Those who have read my previous IM race reports will be delighted that this one is (a little) more concise. It’s not a race I’ll remember with huge fondness, either for the experience or my performance. My level of motivation for the race was well below par and that’s matched by my shortage of enthusiasm for writing about it. But there are two ironies in this – firstly, I clocked a personal best of 11:41; and secondly, my continuing disappointment with the day, rather than making me accept the plateau I’ve firmly arrived on, has given me a shot in the arm and helped me set ambitious new targets for next year. More about that later.
I think my biggest mistake was in deciding to do two Ironmans within 12 weeks. Even the pros, who’re getting paid to think about nothing else, will rarely do more than two, three at a push, long-course races per year. This was my fourth IM in less than 23 months – Ironman UK in September 2008, Ironman Brazil in May 2009, Ironman St. George in May 2010 and now the latest instalment, Ironman Switzerland in July 2010. I found it much more difficult mentally than physically. I’d booked the double-header nearly twelve months ago in a state of post-Brazil vivacity. With a growing habit, one IM in 2010 just wasn’t going to be enough. Ironman had become a lifestyle and I was hooked on the training, discipline and community. I loved having my calendar defined by a huge event looming on the horizon that dominated my thoughts, awake and asleep, and shaped my social life. Everything in the future was measured in units of time before or after the race. I was addicted to an obsessiveness that gave context to everything else in life. And so the theory was that I’d do IMSG first – a new race on the circuit but one that was guaranteed to be a monster – and then, with endurance fitness safely in the bank, I’d have twelve weeks to add some speed for a big PB at the much quicker IM Switzerland. What really happened was that IMSG was so tough, yet such a great experience, that afterwards I just wanted to bask in it for a while. To eat and drink what I wanted and enjoy my first summer in my new home city of Vancouver without incessant training. The weeks started to slip past. In late May/early June I started training hard again. I was putting in the miles but something was missing. I just wasn’t feeling the usual pre-Ironman sense of panic, doom and, occasionally, excitement that serves to drag my arse out of bed at 6:00am for a hard 2,000m in the pool before work or forces me to up the ante on the last 20 miles of a four hour ride. I believe in training hard (I’m naively suspicious of athletes who’re too reliant on heart-rate training because I suspect ‘keeping within certain zones’ is too often used as an excuse for laziness), yet week by week I was procrastinating on doing that speed work that was key to a sub-11 in Zurich. It wasn’t just a malaise of body, it was also one of mind – the prospect of this race just wasn’t sparking me like my previous three have.
I was smart enough to do some races during June and July, which served as hooks to hang my summer training on – Victoria half-Iron on 20th June; Vancouver half marathon, with another 7 miles tacked on beyond the finish line, on 27th June; 4,000m swim in Lake Sasamat on 1st July, complete with a cringe-inducing rendition of O Canada before the gun; and finally the Squamish Triathlon (Olympic) on 11th July. All of these went ok. I was pleased with my 4:58 in Victoria and content with 2:19 in Squamish. But I still wasn’t that excited about Zurich. About two weeks before the race I realised I hadn’t even checked out the bike and run course profiles and I hadn’t been doing my usual trawling of internet forums to find out what other athletes were saying.
It wouldn’t be Ironman if my job didn’t interfere in the race build-up and I still in the office at 2am the night before leaving Vancouver for London and onto Zurich. We were fortunate to get an upgrade to Premium Economy, giving just that little bit more leg room, for the overnight flight and after dinner and TV I slept pretty well. Those two and a half years of catching the 6am X90 Oxford-London has given me the skill of being able to sleep anywhere. With a short stopover in Heathrow T5 and the impact of the 9-hour time difference we arrived in a rather soggy Zurich nearly a full 24 hours after leaving sunny British Columbia. We did, but my bike didn’t. It’s a pretty cosmopolitan bike – continental Europe on several occasions, the Channel Islands, back and forth to Singapore, South America, North America, all around the UK – but this was the first time it had gone missing in transit. Thankfully the authorities at Zurich airport knew it hadn’t arrived before we did, which gave me great confidence that they were in control. We went onto our hotel, dinner and bed and sure enough, when I got up on Friday morning my bike bag was safety stored in the hotel’s left luggage room.
