2014 Geelong 70.3

Ahh Geelong 70.3. Let me count the ways in which I did not enjoy you.

Lots.

So Geelong 70.3, first the why. We put this race on my program because it is a good lead up to the Melbourne Ironman, simple as that. It doesn’t really need more analysis than that.

So now the what. As you can probably figure out from the name, Geelong 70.3 is a Half Ironman in the Victorian city of Geelong. There have been long distance races of one form or another in Geelong for quite some time, but the race being an official 70.3 is a pretty new arrangement. As races go it is a straight forward one.

The course looks a bit like this:

One lap swim, two lap ride, funny sort of two lap run.

Geelong is located on Port Phillip Bay, so the swim is in the ocean, however; the water is reasonably well protected from swell (but not wind). The layout of the swim is a bit like this.

As you can see it is a bit of a funny shape, this is to try and avoid you having to look into the sun while you are swimming. Other than that it is a pretty simple swim, four major turning buoys, quite a few intermediate sighting buoys. Due to the number of buoys sighting was pretty easy, well it would be in flat water, but more on that later.

The start is a proper beach start. I say proper because you start standing on the beach rather than standing in the water. The beach at Geelong seems to pretty long and shallow, so running into the water involves a fair bit of high stepping and quite a few porpoises (I think I got in four, which may be a personal record).

The ride leg looks a bit like this

As you can see, the ride is a bit fiddlier than the swim. There are a few twisty bits through Eastern Park, plus you do about six 180 degree turns per lap. In reality it all works well, but certainly takes a little bit of brain power when you first get to Geelong and try and get familiar with the course (I got it wrong the first time I headed out).

As you can see from the elevation plot, it is not a flat course. My Garmin measured the elevation gain over the two laps as being 415m, what I would class as rolling hills. There are really only two hills of note. The first is right at the start of each lap. The hill itself isn’t too bad, it isn’t that long or steep, but it feels worse because you turn a hairpin into it and so start from a very low speed. The second hill is that lump that you see in the middle of the elevation plot. That is a handful of kms before the far turn and it is a proper hill. Not a mountain or anything, but takes a bit of spinning up. Other than those hills, you spend nearly the entire lap heading up or down an incline of one sort or another; none of them are significant though. There isn’t much truly flat ground on the course though.

The road surface is a bit of a mixed bag. There is some nice bit of recent hot mix, but there are lots of rough surfaces and more than a couple of pot holes. It wasn’t a surface that had me singing praises.

One thing to be aware of when it comes to Geelong is that historically it is an industrial town. The ride showcases some of that. Doesn’t sound all that appealing? That was sort of my point. You aren’t riding past refineries or anything, but it isn’t exactly an inspiring ride, Cairns 70.3 this is not. The bit through Eastern Park is pretty and the section along the Esplanade is cool, particularly in areas where the crowd has gathered. But the bulk of your time is spent on the road out to Portarlington. This is not a scenic route.

Other than that. Hmmm, what else. Three aid stations over the 90kms. There are actually two aid stations per lap, but the first one isn’t open on the first lap (it is only about 5km into the ride leg). Having said that they were offering when I went past, so you could say there are really four aid stations per lap. I wouldn’t count on it though.

The run course does a bit of this:

For reasons that will become obvious shortly, I can’t speak with much first hand authority when it comes to the run. However, I did travel over most of it during the days before the race, so I can talk about what I saw.  

The course is made up by two laps through Eastern Park and then about 5kms or so out and back along the waterfront. The course is all quite pretty, being either through parkland or along the esplanade. The sections through Eastern Park are hillyish. You go up and down a couple of proper hills during the course. The nastiest uphill is right out of transition, you then run up it again at the beginning of lap 2. There is also one total bastard of a hill at the final turn around point on the waterfront. If you haven’t checked that hill before the race, go and do it. It is about 2kms from the finish and it is a doozy. Short, but nasty.  A bit of mixed surface running, with some bitumen and some sections on packed dirt paths. Aid stations every 2kms or so apparently (I can’t vouch for that bit).  Whilst I don’t have firsthand knowledge, I would say the run leg is probably the highlight of this course.

Other details. Transition is simple, one central transition. No gear bags or change tents or anything (pretty normal for a 70.3). Transitions are done at the bike, so nice and straight forward. My kind of race. That is about it I think.

So how did my race go? Well if you have read this far you can probably guess that it didn’t go great. I recorded a DNF stopping after the bike and not starting the run. The result was frustrating and disappointing, but also probably the right thing to do.

