The start of the bike leg found me riding down a chute with people cheering and yelling on either side. It is a pretty amazing feeling.
Add to that the plethora of volunteers constantly asking you what you need, getting your bike for you, or taking it away after you’re done, and it really feels like all you have to do is swim, ride and run. They do that for every athlete, not just the pros. It’s pretty cool.
Feeling charged up from a decent swim time and ignoring the cramping in my right leg which had dissipated for the time being, I exited the city onto a quiet four lane highway and began the 112 miles. The road was flat, so I laid down in my aero bars, checked my speed, and cranked away.
Historically in triathlons I have had issues with going too hard on the bike and wrecking myself on the run. You can easily recover from this mistake in an olympic triathlon because there’s not as big a danger of you missing the time cut and being pulled off the course. In Ironman though, the pressure is on.
The pros do many Ironman races a year, but as an amateur I can’t imagine getting in more than one or maybe two a year. It requires so much money, so much time commitment. It is obscene.
Back on the bike, my plan was to keep my speed under 20mph, but I knew I had to complete the bike as fast as possible to give myself a good shot at finishing the run (and the entire race) on time, so I needed at least 14mph to finish in 8 hours. Ideally I’d have liked to have done six hours. So best case I was shooting for six, worst case eight.
The first half of the ride was pretty uneventful. There are so many miles to cover that you spend most of the time riding in groups of one or two. Occasionally someone faster will pass, or someone slower will drop behind. You’re not allowed to draft in triathlons, but the race marshals don’t pay much attention to the people in the back of the pack. People still try to follow the rules.
The bike leg at Louisville goes out for about ten or twenty miles, then does a big loop of 40ish miles twice, then comes back in along the same route. I knew that there was a section of hills and that I would have to hit that section twice. So I tried to keep within my pace and just not think about how far I had to go.
Riding through an intersection, I noticed spray painted on the road surface the word “IRONMAN” with a big circle around it and a line through, like a no smoking sign. I happened to be riding next to another guy at this point.
“That’s not very supportive,” I said. He laughed.
We all rode on. The pros on their second loop passed me on my first. They were fast and riding very, very expensive bikes.
In my head I was singing selections from the Fun album “Aim and Ignite” that I had just discovered the week prior.
Woh, oh ooh oh,
Woh, ooh oh!
At least I’m not as bad
as I used to beeeee
ee ee eee!
Occasionally I would pull a gel off my top tube and eat it. I had taped as many as I could onto it for this purpose.
One great piece of advice I got from my friend Bill Jestel, who was a veteran of two races already and was racing along with me in mine for his third was that if you get depressed while you’re racing, you should eat. It is very hard for me to remember to eat once I have been going for a few hours. My rational brain shuts down and I’m left with only my animal instincts.
Apparently no one taught my animal ancestors to open a tiny packet of goo once every twenty minutes or so and squirt it into their mouths while riding a bike.
By the time I reached the half way mark I was pretty well spun out. I was doing great on time, on pace for a six hour ride, but I was definitely starting to feel like being off my bike.
Soon after that I hit the hilly section. It was pretty steep, but not horrible. I got to the top of all the hills slowly and rode on. My legs started to twitch a bit though.
The second time around my legs were in full on meltdown. I couldn’t ride up a hill without my teardrop muscles (vastus medialis) cramping up to a ridiculous degree. They cramped so hard I could see each individual fiber of the muscle through my skin. I have never seen that before.
I rode through it but soon it got so bad that I couldn’t move my legs without a great deal of pain. My muscles were not transmitting “Hey, I need your attention here” pain. It was more like “I am about to tear and/or detach from your bones” pain. I pulled over and performed a controlled crash into a ditch somewhere on a Kentucky farm and started massaging them.
Many racers passed me and asked if I was okay. I told them I was and kept massaging. Soon my legs felt less mutinous and I got back on the bike.
I was around the 60 or 70 mile mark at this point. I knew that once I got to the 90 mile mark I would be out of the loop and back on the flat part of the ride. So, I just began to pray for the 90 mile mark.
One by one the miles slowly ticked past me. I began to get cold and annoyed. It seems that I am always cold when the shit hits the fan in an endurance situation. I’m not sure why this is, but it might just be that I’m remembering selectively.
I thought about my girl and our future together. The cornerstone of a family… that’s what I wanted to be. I just had to hang on. I told myself before the race that I couldn’t quit unless I was unconscious or some part of my body was broken. But what if she left?
I realized I was getting depressed and I ate. Thanks, Bill!
After a long time of gritting my teeth and riding and generally not enjoying myself, I finally reached the 90 mile mark. I was beyond tired, but I knew I was mostly home free. Only 22 miles to go from there. My legs were cooperating mostly.
The roadway in that area is riddled with cracks, for some reason. In a car I’m sure it’s nothing, but on an aluminum bike engineered for stiffness (I never spent the money on a carbon tri bike, I was riding a crit bike with clip on aero bars) the bumps really got to me after a while. Every ten yards or so there’d be a crack.
Ba-bump, they each went as my wheels went over them. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. Sweet Jesus I hate Kentucky, I was thinking. Can’t they see how annoying these cracks are?
Excuse me for this, Kentucky. You really do have a lovely state, I was just in no frame of mind to enjoy it at the time.
Anyway I had bigger problems. I came to a long steep hill that I knew my legs were in no shape to climb. I started up, and sure enough after a minute they started to misfire and seize up again. I had to stop a second time, get off the bike, and massage my legs.
After a long leg rub, I got back on and rode out the rest of my ride. I finished in six hours, fifty-six minutes (6:56), so I was smack in the middle of the pace I had hoped for.
I was feeling tired but not completely obliterated. I felt like I had a pretty good chance of finishing, since I had time at this point to walk the entire marathon.
Even better, i was on pace to finish the whole thing in maybe 13 hours or so, which was my target time.
“Team Hodgson, bitches” I thought, leaping off my bike and tossing it to a volunteer who scurried off with it. I jogged to the changing tent (no easy feat in a pair of cycling shoes with road clips) as more volunteers shouted out my number and scrambled to get my running gear.
It was sunny, not too warm or too cold, I had eight hours or so left on the clock, and all I had to do was run a little old marathon.
Easy money!
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