On July 4th, 2010, I raced my fourth IM-distance race. Even if things did not quite go as hoped for, it was still a great experience.
Race week
For my last race, the week before the race was hectic and stressful, and I entered the race quite frazzled. Physically, I might have been a bit rested, but mentally I was exhausted.
This time, I tried to take as much rest as possible. I had to finish some things for work, and I made sure to have enough time for that to finish on Wednesday. This allowed me to take Thursday and Friday off, sleep in, relax and pack my things. It would be getting really hot for the weekend, but I was able to put in a last long wetsuit swim on Thursday.
As my wife had to teach on Friday, we wouldn’t be able to drive down to Frankfurt before Friday and I would miss the race briefing. I knew a friend of mine would also be racing, so I phoned him with some questions I still had about the race. We talked them over and I was able to firm up my plans.
Also, on Friday morning I had a chance to make another phone-call with Mitch from Counterpart Coaching on how to race in the heat. I was anxious, but looking forward to the race.
The five hour drive down to Frankfurt went well, even with all the weekend traffic. We were staying with some relatives of mine, and they went out of their way to help me get ready for the race.
Day before the race
We slept in until 8am, had some breakfast with the family and then went into the town to collect the race package.
It was blazing hot, and just walking a bit around town and the exhibition was exhausting, so we made sure to have some extra water. We went back to the family and I packed my bags before lunch. The family had prepared a nice pasta lunch so my carbo-loading went really great. After that, I finished packing and we drove out to the bike check-in at the swim venue at Langener Waldsee, about a 30 minute drive.
Again, the sun was out in full force and the temperature was in the mid-90s – very hot for a German summer. We had a 15 minute walk from the car to registration in the sun, and I had to wait another 15 minute in line at check-in.
Tina got back to the car as soon as she could, but I had to endure for a bit longer. Check-in was uneventful – after all it was my fourth long-distance race and I had made sure to read all provided information. The swim would be a non-wetsuit swim (official water temperature on race day was 25.7 °C, about 80°F). We also had to drop off the run bag – I was a bit worried as I had some water in my FuelBelt in there and hoped it would not get too hot by the time I picked it up in T2 on the next day.
After that, I hurried back to the car but still missed the start of the Soccer World Cup match Germany vs. Argentina and the first German goal. I was drinking water all the time, but I still felt the heat. We then went for a quick visit with an old friend, watched the second half of the World Cup match and a chance to drink a lot more water. However, by the time we went back home, I had a bit of a headache and had some Coke to fix it. A quick dinner, and I was in bed by 9:30pm.
Race morning
Tina and I slept quite well, some clouds had moved in and it had cooled down a bit. I got up at 3:30am. My relative Doris helped me prepare my big race breakfast (two rolls with nutella and almond butter, three egg omelette, coffee, orange juice and a lot more water). I mixed my bottles and was ready to leave by 5:20. My wife drove me out to the swim start and dropped me off. Logistically it is quite tricky to get back from Langener Waldsee to Frankfurt, so Tina decided to skip the swim, have a breakfast with our family and then head into Frankfurt.
After another walk to T1, I was in transition by 6:10 to ceck on my bike. No flats during the night, so all I had to do was put my bottles on the bike and find a porta-potti. I looked over to the Pros (who started 15 minutes before the agegroupers), but only Cameron Brown was still there. After some good wishes for him, I got my stuff ready, listened to the national anthem played for the pro start and then slowly ambled over to the start area. I was in the water a few minutes before the start and tried to find a less congested area.
Swim
The swim ended up being pretty uneventful. It was somewhat crowded, but whenever it got too bad I just backed off and tried to swim away from the aggressive people. The swim is a two different loops with a short walk on the beach in between. The first loop is about 2.1k – 900 meters out, 400 across and another 800 back. The out section went pretty quick, but I was a bit surprised by the length of the across part. You couldn’t really see how far it would be, but there always seemed to be just one more buoy. I was back at the beach after 43 minutes, so I knew I would end up around my planned 1h20.
I didn’t do any really long swims, but I didn’t have any problems in the second loop. I was looking forward to being out of the water, it was getting a little bit cold without the wetsuit. I managed to pee a bit during the swim – that’s just how relaxed I managed to swim. When I hit the beach again, I had swum a bit under 1h21, so I had slowed town just a bit on the second, but that was expected and I was okay with the time.
I then walked up the steep sandy section on the beach, had a quick drink and grabbed my bag. I put on bike bibs and a short sleeve bike shirt – it would be a long ride and I didn’t care about the extra two minutes it would take to put the clothes on. Before grabbing my bike, I had another quick pee in a porta potti and then I was on my way …
Bike
The bike course in Frankfurt starts with a 12k section from the lake to downtown Frankfurt on a wide, closed four-lane street. I immediately felt really good and relaxed, and even though a lot of people were overtaking me, my speed was really good. My best plan was to race at a 29 km/h average, but my average was over 31 km/h (it was a bit downhill), and even towards the end of the first loop it stayed over 30 km/h.
Everything was going great. HR was in check, speed was great, I was eating and drinking as planned, and I made hourly stops to pee so I knew I was hydrating well. I had a little bad patch shortly after the second loop started, but I took things a bit easier, made sure to eat and drink some more. After that my stomach felt a bit strange, so I just drank some more water, had a bit of Coke and everything settled down. On the 2nd half of the 2nd loop I felt really strong, and overtook a lot of people without trying too hard. I relaxed on the last downhill section into Frankfurt, and was hoping for a good run.
