The Portland Triathlon

I woke up at 4:30am and threw on my race shorts. I hit the kitchen for a white roll, a spoonful of peanut butter, and some Powerade.  I felt terrible.  Due to decreased training volume I have only work up at 4:30am about 3 times since the Ironman.  I had laid out my clothes the night before.  While eating my breakfast I surveyed the weather and temperature.  I put on some sweat pants, a sweat shirt, and a fleece vest that had zipper pockets to hold my valuables.  I had loaded my bags the night before so I threw them and my bike in the car.  I hit the road for Cathedral Park around 5:20am.

The road blockades for the race made parking mildly difficult so I just zig zagged down streets away from the park until I found a place to park.  I took out my bike and inflated the tires.  The glory of early dark hours was that I could pee on the street, yaaay.  I took a while to make sure I had all my stuff and walked down to the park.  I got body marked on both arms and both calves; the Portland Triathlon uses Sharpies to mark so I’ve got 902 on my shoulders for a while.  The Ironman used non-permanent marker and my number was gone by the time I peeled off my wetsuit. 

In the park I spent a fair amount of time arranging my gear; I had never done a true transition before.  In the Ironman all your gear had to be in a bag, but now I could lay out things next to my bike.  I separated my swim gear to the side and rolled my bike sleeves up so that I could get them on quickly and roll them up my arm after I was on the bike.  I had a small towel simply to keep my stuff organized and baby powder to dust my feet with; this is the first time I would race without any socks. 

My wave was the first to start at 7:30, which was nice.  We had to walk along a lot of concrete to the boat ramp.  One volunteer told me, “you need to walk on concrete barefoot more often, man,” I was walking like a dainty school girl.  I didn’t dip my wetsuit before the start since I would have had to walk on concrete down and back… and the grass was nice and soft… and on top of that I was freezing.  I was at the back of the pack when the race started.  I had never swum open water in a river before, so it was a little different.  I passed a fair amount of people and the fastest people from the following waves caught up and passed me.  The water got pretty choppy late in the leg and I had to rotate pretty far out of the water to breathe.  The swim leg was 0.93 miles.  The only part of the swim that got physical was at the last turn about halfway out.  Everyone cut close to the buoy and collisions were prominent.  I took a “hit” to the ribs (not that a swim stroke can do much damage) from a guy next to me who for some reason swung his arm really wide on strokes. 

I felt a little loopy coming out of the water and walked (instead of jogged) up the boat ramp so I didn’t fall over.  The friendliest part of the race was as I jogged to the transition I was reaching for my zipper cord and a guy jogging past me said “I got ya,” and unzipped my wetsuit for me.  This was great because I didn’t have to have my hands behind my back pulling the cord while I was jogging.  I jogged to the transition area and stripped my wetsuit.  The hardest part of transition one was getting my race jersey on since my skin was wet.  I slipped on my rolled sleeves, put on my bike gloves and watch, put on my helmet and sunglasses, dusted my feet with baby powder, threw on my bike shoes, unracked my bike and ran to the bike mount line.

Here’s where the race took one of those delightful turns… one minute (spot on, according to my GPS) into my bike leg I had a flat’ish rear tire.  I don’t know if I caught something wrong on my walk down to the park or what, but it was going flat.  My family was just walking down the path after seeing my transition and I was standing right there getting my tire off.  I can’t fathom how time seems to fly when changing a tire, but it took seven minutes.  It was my rear tire so I got to start my race with hands covered in chain grease, wooooo.

The bike course was pretty flat’ish and didn’t have many big hills.  I hit a max of 30mph about 5 times on the course.  I was carrying extra water to begin with, but when I laid my bike down to get the tire off I lost about half a liter of water out of my aero bottle.  And on that topic, I had lost a strap from my aero bottle holder so my bottle rattled when I was covering rough road.  The wind was pretty rough during the race.  The weather report said gusts up to 30mph, and I believe it.  There were some gusts that could very well knock a bike to the ground.  The bike leg was 24.8 miles. 

The second transition was pretty seamless.  I racked my bike and stripped my bike gear.  To run all I did was dust my feet again with baby powder, throw on my running shoes, and strap on my bib belt.  I opted to leave my sleeves on and leave behind the hat and sunglass.  My flat had cost me any chance of placing, so I used a portapotty.  This is my blog so I get to write whatever I want; I didn’t think I could spend so much time peeing.  It was actually irritating how long I peed for, I wanted to get back on the course.

The run was rough.  In the last month, while recovering, I had logged about six true workouts.  My shin muscles couldn’t handle the run after hammering hard on the bike to fight the wind.  I was alternating a run to a walk whenever my shin pain would get close to unbearable.  I decided to shoot for a 10-minute mile pace.  34 minutes into the race I had covered 3 miles, I was still alternating a walk/run and this wasn’t cutting it.  I needed to go faster; walking during a 10k made my brain hurt.  I started to alternate my regular jog with an exaggerated jog on my toes.  The biggest worry with this method was that I wasn’t wearing socks and I was concerned about excessive friction on the balls of my feet.  Got to love that baby powder; it kept me blister free.  This alternating worked pretty well but hammered my calves.  I kept this up for the remainder of the race and was able to lock down a faster pace to recover minutes.  It took me about 61-62 minutes to cover 6.2 miles, so I picked up a pretty good chunk of time the second half of the race.

I think my total time was somewhere in the 3:10-3:20 ballpark.  Results have not been posted yet and I didn’t look at any sort of clock when I crossed the line.  After crossing the finish line I talked to my family and then wandered around for a bit.  I ate some food and grabbed a beer (it tasted terrible, some kind of cross-pale ale).  The day was done and I took my stuff to my car.  On the way home I was so hungry for calories that I stopped by McDonalds.  When I got home there was chicken.  I ate a substantial amount after the race, yum.

I learned a lot of things from the race.  Rolling my bike sleeves into sweat band sized balls had never occurred to me but seemed to help a lot.  Portland Triathlon’s bike racks suck; they don’t rise high enough and with my seat hooked on the bar my tire was still touching the ground.  I need to walk on bare concrete more often.  Socks are useless for short courses.  River swimming is unpredictable, but everyone is dealing with the same unpredictability.  I need to get more in touch with my swimming side.  When I swim I have absolutely no idea how hard I’m exerting myself until I get out of breath.  I need to hone in on the sweet spot of swimming exertion that I can maintain during a race.

In the end, it was an awesome race.  I did pretty well overall and had a good time doing it.  I learned plenty of things to help me prepare for future races.  It was a great day.  I have yet to dabble in the half Ironman as well as the sprint distance races.  I liked the olympic distance.  After next year’s Ironman I think I’ll shift training to cater to olympic distance courses.  I would love to say the races are done for the season, but there are two more.  The Portland Marathon is two weeks from today, this makes me uneasy.  However, if it was a sure thing what would be the point of doing it?  The 50k in November will be for fun so I’m not concerned at all.

The most important thing about the sprint and olympic distance races is that anyone can try one.  Alot of people have TT bikes or aero bars on their road bike, but there are still a fair amount of people out there for the fun of it with an old mountain bike or road bike.  The swimming is the hardest thing because it can be pretty far out of the comfort zone for alot of people.  River swimming in a group of people is a weird experience, it seems very far out of the norm for a human to be doing.  But if you have an inkling to dabble in triathlons... just do it and you wont ever regret it.

Swim gear

 

Bike gear

Run gear