I'm a Triathlete!

Whoo Hoo!



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After an eventful Saturday, my alarm clock woke me up bright and early at 3:00 am on Sunday morning. I was now officially 30 years old, but honestly that was the last thing on my mind. I got into my pre-race clothes, lugged my bags and bike to my car, and was on my way by 3:30 am.

After hitting major construction delays getting out of San Francisco (at 4:00 am on a Sunday!), I made it to Berkeley at 4:45 am to pick up my amazing friend Andre. I let him finish waking up (his plane into the Bay Area had landed at 1:30 am) while I drove an hour to Napa, nervously babbling and listening to my short pre-race iPod playlist ("Turn It On" and "One Beat" by Sleater-Kinney, "Walking With A Ghost" by Tegan & Sara, and "Breathe" by Telepopmusik). In Napa we swapped, and he drove another hour on very twisty roads to Lake Berryessa.

We made really fantastic time and arrived at the race site with plenty of time. I chose a rack for my bike and dropped my stuff there, went to the registration area and checked in, then went back to my bike and set up my transition area. I had a rough idea of how I wanted to do it, but I also copied the setup of the friendly guy racked next to me. He said it was only his second triathlon, but he seemed very calm and jovial. This helped put me at ease, somewhat. But when I put on my heart rate monitor and saw that my resting heart rate was hovering between 114 and 119 bpm, I knew that my calmness was just a thin facade and that even if my brain felt fine, my body was freaking out.

Seven other amazing friends, including four who flew in from the East Coast, all arrived at the event just minutes before I had to go put my wetsuit on and finalize my preparations. I jogged over to where they were and in about a hundred yards my heart rate spiked to 168 bpm. Yikes! I gave everyone quick hugs then went back to my transition area alone.

The wetsuit went on pretty easily (no Pam, the secret to Real-Triathletes' fast transition times :), then I walked over to the dock. I set my sandals in an easy-to-find spot and went for a very short practice swim. I felt good, though the neck of my wetsuit felt a bit tight. I remembered that it had felt slightly tight in the pool as well, and disregarded it as simple discomfort. I got out of the water and waited for the pre-race briefing with the other athletes, almost feeling like one myself.

The buoys were a bit hard to understand at first, so I initially thought that the buoys farthest away were part of the previous day's Half-Iron Man race. During the briefing the race officials quickly corrected that mistake; we'd be going around all of them. Eep! 18 laps in a short pool is a lot less intimidating than seeing all that distance stretched out before you. The officials also said that, with over 700 participants, the swim start would be in 5 self-seeded waves starting 2 minutes apart. I decided to go in the 4th wave, feeling pretty good about my potential performance.

Swim (1/2 mile) 00:30:01.7 (-2 minutes)

About ten strokes into the swim something happened. Maybe one too many people bumped into me. Maybe someone splashed some water into my mouth as I was taking a breath. Maybe the stress of the race and my first open water swim and the tight wetsuit neck added up to too much. It doesn't really matter what triggered it. What happened was that I started to panic. I've never had one before, but I don't think it's misleading to say that I had a Panic Attack. I was breathing very fast, choking and coughing up water, and even crying because I was so very frustrated by not being able to calm down and swim. You know, swim, like I had trained so hard to do? That. I couldn't do that.

Several very kind, very amazing participants stopped, made sure I was alright, and tried to help me calm down. One girl told me to swim on my back, which I did, and it helped. I also unhooked the collar of the wetsuit and unzipped it partially, but that didn't really help. I could see the first buoy far away, and a race monitor in a kayak right next to it. I told myself I just had to make it to that kayak and I could quit. I really didn't think I could continue. I couldn't make myself breathe properly, and I kept searching around desperately for another, shorter path to solid ground, but the kayak seemed like my best bet. So, thinking about what I would tell my friends when I quit, and desperate to be able to breathe again, and switching from my back to doggy paddle, I made my way to the kayak.

When the race monitor saw me he motioned me to go around the buoy but I shook my head and went to him instead. He asked me if I was okay and I sobbed "no!" I grabbed the side of the kayak and blubbered something about not being able to breathe, and pulled on the neck of my wetsuit, and generally felt very miserable. But the monitor just calmly told me that I was alright, to calm down, that I didn't really want to quit because I was "already halfway done." I said, "really?" Because I wasn't halfway done, I was a third of the way done. But he assured me that I was halfway there, and I looked at my watch and I had only been swimming for 11 minutes, and so I allowed myself to believe his lie. I looked at the rest of the swim course laid out before me, and I steeled myself, and I said "okay, okay, I'll finish" and I let go.

