Steelman triathlon race report

People are People and Why There’s no Such Thing as an A Race
Race Report, Steelman international-distance (Olympic) triathlon
August 9, 2009
Payton MacDonald

Pre race
The Steelman triathlon in Pennsylvania was supposed to be my A race of the season, that is, the most important race for me. The previous races were also important, but really just warm ups. Steelman was it. The big Kahuna. What I had worked for during the past ten months. Here I would prove to myself and my friends and family that getting up at 4:30 a.m. to train and watching my diet and all the money spent on triathlon would matter. This was to be my first international-distance race and I felt good going into it. My body and mind were primed and I was ready to set some PRs as I swam .9 miles, biked 24.6 miles, and ran 6.2 miles.

Jessica—as always—was supportive and cheerful about the project. Steelman is a big race, with over 1,000 athletes. Any race is a festive environment, but the bigger ones are especially so. There’s music, games, an expo, food tents, and the constant spectacle of 1,000 athletes from all walks of life, with all kinds of attitudes and gear. We booked a room at a nearby Comfort Inn and planned on bringing Madeline, our 20-month old daughter. She likes chaos (she often is chaos) and we knew she’d like the race environment.

We got to bed early the night before, and Madeline cooperated beautifully with the new sleeping environment. After jumping around on the bed like a monkey and then reading her Elmo books, she settled down nicely and we were all asleep by 9:00. I didn’t sleep that well, never do the night before a race, but I had wisely taken some good naps for a few days leading up to it, so I felt okay when I got up at 4:30. I quietly packed and then peeked outside.

It was raining.

Damn. So far I’ve been lucky and I’ve not had to race in the rain, but I knew it was just a matter of time. It wasn’t raining hard, but it was steady. I went to the lobby and the clerk told me it was supposed to get worse. When I got back to the room Jessica and I conferred and decided that it would be best if she just dropped me off at the race site and then she came back to the hotel with Madeline. This was really a bummer as the whole point of the trip was for us to be at the race as a family. The state park that hosts Steelman is beautiful and I knew she and Madeline would have had fun. And there is nothing more rewarding to me than to cross the finish line and have those two pairs of gorgeous brown eyes twinkling at me. I was disappointed and I felt bad that Jessica and Madeline had come all that way to just sit around a hotel room. But it was the best choice. There was no dry place for an active toddler at the race site.

So she dropped me off and it began.

Swim
The temperature of the lake was 78.5 F, which meant that it was not wetsuit legal. According to USAT rules, anything between 78 and 82 disqualifies competitors from winning any awards if they choose to wear a wetsuit. (Anything above 82 disqualifies anyone from the entire race). But I knew I wasn’t going to win any awards anyway, so I wore the suit. The additional buoyancy made it safer and since I trained in it and wore it for my other races I wanted to see how my pace compared.

I think I did pretty well in the swim. As usual it took me five minutes or so to really get comfortable, but I’m finally figuring out that there’s really no way around the jostling and crowded conditions at the beginning. The best thing is try to find a good line and then swim like hell. I keep my head down as much as possible when I’m not breathing so I can try to avoid a kick to the face, but basically just go for it. I’m still having trouble zig zagging too much and thus wasting a lot of precious energy, but otherwise the swim was pretty uneventful. That’s the longest I’ve ever swam in a race and I definitely felt the difference in length, but I never panicked.

T1
No problems here; in and out in pretty good time. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many bikes on my rack when I got there. The racks were organized by age group and I’m in the “animal” age group, 30–34. Endurance athletes typically peak in their early 30s, so many of the men in my group are good. There were some very experienced athletes on my bike rack, sporting $10,000 bikes and boasting of completing hundreds of races.

On thing I remember about T1 is that one of the other guys who got there around the same time I did was having some trouble with his leg cramping. I had some anti-cramping cream with me, so I dug around in my bag and tossed it to him. I probably lost 20 seconds doing that, but I didn’t even think about it at the time; I was just glad to help him out. I like doing things like that when I’m racing.

