When you look at the smorgasbord of maladies afflicting the majority of obese people in the U.S., it's hard to believe someone can not only grow up in this society with a deficiency of sodium, but live with a history of heart disease in the family. Somehow, I've succeeded. The 5430 Triathlon (so named for Boulder's altitude) bore that out for me quite nicely.
The day before the race I ran a few errands and spent as little time at a prerace expo as I ever have; I guess after 30-plus races over 21 years I don't "do" race expos anymore. Plus, I didn't want to spend any more time in the atomic Boulder sun than I had to so I got my packet, made sure all the numbers matched and got out of there. I stopped by my friend Jen's condo to make sure I remembered where it was, then headed off to Loveland to get a suit for next week's wedding in Illinois. Once that transaction was taken care of, I headed back to Boulder, where Jen had left me the key to her place; she was off for a motorcycle road trip with her dad.
Through all this, I managed to not have lunch. In other weeks I'd pack a PB&Honey sandwich, some chips, some cookies and a piece of fruit. Didn't happen. Shame on me. I managed to drink quite a bit of ice (splashed with Pepsi) and munched on these really good focaccia bread sticks, while eating a banana and a couple of cookies. That wasn't enough. That night I had my salad and an organic frozen meal with several glasses of water, which might have been my folly.
The next morning, I stuck with the usual — bagel, banana, Clif Bar, 32 ounces of Gatorade. Sometimes I have water if there's a drive to the venue but since I had so much on Saturday I stuck with Fierce Grape Gatorade. Got to the Reservoir with no problem, set up my transition, got written on, jogged a warmup, sunscreened (thus wiping out the number on my arm), used the restroom, and struggled into my wetsuit. I missed the pro start while standing in line for one more pee, but I still had plenty of time to make my wave, if not get into my neoprene sausage casing properly.
For once I seeded myself in the middle of things in the swim. I knew I could get to the inside line behind all the fast dudes because I heard people talking about how shitty their swims were (a rant from an ex-swimmer for another time), so I prepared for a little rubbing. After the start I kicked like mad and stroked hard, and then found my rhythm, though no feet to help me along. The only time I had any contact with anything other than buoys was when I overtook swimmers from previous waves, and even then it was nothing more than a gentle nudge or a paw at the feet. When I came out of the water my watch said 32 minutes and something (Yet again, the run to the transition area was part of the official swim split), so I was disappointed. I was even more disappointed that I got my right arm stuck in the wetsuit and had to put my foot on it to pull the arm out. Ultimately I freed myself and went on my merry way.
The plan for the bike was to keep things comfortably hard and then give it all I had on the run. Comfortably hard on this day was spinning up the false flats in the first five miles and then coasting on the downhills while crushing the inclines. The roads of Boulder County are in perfect shape, though I later heard some grumbling about the cracks in the shoulder. They need to ride Wyoming 230 with me while dodging the inch-wide crevasses that threaten to take your spine out of alignment, so it was nice to not have to look up as much; I could, in theory, just put my head down and go.
The fueling plan was to take Gatorade on the odds (10, 30, 50 minutes) and water on the evens (20, 40, 60 minutes), with a gel at the top of every hour. I followed that plan to the letter and managed to pee at the second aid station on the bike, around 40 miles in. Problem was my diet and my race fuel didn't put enough salt in my stomach. Salt helps the absorption of electrolytes and endurance athletes generally do whatever they can to take on salt — salt their Gatorade, take salt pills, eat pretzels or tortilla chips. Gatorade Endurance Formula, which is what Ironman races have on course, is fortified with salt so it's worked well when I've taken it in. The weak Gatorade you get in stores does not have that, and here I was, trying to drink 48 ounces of the stuff during a 2:39 ride.
I ended up drinking 36 ounces of it, plus about 50 ounces of water, plus two gels, which I thought would be sufficient to fuel eight-minute miles on the run. Consider that this is the Boulder Reservoir, a place where there's no shade once you get away from the parking lot. I heard the announcer mention Joanna Zeiger (the reigning half-Ironman world champ who lives in Boulder) running past the finish line for her second run lap, so I was surprised to see her lying face-down in front of a car along the run path. Considering how I react to heat, I immediately assumed that was the cause of her malaise (she actually dropped out because of vertigo-related symptoms) and adjusted my attitude accordingly.
I did fine for a couple miles, then I felt... tired. I had to pee again at about 3 miles, and I never recovered from that potty stop (In advance, it was seven hours before I used the bathroom again, notwithstanding pounding water and Pepsi in huge doses while having lunch with friends later). I felt like I wanted to take a nap, then finish the run later. The fueling plan for the run was water out of transition and at the even miles, Gatorade elsewhere (they had Endurance Formula), gels at 4, 8 and 12. The gel at 4 went down like a brick so I scrapped the gels for the rest of the run — probably not a good idea. No amount of Gatorade, water over my head, or ice down my shorts helped. what I had taken was no collecting in my stomach and sloshing around.
I walked a lot of the run, for which my split was 2:04. Total time was 5:23, and all I wanted to do was eat a lot and go to sleep. Doubly frustrating was that the weather shook down perfectly. There was little wind and aside from the relentless sun, no element of heat whatsoever, a "no-excuses day" as one story on the Bolder Boulder said in May. Both the men's and women's course records went down, and the times were crazy fast all the way around, meaning I should have had a personal best were it not for my crappy fueling plan and generally weak state of mind.
To give you an idea of how screwed I was, the clock read 4:35 when I passed the finish line. That clocked started with the pros at 6:30 a.m., and my wave was 20 minutes later. For some reason I thought to add 20 minutes to get my running time, and it never occurred to me to subtract. While thinking 4:55 had elapsed (I'd long since stopped looking at my watch, not even for the heart rate data) I again adjusted my mentality accordingly, and not for the better. If I can't do a simple math problem like that, I need to change the fueling plan, and possibly my diet.
So I consulted with my friend Gail, a triathlon coach in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Our chat yielded a diagnosis of sodium deficiency and a prescription of a teaspoon of salt in each of my 24-ounce bottles of Gatorade, plus some extra salt on the food I eat every day. I've always wondered how minor the wall was between me and some decent races, so we'll find out in the next few weeks if I was just a couple grains of salt away from being better.
• I thought the better of stalking two-time defending Ironman world champion Chrissie Wellington. "Hi, I'm a big fan of your work, I think you're pretty keen, I'd apply for whatever position (hee hee) is open in your organization, and you beat me by an hour and fifteen minutes today." She lost by less than two minutes anyway, to yet another world champion in the field, reigning off-road world champ and fellow lymie Julie Dibens, so I'm not sure how amenable she'd have been to some advances — certainly not advances as lame as those.
5 years ago
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