The next 17 minutes, together with the preceding 11, were the toughest minutes of my life. I was seriously fighting the feeling that I was going to die. My body wouldn't do what I told it to. I swam the rest of the course almost exclusively on my back, often not using my arms and just kicking because I just couldn't focus enough to do a proper stroke. I was still breathing very deeply and raggedly, but gradually I knew I'd get through it so it became easier to just wait out. I kept veering off course, since I couldn't see, which just added insult to injury because I ended up swimming FARTHER than I needed to because of the zig-zagging. By the time I rounded the last buoy I was turning onto my stomach every ten seconds to check my position, and I even tried to crawl stroke a few times but I was still breathing too rapidly for that to work. And let me tell you, doing the crawl without lowering your head into the water is a very inefficient way to propel yourself through the water. I tried to side stroke a bit but I don't know the mechanics of that stroke at all so it was equally a failure.

One last swimming confession. I don't like that this is true, but the fact that I was never the last swimmer, that there were always swimmers behind me and not catching up, really helped me. I guess that's just human psychology. The entire wave of people I had started with left me behind and the final wave caught up with me, but there were still a dozen or so people that finished behind me, and not being last helped.

One final shout-out to my fellow swimmers. Everyone in that spread out pod of stragglers was so encouraging. That first girl that helped me calm down in the beginning actually checked back in with me later in the swim, and everyone I bumped into accidentally when I was blindly backstroking was so nice and calm and almost amused about it. This was the group of people just "getting through" the swim, and their calm helped to calm me down.

Touching solid ground with my feet and walking out of that water filled me with such a profound sense of relief I can't even express it. I was drained, completely emotionally drained and empty. Luckily, every one of my cheerleading squad was there to cheer me on and fill me with their energy and enthusiasm.

T1 00:05:25.6

The very first words out of my mouth when I stepped out of the water were "That was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life." And I meant it. But my friends didn't want to hear it, they wanted to cheer and rush me over to my bike. Half of my brain was so relieved to be out of the water that it couldn't function, but luckily all the training and preparing and visualizing kicked in and I went into auto pilot.

One of the auto-pilot things I did was check my watch: it clearly said 28 minutes and some seconds. I don't know why the official race results have me as 30 minutes and some seconds, but given that the swimming heats started 2 minutes apart I can only assume that I somehow ended up being counted with the third wave instead of the fourth. Maybe I stepped too close to the transition antenna when they the third wave people were entering the swim area. In any case, I know it was 28 minutes (and some odd seconds) for sure.

I struggled to find the wetsuit leash as I walked to my sandals, eventually struggled into them and out of the top of my wetsuit, and then amazingly broke into a jog to get to my bike. I slipped out of the wetsuit almost effortlessly, which was a huge relief as I had been mildly worried about that. My friends were massed around me, watching and sometimes cheering, and even wanting to help me when I struggled to get my singlet on, but I of course told them that they weren't allowed to help. The kind man who's bike was racked next to mine then came up and started his transition. How had I beaten him out of the water, I wondered. He said something about "at least that's over" and he and his watching wife were so calm and relaxed about it all that it again helped to calm me down a bit.

I finally got into all my biking gear, slathered on way too much sunscreen, and started to fast-walk my bike to the mounting point. I could have jogged it, but I didn't want to chance it in my biking shoes with my still weak and shaken body. So I walked, stepped over the timing antenna, mounted my bike, and pushed off to the cheers of my friends.

Bike (15 miles) 01:07:22.1

The bike course was a simple out and back route along the lake. In the first ten or twenty minutes I passed almost everyone I came upon, which wasn't as huge a boost as you might think. You see, just being on the bike felt SO GREAT that nothing short of super powers would have made me feel happier. Here, finally, after that terrible splashing slog of a swim, was something my body could do. All that training kicked in and I just FLEW down that road.

Panic adrenaline quickly turned into exercise endorphins, and I fell into an easy groove. Spin, spin, shift, pass, spin, watch what's coming next, commit what's happening now to memory so I'll have idea of how long the hills up and down will be on the return trip, sometimes cheer on the bikers coming the opposite way, spin, shift, eat, water, spin.

