Karma, a saint and other religious experiences

There were approximately 60 seconds that I didn't enjoy at Ironman Mont Tremblant on Sunday, August 17, 2014.  There were the 30 seconds when I looked down at my snapped derailleur with 7 miles to go on the bike course and thought "my day is over."  And then there were the following 30 seconds when I thought "I can make it within cutoff if I walk the mile to the top of the hill and then the 6 miles back to transition."  As positive and overcomey that sounds, it still wasn't a pleasant prospect.

Other than that, I think that I loved every single moment of the race, the day, and the weekend.

Over the past few months, I've worried out loud that the lead up to IMMT was feeling like the lead up to IMLP five years ago which I also loved, but that is forever linked in my mind with the astonishing high of the accomplishment and the depth of the depression that followed, even as I know that one did not cause the other.  Instead, I found that my enjoyment and delight in this event was in the totality of the experience rather than the accomplishment of crossing the finish line.

Firstly, there was the training for the various lead up event like Mountains of Misery, Great Chesapeake Bay Swim and Kinetic Half ironman, and the different groups of training and race partners I had for each, the core posse that I trained most with and all the new friends I made in the last few weeks before the race as I slowly realized just who was going to be participating but with whom I hadn't directly trained.

Secondly, there was the environment for the race itself.  It is very beautiful, despite the faux Austrian village via Disneyland look.  And the village was 100% turned over to Ironman and every single person was seemingly geared towards ensuring that we had a good time there.

You can see in the video how amazing it was to run through the village, first to the right out on the second loop, and finally to the finish line on the left.

Thirdly, despite the days of cold (50s!  Brrrr!) and rain leading up to race day, we had a blast riding the gondola, hanging out with friends and prepping for the race.  

There were the pastries that Bob drained from
Montreal and contributed to the hotel room.

There was the competition Rich and I had to see who
could be caught without our matching spangly hoodies.

One of the highlights was wearing this outfit and screaming
past a guy with a full disk wheel on a test run descent of Chemin Duplessis.
Poor guy was not only chicked, but by someone wearing a
hoody and aero helmet combo. 

I won the competition (Rich was crap at his own game),
but I graciously joined him in the plank payoff at the team dinner.

The athlete dinner included brownies sporting tiny
M-Dots on top.  I mean - how cute is that? (Hilary too!)

As we prepared for the race, there were the usual trappings of Ironman.

Where, oh where is my T2 bag?

Scarlett was bundled up for the
expected rain overnight.

And the typical team shenanigans.

Ryan always has to be the center of attention.

Who you calling Bunny?

And on the morning of the race, all the requisite neoprene hugs and tears.

So, you can see I was having fun even well before raceday.  But something was missing.  While I'd spent the few weeks around the 20/120 weekend bouncing off the walls in excitement, the feeling had quietly packed its bags and left me in the previous couple of weeks.  Nevermind, it'll come back.  It always does.  My Mum tagged me "Tigger" 40 odd years ago and that's normally how I am before an event (obnoxiously so, some might say).  But Tigger just never quite showed up this weekend.  

As I thought about it, I realized that it was because -- as I've said before -- this race felt different.  This time, I'd set very specific goals and written a (more) highly (than usual) detailed race plan.  And now, the consequences were that I was 100% focused on executing.  So that was the fourth element that made this day so enjoyable - experiencing the finish line was now less important than executing the plan throughout the entire day.

Of course, there's a risk in that.  And I acknowledged that to when I hugged Mark in the pre-race dawn and said "Please don't let anything go wrong."  Famous last words, eh?

So, here's where the karma comes in.  Now, I don't believe in all that crap.  But if anything was to make me believe, this would be it.  In the darkened transition area, I asked a woman with better eyes than mine to read where 110 was on my pump (yes, this is despite having pumped up my tires three times a week to the exact same point for the past year - don't judge).  After I'd finished, I heard her friend start to panic about not having a pump and needing to pump up her tires.  I thought "I could leave right now - I have things to do.  But to help her out would be the nice thing to do.  If I help her, that's good karma and it'll come back to me."  Seriously, that's what went through my mind.  So I lent her the pump and then pumped her tires up when she struggled.  And never thought about it again.

Fast forward about 9 hours to the 60 seconds I described above.  Up until that point, I'd had the perfect plan and had been executing it perfectly.  My plan included three sets of goals.  I'd written about my achievable goals in my last blog post. So here, now, are my other two sets of goals:

Achievable

Swim: 1:18

Bike:  7:15

Run: 5:10

Finish: 13:56

(Total transitions: 00:13)

Stretch

Swim: 1:18

Bike:  7:00

Run: 5:10

Finish: 13:41

Died and Gone to Heaven

Swim: 1:18

Bike:  7:00

Run: 4:57

Finish: 13:28

Accomplished to this Point

Swim: 1:17 (21/100+ in my age group - holy shit!)