Also, my great bike time meant that I beat Macca and the race winner Andreas Raehlert .. I finished my bike before they finished their full race – something I had not thought possible before the race.
Here are the raw numbers from my Ergomo:
| Hour | AP | NP | HR | Speed | |
| 1 | 110 | 139 | 121 | 31,5 | |
| 2 | 118 | 139 | 117 | 29 | |
| 3 | 101 | 123 | 99 | 30,9 | |
| 4 | 109 | 131 | 120 | 28,7 | |
| 5 | 104 | 115 | 118 | 29 | |
| 6 | 102 | 120 | 116 | 29,3 | |
| 10 Min | 74 | 93 | 109 | 32,4 | easy finish |
| Total | 106 | 128 | 115 | 29,7 | 6:08:28 182,5 km |
These numbers have to be taken with a bit of caution. The numbers are way too low to be realistic. My guess is that I would need about 200 watts to be able to come up with a 30k/h average. So the numbers are about 95watts to low. This would give me AP of 201w and NP of 223w. The way NP is calculated, NP would be even closer to AP, but this is just a rough estimate. So even if the raw numbers give me a VI of 1.2 (way too high!), it is realistically around 1.08. This means that I was riding relatively even. All in all, a pretty good ride, probably the best I have ever done in an IM.
Run
In T2, I again took my time. I completely redressed, had a volunteer put some more sunscreen on me, and took another quick stop at a porta potti. All this resulted in a slow T2, but also meant that when I started to run my HR was pretty much where I wanted it to be (goal was under 130, if possible closer to 125). The pace was okay (around 6 min/k) and I just hoped things would stay that way.
Towards the end of the first loop, the woman’s winner Sandra Wallenhorst ran by me, so I got some TV time with her:
However, towards the middle of the second loop the walk breaks at the aid stations were not quite enough, and I had to walk a bit more. I was taking a short stop in a porta potti and hoped that would help me reset things. However, I had run out of steam. The run breaks got more and more frequent and pretty soon I was more walking than running – with the average pace dropping accordingly.
At the middle of the third loop, I had a quick talk with my wife and told her it would be a slow second half – but that I had no doubts I’d be able to finish. I asked her to try and get me some cold Cola by the next time I would run by her. I just goes to show how far off I was in my head. It just took me a few minutes to improve on this plan. When I reached the next aid station, I got a big cup of ice and stopped at the people handing out the cola. I sat down on their bench (they were quite concerned and checked a couple of times that I was okay) and downed a big cold Cola and nibbled on some Pretzels. After that, I walked a bit more to start digesting the Cola and started to run again a bit more often.
The Cola effect wore off pretty soon, but I was working as hard as I could. Things were not much better, but as I knew I was on my last loop I started setting some goals to keep me motivated. At the start of the last loop I was still hoping to be able to run sub-5h, but that quickly turned out to be unrealistic. So I again took a Cola-bench-stop – shorter this time, but I got even more encouragement from the volunteers. My new goal became to come in at sub-13h. And I struggled a bit to find some “open” space to enjoy the finish chute. I took some extra time to find my wife in the crowd and smiled my thanks at her. Total race time was 12:54:52:
Here is a quick look at the numbers for the run from my Garmin:
| Duration | Pace | HR | |
| 0-10 | 1:01:30 | 6:09 | 126 |
| 10-20 | 1:10:10 | 6:56 | 121 |
| 20-30 | 1:23:39 | 8:18 | 109 |
| 30-40 | 1:17:47 | 7:45 | 113 |
| 40-Finish | 0:15:47 | 7:24 | 115 |
| Total | 5:08:53 | 7:18 | 117 |
Summary and Outlook
I think I did the best I could do for the race. I did not race the bike too hard, but think I just didn’t have the required fitness to produce a better marathon. As this was to be expected, I’m quite happy with the way I kept working to come up with as good a marathon as possible. Of course, there are always a few minutes I could have been faster, but I didn’t make any major mistakes. Compared to my PR from Roth 2007 (when I ran way too fast from 5k to 20k in the marathon), my race execution was much better this year.
Here is where I think improvements can come from:
- I have to increase the overall training volume, but especially on the run. In the 2010 season (which started in October 2009), I just ran 1100k in preparation before the race, an average of 125k per month. In preparation for my PR in 2007 I ran an average of 170k per month. Some of it was due to an injury, but I still didn’t find enough time for better run training.
- At about 89kg, my weight was unacceptably high for the race which made racing in the heat even harder. I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t manage to get my weight down.
- My bike was really good for the low volume I had done (2150k in 2010, 240k average per month). I mainly attribute that to the bike camp in March which gave me a really good base.
- My non-wetsuit swim time of 1:21 was the slowest IM swim I did, but again it was a good time for the low volume I did (barely 50k in 2010). In 2007, I swam a 1:12 on more than 200k.
All of this means that I have a pretty good understanding of what needs to be done when I’m going to race my next Ironman:
- get my weight down (85kg or lower)
- some more swimming (maybe 100k or 50 hours)
- another bike camp and some more overall cycling volume (about 4.000 km, about 150 hours)
- increased run volume (at least 1500k, about 145 hours)
Summing this up, it gives me a total volume of about 350 hours from October to June (9 months), an average of almost 40 hours per month. Not impossible, but certainly no chicken shit. It requires some more time than I currently have available, so I’m not going to race an IM next year. Maybe 2012? Right now I’m happy to take things a bit easier, and I’m really looking forward to my vacation starting a week from now …
