Ironman Cairns 2013 - Race Report

Flying into Cairns last week was like returning to an old friend. There was an air of familiarity about it and yet my less than optimal performance last year made it feel like my friend and I had parted on strained terms.  (See last year's race report for all the details I wish I could forget but never will!)

This year was the time to kiss and make up.

The stars were aligned for a happy reunion. St Pete had had a great day at the Christchurch marathon, sneaking in a PB, and so he had returned to Sydney happy and ready to retain his mantle as the best support team ever. Good friends Leigh and Paul had arrived from Christchurch to experience Ironman first hand. They were doing the half ironman as a team and it would give them a taste of things to come when Paul comes to do his first ironman in Taupo next year. And to complete the ground crew, Mel had also flown in from Auckland and would be working the T2 tent on the day - I had already lined her up to be my personal sock changer!

And the athlete herself was feeling as good as she had ever been.

In some respects the pressure was off. Cairns had been set as my "B" race for the season. Ironman New Zealand had been my "A" race and, with a solid PB achieved, there was no expectation of pushing the overall time in order to finish the season off on a high.  As my second race of the season I was in the fortunate position of being able to use Cairns to try new things in preparation for New Zealand in 2014.

In my debrief with Coach Dave after Taupo I outlined my primary goal moving forward.  I was certain that I had a sub 6 hour bike split in me and that is what I wanted to focus on.

In the three months between Taupo and Cairns, then, my training was focused on bike strength and the game plan for Cairns was to do a good "warm up" swim leg and then hammer the bike leg. There would be no traditional pacing and conserving for the run.  Instead I would push the pace hard and see how close to 6 hours I could get. The run could then be expected to be a bit of a grovel but performance on that leg wasn't what we were looking for.

Training, then, had supposedly gone to plan, although this was all new so I had no idea whether (a) I would cope with two ironman finishes in the space of 3 months, and (b) I had actually improved my bike speed in that relatively short amount of time.

However our final few days leading up to race day had at least been trouble-free.

On Tuesday we flew to Cairns and appreciated again the balloon archway welcoming athletes in the luggage collection hall.  This was obviously a benefit of having Cairns Airport as one of the event's major sponsors, but it really added to the vibe and the feeling that you were part of something special for the area. Thursday was the Green Island Reef Swim, a 1.5km or 3km ocean swim which Leigh, Paul and I did and really enjoyed. We did the 1.5km option and I was able to treat it as an easy training swim.

Ready for the Green Island Reef Swim

The rest of the week was equally trouble-free and by Saturday afternoon nails were done, the requisite IM merchandise purchased, bike was racked, bags deposited at the transition areas and I was happily chilling out on the couch, nerves barely to be seen.

Waiting, waiting...

So Sunday morning duly arrives with the regular 4.00am alarm. Breakfast is a bowl of porridge with milk and brown sugar and then it's time for some more chilling out until 6.00am when we would head over the road to race start. During that time I returned to my happy place - my iPod loaded with favourite P!nk tracks, and a few select others, which had the unfortunate effect of "treating" St Pete to the vision of Irongirl dancing around the apartment to music he couldn't hear and then the delights of Irongirl belting out her favourite song, also to a track he couldn't hear.

Hmm, probably not the most pleasant of starts to his day!

At 6.00am we picked up Leigh and Paul and headed down to the Esplanade. The place was humming - nervous half and full ironman athletes and their supporters were everywhere. The main task before the start was to check the bike: water in the bladder, bottle of electrolyte in the cage between the aero bars and tyres pumped up. Black Beauty was a bit wet from the overnight tropical downpour but otherwise ready to go.
Wetsuit on and we bid farewell to Paul who headed down for the half ironman start before it was my turn to say goodbye to St Pete and Leigh and also wander down the pier to our start area.

Swim:
In the starting area we could watch the half ironman athletes already out in the water swimming around the course. They had wave starts and we full distance age groupers had a later start time than normal - 7.55am. We therefore had a bit of waiting around but before long we had access to the pontoon and 15 minutes before our start time I was jumping in the water and finding a spot at the start line - close to the inside of the course.