Yup, bikers returning. I bet I wasn't fifteen minutes into my bike ride when I saw the leading racer zoom past going the opposite direction. Then a few more trickled past. Soon there were more bikers going the other way than going my way. It was a little surreal, but motivating too.

Really, the bike ride was a breeze. I played little games like trying to raise my average speed, and always pedalling the downhills. There was a girl in a blue shirt who's number I didn't look at that I was playing leapfrog with. I would pass her on the uphills and she'd pass me on the downhills. We exchanged a few words, joking about it, which was nice and reinforced that this was all just for fun.

I paid attention to my water and food intake, but really took in very little of either. I force myself to have two big bites of Clif Bar, spaced out through the bike course, to avoid a blood sugar crash, and I sipped water when I thought of it, but I didn't want to take in too much food or water especially since my body wasn't really asking for it. Whatever I did must have been good, because I never felt dehydrated or like I had low blood sugar.

I saw lots of people with flat tires, but the biggest problems I ran into were a dropped chain once when I shifted my front and rear gears simultaneously, and the fact that I hadn't removed the safety seal on my Gatorade.

Near the end of the ride my bike-rack-neighbor slowly but surely overtook me. It was the hills that did it; he was a machine! I never had to stop, and only twice had to leave the saddle to crack up a hill, but his legs never even slowed down. Slow but steady, at the very least, finishes the race.

The final two miles of the bike course is the same as the out and back run course, and there were a lot of runners. If I had to guess I'd say that was the main pack of racers turning around at the two mile mark as I passed by on my bike. No matter. The only comment I'll make is that they felt quite entitled to the entire road, even though there were lots of bikers still using the south-bound lane. We even had to ask them to move a few times, and there was almost a bike-bike-runners collision.

My bike computer told me that I averaged 13.2 miles per hour, which I'm pretty happy with actually. I think if I had more practice with long outdoor rides and hills and pushing myself I could have upped that to 14 or 15 miles per hour. The uphills really killed my average speed, and I went to the lowest gear more than once. I felt really good about how I recovered on the flats and downhills, spinning at a nice smooth cadence. I came in from the bike portion with a huge smile.

T2 00:03:24.5

There isn't much to say about T2. Seppo and Andre had positioned themselves with their cameras along the very last stretch of road before the mounting point and took those great pictures of me you see above. Everyone else was ready to cheer me through my bike to run transition, complete with the Speed Racer poster with "Go Holly Go!" on the back.

Lifting my bike back onto the rack took a massive effort, and that's when I realized that I really had put a lot of effort into that bike ride because my triceps were screaming as I lifted the bike. Bike shoes off, running shoes on, quick drink of water, GO!

It was at this point that I was so grateful for all the brick workouts I had done, because the bike-to-run transition for my legs was a real breeze. I'd say it wasn't more than ten strides or so until the brick effect was gone. Yay for training!

Run (4 miles) 00:44:15.5

My watch said 1 hour, 44 minutes, and some seconds, and I had my first inkling that I could finish this race in under 2.5 hours. I left it at that at first, though, and focused on that first mile. The run course was a simple four mile out and back loop, and I already knew the hills from having ridden it on the bike, and I knew that there were aid stations at the mile markers. So I focused on pacing myself and pushing myself to get to that first station.

I can't recall how fast that first mile was; maybe 10 or 11 minutes. I felt good about it at least. The second mile was harder, and felt much much longer. The hills didn't help. There were bikes still trickling in, so I tried to stay conscious of staying out of their way, and alerting returning runners that bikes were behind them. Also at this point a returning runner yelled out to me "Go number 12!" I didn't recognize her, but she must have been the biker I had been playing leapfrog with and who left me behind when my chain fell off. I smiled and waved, but didn't think to check her number until she passed me.

The first time I stopped running and walked for a few seconds felt like heaven. I would run until I got to some small landmark, like the start of a tree's shadow, then walk until the next small landmark, like the end of that shadow. I'd say that for a few minutes there I definitely wasn't pushing myself very hard. Then I did a kind of mental check-in with myself: feet feel good, knees feel good, muscles not too tired, breathing good, heart rate fine... and I realized that the only thing preventing me from running faster was my mental game. I just didn't FEEL like running any faster. So, clearly I started running faster.