That was the only pre-race drama. That and the rain. It didn’t stop all day Friday. Dave and Stephanie weren’t due to arrive until later on and so Andrea and I went off in search of race HQ. When we eventually found it there just didn’t seem to be the same vibe around as what there had been in St. George or Florianopolis. Hardly anyone was at the expo and the HQ set-up was poor, with important services such as registration and massage hidden away and badly signposted. This isn’t what I’d been expecting from the Swiss. Even the Ironman shop was pretty weak and I decided for once not to spend a week’s salary on M-dot mementos. Registration itself was remarkably simple and felt more like what happens at a local race – give your name, show your ID and collect a race bag. In fact, I don’t remember if we even had to show ID. That was it. No multiple processing points, no separate race chip hand out before ceremonial distribution of freebies, no elaborate body marking, just a single bag containing everything we needed. I discovered then that the race would have a traditional transition zone and not the T1 and T2 bags and changing tent set-up I’ve got used to at Ironman races. This helped explain the ease of check-in and lightness of my race bag. Anyway, it was still raining, heavily, and we took refuge in the large tent where a few hundred athletes had gathered for the race briefing in German. It was still 75 minutes until the English race briefing but with it being damp outside we happily sat and listened, picking up the main points through catching the odd word and reading the slide show. Then came the English race briefing and the tent flooded with Brits. This, Austria and France, followed by Lanzarote, are probably the biggest races in the British triathlon calendar. Lots of us were wearing Ironman UK race kit, but many people, like me, do it only once to show some kind of loyalty to our home IM before going on to do international races were we’re guaranteed better weather, organisation and support. Quick calculations showed that 300-400 of the 2,200 competitors were British, and there was a large Irish contingent also, complete with their paddywackery and flag waving.
Toby (an ex-colleague of Andrea’s) and Dave showed up sometime within half an hour of each other and, after introductions, we had a simple pasta lunch while the much quieter French briefing went on behind us. It was great to see Dave again. Earlier that morning I’d built my bike and taken it for a spin around the hotel area, with no problems whatsoever. All I had to do at the expo was pick up a few CO2 canisters and I was good to race. With a traditional transition zone there wouldn’t even be much to do the following day apart from drop my bike down between 4:30pm and 5:30pm. With all this free time I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Friday night dinner at the bistro in the station that I’d last been to a few years ago on a Liechtenstein v Northern Ireland trip (1-4, Healy hat trick) and home to bed. Breakfast in the hotel on Saturday morning was a fashion parade of old race t-shirts, as we all got stuck into the better-than-expected buffet. It was still raining, although less heavily than the day before, which was exactly what had been forecasted. The rain was due to clear up during the day and we were to have a dry Sunday. One advantage of the downpour and milder weather was that the Zurichsee temperature was cooling from a high of 24.4 degrees on Thursday – perilously close to the non-wetsuit temperature of 24.5 degrees. I had a gentle 20 minute jog and Andrea and I, unused to having such a stress free few days before a race, took advantage and went into the centre of town to explore. Later in the afternoon Dave and I caught the train with our bikes and then pedalled directionless through central Zurich to race HQ. Bike check-in was uneventful. I’d got a pretty good spot at the end of a rail and close to the bike exit. The organisers were handing out bike covers to protect from overnight rain. We didn’t hang around. Back to the hotel to collect the girls and a return into town for a lovely Italian meal, booked by Stephanie. I don’t know the reason, but I wasn’t that nervous. Yet don’t mistake this for meaning that I was looking forward to what was ahead. Most of Saturday was spent checking at my watch doing this-time-tomorrow and only-x-hours-to-swim-start calculations, in a rather condemned man frame of mind. I certainly wouldn’t say I was up for it, and I think this affected my performance the following day when I kind of resigned to my fate when the going got tough.
