“Fuckity fuck fuck.” “This is such a disappointment.” “I need to get off this bike.” “I need a hug.” These are all words that have come out of my mouth in the last 36 hours or so. All of them the result of Ironman Hawaii and my poor performance. I don’t want to dwell more than a paragraph or two on Kona; If it isn’t …

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I am pretty wired after the day today, so I figured it may be an interesting thought experiment to capture my postrace thoughts before heading to bed tonight, especially since the plan is to try to unplug from triathlon and the world for the rest of the week while at the Grand Canyon. There’s no need to dive into the …

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I signed up for Ironman Texas last fall, about a month after finding out that we were expecting Evelyn. I’m not exactly sure what my motivation to do so was. It didn’t seem likely I would take a Kona spot, given that I was intending to do Ironman Arizona too. Which meant that if things went according to plan, we would …

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Pre-Race: After a pair of major breakthroughs at Kona and IMAZ last year, I set some admittedly lofty goals for myself this year at Kona. One of those goals was to finish in the top 5 in my Age Group; I figured a performance along the lines of IMAZ would put me in strong contention for this. We arrived on the Big …

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IMCDA 2012 was a first of a kind race for me, in that it was an Ironman that I didn’t need to worry about focusing on qualifying for Hawaii “ I already had a slot tied up. This gave me the unique opportunity to approach this race different both in terms of training and execution “ most importantly I would be able …

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2012 marked my 7th trip to Shawnee State Park in Portsmouth, Ohio for the American Triple-T. After having done the last 5 iterations of this race as member of a team, I was back to the solo division this year. Early on in the season planning, I established 3 goals for myself this season, one of which was to finish in …

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I’ve opened the season with J-hawk four of the last five seasons, each year using it as a rough benchmark of my fitness. After a long winter focused on my running and a recent PR at the half-marathon distance, I had high hopes for the race. However, recent life events, caused me to wake up race morning just hoping I’d …

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After having a good race in Kona, but sub-optimal (broken spoke on my front wheel with massive rubbing for 65+ miles, very poor pacing on the run), my only desire for IMAZ was to qualify for Kona 2012. No time goals, no place goals, no split targets – nothing mattered except qualifying. Despite having an opportunity to …

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Pre-race The last 2 weeks of training leading into Kona were perfect. In many ways some of my workouts were so good it was frightening. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I felt this good so early in relation to a big race. Based on my final benchmark workouts “ I felt that a time in the 9:09 to 9:20 range was …

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Took the swim pretty relaxed, no rush on the swim. Got taken to school by a couple high school kids and towed the last 75 yards for a VERY VERY easy float into T2 “ ~5:50 @ touch. Bike: I intended to keep the real time watts +- 300, but tempered with the reality of the potential for a tactical ride (which never …

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