Tinfoilman (!!!) Triathlon Race Report

As is appropriate to the name, this is a short, quick, easy, sprint tri.  And as the weather here in Tucson has gotten downright reasonable, any semblance of Iron-ness is officially gone, unlike the Firecracker Tri over the weekend of July 4 which, like all 3 of the races in the Tucson Tri Series, covers the same course around the U of A.

I actually took the day off before this one, unlike most Tris under 1/2 Iron distance.  The incentive was not just to see what I could do with a bit of rest, but to possibly net myself a top 3 finish in my age group and get a cool Tinfoilman trophy.  This was the first time in as long as I can remember that I've actually coveted a trophy for its own geeky sake.

You know you want one.

As with many triathlons, the Tucson Triathlon Series punishes those with fast swim times by starting them last.  This means 3-4 hour delays between the opening of transition to set up and the actual event.  Yet another reason for mass start swims.  In exchange for a promise of later guarded nap time free of kid responsibilities, I took both my steed and my wife's down to outside the U of A pool and set up both our transitions.  In what was probably a great stroke of luck, Karen's tire blew out completely around the valve stem as I topped it off.  Better to change before the race than during.  :-}

After a leisurely breakfast, we went back and waited for our swim heats, bringing our oldest as photographer, and leaving the two youngers back with grandma Sandy.

Karen's swim was 2 heats before mine, so I got to cheer her on.  Then I got in and paddled away for 825 yards:

The swim felt pretty good, and I hopped out and trotted out to transition.  I've been working on "flying" transitions, in my 44 year old caucasian way, so I'd set the bike up with shoes on.  I put my geeky aero helmet on, stepped on a towel to dry my feet off, threw some thin, 2-layer socks on, and took off running with the bike.  Transitions weren't timed, but I'm pretty sure I was in and out of T1 in roughly a minute.  My head still felt a bit underwater-ish, so the running mount was more of a trotting one.  Most folks pedal on top of the shoes and put their feet in one at a time, but I just slipped my feet into both shoes at once.  It worked pretty well, looks notwithstanding:

Poetry (poultry?!?!) In Motion

My power numbers on the bike weren't stellar--I held an average of 260 watts, and my 20 minute TT numbers usually run 300-325 watts.  But I went pretty fast, for me: 23.5 mph average, and I didn't feel like I was burning it too hard.  I felt smooth, and more importantly, I only got passed by one of my heat-mates (we were the last heat).  A sprint tri, at least for me, is more of a VO2 max race than a Lactate threshold race, as an olympic tri is.

I passed Karen on one of her laps, and noted, with no small amount of pride and joy, that I thought she looked really cute even before I positively ID'ed her(!!!)

T2 was similarly blazing--I unstrapped my shoes and rode in with my feet on top of them, doing a properly executed flying dismount.  I was into my shoes and running in probably 45 seconds.

It took me the first kilometer to feel like I had my legs under me, but then I got going pretty well.  It helped that I got passed by some skinny punk-oid with the number "21" tattooed on his calf in sharpie (his age, for those who don't know).  I let my heart rate run up from 155-ish to 159-ish, which is about as high as I can run it without making serious lactate.  5K goes pretty quickly, and it was over in no time.

Karen blazed it in 1:22:46, and was getting a head start on the bananas and gatorade at the finish line:

My line:

16

Thomas Quigley

335

44

14

10:39

15

32:32

24

20:35

1:03:46

I was sixteenth overall out of 305 particpants, 20:35 for the 5K, transition times included in the bike.  This was 5 entire minutes faster than my race in July on the same course, which didn't seem all that slow to me at the time.  I was second in my age group, netting me the coveted hardware:

The only faster 40-44 year old was a Kona Qualifier.  Granted, he was 4 minutes faster than me, for a race which is roughly 1/9th of an ironman.  But I'm starting to wonder if my long-term dream of qualifying is neither all that farfetched, nor all that far off. . .

Training for Ironman Coeur D'Alene begins in earnest this December.  But next, meaning next week, is the Lake Mead 1/2 Ironman, which is likely to be far more representative of my long-distance potential.