What led to my decision to stop? In short, I wasn’t well. I got a cold about a week and a half before the race and whilst most of the symptoms had cleared by race day I was still nursing a bit of an upper respiratory tract infection.  In the days immediately before the race I was still having trouble taking a deep breath. The day before the race I headed to the doctor and her opinion was that I would be right to start, but if I was feeling off, then stop. Daryl had similar advice. On race day I followed that advice.

So other than the obvious, how did the rest of the race go? Well picture hell…

Okay that is probably overstating it. Plus I had a pretty negative experience so that is tainting my view of the race significantly. But putting that aside, it was not a great race day. The reason for that was simply the weather. On race day the temperature started at 30 degrees and got up to around 36 degrees or so. But the temperature wasn’t the big deal. The big deal was the wind.  During the ride winds got up to around 50km/h with gusts up to 70km/h. Between the temperature and the wind it was a horrible day to be racing.

The day started okay. Heading to the start line I was still coughing and having trouble breathing, so I was apprehensive, but also willing to be there. The wind had been forecast for days and so heading to the start line it wasn’t a big surprise. Annoying, but not surprising. We also knew it was likely to be a warm morning, but heading down to transition I was surprised at just how warm it was.

I was starting in the last wave for the day, so after setting up transition and doing my last bike checks I had plenty of time for sitting around.

When the sitting around was finished I shimmied into my wetsuit and headed down to the start line for a bit of a warm up. The wind was already hammering and there was a good bit of wind chop on the swim course. Heading out for a warm up showed me just how much wind chop there was and made it obvious that we were in for a pretty interesting swim leg.

Warm up done it was time to stand around a little bit, cough a bit more, and then finally, move to the start line.

After a bit of standing around the horn sounded and it was time to go. As mentioned above the beach at Geelong is pretty long and shallow, so we had a pretty long wade before we were away and swimming properly. I am guessing there weren’t to many people racing from a surf lifesaving background because I got a surprisingly large jump on the rest of the field off the start line. That wasn’t to last though.

Once we were swimming properly we got into the rough water pretty quickly. By the first sighting can we were swimming though some decent wind chop, with waves up to a couple of foot.  It was one of those swims where there were people with their arms in the air, asking for assistance, within the first 100m. Once we were into the bad water, we never really got out of it.

The swim very quickly got pretty chaotic. We caught the backmarkers from the wave in front very quickly and I also got pulled in by a couple of guys from my wave short order. Between the rough water and the backmarkers I lost track of the people from my wave and after a while had no idea if they were in front of me or behind me.

On top of all that, not long into the swim I felt one of the straps on my goggles go loose. My goggles have two straps and within the first few hundred metres I felt one of those straps loosen right off and fall down to the back of my neck, leaving my goggles being held by a single strap. Whilst it was annoying, there wasn’t much I could do so I kept swimming, hoping that my goggles weren’t about to fall off.

There isn’t much finesse to a swim like this one; it quickly descends into a bit of a struggle for survival. Breathing is difficult because you can’t settle into a rhythm. Sighting is difficult because you lose sight of the buoys if you or they are in a trough. After battling through the swell for what felt like quite some time I finally made it to the far turn and was able to stop swimming straight into the swell. Swimming across/with the swell was only a bit better, but it was better.

I was very glad to make it to the second last buoy since I knew I only had 400m or so left. Around this point my luck with the goggles started to give out and my left lens started filling up with water. The loose strap also gave way and came apart. I emptied my goggles a couple of times, but quickly realised that it wasn’t doing much good, so instead just put my head down and swam for the beach.

I very gladly ran up out of the swim leg, through the showers (remembering to wipe my face in case of a sludge beard) and into T1. I didn’t know it at the time but I was 2nd in my age group out of the swim, something like 15th overall. As horrible as it was, I also didn’t realise at the time that the leg was going to be the nicest leg of the day.

For those interested, my goggles came loose because the buckle that holds the straps together gave way. It had been fine leading up to the race and I suspect the dolphin diving on the start line caused it to fail.

T1 went pretty smoothly, except for a minor hiccup where I stopped and took my wetsuit off, only to realise that I wasn’t at my bike. That was a little annoying, but I don’t think it cost me any time since I quickly found my bike once the wetsuit was off.

Out on the bike and at first things were feeling pretty good. We had the wind behind us on the way out and so everyone was flying along. Since my wave had been at the back of the field I was passing lots of people and feeling okay.

Our first taste of the wind came when we turned to ride out to Point Henry. For this section we turned into the wind and we got our first feel for just how strong it was. Unpleasant. Still after the turn at Point Henry we were with the wind and flying along at 50km/h and feeling good.

