Race Recap - 70.3 St. George - racing well trained vs. racing sub-optimal training

I completed St. George 70.3 on Saturday May 2^nd and had a tough day but that’s what happens when your training leading up to an event is sub-optimal.  I did not plan to do the race but my boyfriend signed up so I figured I would do it.  My last race was Ironman Cozumel about 6 months ago and after that race I took about 2 ½ months off from running to let a plantar fasciitis in my foot heal.  I have been running a little but very cautiously as I didn’t want to get re-injured.  I have lacked motivation to get outside on my bike so most of my training on the bike was on my trainer and even that was less than what I should have been doing.  I went into the race knowing that I would not have a great race so it was about being with friends and having fun.  I did this race 2 years ago and it was 2-weeks after Ironman South Africa. I was very fit and recovered really great after IM SA.  I finished St. George in 2013 in 5:30 and on that hard course I felt pretty good about my time.  At that time I was running really great and did a 1:53 on a very hilly tough run course.  I knew there was no chance of that and I was hoping for less than 6 hours.  I felt my swim training was good so I thought I would go all out in the swim and see what I could do since this race was just for fun anyway.  I did this strategy at the full in November at Cozumel and I came out of the water 2^nd in my age group with a PR Ironman swim of 58 minutes.  Keep in mind Cozumel was very warm water and St. George was very cold. I didn’t think that would be a problem but it turned out to be a bad decision to try and swim fast in the cold water.  I seem to be prone to hypothermia and starting off really fast seemed to trigger my asthma.  I actually had to stop and breast stroke to catch my breath, which for me has never happened.  I slowed down significantly and was able to continue but my overall swim time as 4 minutes slower than I had hoped.  Coming out of the water I was shivering so that made for a slow transition.  The bike is a very hilly course with lots of down hills and I am strong the uphill but I am not very good at descending.  Even though I hadn’t been out on my bike in a while I had a pretty good time on the bike and I even stopped for a few minutes because a guy crashed on the descent.  As I came upon him some other guy stopped to help and was trying to get him out of the way.  People were flying by and it was a very dangerous situation because they were not slowing down in fact they were yelling at us to move.  I was pretty shocked how people reacted when this guy could have been seriously hurt.  In the end a it’s only a race and caring about people is far more important.  The guy who stopped first seemed to have things under control and told me I could carry on after I had been there a few minutes.  My bike time was only 2 minutes slower than in 2013 and considering I stopped that’s not too bad.   While on the bike I started feeling some pain in my toe but, I didn’t think too much of it.  It started hurting worse off the bike on the run. 

My toe not sure what happened to it

I was also having trouble breathing from the swim that carried on to the bike and then to the run.  Because of this and because my run fitness was not nearly as good as 2013, my run time was much slower this year.  My overall time was about 25 minutes slower.   I guess that’s the difference between going into a race really well trained and not so well trained.  It’s time to get serious about my training since I have my A race at Ironman Chattanooga in September.  

Best part of racing is breakfast after

The female winner

The male winner