Back home

I've returned home from an all-too-short trip to California. My travel over was pretty painless as far as getting from one end of the country to the other can be. I was the first of our crew to arrive at a condo a few blocks from the ocean, less than a mile from transition but surprisingly lacking in beds for the eight of us to utilize. Teammates Mark, Michelle and Phoenix had already arrived and made reservations at a restaurant that turned out to be a horrible mistake. Fortunately I did not order the lasagna, which tasted suspiciously - though greatly more expensive than - Spaghettios with meatballs. Nor did I order the flavorless, gluten-free polenta. I've had polenta before, and it can actually taste good if you add something - anything - to flavor it a little. I ordered eggplant parmesan, which in this case was missing any type of pasta, which is kind of the whole point in going to an Italian restaurant a couple of nights before the race in the first place. At least our pre-dinner bruschetta was good, otherwise there would've hardly been any carbs at all. Needless to say, should I find myself in Oceanside in the coming years looking for my pre-race meal, it will be in the harbor at Dominic's, where I know for a fact I will get a good meal that actually comes with pasta.

Thursday night involved not a whole lot of sleep. While I was one of the few in the house fortunate enough to get an actual bed, it didn't save me from the train that seemingly went by every 15 minutes or so nearly all night long, never failing to blow the horn multiple times as it sailed through the intersection nearby. I think it stopped sometime around midnight, but definitely picked up again around 4, when I had already long since been awake. I walked down to the beach that morning when lying in my bed with my eyes closed had long-since gotten old and I still had lots of time to kill before breakfast.

Ah, pre-race breakfast. This is one of my favorite parts. Usually it is the last pleasant carb-loading experience before it starts to get old. A huge group of QT2 teammates all met at IHOP to clean house on pancakes. Oh, and toast and hash browns and eggs. Their butter pecan syrup tastes like liquified buttercream frosting, a fact I unfortunately didn't discover until my pancakes were gone. There's always next time.

The rest of the day was spent munching on pretzels, trying to sit still in the restlessness, making sure all of my stuff was ready for the next day and basically trying not to think about how unprepared I felt to be racing. I don't know what it was, I just didn't feel all there. Sometime around 6:30 that night I was about an inch away from falling asleep for good, but unfortunately it was time to force down one last meal. After being made fun of for the pillow marks across my cheek, I very slowly choked down some pasta and chicken and was ready to go to bed for the night.

My alarm went off at 4:30 and I headed downstairs to force down a whole bunch of applesauce as quickly as possible. The nice thing about this race is that there is no parking involved, just riding the bikes down to transition, so there is no need to leave 3 hours before. This is a fact I took full advantage of. Oddly, this year they did not have assigned spots on the racks, just ranges of numbers. In the morning haze of my brain I got a little mixed up and initially racked in the wrong spot, but got it together with plenty of time to spare. Our wave was 16th in line to go off, roughly 45 minutes into the start of the race, so there was a whole lot of time to kill. I don't really remember much of what I did except trying to figure out what the reasoning was behind the girl in my age group who quite openly was consuming a can of Bud Light while walking through transition in her wetsuit. Um, what?!?! I wish I'd gotten her number. If she beat me in the race, maybe I'll have to try that next time.

Somehow the time passed quickly, and for the first time ever at that race I wasn't frozen standing around in my wetsuit waiting for the gun to go off. We got to watch a lot of the other racers come through, so at least that provided a bit of entertainment, if not also a bit of jealousy that they were already finished with the swim and we had yet to start. But soon enough, it was time to get in the water. This was also not nearly as painful as I anticipated. There is no chance to warm up for this race until the wave in front of you goes off, then you just swim to the start, tread water for a minute or two, and go. I believe the water was advertised at 59, and it really didn't feel bad at all. I started right at the front of the line on the inside, and once the horn sounded, we were off, and I found myself alone and swimming for the first buoy.

I seem to have a problem with open water swimming. I think I enjoy it too much if only for the fact that I forget that I am in the middle of a race and I'm supposed to be working really hard instead of just swimming along, because my pool times and my race times do not match up at all, and certainly not in a good way. This is something that needs serious work, especially since I seem to swim my half ironmans at a speed quite a bit slower than my ironman swims. Hello, you're supposed to be racing! The water got colder as we got out more into the open ocean, and the buoys were hard to see coming back in, but it all seemed to go by pretty fast and I was out of the water in some embarrassingly slow time probably at least 5 minutes slower than I should've been. Can I blame the fact that I had to wear my 5-year old wetsuit because my newer one had a broken zipper? I doubt it.