Bike
Here things began to unravel and I saw some of the best and worst of my colleagues on the course. Notice that I don’t call them competitors. They’re colleagues. We’re all in this to better ourselves, not to beat each other. Professional triathletes are different of course because winning translates to earnings which translates to food on the table. But for recreational athletes the attitude is different. It must be. Even if I win my age group or even the entire race, so what? Does anyone else in the world care? Am I going to solve any of the world’s problems? We can try to beat our own PRs and we can use other folks on the course as markers to pace or to pass, but spending even one second thinking about “beating” (such a violent word, isn’t it?) someone and “winning” is a waste of energy.

By this time the rain had intensified and now it was dumping. I climbed the first hill pretty well and soon enough I was out on the highway (which was thankfully closed to traffic) and bombing along at 24 mph. Within the first mile I hooted out a war cry and screamed “It’s raining, and I’m racing!!” I had a huge grin on my face.

This continued for the next six miles and then a STP (Super Triathlon Person) passed me and told me my rear memory lock was loose. Huh? I looked down and back and the lock that holds my rear axle in place was indeed loose. Holy cow, that’s dangerous! I thanked the guy who mentioned it to me and immediately stopped and fixed it. I have no idea how it became loose, but perhaps the rain had something to do with it. I was back at it in less than a minute, though, and making great time, but around mile eight I heard someone coming from behind and screaming at me. I thought he said he was passing me on the right, but because it was raining so hard I couldn’t hear him that well and I wasn’t sure.

“RIGHT!!! RIGHT!!! GET TO THE F@$#ING RIGHT SO I CAN PASS YOU!!! %#$&$%!!!”

Ah, now I understood. I was riding towards the middle of the road because it was sloped slightly towards the shoulder and there was less standing water in the middle. Of course, normally I would ride more towards the right because according to USAT rules you should only be on the left if you’re passing. But at this point the course wasn’t very crowded and there was plenty of space to pass on either side. Technically, this guy was correct. I was at fault for riding in the middle. But under the circumstances (dumping rain, not crowded), his behavior was really shameful. I mean, he could have asked nicely. So I moved to the right and he passed me while continuing to swear at me. I thought about speeding up to him and getting his number so that I could report him (he would have been disqualified from the entire race), but figured his life was probably a trainwreck anyway and his bad karma would play out in other ways. The irony of the situation is that after he passed me he only stayed ahead of me by 10 yards or so. I would have easily passed him if my luck had been better that day.

That experience really left a bad feeling in my stomach, and was especially jolting after the good sportsmanship displayed by my colleague who alerted me to the loose memory lock. As I sped along in the rain I thought a lot about people and their behavior. Why are some people so ungracious? And why is it that one’s personal demeanor may or may not bear any correlation to one’s accomplishments in other ways? This guy was clearly a real jerk, but maybe he spent his days as a pediatric surgeon saving children’s lives. Or maybe not. Maybe he was a greedy Wall Street lawyer whose only God is money. Who knows. But the first scenario isn’t improbable. Over and over again I meet people like that, especially in the arts. They’re good at what they do, and contribute greatly to the overall human project, but in terms of human relations they’re selfish, ugly, and abusive.

These thoughts occupied my mind as I kept speeding along through the dumping rain. I made the second turnaround and then something on the bike felt strange. I felt the rear tire slipping a bit. I had hit a big pothole about a half a mile back and I knew immediately what had happened. I had a flat tire.

With a groan and a sigh I pulled off the road and surveyed the damage. Yep, flat tire. I turned my bike over and took the wheel off. I found this easier to do if I took my glasses off, as they were so wet I could see better without them on, despite my nearsightedness (the wet glasses were problem when I was riding, too). I had changed one of my tires before, but doing it in a dry basement was a lot different than in the pouring rain on the side of a road. As the summer has progressed and I haven’t suffered a flat tire I keep thinking that I should take a day and change a tire a few times just to practice, but I always procrastinate on that aspect of race preparation. It’s much more fun to ride the bike than to fix it. That line of thinking is a mistake and it cost me this race.
Fortunately I was smart enough to be carrying a spare tube and a CO2 cartridge. It took me a long time to get the new tube and tire reseated, much longer than it should, but after mucking with it for 15 or 20 minutes I finally got it. Then I took out the CO2 cartridge. It took me a minute to figure out how to work it, but once I did it worked fine. The only problem was that I hadn’t seated the inner tube perfectly and there was a bulge that popped out when the tire inflated. But that was it. I didn’t have another CO2 cartridge.