Finally the gun went off and we were into it. It appeared I had ended up closer to the front of the pack than usual and so the first 25m was spent doing polo freestyle as there were way too many kicking feet in close proximity to put my face under water. Thankfully Coach Dave had prescribed plenty of polo drills these last few months!

Finally the pack thinned out a bit and I was able to get going properly. The swim was, however scoring reasonably high on the contact front compared to my previous experiences, and would so for the duration of the course. The lack of visibility meant it was pretty difficult to follow feet and it also meant that you tended to swim into someone before you saw them. Of course that also meant I got a few limbs knocking me and my goggles - thankfully the goggles didn't leak once, despite the kicks!

Overall I was happy enough with the swim - we had the outward tide to deal with again and it also got a bit choppy coming in off the second lap so that final leg coming back in was a bit of a slog. I did a slightly slower time than in Taupo this year (1:33:25 versus 1:26:19), however I was happy enough given the conditions and I came in feeling 100% better than last year (when I spent 2 hrs 17min fighting the tide and leaking goggles, and had exited the water feeling completely shattered).  A check of my stats from Taupo shows that I swam pretty much the same pace as Taupo (20:29min/km).  However although I succeeded in sticking to the buoys and the inside of the course the Garmin's GPS reading claims I swam 4.49km versus 4.15km in Taupo.  This extra 340m therefore accounts for the slower time.  Interesting, too, that this year's 4.49km was also a longer swim than my nightmare swim in Cairns last year when I covered a "mere" 4.23km!

For the data geeks amongst you, here is a comparison of my three swims:

Bike:
As always it was great to get out of the water and I couldn't help but look back at the course as I ran up the pontoon to see plenty of people still swimming in behind me.  Yippee!

Onto the bike and I was feeling great.  We had a tailwind heading up to Port Douglas so I went hard as planned and used it as much as I could. It was then a headwind coming back to Wangetti and the turnaround for the shorter return back to Port Douglas. At the 90km mark I was sure I had done sub 3 hours but I also knew the bulk of the second 90km was the long drag in the headwind back to T2, so wasn't sure what I could do. Fatigue, headwind and the rolling hills could all combine to drop a significant amount of time.

Starting the bike leg

The wind was pretty gusty, sideways, as well. I imagined this must be giving me a taste of Kona! I saw a couple of ambulances, sirens going, and one guy lying on the side of the road not looking happy (and a couple of people helping him). (The following day we saw a couple of people with big doses of gravel rash down their sides and at the after party spoke to a guy who had come off his bike after misjudging a bottle handoff at an aid station and hitting the tent!). There were also plenty of punctures being repaired, so there was a bit of carnage out there.

But not for me.

I felt strong and pushed hard the full distance. The plan was for controlled aggression the whole way and that's what I did. On the aeros for all but the odd occasion where I'd stand on the pedals to accelerate over a crest (or out of the turnaround at Port Douglas) or pick up a bottle of water at an aid station.

Port Douglas turnaround

Black Beauty and I moved through the field like a well-aimed cruise missile. At one point I almost had to yell at a technical official who was watching a bunch I had caught up to and wanted to go past. The motorbike he was on was blocking me from moving around the pack and I was just about to yell at him when the rider saw me in the mirror and got out of my way.

I did let one guy go past me (but only one!) - he was on an S-Works and commented "nice bike" as he went past. With such obvious good taste I figured he didn't need to be chicked on the bike by this Irongirl.

The only time I really had to slow down was at the aid stations. After the experience in Taupo, when I kept running out of water and suffered dehydration as a result, I changed the game plan slightly. At every aid station I picked up a bottle of water and topped up the internal bladder. The bladder wouldn't need the full bottle so what was left over went over my head and down my front and back. If I timed it correctly I was able to pick up the water off the first volunteer in the line, top up the bladder, water myself down, throw the bottle away and have time to pick up a banana off the last volunteer before I hit the end of the aid station zone.  I inevitably lost time for all this but it shouldn't have been more than a couple of minutes overall and probably paid off in the long run.

How close I was to my 6 hour bike split, though, I had no clue.

What I had failed to do was check the time at the start of the bike and the Garmin was only showing total time (not time for the leg). I knew that I had come out of the water at around 1hr 33min but could only guess what my transition time was.

