m2sport

Thanks J. for the quote and Dave for the pics.

That quote was from my friend Bryan. It made me smile. He knows how much work I put into this and it wrapped up my day pretty well. I thought things were going to go better for me on Sunday. It just wasn’t my day. 11:02 was pretty far off the pace. You can’t fake it in Ironman. When things go wrong they go very wrong and it hurts. Last year I was 42 minutes faster and looking back it seemed easy. This year it really hurt.
On the positive sides of things I have finished Ironman 4 times and that alone is a major accomplishment.
Time to kick back now and relax for a while.

A great day for racing but not the best days for photography. Cold, rain, grey. I didn’t get a chance to get out on the bike or run course because of weather. So here are some highlights from the swim and the great finish.
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Rich Strauss is an excellent coach and teacher. After the race on Sunday we had a talk about the path ultra-distance athletes take. From entering your first Ironman to qualifying for Ironman Hawaii. He has coached 100’s if not 1000’s of Ironman athletes so he see lots of patterns. The following is an excerpt from an email he sent to all of his athletes. It sums it up pretty well. I’ve completed 3 Ironman events, so you can see where I’m at below.

First Race: don’t know what to expect, a good bit of fear and intimidation, leading to a healthy respect for the distance. Focus on execution and “the experience” rather than performance. LOTS of pre-race nerves, as everything is completely new to you.

Second Race: immediately after the first race, you begin thinking of all the things you could have done better in training and racing to go faster. Your head moves to the right, from “experience” to “performance,” but you still know enough to know you don’t know enough to think you can “race” the thing. Actually, hanging around me for the past year has likely kept you focused on execution instead of performance and racing. You know what to expect on race day and therefore have less fear. You’re still nervous, however. (more…)

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A great day in Lake Placid on Sunday. Cloudy & cool for the swim and bike with a little bit of sun for the run. I love those conditions, and I had a great day because of them.

I couldn’t be happier with my result. I started the day with a poor swim (1:09), but it didn’t really bother me. However, being 768th out of the water created more work. Now I had to navigate through all that bike traffic. Whereas if I would have swam an hour, I wouldn’t have had to work so hard to ride around people. 5 hours and 20 minutes later I was off the bike in 85th place. Nothing like a fast bike to put you in contention for an Ironman Hawaii slot. (more…)
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