As some of you know, my race season has been up and down. The year started with a shortened race at the Boise ½ Ironman and went to hell in Boulder (see previous post) so I scheduled this Provo ½ Ironman distance as a hope to recover my season.I went into this race with a somewhat casual attitude that came back to punish me as you’ll see.
I headed to the Provo Marriott Friday afternoon after office hours and picked up my race packet on the way. I made a list of everything I needed that I could get from Smiths near the hotel later that night. Once I got unpacked and settled in I took a walk from the hotel and figured I could get breakfast makings at the supermarket.
This proved to quite a challenge. Being a vegetarian presented some real problems in that I neglected to bring anything to hotel for food prep. Combined with the fact I needed to get out of the hotel to be at the transition area by 4:30am meant that there wasn’t going to be anything (food or coffee) to get me started in the morning. After walking up and down the aisles 5 times, I eventually settled on some day old bagels, and avocado and almond butter. “I can make this work,” I thought. Wrong.
4am came and I couldn’t stomach anything I bought. The bagels were stale; the almond butter was not mixed and was totally dry (even after attempting to stir it with the end of my toothbrush) and the avocado? For breakfast? What was I thinking?
Side note: Friday evening I pleaded with the hotel staff asking if the Starbucks located in the lobby would be willing to open up a little early for us triathletes staying at the hotel. I never heard anything back so didn’t know what to expect. But, sure enough, someone was opening early when I took my bike down to the car (THANK YOU!). The woman was nice enough to try and get me something to eat but the only thing she had was yet another stale bran muffin. I tried to get it down on the ride out to Utah Lake, but man, this thing was bad.
So after all this I didn’t quite realize I hadn’t consumed much if anything for my long day. I ended up eating a Trio bar I had stashed and figures everything would work out. Well it kind of did until mile 9 on the run…
The swim went ok as I’m not the fastest guy out there by any means (think winter improvement) and the bike was spot on what I anticipated at came in with a 20mph average. I consumed all my food and drink on the bike so I was feeling good.
The run went well until I hit the last few miles when the lack of a decent breakfast came back to haunt me. My splits were going up every mile and I was struggling to keep a decent pace. Add to that it seems the run was about ½ mile longer than 13.2 hmmmm.
I did finish and came to find out hours later I won my age group. It was about 20 minutes slower than expected because of my run falling apart but I’ll take it. The lesson for me: don’t start experimenting with unknown factors on race day. You can bet I’ll be prepared for all future events whether Starbucks is open or not!
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