Race Report: Mass State Tri

Mass State Olympic Triathlon

.9 mile swim / 22 mile bike / 6.2 mile run

July 14, 2013
Winchendon, MA
Start time 9am

Weather: 90's, sunny & humid
Total time: DNF 

This would have been the longest triathlon I'd ever done. I was figuring it would take me about 4 hours to complete, which is less than half the time it would take me to complete Timberman 70.3 next month. My mindset for this race ever since I signed up for it months ago was that this would be the best gauge of my fitness for Timberman. I was confident that I'd finish, it was just a matter of how beat up I'd be at the end of the race. I never actually thought I wouldn't finish, but that's what happened, and here's how...

The day before

I was up and out of my house before 5am on Saturday morning to drive to a sprint tri in Amesbury that I was timing with the race timing company I work for. I was there til around noon. Just like the last tri I worked, I look out at transition from the timing van, and I think that it has no appeal to me. As I stand at the swim start yelling, "Two single file lines! Stay to the center of the mat!" at the hundreds of athletes filing into the water, I have no desire to be one of them. I'm not alarmed by this feeling, because I've felt it before, and I know it goes away when I actually show up to race. I figured I'm just in the moment, and at this moment, I had a job to do, which was to yell at these swimmers to stay in a single file line as they crossed over the center of the mat. Towards the end of the race, we're all cranky and hot and tired and we want to go home, and we count the results and we realize there are still about 6 people out on the course. I do some quick math and realize this is just about the time that I would be coming in. I'm resentful at these slow pokes more than I'm sympathetic with them. The stragglers finally come in to an unceremonious finish line, and we rip the finish line mats out from underneath them, wasting no time to get packed up and out of there. I finally leave there about noon, and then head to Winchendon to watch Connie's son Kellan participate in a kid's triathlon before heading over to the race site to pick up my number for tomorrow.

I get to the kid's tri about 30 minutes early, and find it funny that I feel the familiar sense of pre-race anxiety. Not for my tri the next day, but for this one that the kids are racing, and I don't even have a kid. I see my high school friend Lori there, which isn't really surprising because I see her at tons of races, races which she basically runs to & from. The girl is insane, piggy backing marathons on marathons and biking on her trainer at 3am just because it's there. She's doing a full Ironman in 5 weeks (same weekend as Timberman), and she's racing Mass State tomorrow, just like me. I jokingly ask her if she has any races between now and then. Yup, she's doing a marathon in a couple of weeks. Of course she is. Her daughter Zoe, who she appropriately nicknamed "mini me", is there to race in the kid's tri. Zoe places 2nd in her division, naturally. Kellan had a great race -- his first triathlon ever. As I watched the 7 & 8 year olds do their 25 yard swim, 1 mile bike ride, and .33 mile run, I thought, "Man, that looks hard." Maybe I was already exhausted. Or in denial. Or maybe I wished I started when I was 7, instead of 7 months ago.

From the kid's tri, I went to pick up my race packet. Lori and I are there at the same time, so we take this opportunity to take a picture with us on the podium. I'd make a comment about how maybe I jinxed myself by doing this, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the photo that caused the big failure the next day. I finally get home around 7pm after a long day of driving (over 200 miles total) and go to bed around 8pm.

Race day morning

I'm good at waking up early, so I was up around 4:15. I planned to leave around 6am, but it was more like 5:45 because I figured I'd rather be tooling around transition instead of sitting on my couch. The first person I see when I park my car is Ed, a fellow Run for Research teammate. Ed just completed a 12ish-hour full Ironman about 3 weeks ago. I joke that this must feel like nothing to him, which was pretty much the sentiment of a lot of E3 athletes, based on their recent facebook posts. Jana, aka the Czech Chick, is a triathlon goddess who WON a 70.3 distance last month had posted earlier in the week that this was her first time in 3 years doing a "short course" triathlon. Spoiler alert: She placed 1st in her Age Group at this race too. I know it's all relative and I shouldn't be comparing myself to these people, but these are the people who do these races. There are no couch-to-Olympic distance triathlon racers at this race. There are no charity teams hanging out eating pre-race snickers bars. This is another league of athletes that I'm not used to being around, and now I'm surrounded by them.  As I walked my bike into transition to get set-up, I saw another Run for Research teammate, Jane. Jane is good people, and has a very calming presence. This was her 4th consecutive Mass State, although this year she was only doing the bike and the run on a relay team since swimming is her least favorite (GENIUS!) Jane reminded me that we're just here to do the best we can do, which is definitely what I needed to hear. I made my way to my bike rack, which are organized by number. I noticed immediately that they numbered the athletes by division, so I made my way through the sea of other Athenas to my bike rack. Athena is the division for women who weigh more than 150 pounds. Finally I was with my people! Yet, I still felt uncomfortable here. They all seemed to know each other, and I was asked by 3 different people if I was on the Athena facebook page, which I am not, and didn't even know existed. (And when I came home to try to find it, all I could find were pages for the Athena sex toy home-parties, or pages written in Greek. These are not my people either!) I walked away from the Athena love fest that was happening and walked around, carefully avoiding the E3 tent where I knew I would feel awkward, and went to the only place that felt comfortable: the porta potty line. Ha!

