2013 Ironman Western Australia

An Ironman. After I had done a few Half Ironman races I guessed that a full Ironman was probably going to be on the cards someday. I suspect it is almost impossible to do a few Half Ironman races without then looking at the full Ironman and wondering if you could. But up until December 2013 I am not sure I ever really believed I would get it done. But done it is, so how did it go?

It went okay.

The race in question was the Busselton Ironman, or more correctly Ironman WA, which is what it is actually called. Why this particular Ironman? Well once the decision was made to do an Ironman, it was the obvious choice since it is a couple of hours from where I live. Plus all indications were that it is a good race, well run, well supported on a pretty quick course. Sounded good to me. Well as good as a race that was likely to take me between 9 and 10 hours can sound.
So what does this race look and feel like? I won’t go into taste and smell of the race too much, but if you are interested it tastes like fly, but more on that later.
This was my first Ironman, so I have nothing to compare it to directly; however, I have done a few Half Ironmans so I can compare it to them. From that I can say it is a pretty straight forward race. There is one big central transition, the course is simple and well-marked, nothing too complicated. The trickiest bit is the fact that there are gear bags and a change tent, but even that isn’t particularly unusual in Ironman events I gather.
The swim is simplicity itself with it being a single 3.8km loop. Sighting is easy since you simply swim around the Busselton Jetty (which is huge). If you hit the jetty you have gone too far left, if you can’t see the jetty you have gone too far right. They also have buoys to help direct you on the way out. They may have them on the way back in as well but I didn’t notice them until the last 300m or so. I gather in the past these buoys were ‘guidance’ meaning you could swim either side of them. This year we were told they were boundary buoys and we were to keep them on our right. This is important since the jetty has a slight bend in it, so the quickest way to the end isn’t actually to follow the jetty, but rather to swim straight towards the other end. I think the boundary buoys reduced that effect a bit (worth knowing as future reference though).
The start is a single wave, so going into this race you have to be prepared for the fact that you will be starting the swim at the same time as about 1500 other people. We were told that the start was going to be a beach start, which I thought was going to be pretty interesting, given the number of people. However, in reality we started in about thigh deep water, which meant there was no ‘running down the beach like a crazy person’. The start was deep enough that you could dive in and start swimming, rather than needing to porpoise. However, since we were standing it was much easier for the race organisers to control the ‘start line creep’ that you tend to get. All up I think the start worked well. The finish is simple too, with a gently sloping beach leading to the chute to T1. The only really tricky part to the swim is not thinking about the fact that at the turn you are a mile offshore in an area where there are semi-frequent shark attacks. Good luck with that.
One thing to be aware of with the swim is to get there early. To start the swim, everybody gathers in a big pen type area. However, to ensure that everyone goes over the timing mat prior to the start, everyone has to enter the pen area through one entry. That one entry is a bit of a bottle neck and it takes time to get 1500 people through it. By the time I got through there was only 5 minutes or so to the start and so I found that I didn’t really have time for a proper warm up. Give yourself plenty of time.

As I mentioned above, this race uses gear bags and a change tent. With Ironman races I think people tend to spend more time in transition, change over more clothes etc as they prepare to spend a lot of time on the next leg. Given that, I think the gear bag, change tent approach works pretty well for this length of race. For those unfamiliar with the system I will give a brief description. Basically you put all your gear for the ride and run legs in bags. You then hang these bags on hooks which are numbered with your race number. As you enter transition you grab your gear bag, and run into the change tent. In the change tent you take everything out of the bag and get changed for the next leg. You then put everything you have just taken off from the leg before in the now empty bag. The change tent volunteers then get rid of the bag for you. Once you get your head around what needs to go into each bag, the system works pretty well. The organisers help a lot with this, giving you a pretty good list of what should go into each bag. So as long as you remember where you put your transition bag, there isn’t really a problem.