Bike: First loop - 3:33 - and feeling good for a 7:06-7:08 finish depending on how long I stopped for special needs.

So at this point I was well ahead of my achievable goal and gunning for the stretch goal.  

Then I dialed it up.  

I had two voices in my head on the bike leg.  The first, for the first loop, was Mark commenting to someone the night before that I was more disciplined than he at staying in Zone 2 on the bike.  Really?  Huh.  I didn't know that.  Well, telling me a truth about myself is obviously all it takes, because I was incredibly disciplined on that first loop.  Held it back for the first 5 miles to allow my HR to settle down after the long run from swim exit to T1, mid-high Z2 for the entire thing and only kissing Z3 on the stair step climbs in miles 45-56.  Probably a hundred or more cyclists (all with slower swims than me thanks to starting in the last wave of the swim) passed me as I 'sat up to get up' the hills, spun at 90+ cadence, and took plenty of time to fuel and hydrate always reminding myself that the race will only truly start at approximately mile 13.1 of the marathon - 7+ hours from then.

The second voice was my friend, run & triathlon coach Taneen who looked at my race plan and suggested that since I'm a strong cyclist and the course suits me, that I should push it a little on the bike and give myself a few more walk breaks on the run.  So, OK, at mile 56, with my heart rate settled and comfortable, and knowing that HR drift will mean that Z3 is the new Z2, I started to push it.  

And one by one I passed all those cyclists who'd passed me earlier in the day, hammering and mashing their ways up the hills, killing their legs and spiking their heart rates, descending in the worst possible position.  And for good measure, I passed some more.  I was able to maintain 18/19/20 mph for 5 mile stretches of tempo riding, allowing my HR to float in low-mid Z3.  I was flying and having an absolute blast.  I caught several Team Zers and got to check in on their days (yes, some "catches" were unfair because they were standing in line for the portapotties, but I'll take them!).  I bopped along to the loud salsa music in St Jovite and the vicarage kid in me got a kick out of the bells ringing out of a church tower.

There were even moments of fun when I saw my teammates.

Caption contest!

I hardly dared to look at my overall pace, but I knew I was going to negative split this course which is something that is very difficult to do.

And I would have - I was on track to negative split by about 11 minutes.  If I'd maintained anything close to the pace I'd climbed the final 12 miles of hills on the first loop (and I felt so good at the bottom that I was sure I would), I'd have finished the bike in 6:55.  

But remember how I asked nogod to not allow anything bad to happen?  The first clue was a dropped chain.  No problem - I've ridden my chain back on dozens of times.  Instead, my bike stopped.  Simply stopped.  I looked down and saw my rear derailleur hanging by its wire, no longer attached to the bike, and the chain was stuck on the inside of my small chain ring.  Oh shit.  Oh shit oh shit oh shit.  Even I could see that it couldn't be fixed.  

So, here I was, 7 miles to go and my day was done.  You probably won't believe it, but at that moment, I wasn't angry.  Freak mechanicals happen.  And I'd proven to myself that I could achieve my goals and more and was so happy with how the second loop had gone.  So I resigned myself to a race report that would end a mile from the top of Chemin Duplessis.

And here's where the karma comes in.

In the 60 seconds it took for me to move from "my day is done" to "maybe I can walk back to transition," a saint in the form of Dominic the mechanic pulled up beside me on his little moped with wheels attached on the back and asked if I needed help.  And Saint Dominic of the Mechanics (as he will forever be known to me and my teammates) proceeded to remove the derailleur, install a new chain, reset the wheel and literally push me up the hill to restart my race.  

Of course, in the process, Scarlett the Tribike turned into Scarlett the Single Speed.

Fiddle Dee Dee - who needs gears?

So off I went, standing out of the saddle to climb the hills, getting as aero as I possibly could on the descents, peddling in high cadence on the flats until I simply physically couldn't pedal any faster.  In the end, I lost 10 minutes to the repair and 3 to the lost speed on the last 6 miles of the bike.  But I didn't give a damn. I was so happy that I was making forward progress, I even giggled at the very idea of finishing an Ironman on a single speed, as I made the last turn back into the village.

Despite the issue, my final bike was 7:08

Accomplished to this Point

Swim: 1:17

Bike: 7:08

7 minutes over my stretch goal, 8 under my achievable goal.