Things continued in this vein until the far turn. Once we turned I, along with everybody else I am sure, knew the trip back would be tough. We were right. I felt pretty okay for the first section into the wind, but after about 30km I just started feeling worse and worse. The last section before heading back into Eastern Park was the worst, crawling along at just under 30km/h.

Between 30km and the end of the first lap, my mental state collapsed. I was pretty sure I was heading in and pulling out at the end of the first lap. I just didn’t want to be out there anymore. The last section of lap one was a tail wind and that was enough to get me back on lap two. But by then I had pretty much already given up.

After about 50km I sat up and was looking for somewhere to turn around. As far as I could tell my average speed was terrible, my time for the bike was going to be awful and I was in the process of getting passed by little old ladies (that last bit may not have actually been happening).

I sorted myself out though and convinced myself to get through the ride leg. It wasn’t great and I felt like I was barely moving. But I made it through.

Coming into the last section of the bike I had pretty much already decided that I wasn’t going to start the run. In my mind I was well back in the field and was on track for a pretty average time and result. Adding to that I was feeling terrible and was fairly sure I was only going to be feeling more terrible. Taking all this into account, I felt that getting to the finish line wasn’t going to be worth what it was going to cost me.

Despite all that I got into T2, put the bike away, got the shoes and hat on and gave it a bit of a jog. That was enough to show me that I definitely wasn’t feeling great. That was it. I stopped, handed in the timing chip and was done for the day.

Not a great day out.

After the race I was full of the usual doubts and second guessing that everyone gets when they pull out of a race. On the doubts side, my first reaction was that perhaps I wasn’t feeling as bad as I had thought. It turns out that whilst my ride was very slow, so was everybody else’s. I had lost some ground on the ride, but in the age group I was still around 3rd or 4th and I was something like 15th overall. Seeing that, my first reaction was I should have kept going, the result wouldn’t have been too bad.

However, that thought has one significant flaw; it assumes my run would have gone well. It might have, I will never know for sure, but my one previous experience of racing whilst feeling like this was at Cairns 70.3 in 2013; in that race the worst part of the race was the run. Plus at Cairns in 2013 I was feeling better off the bike and the run leg was easier. I think it is a fair bet that my run leg at Geelong may not have gone great.

So I am okay with my decision to stop. I probably wasn’t going to achieve much by finishing and I would probably be feeling a lot worse right now if I had. It was an extremely tough day out on course and I wasn’t feeling 100%. I can live with the decision to pull out.

However, whilst I am willing to live with my decision, there are some aspects of my decision I could have done a lot better.

Firstly, I let being sick get into my head. Being sick had disrupted my physical and mental preparation in the two weeks leading into the race. Whilst the physical disruption probably wasn’t that significant, mentally it really threw me out. By the time I got to the race, mentally I wasn’t there. I had already given up. With that attitude my result was almost a foregone conclusion.

During the race I let my perception of the race crush what was left of my mental resolve. I THOUGHT I was doing badly, I THOUGHT my time was rubbish. Turns out all that was wrong, but by the time I knew that, I had based decisions on it. This is a tough one, as an age grouper, starting back in the field, sometimes it is very difficult to know what is going on in a race. This just means that it is probably not a good idea to be basing critical decisions on what you THINK is going on. Sometimes you just never really know. You never really know what is going to happen later in the race.

Despite the above, I still think I made the right call. I can only go by what I was feeling at the time and based on that pulling out seemed like the smart thing to do.

So what did I think of the race, would I go back? Well this is a tough one; I obviously have a pretty biased view of it. However, trying to put that aside, I think I would have to say that I probably wouldn’t go back. Nothing to do with the organisers or the volunteers, or even the weather. The organisers, volunteers etc were great. I think the race was run well. Weatherwise, well nobody can do anything about that, you get what you get. No my biggest issue was the course; it just didn’t do much for me. Lots of little things work against it, the bike leg isn’t that interesting, I think the road surface on the ride is a bit average etc. There are so many races in the calendar these days that a competitor can afford to be pretty choosy. I think next year I would choose something else, Challenge Melbourne perhaps. Maybe I will change my mind with some distance from the race. Time will tell.

So that is that. I would like to take this chance to say a big thanks to a few people. To my wife and family for their unfaltering support. The day before the race I got a message from my wife saying she would support me no matter what I decided to do on race day. That kind of faith means a lot. As always thanks to Daryl, one for getting me to the start line and two for putting up with calls from a fairly stressed athlete the day before the race. A big thanks to Bin and Bertram Birk as well as Dave and Joy Glass. It was great having somebody to hang out with before the race, but also people to lend an ear after a bad experience. Finally big thanks to the guys at Break Your Limits, for keeping an eye out for me and just being awesome.