Thanks to EQ for all the photos.  Thanks to KQ for joining me in enjoying this pleasant torment.

What Motivates Triathletes to Suffer? | Active.com

What Motivates Triathletes to Suffer? | Active.com

What Motivates Triathletes to Suffer?

Triathlete exhausted at the Kona Finish Line.
Photo: Jesse Hammond

• Share
• Email
• Print
• Save

By Matt Fitzgerald
For Active.com

Dave Scott and Mark Allen suffered immensely during the 1989 Ironman, the race remembered as Iron War for the awe-inspiring duel that took place between these two legendary athletes within it. In fact, Scott and Allen probably suffered more than any of the 1,284 other competitors in the race, and that is probably why they finished the race more than three miles ahead of any other competitor.
Allen’s most excruciating moments came about halfway through the marathon, when Scott, who had been towing Allen along since the first strokes of the swim almost seven hours earlier, threw down a vicious surge that threatened to once again finish off the man who had lost to Scott five times previously at Ironman.
“I responded, but barely,” Allen later wrote of those moments. “My reserves were reaching their limit… This is too much. My legs are killing me.”
Despite these torments, Allen found a way to rally and win the greatest race ever run. Which means Dave Scott ultimately suffered even more. Soon after Scott crossed the finish line 58 seconds behind Allen, a journalist asked the runner-up how the race had felt.
“I’m not sure I want to feel that again,” he said.
Accepting the degree of suffering that Dave Scott and Mark Allen bore in their Iron War requires exceptional motivation. What motivated Scott and Allen to embrace the agony they did in their epic showdown? It certainly wasn’t money. The prize for winning the 1989 Ironman was a meager $20,000. The second-place finisher took home $8,000.
One of my goals in researching my newly published book about Iron War was to discover what motivated Dave Scott and Mark Allen to reach so deep in that race. I learned that, while each man had his own personal motivations, perhaps the greatest motivation was shared—and not only that, but was the same motivation that draws every Ironman participant to the challenge. Scott and Allen just had more of it.
In 2008, a Canadian-born sociologist named Michael Atkinson published a paper titled, “Triathlon, Suffering, and Exciting Significance.” In it, he argued that the tremendous amount of suffering that all triathletes experience in training and, especially, in races is not a negative price that participants pay in pursuit of the rewards of the sport; instead, that suffering is itself the primary reward.
Atkinson argued that the comforts and conveniences of modern life have come to pamper us so much that much of the excitement has been drained from our daily existence. Our bodies are so coddled that we crave physical challenges. On top of that, we have grown mentally soft, and we know it and vaguely despise ourselves for it.
Triathlon represents a way to put some excitement back into our lives, to toughen us mentally, and to boost our self-respect. The sport delivers these rewards by affording us an opportunity to overcome great suffering. The prize that every triathlete seeks above all others is what I call the finish-line feeling—that tremendous feeling of satisfaction that comes when we complete a race and conquer the internal weakness that tempts us to quit.
It is no accident that the event that caused triathlon’s popularity to explode was Julie Moss’s famous crawl to the finish line of the February 1982 Ironman. We who watched it—the susceptible among us, at least—felt a powerful urge to suffer as she did, and to bravely defeat our suffering, as Moss did hers.
The more you suffer in a triathlon, the better the finish line feels. While the finish-line feeling is the ultimate motivator for the suffering we subject ourselves to in races, other motivators may inspire us to suffer even more, which enhances the finish-line even more, which boosts our willingness to suffer still further. The opportunity to win is one such motivator. Competition is another. Competition against an arch-rival works even better. A state of peak physical readiness—having your best day and knowing it—is still another.
In the 1989 Ironman, a perfect storm of circumstances conspired to make Dave Scott and Mark Allen willing and able to endure as much suffering as any athlete ever has in competition. And that’s one of the reasons both men redefined the possible on that unforgettable day.
Push your limits at a race.

Matt Fitzgerald is the author of Iron War: Dave Scott, Mark Allen & The Greatest Race Ever Run (VeloPress 2011) and a Coach and Training Intelligence Specialist for PEAR Sports. Find out more at mattfizgerald.org.