The simplicity of the swim continues on the bike. Three laps, each one 60km long, straight forward so far. If you look at a map of the bike course you will notice that each lap has three turn arounds, which seems a bit complicated, but once you get out on the course it is all pretty obvious. The ride heads out of transition and follows the coast for around 10km, then turns off down a side road called Coast Road. Unsurprisingly Coast Road continues to follow the coast. You ride down Coast Road for about 5km, then turn around and ride back to where you turned off. From there you move away from the coast and head into Ludlow Tuart Forest, where you spend the next 26km or so. Most of the time in the Tuart Forest is spent on Tuart Drive. You ride almost to the end in one direction and turn around, then ride almost to the end in the other direction, turn around and then ride back to Busselton. This gets you your 60km. As you can imagine, the section in the Tuart Forest is quite pretty. This year the lap had four aid stations on it, which was plenty.
The ride leg is dead flat. I really mean it. According to my Garmin there was 57m of elevation gain over the entire 180km. That has to be close to the definition of dead flat. The road surface is a bit of a mix. From the start of the lap to Coast Road it is bit like angelic asphalt. Very nice, very smooth. Coast Road is a bit of a rough surface. Tuart Drive is as well. Not terrible surfaces, just normal bitumen. Normal bitumen is fine, but it isn’t quick. The wind can also start to be a factor during the bike. This year the winds were light at the start and built to be a bit more annoying by the third lap. If the race had been the day before we probably would have been blown out to sea. This area can get windy, so it is something to be aware of. It can also be hot. Temperatures were close to perfect this year, but other years it has hit 40 degrees Celsius. Once again, something to be aware of.
After the bike and T2 is another gear bag, change tent affair. Then it is out onto the run.
The run is four 10.5km laps up and down the coast. You spend the entire time either running on the footpath that follows the coast or the road that runs parallel to the cycleway. Basically you run east on the footpath and west on the road. Being the coast it is nearly all open, virtually no shade. It is also very flat, 252m of elevation gain over the course. However, those are just all small undulations, no big hills. In fact I was surprised there was that much elevation gain over the course, it didn’t feel like there was any at all. If the course sounds a little dull, I would say it is a bit. Certainly by the 4th lap you are glad that you won’t be seeing certain stretches of road a 5th time. There are three aid stations per lap, but they are double sided, so really there are six, 18 over the course of the marathon. It felt about right.
So back to the taste of fly. There are a lot of flies. I was surprised that I only swallowed one, but you should be aware that there are heaps of them. They didn’t bug me that much on the run, which I was expecting them to, but after the race I noticed that if you stood still for any length of time they found you pretty fast. I saw people running and even riding with fly nets over their faces, which I think might have been a bit extreme. I didn’t think they were that bad, but they are there.
Over all, the course is slickly managed. The aid stations were all run well, the volunteers seemed to know their stuff, and the transitions were good. It all worked well.
So how did my particular little slice of Ironman go?
Well as I said above, I found myself in the starting pen a bit later than I would have liked and not really with enough time for a warm up. I ended up taking a token dip with a short swim, but it wasn’t really enough to be called a warm up. So that was probably the first mistake of the day.
After my ‘warm up’ it was time to get on the line. I wasn’t sure whether people were going to swim wide or close to the jetty on the swim course, so I put myself in the middle. I also wanted to avoid getting caught up in the crowd and missing toes, so I got myself right to the front. Once I was in position, it didn’t seem like we were waiting long, when the horn sounded and we were away.


With 1500 people starting at once, as you can imagine the swim start was pretty chaotic. I got swum over once, which was a new experience for me. Certainly got knocked around a bit, plus got a bit of water in my goggles, which was annoying, but not of immediate concern. Despite the initial madness the field cleared reasonably quickly and I was able to latch on to a bunch that was heading wide, which is what I thought would probably be the fastest course.
Now it was time to sort out the water in my goggles. As annoying as it was I knew I had to clear them, otherwise I was going to swim the next hour with salt water in my eyes and my eyes were going to be sore for the rest of the day. I took a moment to pop up, empty the goggles and get on with it. In the end I didn’t lose any toes and it didn’t cost me anything.
Once the goggles were sorted I settled onto some toes in a biggish bunch. After a bit it became obvious that the bunch was slowing down with a few lone swimmers going off the front so I went with them. The bunch also looked like they were going to go outside the second of the boundary buoys. I am not sure whether the volunteers stopped them or not, but I didn’t want to be deliberately cutting the course, or risk being stopped doing so, so I broke away from that group and headed towards the second boundary buoy. That bought me closer to swimmers who had taken a course close to the jetty and I thought we might join up. But that didn’t quite happen and instead from that point to the end of the swim I found myself swimming in clear water. I could see a single swimmer a bit ahead, he appeared to be slowly pulling away, but wasn’t going anywhere too quickly.
In what seemed like a really short time I found myself at the end of the Jetty. I had to convince myself that it really was the end, because I felt we couldn’t possibly be there already. At the far turn there are four buoys that form a semi-circle around the end of the Jetty. You swim around all of them to make your turn. I made a bit of a mistake when I went to miss the first one (I thought it was another boundary buoy) but was redirected by the volunteers. After that I completed the turn and was on my way back.
Once we were on the west side of the Jetty it was a bit choppier, but nothing particularly extreme. From this point I also started getting regular taps on the toes. Anyone who has a background in swimming tends to find this really annoying and I am no exception. However, I am also aware that in a choppy ocean it can be really hard to avoid. I probably found it more annoying because it reminded me that I hadn’t cleared the bunch and I instead had somebody on my toes.
The rest of the return trip continued in this fashion. The trip back certainly felt slower than the trip out. Whether it was the chop, current or just fatigue, I am not sure, but I would love to see a split. Nothing eventful happened on the way back, other than it feeling like the person behind was trying to type War and Peace on my toes. Once we hit about 300m to go I noticed somebody started to surge up on my right. But to my surprise I was still getting toe taps. ‘Hang on a sec’ I thought to myself, just how many of you are back there. As it turns out quite a few. A couple of people were starting to come up alongside by that stage, but I wasn’t going to have towed them around half the course only for them to sprint past at the finish so I kicked up a gear and put in a bit of an effort to the beach. Ego can be a funny thing. I hit the beach alongside a couple of the people who had been behind me and headed into transition. That was it, Leg 1 done and dusted. I was around 4th out of water in the Age Groupers (1st of my Age Group), time was 51 minutes 38.

