2012 70.3 World Championships

My trip to the 2012 70.3 World Champs resulted in possibly the worst race experience I have had to date, culminating in a DNF against my name. As a result, I am not really in a position to give a full race report. But I can report on the section of the race I did do, and also on the many lessons that I learned.

I qualified for Vegas at the Singapore 70.3 in March 2012. Singapore was my first major triathlon, so the plan had been to do the Cairns 70.3 in June to gain a bit more race experience before Vegas. Unfortunately a stress fracture came my way in April 2012 instead, so I had to withdraw from Cairns. As a result I headed into Vegas a bit light on for experience. Still I have been racing in other sports for years, so I figured I would be okay.

Still, whilst my preparation for the Worlds was not ideal, I was in pretty good form leading in. I competed in the Northern Territory Long Course Championships two weeks before the Worlds in very difficult conditions (36 degrees and quite humid) and had a great race. So heading over I was feeling pretty good.

We arrived in Vegas on the Thursday before the race (which was on Sunday). This was going to be my first race internationally and I thought I should be right in terms of jet lag. This was going to be lesson number one.  I had been given lots of advice before heading over about trying to minimise the effects of jet lag, getting sleep on the plane, staying hydrated etc. As far as I am aware, I did it all. However, jet lag hit me pretty hard. I didn’t get a good night sleep until two days after the race. In hindsight I should have arrived on the Tuesday at the latest.

We stayed at the race resort, which worked very well, very close to the start line. We also travelled with the official event travel organisers, Ken Glah Endurance Travel, and they were really really great. If we were to do it again, I would do those things the same.

The couple of days I had leading into the race went smoothly enough. We went for a bit of a spin on the course. Drove over the entire ride leg. Had a famil swim in the lake. All the usual stuff. It all went okay. It was very hot in Vegas, around 40 degrees and it became obvious that it was not going to change for race day. The forecast was for it to be around 38 to 40 degrees. In the few days leading in my mind started playing games. Was I feeling a little off, a little sick etc. By race morning I had more or less convinced myself that I was fighting off a cold. The ride leg looked tough, the famil on the bike revealed just want they meant when they said rolling hills. All these little things picking away at my mental resolve.

Saturday came along, time to rack the bikes etc. Transition seemed okay, long run in from the swim but nothing too stressful there. Headed back to try and relax before for the evening.

Everything went smoothly that night; I got into bed pretty early and just didn’t sleep. I think I must have had at most 4 hours of sleep that night. Whether it was jet lag, nerves or a combination of the two, I have no idea. In the morning I got up, annoyed, but resigned to the fact there was nothing I could do to capture lost sleep. So I got ready and headed to the start line, feeling pretty alright.

As with most race mornings there wasn’t a whole lot to do once I had checked and double checked transition and got my numbers, so I did a fair bit of sitting around, watching the pros etc. My wave was fairly early, so I didn’t have to wait that long thankfully. So a little bit before 7:00am, we were called and it was time to head down the ramp and into the muddy waters of Lake Las Vegas.

Now is probably an appropriate time to give a quick rundown of the Las Vegas World Champs course.  The start line, the swim and most of the ride is not actually in Vegas, but in Henderson, which is on the outskirts of Vegas. The swim is held in Lake Las Vegas which is a man-made reservoir a bit over 1km long. It has been produced by damming one of the tributaries to Lake Mead. For those unaware, Lake Mead is the massive Lake produced when they built the Hoover Dam. Lake Las Vegas is surrounded by a very typically Vegas subdivision full of big houses and a few resorts. It all looks quite impressive, except when we were there big chunks of it were empty, due to the downturn in the US housing market. The whole area is about the last bit of civilisation before you hit the Lake Mead recreational area, which is where the ride is.

The swim is a single lap course, starting at one end of Lake Las Vegas, swimming most of the way to the other end and then heading back. You exit the swim on the opposite side of the lake to T1, so there is a decent run around the end of the lake to get into transition. The lake is not all that inviting, the water is pretty tepid and sort of a muddy murk. For the outward leg of the swim up the lake, you have the sun in your eyes. On the whole it is a functional swim leg, without being a particularly special one.

