearing down and I began to feel like one of those ants I used to torture with a magnifying glass back when I was growing up. I thought maybe all those little ant souls were up there in heaven seeking revenge for my childish antics.

I made it back to the high school without a clue as to how I had done. Dianne, Kira and Conner were hanging out by the large speed bump into the school for most of the day so they could watch hapless riders flying off their bikes, realizing a little too late that a speed bump at 20mph around a corner was not a good thing.

I felt great at the end. I had heard about the traditional white wine dunk tank, but alas, Ironman had eliminated that post race activity due to safety and health concerns. Allegedly, a few years back two athletes, after soaking in the tank for an unspecified amount of time, became overly amorous and the tank had to be drained. It was hot, so we hid under a covered tent and snacked on some pretty good food. After hanging out for a bit, we headed over to the large field to gather my swim bag that had been trucked from the beach to the high school. When I arrived I noticed that they had just started to unload the truck. For some reason they only used one very large truck and two very slow guys. Of course the bags were packed from highest number to lowest. My number 117 was at the very front of the truck. A bunch of us, realizing the disaster in front of us, starting helping to unload the truck, sort the bags and help them organize. About 90 minutes later my bag finally arrived and I was free to go. We headed back to the hotel for showers, made it to a local greasy spoon and then headed home.

I was up at the crack of dawn Monday morning. Sunday, the day of my Vineman race, was also the date for Ironman Lake Placid. That meant that the lake Placid event would be opening up entries for 2008 at 8:00 am Monday morning. A bunch of us from Danville had decided that we were going to try and get into this event. Last year the event sold out in a few hours, so I had to be fast on the computer if I wanted in to the 2008 race. I logged on at 7:00 to catch news of the event and was told that the race entries for 2008 would be available at 8:00. At 7:30 I checked in again and the website stated the event was sold out. At 7:45 the page changed and stated there would be an announcement at 10:00 and that this year's participants, given a chance to enter next year's race before us, had taken most of the spots. I raced off to work and logged back on to the website. I tried again at 9:55 and found out that the entry process had just started. I typed madly for 5 minutes filling out the 10 page entry form\legal disclosure\medical checklist, plunked down $500 and hit the send button. One minute later I got a message back.. Congratulations! I was in. 10 minutes later the website posted a "sold out" message.

After sharing my elation with Dianne and other friends, I quickly realized what happens when 2000 athletes and their 4000 friends find out they get to go to a town of 2000 for a large race one year later. They all need a place to stay. A mass panic over the internet ensued over the next of a couple of days. Of course athletes for this year's race all got first pick of houses for next year and most houses didn't come available until a few days later. Luckily, Dianne was fast on the draw and we managed to secure some accommodations right down down, a mile or so from the Olympic stadium. The house is huge with 5 bedrooms and a massive porch. Anyone looking to vacation in upper New York state next year and wanting to watch a triathlon are more than welcome to join in. If you don't like to watch the triathlon, I've heard the Olympic bobsled run is open to the public in the summer and you can descend at 80 miles per hour catching flies in your teeth. We've got the place for 9 days and plan to hang out, go swimming and generally relax.

With another race next July 20, it's time for a little more R&R and then back to the training. For now, it's off to bed. More news later. tom