After the incredibly long transition through the rows and rows of 2500 bikes, I was off to the bike course. Fortunately, the sun was out and it was nice and warm, as it can often be pretty cold coming out of that water early in the morning. I spent the first chunk of the bike passing lots and lots of people in the waves in front of me and got stuck behind a 71-year old man on the uphill, half-mile long no-passing zone. Yes, that always seems to be the case. I was cruising along on the back roads, trying to remember when the course got hard, which was a lot later than I remembered. There were some scary crosswinds, especially on the long, 25mph speed limit downhill. I swear I've never been so afraid of getting blown sideways off my bike - not even in Kona. Then that crosswind turned into an uphill headwind and I started having visions of the last 15 miles of Kona last year when I was just about ready to hurl my bike into the Pacific ocean and hitchhike back into town. Fortunately, the course turned, and the last 10 miles or so actually flew by.

I was off on my bike time, slow by a few minutes, but I will say that the conditions were tougher than I've ever experienced there. Still, I should've been faster than that.

Oh, then it was time to run. Or at least my own personal approximation of running as of late. Up to that point nutrition was good, no stomach issues except for the slight regurgitation of my half Powerbar early on the bike, which always happens, no aches or pains. This was my first triathlon running with my Garmin, which had worked great for the bike. The problem now was that I had totally forgotten how to switch it to run mode and follow the pacing there. I literally spent the first mile pushing buttons and trying to change screens and failed miserably before I restarted a new bike file, so as far as the Garmin is concerned, I just biked an incredibly slow 12 miles. I also couldn't get the pace to show. In part that contributed to my decision to just run a comfortable pace rather than actually trying to race, but for whatever reason, mentally I just didn't have it on the day. There was no incentive for me to make it hurt. Was it more embarrassing to actually try yet still wind up with a crappy time or just to make the decision to back off? I at least knew the second one would have me recovering faster.

So that's what I did, I just ran. The first loop was mentally taxing, but on the second I just sort of zoned out and enjoyed the scenery. It was quite warm and sunny along the beach, so it really couldn't be all bad, right? Except I couldn't seem to escape the thoughts plaguing my mind about how much faster I used to run those things, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it right then. At least I knew it would be over soon. And the good thing was that even running a measly 8:30 pace I was running past an astonishing number of people. It almost made me forget that I finished about 20 minutes after I should've. However, I'll take a slow race over 2008 when I was too hurt to even start, any day. And I'm also smart enough to be able to put it in perspective and know that this was not the important race. Slightly annoying? Sure, but I've just got to get over it and move forward.

After that I had a brief visit with one of my best friends from college who lives nearby and brought her husband and kids. I had gotten to spend a lot of time with them when I lived in Arizona a couple of years ago and they did too. Then we had a QT2 celebratory post-race meal and, more importantly, post-race Cold Stone Creamery. Cait puts us all to shame with her Cold Stone ordering skills. It's actually amazing considering what she orders that she limits herself to the "Love it" size as opposed to the "Gotta Have It". And congrats to Cait on her top 10 women finish. And to all of my other teammates who set PRs and had great races. You guys are amazing.

Sunday was spent lounging in the sun mostly, enjoying the near-80-degree weather and wishing I didn't have to go home the next day. We had our final meal on a roof deck overlooking the ocean, and I can't think of a more perfect way to end the trip. All things aside from the way I actually "raced" I really do enjoy going there for that event.

My trip home was as painless as can be when traveling across the country, completely on time and thanks to Southwest for always charging $50 for bikes with no variation no matter where I am. The biggest problem was that I returned home to more flooding rains. Not exactly my favorite weather pattern. But hey, no new pipes had burst, and the mouse I saw before I left had been caught. Mice prefer Jif peanut butter apparently to the natural stuff, just FYI.

Now it is time to get training again. But that has not been without its setbacks either. Yesterday morning I got up to do my swim, which didn't go great, but I figured I was still just a little off from the travel and not much sleep while I was in California. Except upon my return home I found myself so incredibly tired that I went straight back to bed and slept like a baby for two more hours. Upon awakening, I found myself barely able to lift my head off the pillow, and although I was supposed to bike and run, I found it difficult to even stand up, as well as the thought of eating anything making me feel like I wanted to throw up. I managed to stay awake for another hour or so, and then instead I just went back to sleep for yet another two-hour nap. I swear, I haven't felt that terrible in a very, very long time.

Not to get graphic, but I did eventually throw up. In the past 12 years I have only thrown up a handful of times, each of those occurring within 24 hours of completing an Ironman (not every time, but definitely a few of them) Before that, I recall a few times I threw up because I had eaten too much crap. I actually have no recollection of the last time I threw up just because I was sick. I'm thinking it was even before high school. It is NOT fun. Needless to say, those workouts never got done and eventually I just went back to sleep. This is supposed to be a pretty major training week, except thus far, we haven't come anywhere close. Fortunately I don't feel like I'm going to die today, but I'm still feeling light-headed and just "off" so hopefully this feeling will subside very, very soon!