The Race Report (get comfortable for this one)

Life is full of surprises, and sometimes it's our own reactions to what life brings that surprise us the most.

The biggest surprise of Ironman for me was that I wasn't moved by it. The day was exciting, it was fun, it was exhausting, it was overwhelmingly long and it had some seriously uninteresting stretches. It also had touching moments that I will never forget. But did I cry at the start line as the sun rose on the Mediterranean, or did I well up with emotion as it was setting on the hills behind Barcelona when I crossed the finish line? (I'm not just being poetic; it really did happen like that). Did I battle with inner demons and emerge victorious time and time again during the 11 hour and 45 minute stretch in between; was I touched by my own humanity and the humanity of those around me who were each engaged in their own battles no less kind than my own?

Nope. When I crossed the finish line, my predominant thought was 'I don't think I'll do that again'. The next thought was 'what's to eat?'

So I feel exactly the same the other side of the race. I've done plenty of endurance races that have left me forever changed, and weirdly, Ironman wasn't one of them. I'm going to offer up some theories as to why later. But now that I've given my emotional summary of the race upfront, I'll go into the details of the day. Here's how it unfolded:

I traveled to the race site, located in the Barcelona suburb of Calella, with my fellow club members who were doing the race: there was the club President and chief training partner Arnold, Eric, a former professional boxer from Alsace who says that doing Ironmans makes boxing look like a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, Vincent, a doctor who distributes handy medical certificates to club members at licensing time, and then there was me. We were originally supposed to be five but we lost Bruno, another doctor, to a bad fall in the vineyards a few weeks back that left him with a self-diagnosed twisted pelvis that he's been writing heavy-duty painkiller prescriptions for ever since.

Vincent stayed in separate accommodations becasue he had his family in tow, while Eric, Arnold and I shared a trailor and fought like cats and dogs for the entire day preceding the race. Eric irritated everyone by humming non-stop in a subduedly anxious manner, Arnold kept wondering out loud why everyone expected him to know the answers just becasue he's the club President, and I was mad that I got the blame for getting us lost four times when we were trying to find the bike park at check-in time (I didn't volunteer to navigate, I just happened to be the only one who had thought to print the map). I managed to miss the English race-briefing (couldn't find the venue for that either) and had to attend the French one, which in typical French manner turned into a heckling match which I was sure was going to culminate in a strike on the part of the French athletes as they took up arms about everything from the ambiguity of drafting penalties to the lack of translated pre-race information that the Spanish organizers had emailed out in the preceding weeks. Eric hummed throughout the entire briefing and Arnold looked like he was ready to break his legs. Having learnt to keep my questions to myself at this point in the day, I sat tight and put on my best angry face in an attempt to fit in with the crowd while trying to absorb the important information, like what to do when you want to drop out.

A pictoral interlude.

The buoys marking the swim course:


Eric checking in his bike:


Preparations in the bag tent:

Saturday evening: we ate an early dinner on the trailer's balcony, shared a bottle of wine and watched the moon rise on the water. We agreed that it was indeed a full moon, concluded that it responsible for our agitated states and collectively forgave each other our transgressions of the day before going to bed. I slept fitfully.

Five am: breakfast, washroom, dress, do hair, undress, washroom again, redo hair, fret over what goggles to wear.

Seven thirty am: am standing in my wetsuit in the 'holding pen' for swim start, wishing that I'd picked the other goggles with a darker tint becasue the sun was breaking the horizon immediately behind the first buoy.

The Swim.

The swim was a beach start, single lap 3.8km course. It was essentially an out-and-back with a two-buoy turnaround. There were thirteen waves spaced two minutes apart (for non triathletes: sometimes swim starts are broken up into groups, called waves, to avoid crowding in the water). The male pros were first, then the female pros, and then I was in the third (which consisted of all female age groupers, which turned out to be just 90 in a field of 1,700 competitors - apparently women's participation in endurance sports in Europe has some catching up to do on North America). I lined up behind the front girls, hoping to draft the leaders and avoid getting stuck in the middle of the pack if the pace wasn't too brisk in the first few hundred meters. The gun went off and we ran into the breaking waves.

Everybody talks about the brutal mish-mash of an Ironman swim start, with kicking and thrashing, being swum over, having goggles ripped off, getting pushed under and having to fight to catch a breath. I had prepared myself for this a thousand times over, but there was none of it (in no small part due to having a wave start of only 90 athletes). Us girls organized ourselves into a tight but fluid pack that swum together until the first buoy turn. Other than the tapping of a hand on my foot as I was drafted, I had no other physical contact with other athletes in the water. The pace of the leaders was faster than I wanted to swim in the first twenty minutes, so after the turn they broke ahead and I pulled back and led the chase pack. I tried to focus on using my upper body (I have a strong kick - and I like to use it when left unchecked) so I switched to a three-count kick to conserve my leg power for later in the day. The water was beautifully clear and the sun was rising behind us; with every sixth breadth I could see the orange globe moving up on the horizon under my right arm. While there were waves, they were of the large rolling kind that aren't difficult to swim through but do shift the landscape moment by moment. Sometimes the buoys marking the turnaround in the distance were there, and sometimes they weren't.

Which brings me to the task of sighting. While I might not have a strong sense of direction on land, I am usually a fairly good sighter in the water. It's fair to say that the swim course buoys were a little lacking in height, so I was counting on the kayacker that stayed close to our pack to do some guiding. Big mistake. When I arrived at the first of the two buoys marking the turn around loop, a referee boat pulled up. There was some shouting at the kayaker, some whistle blowing, some general confusion in the water, and we were turned at an angle to loop a different buoy. I now had the bulk of white swim caps marking the female agegroupers, mixed with the odd blue cap from the first of the male agegroupers who had caught up to us, ahead of me. I still don't know what went wrong and why our course wasn't corrected sooner, but word at the finish line was that we were not the only wave to do this and the swim times reflect it.