And then I ran.  I actually don't have a lot to report on the run unless you want a blow by blow account of every portapotty I visited, and I'm fairly sure you don't.  I stuck to my 10/1 plan with a few short walks up the steepest parts of the hills.  I could see that I was running faster than my planned pace, but it felt comfortable and sustainable, and since it wasn't out of the realm of what my training data suggested I could do, I kept trucking, knowing that if I wanted to hit my stretch goal, the race would start for me with 13.1 to go.

Along the way, there were teammates and supporters galore who I can't thank enough for the high fives and the cheers.  And to Keri who complimented me on my nicely separated boobs?  Why, thank you!

What can I say?
That bra was totally worth it.

Those of you who know me won't be surprised that I included in my race plan the fact that I budgeted for two and only two teammate hugs.  One was my swim coach and friend Mark who I ran up to on the trail and said "this is in my race plan" as I hugged him and wished him luck.  And the other occurred as Rich and I both crested a steep hill from opposite sides.  I've trained with him nearly every step and pedal stroke of the way, so it seemed appropriate that we hugged at the highest point of the race.  I will always treasure those hugs.

As darkness fell, I was close enough to the finish to know I was going to make my stretch goal although I couldn't see my total time thanks to my piss poor eyes and the teeny tiny numbers on the timex.  I used a coach's suggestion to check my overall pace at mile 20 and just try to maintain that.  While I didn't negatively split the marathon, I was only off by 4 minutes and I'm most proud of the fact that 21/26 of my miles were in the 10:5x-11:3x range, the final one was 10:40, and the slowest was 13:00 (see tour de portapotty remark above).  I simply never fell apart.  

Accomplished

Swim: 1:17:29

Bike: 7:08:51

Run: 5:00:46

Finish: 13:40:05 (35 minute PR over flat-as-a-pancake Cedar Point)

A minute below my stretch goal and had I not lost 13 minutes with the mechanical, I would have beaten my died and gone to heaven goal by a minute also.  And I'm not disappointed at all.  Not one single bit.  I planned this race, pushed it when I needed to, held back when I should and only was tripped up a little bit by something completely out of my control.  In short, I executed.

The resulting picture is the face of someone who loved every single moment of an Ironman.  Crossing the finish line was only the smallest part of my day.

The Thanks

Any race report would be incomplete without thanks to those who got me to this point and carried me throughout the day.  

I've said it before, but it bears repeating.  Team Z is the greatest triathlon team in the country.  I can't describe the supporters and sherpas better than my friend Lisa, so I'm going to borrow her words:

Housing - $700

Travel costs - $500

Miles on the rental car - 1,420

Emails bombarding people for cheer squad coordination – 30 

Hours editing cheer guides, learning French, making pompoms and pompom tutorials, shopping for sign and cheer supplies – 80 

Feet gained over 8 miles of walking/running up Mont Tremblant entertaining ourselves the day before - 2,707 

Hours walking, running, dancing, jumping on IM day – 18 

Distance covered moving on IM day - 29,918 steps/12.91 miles 

Seeing all the smiles on my teammates when they saw us, watching their paces quicken with the extra boost of energy, giving them something to look at that wasn't another athlete's ass, being a part of the Team Z presence = Priceless!!

64 athletes, over 100 supporters, 3 coaches.  Each and everyone of them contributed a cheer, a wave, a high five, a hug, a helping hand, a cowbell, a photograph (thank you Miro in particular for a lot of the photographs you see in our race reports), a piece of equipment, a word of encouragement, a laugh, a challenge, a piece of last minute advice.

In particular, I'd like to give a shout out to the first timers who overcame issues like stomach issues, crashes, mechanicals, and Just. Kept. Going.  They adapted, they pushed it, they planned around their weaknesses, eliminated unnecessary stoppages buying themselves precious time, and they kept moving forward even as tears ran down their faces.  You guys are my inspiration - you show me that the training and planning and wisdom that is available in this team is solid and valued, and that this team continues to attract people of great character who deserve to be called Ironmen.

And a final thanks to my personal sherpa who carried my bags with great cheer, made sure I had all the right tubes and CO2 cartridges in my saddlebag (I'm pretty sure that a chain break tool will be in my christmas stocking this year), added even more red bling to Scarlett, made me innumerable cups of tea, and listened to me as I went over my plan YET AGAIN.  And, of course, told me that I could do what I'd planned to do.

And finally finally, here is Saint Dominic of the Mechanics after we ran across him and his mates at the pub then next day.  Hey!  What's that giant thing hanging around my neck???

My hero!

What a wonderful race to end my Ironman career on.  Merci Mont-Tremblant!