I took a little bit of extra time in Transition to get some socks on, which I don’t usually do for a 70.3, and then it was off to the bike. I found my bike on my first go this time through (unlike Mandurah 70.3) and in no time I was out onto the course.
My first impression on the bike was that people were going pretty quickly, but also that the conditions felt quick. I settled in and tried not to focus too much on what others were doing. I had a big fear of going too hard in the early stages of the ride while it felt good and suffering for it later. At the same time I knew my goals required me to ride at a decent speed. I tried as well as I could to stick to my race plan while still being mindful of what others were doing around me, using others as pacing markers when I could.

The ride is a long way so I won’t go through every bump and bounce.
The first lap felt really good, the speed came easily, the nutrition plan felt like it was working. I had settled in with the others around me and felt like I had found a good groove. All systems go. On the first lap and on other subsequent laps I passed some people and got passed by others, but I wasn’t really concerned. Final position hadn’t been one of my focuses going into this race and so I was determined to not fixate on it.



The second lap things continued in that vein, except for a 10km stretch between 90km and 100km. I am not sure what happened, I think perhaps I had just turned into the wind or something, but whatever the reason I just felt flat for 10km or so. After a little while I came back into myself though and by the 110km mark I was feeling okay. At the end of the lap I was happy that I was still managing to hold my target speed and everything was feeling pretty okay. 

Another fear I had before the race was that my back simply wouldn't cope with a continuous 5 hour ride. My back generally gets pretty stiff after a couple of hours and I usually need a mid ride stretch around the three hour mark or so in training. I have been working on trying to avoid this in training over the last month or so. With this in mind I was stretching my back pretty religiously over the bike course. By the end of the second lap, I had had some back soreness, but it had been managable. Heading into the third lap I was starting to feel confident that my back would survive the bike leg.

Beginning the third lap I was starting to fatigue, but it wasn’t catastrophic. The wind had also started to pick up on that third lap and so in some areas I knew I had to let the speed drop. It wasn’t worth the energy it would have taken to fight it. But even still the average speed stayed about right.

With 30km to go I was really starting to fatigue and my thoughts turned to the run. I started to have doubts that my legs would actually be capable of running. Conscious of this, I eased back on the effort a bit, trying not to redline the legs too much. In this fashion I got back to transition and headed into T2. All up the ride took me 4 hrs 51:14, which is pretty much exactly where I wanted to be. At the end of the ride I was third in my category and 22nd overall.
Transition passed quite easily, I found my bag, got the shoes and hat on and headed out.
My first thought on the run was, ‘wow I can actually run’. My second thought was ‘wow I need a toilet’. This would be the first of what would end up being three toilet stops.
I was surprised to find that I was running and actually running at the pace that I was after. I had my doubts that I would run the whole way, but I was determined to try and run comfortably for as long as I could. I had several thoughts along the lines of, ‘10kms I run now is 10kms I don’t have to walk later’. I wasn’t really paying attention to pace, and was more than happy to let it drop, as long as the running was feeling semi-comfortable. I continued in this fashion until about 16km. At 16km I was hitting a bit of a limit and so I decided to walk my first aid station. My intention was to continue in this fashion for as long as I could. I also had my second toilet stop somewhere around this point.