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| Bike check-in |
Swim – 2.4 miles
Dave and I walked from the bike racks to the swim start together. We knew that Andrea and Stephanie had rose early and travelled down by taxi to watch but we couldn’t see them in the crowd. It was a beach start and we got good spots on the far left of the course, with a straight line to the first turn buoy, and hoping to avoid the mess of flaying body parts from those who’d chosen more technically difficult spots on the beach to our right. I heard the gun for the pro start and saw 15-20 swim caps disappear off into the distance. Two minutes before 7am we were told to enter the water and I swam out to the start line. Within seconds of arriving and with no countdown the gun went and the race was underway. It was surprisingly calm. Within 10-15 strokes I’d found my own clear water and could get into a rhythm, at this point unaware that the mayhem would begin in 10 minutes time when the hundreds who’d started to my right would attempt to angle in to get around the first buoy. The water was beautiful – clear and comfortably warm. All the same, everyone was glad it was wetsuit-legal as the buoyancy of the neoprene saves at least 10-15% of time in comparison to non-wetsuit swims.
The rough and tumble began a couple of hundred yards before the first buoy and there was nothing else for it but to get involved. If you let that guy who’s trying to swim over your back get past you then you can bet there’ll be another one right behind him. Definitely better to fight for your own space and know that after the 90 degree turn things will relax. It was a two-lap course and the argy-bargy continued at each buoy. I was in a fighting mood and gave good shoves in the back to a few of the inconsiderates who stopped to breast stroke and take stock of their position just as they approach the turn points.
It was around this point at the end of the first lap that I realised I still hadn’t peed since getting up at 4:15am, despite having sipping water and energy drink all morning. Making sure your bladder is completely empty at the end of the swim is the easiest 2-3 minutes you’ll save all day, and usually means I can survive the rest of the race with a single pee-stop. I went under the bridge and took time to glance up and see the crowds hanging over it and cheering before being helped onto the island for the 100 metre run to the other side and dive back into the water for lap two. There was much more room now and I was fairly pleased how things were going. Lap one was slightly shorter and so with 32 minutes on the clock I was bang on schedule. I was even managing to catch onto some feet and draft.
But then I remembered my bladder issues and grew increasingly obsessed with peeing. I really didn’t want to have to stop in T1 or even early on the bike course. Come on, squeeze one out. I kept going, realising that the swim course was disappearing behind me and that another 2.4 mile Ironman swim would soon be complete. It felt like I was swimming ok and I was happier than usual with my sighting, meaning I wasn’t zigzagging any extra distance. But occasionally I’d realise that I hadn’t been concentrating for several minutes at a time as I tried to tease out some wee. I was trying every mental trick in the book but nothing was happening and I was convinced I could feel that my bladder was full. When I eventually came under the bridge for the second time and was pulled out of the water I checked my watch to see 1:15. This was disastrous. I’d collapsed on the second lap and clocked a personal swim worst, a full five minutes slower than St. George but in much faster conditions. And I hadn’t even managed to urinate.
Bike – 112 miles
T1 was uneventful and I caught sight of Andrea and Stephanie at the bike mount line. The first 20 miles of the bike course were flat and fast, taking us around the head of the lake in the centre of town and then out of Zurich on the main lake-side road. I knew that for a 6-hour bike leg I had to average 18.5 miles per hour and for the first hour I was struggling to hold myself below 22 or 23mph. It felt easy and towards the end of this 20-mile stretch the field started to settle down as swim/bikers found their natural position in the line-up. Dave came past me after about 8 miles, which actually encouraged me as after my dreadful swim I’d assumed he’d come out of the water ahead of me. When he checked the results later he saw I beat him in the swim by only 4 seconds, but he’d stopped in the portaloos in T1 giving me an advantage of several minutes. This would be my only victory over him all day. Then came the hills – the infamous Beast and the multiple rollers that wound their way through the towns and villages in the mountains to the south-east of the city. The locals were out in number, with cow bells so heavy they had to be swung two-handed between their legs and shouts of “hupp, hupp, hupp” to help us up the hills. The course felt too busy. With the number of athletes and the frequency of hills it was impossible to observe the 10m drafting rules. Others were simply ignoring it and occasionally a pack of 10-15 riders would pass, clearly cheating. I came up behind an American girl called Julie who was wearing an Ironman St. George cycle jersey and we chatted on-and-off for the next 10-15 miles about that and other races we’d done around the world. The poor girl had even had the misfortune to travel from Maryland to Bolton last year to do Ironman UK, only to discover that the mile markers on the marathon course had been stolen the night before. Anyway, her UK experience provided a happy ending as she managed to grab a Kona spot.