With 30km to go on the bike I had a headwind to deal with, fatigue (surprise, surprise) and a slight overall climb back to T2. I figured that I was at around 5 hours and so if I could maintain an average 30km/hr for the last hour then I could hit 6 hours. But it was all a big guessing game and I was starting to be ready for the leg to be over.  As we came off the coast and inland I started searching out the signs for Yorkey's Knob and the confirmation that the bike was done.

Finally it appeared and I sped into T2, happy and comfortable (love that Specialized Body Geometry Bike Fit from Jet Cycles!) and knowing that I couldn't have done any more in the conditions.  In my heart I knew that, 6 hours or not, the job had been done.

I didn't know it at the time but I had in fact shaved off 27 minutes from my Taupo bike time and a fantastic 59 minutes off last year's Cairns time, breaking 6 hours and coming in at 5 hours 57 minutes.  Even better - this bike split was the 3rd fastest in my age group!  (Pity I'm still a crap runner, lol.)  While I had been hopeful of getting close to 6 hours I really didn't think it was on the cards for Cairns and so this result exceeded all expectations.

Run:
It would be fair to say that by the time I started running I was pretty much over it.  However I maintained a positive attitude and focused only on an easy start and thought only about getting to the first aid station.  My first kilometre split was faster than planned (6:14), but once I got past the first aid station I started fading pretty fast and the mental wars began in earnest.

I had achieved my goal for the day and so the pressure was off.  For the first 12km, then, I was playing mental games.  Make it to the next aid station.  Make it to the next 2km distance marker.   And so it went on.  Fatigue was urging me to stop and one half of my head was saying "why not, you left it all out on the bike course, the race plan allowed you to walk" while the  other, more stubborn side, was saying "come on, let's get the job done".

At the first aid station I suffered my only real disaster - if you could call it that.  I stopped at the portaloo and, as I dropped my shorts, forgot about the gels sitting in the back pockets.  Two of them dropped into the toilet and, although they didn't drop down into the bowels of the portaloo, there was no way I was going to retrieve them and try to use them!  Thankfully there were two spare gels sitting in my special needs bag, so it wasn't too much of a crisis.

At around 12km I started feeling slightly better and started thinking maybe it's taken 12km to recover from the bike and now I'll be better.  Between then and 13km I saw St Pete and asked what my bike split was.  He had calculated (correctly as it turns out) it to be 5 hrs 57sec and so after asking if he was serious (and getting an affirmative answer) my spirits went sky high.  I seem to recall pumping my fists in the air and yahooing at the news, which would have no doubt been amusing for the other runners around me...

The news of my sub 6 hour bike split...

The news of my sub-6 hour bike split carried me through to the halfway point.  By that time we had reached the Esplanade where we had to run to the finish chute and then, in a cruel twist, do two full laps of the Esplanade before being allowed to turn onto that coveted red carpet.

In the meantime, though, I had further arguments to have with myself.  More walking and shuffling continued and more arguing with myself about being able to break 14 hours versus it doesn't matter, save it for next time.

I had pretty much accepted that I wasn't going to worry about the PB when I got to the 36km marker.

With 6km to go I looked at the Garmin and see it was just about to tick over to 13 hours.  Suddenly I was calculating the chances of doing 6km in 60 minutes (for sub 14 hours) or 68 minutes (for a PB).  Oh shit, goes my head, I could do this.  So with that I got going .... and did it!  As I reached the last turnaround at the far end of the Esplanade I knew I had a sub 14 hour finish in the bag and, sure enough, as I turned left off the Esplanade and saw Pete at the turn, the huge grin on my face confirmed to him that I knew that my finish time was starting with a 13.

No matter how many ironmans you do, I don't think anyone ever loses the pure joy and elation of hitting the finish chute.  And as I turned the last corner and looked up at the clock, to see that PB looking down at me was truly one of the most exciting things that could happen.  Not only did I exceed my bike expectations by doing a sub 6 hour bike split, I also managed to further drop my PB and break 14 hours at the same time.

And as I crossed the finish line, I recalled my reaction to the Kona video played at the Friday night Welcome Dinner when I uttered: "Man, I love this shit"!