Yesterday was try #2 at the Mountain Man Half here in Flagstaff, and it went better than I would have dared hope for. I just got back on Saturday from driving back from Vermont... I was pretty confident / determined to make the cutoff this time (and then finish the race), but I wasn't sure how much of a struggle that would be.
The swim: like it seems is always the case, I haven't been doing that much swimming lately. I feel like my swim is the strongest part of my race, so I tend to not really focus on it. The lake was pretty nice, not too cold, but the water was very brown (I guess from all the rain we've had lately). As usual it took me a little bit to get into a rhythm, but it seemed like it was faster than normal. My goggles did fog up, but instead of messing with them I decided to just try to push through it, and eventually they did clear up on their own. This was probably the most consistent and steady pace I've kept for a swim of this length, and in the end it was a new personal best for this distance, finishing in 42:32, a 2:12 / 100m pace.
The bike:
On the cross-country trip my bike got repeatedly rained on and then dried, and my chain was ridiculously rusty now. I took it to Absolute Bikes on Saturday and got a new chain put on, and with the new chain it was so smooth. The guy said I was in desperate need of a tune up too (which I knew), but even just replacing the chain made a huge difference.
After what happened at Wildflower, I came up with a new nutrition plan for the race. I like the ClifBlocks, but I felt like it would be good to have more variety. I put some Fritos in a bag, pretzels in another, and put some chunks of chocolate chip cookies in one (I froze this one to try to last longer). I think this made a huge difference for me on the bike.
So, I took off on the bike after a pretty fast T1... I probably went a little too fast for the first mile or so, but then settled in to a good pace. I had hit the wrong button on my watch during t1 (pausing the time rather than doing a new lap), so I decided that I would switch it forward to the bike lap right at the start of the nastiest hill (7 miles into the course). I'm not sure what I did for the first 7 miles, but I managed the next hour at ~15 mph, which I thought was very promising considering it included 2 big uphills without the downhills that go with them. I figured if I could get to 30 miles after 2 hours (not counting the first 7 miles), I would be in very good shape... I think I hit almost 32 miles by then. Then my last estimate was to try to be at 48 miles after 3 hours, but instead I finished the whole thing (49 miles + the earlier 7) in 3:19. This is 40 minutes faster than last year (which was a personal best), which is nuts. I was way under the cutoff time this time, which was nice to not have to worry about it.
I felt pretty good going off on the run... knowing that I was way ahead of my goal pace helped a lot. I hadn't thought that much about the run, but pretty soon I decided that I would run the first 1.5 miles fairly easy, then I planned to walk up the whole 1.5 mile hill to just take it easy and get my legs loose. This seemed to work out pretty well, and I was happy with my pace so far. I was trying to conserve energy for the end, but ended up basically getting slower and slower til the finish. The slowest of us got poured on near the end of the run course, with bonus hail... it was nice to cool off, but I could do without the hail. It seemed like this helped step up my pace, but then we got out of the rain and I was just out of gas pretty much. I had to revert to my step counting tricks (run 200 steps, etc) just to make up ground. For a time I thought I might be able to break 7 hours, but it got more and more clear that that wasn't going to happen the closer I got to the end. My run time ended up being very slow at 3:08:33, but I got there eventually.
With the personal best in the swim and the bike (and considering how bad my only other 1/2 IM finish time was), I ended up improving my overall best by over an hour, finishing at 7:19:17. I am very happy to have finished this race (after my last 2 dnfs)... but now I'm still left with the question of where to go from here. I feel like the long races are probably the biggest challenge (moreso than just trying to do a shorter one faster), but they also require a lot more time in training. I have an Xterra coming up, and now I'm thinking I might throw in an olympic race before the end of the year too (lake powell).
