Ben Woolston's Timberman Race Report

TLDR: I finished, but felt awful afterwards, and would train differently next time.

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Timberman was my first half ironman distance race, and wow was it fun! Having a whole bunch of other MIT athletes and friends, as well as my dad and his triathlon training buddies there, made it a really memorable experience.

Swim (33 min)

The swim is usually the worst part of my races, but in this race I posted my fastest ever swim pace (my fastest sprint up to this point has been 1:45/100m, vs. 1:42 at Timberman). In retrospect I attribute this to two factors: 1) The water was crystal clear. This made it really easy to see the splash from feet of people in front of me, and I put a lot of effort into making sure I was always in someone else’s draft, which turns out to be really helpful. 2) Because I knew the race was going to be long, I wasn’t worrying about swimming as fast as I could, which I think made me more relaxed, and swim with better form and thus (ironically) faster. I remember getting to within 100 yds of shore and thinking “I can’t be done with the swim yet; I don’t feel like I’ve done any work!” I got out of the water not feeling at all dizzy or shaky (as I normally do) and ready to get to work on the bike.

T1 (Too slow to put up here)

My transition was slow. I think Antoine is right; that you can gain precious time in transition, but I was mostly concerned with making sure I had everything properly ready for my ride, and that I was sticking to my nutrition plan. I’m ashamed to say I sat down to put on my shoes and socks :/

Bike (2:27)

Even the morning of the race, I wasn’t sure what my pacing strategy was going to be for the bike leg. I knew this was the leg I could make up the most time on (with most of my training this year focused on improving bike fitness), but I was really worried about going too hard and putting myself into the red for the run. In the end I decided (on the suggestion of Stephen Shum) to follow the advice in Andrew Coggan’s book “Racing and Training with Power” to aim for 80% of my Functional Threshold Power. For me, this translates to about 240W. So, on the flat and downhill sections, I tried to keep my power around this mark, and on the hills (of which there were quite a few), my aim was to keep below my threshold power. I think this strategy worked quite well: I never once felt tired on the bike (even after the climbs), and my average heart rate stayed comfortably in the tempo range, with a few bumps up into the threshold region on the longer hills. I focused on staying in my aero tuck as much as possible, and then giving my shoulders and neck a rest by sitting up taller on the climbs, where the speed is much slower and aerodynamics don’t count for as much. I think the biggest thing I noticed on the bike was how much cheating was going. In contrast to Antoine’s unfortunate situation, I witnessed several people actively drafting each other for minutes at a time. In fact, for about 5 miles of the race, there was someone sitting right on my rear wheel! He stayed there until someone passed me, and then hopped onto his wheel instead. I tried to get a look at his race number, but couldn’t see it clearly. By the end of the bike leg my shoulders were getting tired from being tucked in for so long, but other than that I was feeling pretty good. I’d eaten a gel once every 45 minutes and timed it so I drained my electrolyte drink (2 bottles) just before getting into transition. I made sure that I didn’t eat anything within half an hour of finishing the bike, since I tend to have uncomfortable stomach issues if I run with a full (or even partially full stomach). Average power: 232W, average speed: 22.9mph. So far, so good…

T2 (~ 3 minutes)

Nothing too much to report here. I changed socks for the run, put on sunglasses, and managed to remember to attach my race number belt (most of the time I seem to manage to forget this).

Run (1:48)

This is where it got hard… The first seven miles of the run felt great. My legs felt good, I was keeping a high cadence, and I was happy with the pace I was running. But round about mile 7, I started to feel… awful. It’s hard to describe: I’ve ‘bonked’ on the bike before, and it didn’t feel like that. I’ve had GI issues while running before (mainly caffeine related), and it didn’t feel like that either. It just felt like suddenly I had absolutely no energy left. My positive attitude was starting to fail, and I couldn’t believe that the mile markers were showing up so infrequently! It didn’t feel like I needed to eat (and I was wary to put anything in my stomach), so I was a little at a loss to know how to fix it. In the end I thought to myself “OK, you’ve only got 6 miles to go, just think of it as two 5K runs.” This seemed to really help. I’d also read other people’s race reports with similar feelings at about this point, and they all seemed to say it would get better if I just pushed through it. So I kept running, but it was getting harder and harder to keep turning over my feet. I think I actively groaned when I rounded a corner to find the major hill of the race waiting for me. In the aid stations, I started walking, taking the sponges they were handing out and trying all sorts of things (water, Ironman Perform, etc.) to make myself feel better (none of which really worked). I kept looking at my watch, doing the math, and I realized that, even if I kept up the terrible pace I was currently running, I could still finish in under 5 hours (my stretch goal), as long as I just kept running. To cut a long story short, there were many many times when I almost stopped, but somehow didn’t let myself. At mile 12, I knew I’d done it: The hills were over, and the last shreds of adrenaline gave me a little kick to finish of the race.

Final time: 4:55:50.

Post-Race

I might have been running and smiling when I crossed the finish line, but it was only about 10 seconds afterwards that the effort from the run caught up to me, and I started to feel terrible. As my Dad said, “You looked like death”. I guzzled down two water bottles (I guess I was pretty dehydrated), said only a few words to the other people who had already finished (I wasn’t in the mood for talking), and went and sat in the lake for a while. My legs hurt, my muscles were tight -- I was completely drained. It took a solid 30 minutes before I started to feel even a little better, and another 30 before I felt able to force some food down. Basically the whole rest of the day I didn’t feel good at all, and my muscles were so stiff I could barely walk (something which lasted until… today, actually). But, I had done it.. that was the important thing.

What would I do differently next time? I think what happened on the run was that I had completely drained my glycogen reserves by about half way through. (At the point where it got bad, it was ~ 3.5 hrs in, which as I understand it is about as long as your glycogen can possibly sustain you). I have a tendency to do too much of my training at too high an intensity - I’d like to get more efficient at burning fat (a virtually inexhaustible energy supply), and being able to do longer efforts (most of my training rides are never more than 4 hours, and I rarely run more than  6-7 miles most of the time). In the future, I think I’ll focus on longer training sessions at lower intensity, to make a long race like this one more manageable.

I’m looking forward to doing this race again next year, and hopefully at some point the full Ironman, though given how I felt most of this week, that is clearly a while away… :)

I just want to thank all the MIT people that were up there this weekend, racers and non-racers alike. Seeing people on the run and hearing Zuzka and Isa and others cheering was probably the only reason I finished!