With my second toilet stop came the slow realisation that something was going wrong on the nutrition front. I had been planning on working with Gatorade and Gels during the run. But any Gel I took was going straight through me and the thought of any more Gatorade made me feel ill. At that point I swapped to coke at most aid stations. I tried a bit more Gatorade at a couple of aid stations and regretted it each time.
After about 22km the wheels were coming off a bit and I was at a pretty low point. I had my last toilet stop about now. I also switched to walking 100m out of every 1000m. At some point around 26km I walked 100m, started running again and then stopped almost straight away. That’s it I thought, I am now done. I walked for about 300m to the next aid station. After that aid station I got myself jogging again and back into my 100m off, 900 on routine.
Needless to say I was also getting passed by every man and his dog by this stage, but I really, honestly did not care.
I finally made it to the end of the third lap and ran past my family, the Break Your Limits folks and the rest of the crowd as I headed out onto the last lap. Knowing I was on my last lap, plus seeing everyone didn’t really improve my pace, but it did improve my outlook. I kept telling myself things like ‘I don’t have to run past there again’ and ‘last time though this aid station’ as I moved through the lap. I finally got to the far end of the course and got to turn for home. From here I mustered a continuous jog and headed for the line. Running past the 40km sign was a very sweet moment, grabbing that last lap counter arm band, just sublime. By that stage my legs were moving on instinct and I didn’t really have much left. I took that last beautiful turn into the finishers chute and charged for the line.
Everybody had told me before hand to enjoy the finishers chute. But to honest I was so far gone, I just had eyes for the line and I didn’t take much of the chute in. Prior to the race I had thought about whether I did a little jump across the line or something cute. When I finally hit the finish though all those thoughts were out of my head. I don’t even remember hearing myself being declared an Ironman as I crossed the line. In hindsight I am a bit annoyed about missing some of that experience, but in the state I was, I am not sure I would have remembered it anyway.
I do remember hitting the finish though and that was a sweet moment. I wobbled on jelly legs into the recovery area and collapsed into a chair for the first wonderful sit down.
That was it, I was done. I was an Ironman. Big smiles.
All up I was done in 9hrs 24:32. I was 11th in my age group and 59th overall.
Immediately post race I felt pretty okay, given the circumstances, and I was hoping to hang around and bask in some of the atmosphere for a while. But halfway back to my accommodation for a shower I started throwing up and didn’t really stop until later that evening. So unfortunately my afternoon was spent in bed, shivering and being sick. Not as much fun as I had hoped for. My experience of the afternoon really hit home just how wrong I had got my nutrition. Big lesson.
So that is it then. That was my Ironman. A mix of good and bad. The biggest good should be pretty obvious. I JUST COMPLETED AN IRONMAN. The time was in the ball park of my goals (just), so that was postive. The bad was the manner of execution. It was far from a perfect race, once I was on that run a fair bit went wrong. In post-race analysis I have also come to realise that things had started to go wrong on the bike as well, but they didn’t manifest until I hit the run. The mistakes with nutrition started on the bike, the run was where I paid for it.
The other massive positive though is that I now have a chance to learn from those mistakes. It took me about 4 Half Ironmans and a Long Course of making mistakes before I figured out how to put together a race without them. I am hoping my learning curve with Ironman is better, but in the end those bad races are what good races are built on. It is all about the preparation, and now I am just a little better prepared. So for me that is a very big plus that I am taking out of this race.
All up I thought that Ironman WA was a very well put together event. My wife and I commented to each other a couple of times that it was pretty slick. Nearly everything was well run and worked just like it should. The expo was about the right size, registration, racking, picking up gear, all that stuff worked well. It is an impressive event.
It has a nice feel too. My wife has been following me to sporting events for 15 or 16 years now and this would have to be one of the first where she has left saying that she had really enjoyed the atmosphere on the race course. If I was Ironman I would put that on their website, that is about the biggest endorsement I have ever heard.

Now that the race is done I would like to say a big thanks to everyone. Thanks to my wife and kids for being awesome and patient and tolerant and generous and maybe just a little bit crazy themselves for putting up with me. Thanks to the rest of my family for coming down to Busselton and cheering in the sun and flies. Thanks to Daryl Stanley for coaching me and getting me to the point that this didn’t just seem possible, but a good idea. Thanks to the Break Your Limits folk for being there and cheering just when I needed it. Thanks to Paul Newsome and Swim Smooth for showing me how to improve a leg that I had almost given up on seeing improvements in.

There I think that is pretty much everyone.

So would I do another one? Well I haven’t withdrawn from Melbourne yet so ask me again at the end of March 2014.




1 comment:

  1. Hi Good Post
    I am still planning my ironman soon. you can check my progress here: wonderlandguru.com

    ReplyDelete