Once you have your bike, you exit transition via a reasonably steep switch back path to get to road level. The path isn’t that steep, but I certainly felt that running without bike shoes was the way to go. It is also a bit of a bottleneck.

The mount line is at the end of the path. Once on your bike, you ride for a few hundred metres, turn left and then head straight uphill for the next few kms. The ride leg certainly welcomes you in style.

The ride leg heads away from Lake Las Vegas and after a bit of to and fro heads out into the Lake Mead Recreational Area. This is desert. Not rolling sand dunes, Saudi Arabia type desert, but more bare rocky landscape with few things of significance size growing, type desert. It is actually pretty impressive. You ride into the desert for around 30kms and then turn around. You then ride back, past Lake Las Vegas and towards suburban Henderson. T2 is in the suburbs rather than at Lake Las Vegas. The ride course is hilly. I find that your definition of hilly depends on your experience base. Coming from Australia, in particular Darwin, which is very flat, I would describe it as very hilly. The hills are not big long long hills. For most of the hills you can see the top from the bottom. But they are continuous. I would say there is barely a single km on that bike course where you are not either riding up or down a hill. Continuous, not big hills sounds fine on paper, but in reality it wears you down.

Once out of T2, the run leg is 3 laps of 7km circuit. In short the course can be described as, downhill a little bit, then uphill for around 3kms, turn around and then downhill for 3kms. No shade.

As I have already mentioned, it was hot on race day. I have heard some people say it was unseasonably hot, but we also had a couple of different people tell us it is always that hot in Vegas at that time of year. If I was heading back I would mentally prepare myself for it being 40 degrees, that way if it was any less I would have a pleasant surprise.

Over the weekend I heard the course described several times as a real World Champs course. Which basically just means it is tough.

So that is the course. Back to the start line.

As I was bobbing away in tepid Lake Las Vegas with the rest of my wave I had a few brief moments of, wow how crazy is this that I am here, and then we were away.

The swim leg went pretty okay, I got away fairly well and got into a rhythm working against another guy from my wave. This went on for five or six hundred metres before we hit the wave in front. Our wave had been the third wave, but the two waves in front had been one of the older women’s waves and one of the older men’s waves. It took quite a while to get through the main bulk of these waves, and I never really got clear of them all together. In the confusion I lost track of the guy I had been pacing off and just worked on getting back to the swim exit. Once I got there, the swim finish chute was thankfully nice and clear and I was out and on my way to T1. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was 6^th out of the water in my age group.

Transition went smoothly, I had a bit of congestion going up the ramp out of T1, got yelled at by an older guy for barging through but then I was away. The ride is where it all started going wrong.

Whilst Darwin is flat, we do have some hills that we work on and generally hills are not a weakness of mine, so I wasn’t that scared of the course. But as I started riding up out of transition, it wasn’t feeling that easy and I was getting passed a fair bit. That is okay I thought, early days, these guys are probably pretty strong cyclists. But the further into the course I got, the worse the hills felt. It wasn’t far into the course that I started to realise that I wasn’t flying up the hills like I would expect and that this wasn’t going to be a quick day. I mentally changed gear and decided instead to focus on it being a good day. But still it got worse. I was crawling up every hill then struggling down. I reaslised something was seriously wrong when the first hour of the bike passed with me having an average speed of less than 30km/h. It got to the point where I was creeping up hills at around 15km/h. Any slower and I would be walking. It was around then that the thought of pulling the plug entered my mind. There was an aid station 8kms of so after the far turn and my plan became to get back to the aid station and see how I was going. Perhaps once I had turned I would begin to feel better. But by the time I got to the far turn I wasn’t sure I could even make it back to the aid station. I didn’t want to be sidelined in the middle of the desert. So as I rolled up to the far turn, I came to a stop and got off the bike. And that was it.