Between the rain, the unsportsmanlike behavior I described earlier, and the flat, I was pretty discouraged, but during the time I was fiddling with the tire at least 20 people rode by me and asked if I needed help. That cheered me up considerably and improved my opinion of my colleagues a great deal. I politely refused their offers as I was determined to fix it myself. But after screwing up with the first cartridge and having no extras I realized I needed to accept some help.

“Need any help?” asked an older gentleman riding a Specialized.

“Yes! Do you have any extra CO2?”

“No problem,” he said as he pulled over. I ran up to him and we got it out of his bag. I took note of his number and thanked him profusely.

“No problem, and good luck,” he said as he sped away. Between stopping and the fact that we were at the bottom of the hill he must have lost at least a minute or two of time.

Unfortunately, though, this cartridge didn’t work that well. I couldn’t get it to release enough air, so even though I now had the tube seated correctly it never inflated properly. I didn’t feel right about stopping yet another racer, so I decided then to call the race. I had spent at least 30 minutes or so trying to fix the flat at this point and knew it was over. This is what it came to after ten months of training. A flat tire. That’s a hard pill to swallow.

I put the wheel back on and rode four miles into T2 at about 10 mph. Since I only did one bike loop I knew I would be disqualified from the race, but what could I do? I figured I could at least try to run hard and see how my pace was in the run and swim.

T2
In and out very quickly, no problems. The stacked brick workouts that Keith gives me are really paying off. I had no trouble transitioning into my shoes and my legs felt good going into the run.

Run
As of this morning they still haven’t posted the times to the race, so I’m not sure how I did in terms of numbers, but I felt pretty strong. 6.2 miles is a long ways for me; I’m not a strong runner. I stopped three times and walked briskly to let my heart rate settle a bit and stave off a cramp in my side, but otherwise I ran well. I find that the hardest part of the race is about two thirds of the way through the run. At that point I start feeling very tired and it really becomes a mental struggle to keep moving my feet forward. My form suffers and I know I start to shuffle, but it's tough. In retrospect, those are some of the most powerful moments of the race. Those are the moments athletes talk about when they say things like “digging deep.” That phrase is very accurate. There really is a sense that all the available reserves have been used up and you've got to look a little bit further into yourself to make it to the end. It’s very much like those epic practice sessions I’ve done in the past where I go for months putting seven or eight hours a day on my instrument, ignoring everything and everyone and pushing hard at the perceived limits of my potential.

Post race
So this was supposed to be my A race, the one where all those hours of training would come into focus and I would shine. But I got a flat tire. Even if I had known how to fix the tire better, my bike time would still have been off by at least 10 minutes or so. I thought about this a lot as I was running and I came to the conclusion that for me, there is no such thing as an A race. In my other life as a professional musician every performance is important. We have a phrase in the music community: every performance is an audition. Whether you're playing at Carnegie Hall for 2,000 people or at some dingy bar for six drunks, you always play your best. You never know who might be listening. I like to take it even further. Every musical moment is magical. Why would I ever get behind my instrument and not play every note with as much soul and depth of feeling as possible? Even in the practice room, I try to make every note I play count. And when I'm on stage—no matter where—I lay it all on the line and play as if it's the last concert I will ever play.

Triathlon is no different. I suppose if I were an elite athlete doing this professionally and I had to be careful about not straining muscles, then some races I might just cruise along and not try that hard. I would just get my body loose and ready for the big day. But I’m not an elite athlete and I never will be. I am proudly a recreational athlete and although I take triathlon very seriously, I always know it is part of the bigger picture of my life in general. So for me, every race is an A race. From the second that gun goes off I'm going to let the big dog rip and go for it.

After the race I found the race director and told him about the gentleman who gave me the CO2 cartridge. When he was making the announcements of the winners he had a special category for folks who had done some unusual things. One guy got a race belt for being the oldest guy to finish the race at 71 years old. The gentleman who helped me also got a race belt for good sportsmanship. I learned something from that. From now on I will always carry three CO2 cartridges. One for me, and at least one or two for someone else who might need it.