Challenge Roth: The Rest of the Story
I put off and put off writing the rest of this post. Truth is, I don’t want to dwell on what went wrong, I want to move on! The rest of the race was terrible from a performance and body cooperation standpoint. I nearly fell asleep on the bike.. I had no power.. I think I got lapped on the one loop course. 🙂 I had a lot of muscular weakness from my RF procedure several days prior and had trouble holding myself up.. and my head up.. on the bike. Riding up Solar Berg Hill is as cool and amazing as everyone says.. I only wish I hadn’t felt like death and could have enjoyed it more. Truly though, I’m not sure if I’ve ever been so close to getting off my bike and walking up a hill during an IM.
On the run I actually felt a bit better and ran a steady 1:5x for the first half, then I decided to walk an aid station and immediately felt a bad twinge in my healing foot. My mind started racing about surgery and how long it would take to heal if I completely tore the thing and I just couldn’t do it. Â So one half marathon running as well as I could have expected plus one half marathon walking quite slowly.. basically hobbling. At that point I was really far away from the start or the finish or any way to really stop so I decided to just walk it in. I have never walked more than a minutes or so at an IRONMAN.. it was about as fun as I pictured it. Actually, a lot less fun and there are a couple of key differences than in the North American IMs I have done.
1. In European IMs no one walks
2. No one speaks English
In NA IMs there are lots of people walking and presumably, lots of people to talk to. In Eurepean IMs they don’t like it when you walk and spectators WILL yell at you in a negative way and berate you to try and run again. I did get to chat with a lot of ATC people as they came through, so that was kind of cool. It turns out going overseas on Thursday racing around on your feet constantly for 72 hours, then getting up to start an IM at what your body thinks is midnight did not bode well for many of us ATCers.
The finish is truly one of the coolest finishes ever. One small bonus of not running is that you don’t hurt that bad afterwards. Oh yeah, except for my poor foot, which by that point, I thought I was going to lose completely. I knew going into this race that my foot was a huge question mark, I was not where I needed to be fitness wise, and was struggling with a few other issues. I gambled and I lost in terms of race performance but I did appreciate the amazing trip. Now to the good part….the tour, San Sebastian, and Barcelona.
Would I do this race again? Perhaps someday. I would do a few things different including getting there at least a week early, and not getting the radio frequency procedure ten days prior. Also, my immune system did not seem to cope well with things there. I was crazy sick two days after the race, spending an entire 24 hours in bed with a fever and basically not eating for two days. I also picked up a staph infection which started as a “bug bite” on my leg acquired during the trip that eventually required antibiotic intervention.
Despite those challenges, this was definitely the trip of a lifetime. How often can you race overseas with 30 of your friends?!