The return leg of the swim was uneventful; I stuck in the middle of the group and was happy to be able to draft somebody else when I caught onto the feet of a male age grouper. When the beach began to draw near again, I returned to a single-stroke kick rhythm to encourage the blood back down to my legs (thanks for the tip about this, David - it worked and I could run out of the water without too much dizziness). My swim exit:



The Bike.

I've never been so bored in all my life. Six hours and three laps of an uninteresting waterfront route. Lack of beauty in a landscape might not affect some athletes, but it leaves me climbing the proverbial walls of my mind. I've never visited the stretch of coastline east of Barcelona before, and I won't hurry back; it's the sort of place that you might think is suitable to pass a week's vacation if you're British. Maybe I've been spoilt with our largely untouched coastline in Southwest France; but in any event I've lost my taste for concrete highrises and was missing the beauty of vineyards, olive groves and Mediterranean pines. I definitely, definitely enjoyed training for the bike portion a thousand times more than I enjoyed the actual bike portion of Ironman. I couldn't wait to get out of the saddle and do something else.

This sums up my feeling on the bike:




The Run.

Having said that, when the bike was drawing to a close, I had absolutely no interest in running. My legs were feeling fine (although I had a period of feeling a little physically low in the second loop) but my mind felt numb and I would venture to say I was actually feeling indifferent to the race at this point. It's true that I had periods on the bike where I completely zoned out and I don't recall what I was thinking, but I clearly remember the very lucid thought that I would much, much rather spend the afternoon at the beach than running a marathon. I tried to pep myself up with coke at the final bike aid stations, but they'd run out. Some had also run out of water, and towards the end they were handing out no other food other than whole, green bananas (not very palatable, or open-able) and whole energy bars still in their packages (also not very openable). It's a good thing I was in my indifferent mood at this stage or I might have had more to say about it at the time.

But back to the run: four loops of an equally non-descript waterfront course. Thank goodness the crowds were good: the Spanish know how to throw a party and every bar and cafe along the route made sure they did. Spanish kids went crazy with whistles and blowhorns at aid stations. The sun was high at this point in the day, and I had stupidly counted on suncream being available at the exit of the second transition zone; there was none. I felt fine in the first 20 kilometers, running a fairly steady pace and alternating between water and coke at every aid station. Around kilometer 15, I was delighted to find out that I had done a good job of staying hydrated with the arrival of the desire to visit the little girls' room. Only, there were no little girls' rooms to be found on the run course. Yes, there were no portapotties. Don't read the next paragraph if you're delicate.

The absence of portapotties is less of a problem for little boys who can go at the side of the road, but the girls were left with little choice. Yup, I 'went on the run', or as the French say, 'j'ai fait le pee-pee dans les shorts.' A lot of people advised me to 'practice' this before race day, because it's a bit of a skill. I didn't practice it becasue I had no intention of doing it in advance, but I actually found it was fairly easy to do. However, and I am sharing this as a warning to other athletes who like me, might think it's a good idea to then rinse off by dumping cups of water on your legs at the next aid station: don't do that. Four steps later, I realised that my runners had filled up with (I imagine) both liquids, and each and every step for the next several kilometers was soggy, heavy and squelchy until the heat of the pavement dried them up. I cursed my lack of foresight with every step.

Next problem: a few kilometers later I began to notice the skin on my arms and shoulders turning red and could feel my lips starting to burn. I am usually a stickler for wearing suncream and my pink arms became distracting towards the end. Luckily I had a good base tan from a summer of swimming outdoors and my damage wasn't too bad; other athletes were doing less well and there were some badly burnt specimens towards the end of the afternoon. I cursed the race organizers, pulled my visor low on my face and battled through the second half of the marathon.

This was without a doubt the hardest part of the day. My creado (hey Anthony - this was the best I could come up with) was 'just keep putting one foot in front of the other'. That seemed to work, but I didn't enjoy one single step. Nobody else seemed to be enjoying it either; I'm not at all sure that it's a good thing to pass other athletes again and again on a four lap course - it's sort of like being forced to watch your own deterioration in a mirror. The final kilometer, which was marked 800 meters too early and made for a seriously long final push, was tough. My expression at the finish might belie this, but I was really just delighted to be done:




I found Arnold who had crossed the line just ahead of me and we exchanged war stories and grievances. I sat with my head between my legs for a while, ate the corner of a bagette, waited for Eric to arrive, gave up after an hour and went home to sleep. And that was that.

So why wasn't my Ironman experience as meaningful as I'd expected it to be? I have no idea. Perhaps what there was to learn was, for me, learnt in training. Perhaps it was learnt in previous races, or perhaps the magic of Ironman has been a little too hyped-up. Perhaps I am in too much of a post-race fatigue to really feel the extent of what it means to me (although three days later, I feel fully recovered but am not going to do anything silly like start training again right away). Or perhaps (and this is currently my favourite theory), I belong out in the woods. So guess what I'm doing next? (yes, of course I've already thought about that) - I'm going back to ultrarunning. I'm going to keep swimming and biking because I like both and the cross-training is good for the mind and body, but my next race will be out in the hills, away from concrete, away from hoards of other people, away from aerohelmets and compression socks and disc wheels. I might keep blogging, but don't count on it. I might start writing something else instead. I might stay vegan since I am now convinced it's the healthiest way to eat, but it's more likely I will be vegan just most of the time since it works better with the rest of life. I feel pretty flexible on all these fronts.

So maybe Ironman did change me, just a little.

My biggest thanks to everyone who's been reading about my journey. Your interest and support made the biggest difference of all.