Chattanooga 70.3 Race Report
Started in the back with Laura, Hilary, Amy, and we had a fun time in line. At IM Chatt I really enjoyed starting in the back because of the massive affect of slingshotting on the bike. If I had to do it again tomorrow, though I would start up more.
I felt fantastic on the swim. Definitely am feeling the effects of more recent swim training. I felt like the swim would be a non-factor because of some current help and indeed the times were very mushed together. I was thinking around 30′ so was happy to pop up a few seconds over 29 incidentally right by Melissa. Hey, any day I can swim with her is a good day so I figured I did okay. Perhaps she figured she did terrible. 😉
Ran up to transition. Had a money spot.. no literally a $$$ spot having had to sign up under the Ironman Foundation. I was racked right across from Andy Potts though which was pretty sweet! I must have done some lazy yogging though because my transition times were actually not good. I think I have gotten a little too relaxed during T2 so I will have to jump on that.
Anyways, I ran to my spot and a few alarm bells went off. I had left my shoes clipped into my bike and now they were not clipped in and instead laying randomly on the ground. I thought that was really weird. I theorized that perhaps I had a flat in transition and an official had noticed and fixed it prior to my arrival. That’s really the only thing I could come up with! It left me with a bad feeling especially considering the IM Chatt drama, but I put it out of my mind and got going.
My whole goal going into the day was to maximize my ‘free speed.’ This whole dental drama has taken it out of me the past month and I basically haven’t been able to hit any bike workouts SO I was hoping to see how much speed I could get out of whatever I had on the day. I really feel like the pieces have come together this year on that end. Amazing bike with the Felt IA, a fantastic fit, and my shoulder behaving have enabled me to ride a bike like you’re supposed to. Staying in aero and all that. Also, I literally have nothing on my bike except for one bottle cage on the downtube. Everything is hidden away.
So I got going and right away I knew it might be better to not look at my power. It was much lower than what I was targeting and my legs burned way more than they should have anytime I tried to push. On the positive end my speed was still pretty good and I was passing constantly. Before I mentioned that I would have started a little bit more forward in the line. During IM Chattanooga I started at the back and felt that I got the benefit of legal slingshotting without being held up too much. During this ride, I felt like there were a lot more instances of riders riding three, four abreast and who didn’t seem to know the rules. I started getting hoarse saying on your left and some seemed to take it as a suggestion or something they should eventually do but not immediately. It was actually pretty frustrating.
Besides that, I was having a pretty good time. I tried to push the bike shoe mystery out of my head. I got past the part where I spent a few hours in the middle of nowhere during IM Chatt and felt relieved. Then the painful part happened. This was so painful. Even days later it actually hurts my heart to write about it because I am really disappointed in how this went down. Anyways, mile 45, hard right turn. I took it too hard and skidded out and about died. I mean, I’m not sure exactly how it looked but it felt like I was so sideways I don’t know how I still ended upright. When i was sideways there was this scraping sound and it literally sounded like I was riding on the side of my rim or something. Â I was very thankful to come out upright after that but immediately thereafter I knew something wasn’t right.
Pulled over and the front was flat. Actually there was still air pushing through a pretty big hole. Long story short. I had to find something to plug the hole. Thank you Harold for giving my your gel wrapper. It held just great till I finally got everything replaced at Podium yesterday. Next, my inflator didn’t work. Thank you to Sara for stopping and giving me her inflator. I burned through 2 of 3 CO2s with the bad inflator and had one remaining. What are the odds.. that one was a DUD. I have never really heard of dud CO2s until recently and I have had two of them both in situations where I could have stood to have a non-dud one instead. 🙂 A race official stopped and gave me a CO2.
Finally back in the game. I stopped my garmin when I stopped, both to preserve my splits for my own vanity and so I wouldn’t ruminate incessantly about how much time I lost. I knew in the back of my head that all that took a long time, but I told myself that it was only 8 minutes so that wasn’t too bad. Rode back to town.. more carefully.. certain that any second my gel wrapper fixup jog was gonna fail and now I had nothing left to fix an issue.
That whole incident took the wind out of my sails a bit but I was determined to still try to stay in the game. Long shot but I thought maybe I could make up some time and catch the tail end of the podium. The run was a bit of a struggle with maintaining a positive attitude. I saw Sondra, tracker extraordinaire who I was so excited about giving me splits and mentioned what happened. She really does know the right thing to say because after that she didn’t give me any splits.
Until the last half mile of the whole thing. I was jogging certainly, but my head was not in a good place. I just wanted to be done. She was on the last bridge and said that she thought I was within two minutes of fifth place. That was enough for me to hightail it into gear and I picked up pretty strongly for the last half mile. In fact, after she said that, it was almost like a movie where you see something a long ways off. I swear I saw a lady with a 32 on her calf right after and thought ‘that’s her’ Anyways, I ended up in fifth by just a few seconds.
A few days later, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand, I feel very thankful that I didn’t crash or hurt myself seriously. Because I would have if I had gone down. I really consider that divine intervention. On the other hand, I had the ingredients in place to have a result I would have been very happy about it something out of my control went wrong.. in Chattanooga.. again.. which is frustrating. A few weeks out my perspective is more zen but I don’t about future Chat races other than spectating ones!