The Swim - 31:39

At 8:30am, the sun was already beating down with no cloud cover. I decided to put my wetsuit on since it might take me some time, and because athletes would be asked to leave transition at 8:45am for pre-race announcements and the national anthem. The first wave of swimmers went at 9am. I was in the 5th of 6 waves, and all the waves started 4 minutes apart. That meant I was basically standing in the hot sun for almost an hour in my wetsuit. About half the people were wearing wetsuits. Based on my open water swim workouts I've done in and out of my wetsuit, I figure the wetsuit gives me about 2-4 minutes of speed, and probably only costs me 1 minute getting out of it in transition, so I decided to wear it. Wave 5 was all of the Athenas, plus all women age 40 and up. I started in the second row of the pack, which was about 15 swimmers wide, and that was probably just right. I didn't pass anyone, but jostled a bit with other swimmers next to me. Once we hit the first quick turn which was only about 100 yards away from the start, it spread out pretty good. My swim was just ok. I didn't feel great, but the distance wasn't a problem. I passed a few swimmers from the previous wave, but swimmers from the next wave also passed me, so that canceled it out. I was very happy to get out of the water, and unlike the last race, the transition area was right there so it was a very quick run to my bike rack.

T1 - 2:38

I didn't have any charley horse pains getting out of my wetsuit like I did at the Escape the Cape Tri. I was still a little discombobulated in transition, but I think that just comes with practice. I try to dry my feet with a towel to put my socks on, but I'm leaning over dripping water into my bike shoes, and when I step back, my feet get covered in wet grass clippings. I just don't have a good rhythm down yet. The girl next to me was at her rack when I got there, and was definitely taking her time, which made me slow down. A true competitor would have seen this as an advantage, but I saw it as an excuse. I wanted to make sure I was set for my 22 mile bike ride, and didn't want to leave my sunglasses or my nutrition behind just to save 5 seconds. Once I was set, off I went.

The Bike - 1:46:39

Because I was in the 5th of 6 waves, and there were about 80-100 people per wave, I had a rough idea of how many people were behind me. About 5 miles into the bike, I figured at least 100 people had passed me. I still had 22 miles to go, and I was probably already one of the last ones on the course. Again, I know this shouldn't matter, but on this day, it did. It's not that I want to place higher than other people on the results (though that's nice), it's that I don't want to be out there all by myself. If it was a regular bike ride, I'd welcome the solidarity. But this was a race with 600 triathletes, and I didn't see any of them. I know biking is my weak sport of the 3, but honestly, I can't run very fast either. The thought of coming in dead last on the bike and then running 6.2 miles all by myself was not appealing at all. I had no competitive fire. I had no desire to get it done. All I could think about was how this was not fun. At first I was pissed. All of this hard work and training I had done, all of the social engagements I passed up because I was either training, or too tired from training, and all for what? To be miserable out here all by myself? I was going up a small hill at about mile 11, and it was hard. I was in the lowest gear possible on my bike, and I was barely moving. This hill was NOTHING compared to the hills that would be on the Timberman course. I remember looking at my watch and seeing that I was only at mile 11, and the thought of doing 56 miles of this, on a much hillier course, with much more hardcore athletes, had zero appeal to me. It's easy to make plans and set fitness goals when you're sitting in front of your computer watching youtube videos and getting inspired by internet memes, but I suddenly had the thought that how I felt during the race was much more important. I was 11 miles in, and I hated it. I decided then and there that I wasn't going to do Timberman. There was a little bit of psychology going on in my head -- I'd like to blame Sylvia, but in all honesty I think it was all me. If I don't finish this race, I reasoned, then I can't/shouldn't do Timberman. If I did finish this race, then momentum would just carry me forward into another 5 weeks of training all leading up to something that might just be too physically impossible for me to do. And before you start with the "anything is possible" crap, I'm being a realist. There is a time limit for the bike course, and the math says that I am bordering on not making that time cut. So for the rest of the ride, I just rode at my leisurely pace, which looks very similar to my race pace. I got back to the park and walked my bike from the dismount area into transition, and stopped my watch. There wasn't even a glimmer of hope that I might run. I just wanted to get my stuff and pack up my car and get the hell out of there. After looking at the overall results when I got home, I discovered that I had the 3rd slowest bike split for the entire day, which includes people who got a flat tire or had other technical difficulties and still managed to finish. 

The fact is, I'm just not a strong enough cyclist to be participating in events of this distance. I've always known I was slow, but I thought that I would get faster really quickly once I started riding my bike more. That didn't happen. Maybe I need more time, or maybe I need a lesson on how to ride my bike, or maybe I just settle for doing sprint distances only from here on out. I could analyze this to death (as everyone who I talk to wants to do), but the answers will come in their own time. I'm not rushing it. Whether or not I'll do Timberman remains up in the air, but in the meantime, I've never felt better, and that's a feeling that must not be missed.