Ironman Canada Finished!

I finally finished Ironman Canada a couple of days ago!!! Yippe, yahoo, it's done and now I can relax and rest!!! My legs are still a little stiff, but loosening up nicely. I'm tired, but not completed wiped out like last time. I have a few blisters which are healing, but not letting me get into running shoes too soon which is fine by me right now.

I was nervous leading up to the race since I had been burnt out and was also having a hamstring that was bothering me. All I could do was just try to stay steady and stick to my race plan and see what happened. Before the race, you get so busy just preparing, registering and visiting with friends, not to mention menstrual cramps (at least it wasn't on race day!) that I didn't have time to get too nervous once I got up there.

The day of the race was a little cooler than normal. I'm not sure what the temperature got up to, but it wasn't too hot. It did get quite windy especially on the bike and part of the run. There was a little rain on the bike, but nothing much to worry about. The female winner said it was her windiest race there ever in her few times doing it! I was afraid of starting the swim with almost 2800 people. Lucikly I swim off to the right a little in open water and was on the edge of the masses of people so didn't get beat up much and just kept it steady for the entire swim as I had a long day ahead of me. I came in just a few minutes longer than I had hoped, but no big deal. Had a fairly quick transition and off on the bike I went.

I had a ton of people pass me on the bike especially lots of men. At leat they had great legs to look at :). I just focused on my own race and constantly kept monitoring my heartrate. This was new for me as I usually just raced like a bat out of hell and just would hang on to the end. It was great having the heartrate to focus on also. My friends, Carol and Helen, had spray painted (water-based) messages along the course so it was great to try to look for them which also kept my mind occupied on something other than the long day ahead of me and some of their messages were quite funny. Thanks to them sooooooo much for putting in that effort! I did feel stiff on the legs and back on the bike which just kept getting better and then not so good, but were quite stiff by the end of the bike so I just took it easy than to try to get them ready to run the marathon.

I had to walk through the next transition since my legs wouldn't run yet. There is a big change tent for each the men and women and you get your own volunteer to help you with your transition clothes, etc. By the way, the volunteers at this event were so absolutely amazing through the whole thing. Always smiling and encouraging from the time of registration onward. I had a great surprise that my volunteer was a client of mine so we had a big hug and it was fun to chat for a couple of minutes while I changed.

Starting the run was tough as my legs were so incredibly stiff. Again, I just went back to monitoring my heartrate, looking for signs on the road and looking for all the people I knew during the race. It was an out-and-back run course so you could see everyone!!! It was great to cheer my friends on no matter where they were in the field. Of course, my diligent supporters were amazing in cheering. My bowels were also doing funky things and had to stop a couple of times. This happened last time also. It's tough getting the exactly right electrolyte/fluid balance which I obviously haven't figured out for myself yet. My legs did loosen up a bit, but I would feel my hamstring when I tried to pick it up. Since I wasn't going to win anything at that point I didn't need to have an injury on top of it all so I just kept it steady. I didn't run nearly as fast as I had hoped, but I did the best I could on the day, stuck with my race plan and finished quite strongly at the end since I wanted to break 12 hours at that point and did with a time of :



I was finishing as a guy was asking his girlfriend to marry him just before he was crossing the finish line!!! It was great to see all the varied shapes, sizes and ages of people finishing the race. One lady was the first to finish in the over 75 year old category under the time cut off!!! So amazing. A funny thing at the awards banquet was a bike company figured out who they voted had the worst bike in the race and gave them a free Cervelo bike!!! How cool is that!

My original plan was to try to qualify for the Hawaii World Championships in my age group. In the previous few years there had been 5 spots allocated for my age group and the last person to get a spot was around 11:10-25 which I thought was doable for myself. The number of spots in each age group is determined by the number of participants in the age group as a percentage of the total participants and then you get that percentage of the availabe spots for Hawaii. So this year there was only 3 spots in my age group and the gals were so smoking fast in my age group that the last spot was 10:30 which was so much faster than my time goal - even faster than my man-if-I-feel-so-incredibly-amazing time goal. So I didn't qualify, but was happy that I just didn't missout either. I still haven't scratched Hawaii off my list of things to do, but I'll figure that out later after I recover and rest. By the way, I didn't sign up for next year. I told my supporters not to let me while I was out running, but I didn't get the urge to either. You can check out the official results at the IMC website (click here).

I want to thank everyone for their support as it was incredibly great knowing that I have such awesome friends and family that care. Thanks to those who were free and made the effort to come up in person to cheer. Thanks again to Pamela for being the hostess with the mostess. Not sure what my next step is from here. I'd like to do some trail running races and try to keep some of this fitness up for now and see what's instore next time.