Back on the lake-side for five miles into town, around the head of the lake and past the race HQ towards the Heartbreak Hill out-and-back making up the final 10k of each loop. This gave me a chance to judge my position in the race as the faster guys beginning their second lap were passing on the other side of the road. The first time up Heartbreak Hill was probably the high-point of the entire race for me. It comes 52 miles into the bike course and so some fatigue is starting to set in and suddenly you find yourself at the foot of a very sharp climb that’s flanked by spectators two or three deep. The roads are covered in chalk messages, there are live bands playing and as you get near to the summit you can’t even see the tarmac ahead before the crowd parts immediately before you and lets cyclists through in single file. People are slapping you on the back and leaning over to shout in your ear. This YouTube video gives a good idea of the experience - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_dAbWsoRlo. Towards the top I caught sight of someone to my right running alongside me and realised it was Andrea. She was shouting encouragement and telling me Dave’s position. As I came down the steep descent the other side of Heartbreak Hill I jammed on the breaks and finally stopped for that pee, a full three hours after it refused to leave me during the swim. Back onto my bike and I was started to hurt but took encouragement from the hundreds of riders behind me and still heading to the climb as I passed HQ and began my second lap. I went through half way on the bike course around 2:56 and, at the time, felt this gave me a decent chance of a 6-hour ride. Yet on the flat stretch along Lake Zurich I could now see my computer flickering between 18-19mph and it didn’t feel easy anymore. I was beginning to have to stand on the pedals to stretch every now and then and couldn’t stay comfortable in the aero position for more than a few minutes at a time. The Beast and ensuing rollers actually gave some relief as they allowed me to stand to climb, although the five mile slog uphill beside the train track felt several times longer this time than on lap one.
I wasn’t feeling happy. In the grand scheme with only 30 miles to go I knew I’d broken the bike leg, but when you’re suffering 30 miles feels like a very long way ahead. I sum it up in sentences in a race report but when actually living it each minute passes in real time and I was watching my mileage slowly grow every tenth of a mile. I knew my time was slipping simply by comparing my speed at certain milestones to what I recalled they’d been on the first lap and I began to get depressed. I tried to make up for this by taking a few more chances on the sharp descents and was actually pleased by hitting the low-mid 40s a few times. By the time I got to lakeside again I was really unhappy. The ten miles of flat followed by Heartbreak Hill felt impossible and my negative state of mind was compounded as I came around the head of the lake and cycled past hundreds of athletes already out on the run course. I started to scan faces for sight of Dave but couldn’t see him. Heartbreak Hill the second time wasn’t as much fun. As it turned out, I was still top half of the field, but many of the spectators had already moved off the hill and gone into town to watch the run. Finally I got to the dismount line and checked my watch to see over 6:15 for the bike. Across swim and bike I was at least 20 minutes down on where I'd planned to be.
Run – 26.2 milesT2 was easy. I decided to play it safe and change my socks but managed to morph into a runner and get out on the course within a couple of minutes. As usual I stuffed some energy chews and gels into my tri top pocket and as usual I carried them untouched for the next 26.2 miles, preferring instead to survive on a diet of fresh fruit pieces and Coke. In an effort to be spectator friendly, the run course was a four-lapper and was going to test my mental strength. On lap one everything was new – the course, the signs I saw spectators waving, seeing Andrea and Stephanie, the live bands, the smells of cooking burgers, the location of aid stations – but none of this was to be freshly discovered on laps two and three. I was feeling sluggish and pissed off with myself. I knew my sub-11 hour target was down the toilet and began to give up. My only goal was to finish, enjoy my remaining holiday in Switzerland and the UK and forget about triathlon and Ironman for a few months. At the frequent out and backs I was searching everywhere for Dave to see how far ahead he was and if catching him would be possible, but there was no sign of him. As it happened, he started the run half an hour ahead of me (and just within the striking range that I’d previously thought possible) and increased his lead by nearly ten minutes over the marathon. Due to the querks of the course this meant that while I saw just about every other of the 2,200 competitors during the run, I didn’t see Dave. I could tell, however, that he was going strong as Andrea stopped giving me updates on his progress whenever I passed her at the end of each lap.
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| Suffering |
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| With Dave shortly after finishing |