By the time I reached the turnaround point I was feeling great. I had passed a few people but also had a few people I was trying to keep up with. I had another bite of Clif Bar, but just as a preventively measure. I stopped for water at all the aid stations, but drank very little because I was scared of getting a stitch. I continued to walk for short stretches, but in a very deliberate way and always running faster after the short rest. This is a nice way to increase your average pace if you are feeling tired, but I still tried not to overuse it.

Somewhere in the third mile was when I realized that I had a good chance of finishing in under 2.5 hours if I just started running a little bit faster. So I chose a pair of runners about twenty feet ahead of me who had just passed me and decided not to let them get away. This worked pretty well, and kept my pace higher, though they did pull away very gradually.

Just after the final aid station a woman ran up behind me and said that I looked just like her sister. I was pleased to find that I had enough breath to hold a short conversation, and even laugh. She pulled away from me, and I set her as my new "don't let her get away" target. She was even faster than the pair of men, though, and I found myself wondering how she had managed to be so far back in this race.

Crossing the bridge for the last time was fun, because the race workers were so encouraging and friendly and fun. I was also feeling good because I knew I'd make my 2.5 hour goal. Just after the bridge I started to hear the bells that signal the turn into the parking area of the resort; the few hundred yards of the run, of the race.

I passed by the professional photographer with an enormous smile on my face. She told me I was doing a great job, keep going, and took a very flattering burst of photographs. When I passed Seppo a few dozen feet later I was in "game face" mode, so no smile for him.

Those last fifty yards were gruelling. I tried to go faster, to sprint, but my legs wouldn't do it. It was almost like inertia wouldn't let me slow down or speed up, and I finished the race at the same pace I had run the whole last mile. The last time I glanced at my watch it said 2:28:xx. And there was Andre waiting for me with his camera, waiting to capture the moment of victory.

Finish 02:30:29.5 (-2 minutes)

Andre tells me that in the picture, if you zoom in, you can see that my watch says 2:29:xx. That's good, because it completely slipped my mind to stop the watch (doh!). The smile in this photo tells it all: I was exhausted, exhilarating, joyous, and above all I felt strong. I had just spent two and a half hours pushing my body and mind as hard as I knew how, and it felt GOOD! I was very glad it was over, but so glad I had done it. I had pushed my knowledge of what I was capable of and was happy with what I had found.

(Performance Note: My predicted finish, based on training paces, was 2 hours 23 minutes plus transition times. So I actually beat that prediction! I clearly swam slower (43 yards per minute for 900 yards was my fastest long training swim, sans panic attack), but I biked faster (13.2 mph vs. 10.7 mph). I ran slower (11 minute miles vs. 9:40 minute miles), but I still think that was mostly a mental limitation and not a physical one, and I felt pretty good about my running performance overall given my lack of race experience.)

The next half hour is a bit of a blur. I babbled about how hard the swim was to all my friends for a bit, laughing about it because it was over but still surprised and a bit traumatized by it. I drank some water and wondered out loud over and over where my medal was. The race newsletter had said that the medals would be given out at the finish line, and I wanted to be sure that I got mine! Turns out they were being given out in the check-in area, along with more snacks and the t-shirts, so we headed that way.

This is about when my mood crashed a bit. The fatigue I was feeling was extreme, and luckily most of my friends peeled away and gave me some space to just breathe and rest and collect my shirt and medal.

Amazingly, this is when that race monitor from the kayak found me! He recognized me, and calmly congratulated me for finishing. I thanked him over and over, saying that I had been so ready to quit and he kept me going and thank you thank you thank you. He almost brushed it off, said no problem, and then related a story of his own of swimming in a very frigid lake and having a similar reaction. He said it happens all the time, you just have to work through it. Now they tell me...

My heart rate monitor said that my average heart rate during the course of the race was 166 bpm, which I was overjoyed to see. Solidly in the "working hard" region, but well out of the "burn myself out" region: exactly what I was shooting for! My only goal had been to finish strong, to feel strong through the race, and to have a fun time. I had done all those things, and I had shared that experience with my friends to boot.

My heart rate monitor also told me that I had burned 2238 calories during the race, so after a quick rinse and change of clothes, I settled in at the picnic lunch everyone had set up at a picnic table under a shady tree. I had a sandwich, wore the throwback-style birthday triathlon jersey t-shirt Adrian had sent me and I had just earned the right to wear, and relaxed. Talk about a birthday.