All the volunteers at the aid station and in the sag wagon where brilliant. Very helpful and full of concern, no condescending pity for pulling out, nothing like that. Just genuine concern that you would be okay.

After I pulled out, I got a ride back to T2 in the sag wagon and then watched a bit of the run. Watching the run, in the blistering heat, didn’t make me feel particularly sorry for not being out there. Although of course I really wished I was. All I can say about the run was that is looked like very hard work.

So that was my race, what there was of it. What did I take away from it and what do I think went wrong. Well I took quite a few things away from it, but as for what went wrong, I am not sure I will ever really know. My coach and I have discussed it and he thinks I was just on too fine of a knife edge, in terms of fitness etc. So fine an edge that I didn’t need much to push me off, something like a bad night’s sleep, a bit of a cold etc. I certainly think he has a point.

What else though. Well the race beat me mentally. Even before I had jumped in the water, I had psyched myself out. It was going to be too hot, the course too hard, I was feeling to sick etc. As a result of all of this I went in feeling negative from the start. Before the race I thought I was fighting off a cold, such that after the race I was expecting to fall in a sick heap. Except it didn’t happen. After the race I didn’t feel that bad. If I was sick at all, it wasn’t as bad as I had convinced myself.

The heat was certainly a factor. I collapsed at the finish line of Singapore from heat stress and that wasn’t the first time. I didn’t feel that bad during the race at Vegas, but I am sure the heat would not have helped.

Lack of sleep. Once again it was probably only part of the reason, but I don’t doubt it contributed in some part to the way I raced.

And finally, maybe a mechanical fault. This one I don’t know about, and I have no way of knowing for sure, which frustrated me no end at the time, but is something I have since gotten over. After I had got a lift to the finish line, I was wheeling my bike around and I noticed that the front wheel was rubbing on the brake, quite a bit. How long had that been happening? By the time I got to the finish line the bike had been sitting on the back of a car for a couple of hours, perhaps it got knocked out of alignment then. But then I do remember bumping the bike in the log jam of people running up the path out of T1 (that is why the older guy yelled at me). What about then? Or somewhere on the ride? When I was setting up T1, I gave the back wheel a test spin to make sure it was running free, but not the front. I remember thinking, it should be fine, perhaps it wasn’t?

As I said, I have no way of knowing, and perhaps the rubbing brake wasn’t a factor at all. But it would explain a couple of things. One thing was that I didn’t feel that bad on the bike, I was just riding really slowly and I couldn’t figure out why. Another thing was that no matter what I did, I seemed to be riding downhill slower than nearly everyone else. I wasn’t on the brakes or anything; just my speed downhill wasn’t what I would expect. The lack of downhill speed was significant enough that I made a mental note of it during the race. When I got off the bike at the far turn around, it never occurred to me to just give the wheels a test spin, or check any of the bike for mechanical trouble. I had mentally beaten myself so convincingly, that I assumed the fault was with me and so got off and sat down. Maybe the brake is part of what went wrong, or maybe it wasn’t. No way to know for sure.

So for lessons learned, well now I am quite pedantic when it comes to checking the bike over in transition. Do I give the wheels a spin, most definitely, many times. Also you can guarantee that if I ever have another race where I am at the point of pulling out, I will be checking the whole bike over first. But the biggest lesson has been about mental preparation. I still struggle with nerves and doubts, just like everyone else. But now I work hard to keep relaxed to try and make sure the nerves and doubts don’t get out of control.

Would I go back? I am not sure, probably not to Vegas, I didn’t really enjoy my time there, plus it is pretty tricky to get to. Also, there are a lot of people at the World Champs and for the most part they are really, really into Ironman. The event certainly the highest M-dot tattoo count per capita that I have seen anywhere. By the end of the event the whole Ironman hysteria was starting to get to me. But having said that, now that they are planning on moving the 70.3 Worlds around various regions, I think I would like to go back to the event, if not the location. I would like to be able to put the race to bed.