After getting out the water, it was a long run to the bike gear bags. It was about 200 yards, so I decided to have some fun encouraging the crowd (which was several people deep along the rail), stop to give my wife a kiss (or vice versa), and continue the trek to the changing tent. My bag was pretty easy to find among the relatively empty racks. That’s one of the advantages of being in the back of the pack. I grabbed my bag and headed into the changing tent.
Off with the swim jammers, on with the chamois cream, tri-shorts, bike jersey, calf sleeves, helmet. Nutrition and electrolytes into the pockets. Wait, I didn’t get the sunscreen slather I had heard about at other races. “Sunscreen please.” “Sunscreen por favor.” “Alto del sol, por favor.” Nothing. There were 38 people trying to give me Vaseline, but I couldn’t find sunscreen. Maybe it’s once I get out of the tent. Nope. Okay, back into the tent. After a few minutes, I finally found the one guy (!) with the one can of spray sunscreen! I found it hard to believe that sunscreen was so hard to find on an island in the tropics.
One quick lesson from this is that I should have known how to say critical words in Spanish. It would have made things go quicker. I knew I was good on water, please, thank you, ice, Pepsi. “Stop of the sun” got the point across, but knowing the proper translation would have been much quicker.
After finding sunscreen and adding water to my Perpetuem powder, I grabbed my bike (also easy to find). It’s about another 200 yards from the tent to the mount line if you have a good bike rack position like I did. Add another 100 yards if you register late in the summer. I stopped to say goodbye to my wife and headed onto the bike course. All told, I was in T1 for over 14 minutes! The sunscreen fiasco didn’t help, and the quarter mile on foot took 3-4 minutes, but that still seems like a really long time. Something to work on for next time.
Not having had anything to eat or drink for two hours, it was time to get on my nutrition and hydration schedule. Luckily the first 12 miles of the bike is downwind (though it’s a bit hard to feel), so I was able to get the heart rate in line and focus on eating and drinking. Then I hear a high pitch whistle behind me. Thirty seconds later and there it is again, but much closer this time. What the… Wow! A freight train just blew past me. I was five miles into my bike leg and the top three male pros just flew by me on their second lap of the bike course. I was doing 20mph, and they passed me like I was standing still. They were probably doing 30mph if not more. About ten minutes later another eight pros passed me at about the same rate of speed. These guys were flying. The group of eight was certainly short of the 10 meters drafting zone for the pros, but it’s not like they were sitting on each other’s wheels. In fact during the whole bike leg, I only saw about four people blatantly sitting on wheels, and never saw any large groups. That was very welcome given that drafting has been a huge problem on this course in the past.
While the freight train of pro men was a nice (but short) distraction, I was having hydration issues. I use a Torpedo between the arms bottle and drop in a couple of Fizz and add a bottle of water from the aid stations. I dropped off my bike on Saturday around noon with the bottle empty, then added Fizz and water before starting the swim. Fizz makes the water a little bubbly, but I was getting a lot of air with my water. I really didn’t know what was going on. I thought maybe the straw had curved back up and I was taking in air once the water got too low in the bottle. I was baffled. I decided to try to pull the straw out a bit to see if this was the case and I got a nice glimpse of the second curveball of the day. Right where the straw touches the bottle were about a hundred tiny holes and a melted mess of a straw. My best guess is that the hard plastic bottle heated up in the sun on Saturday and melted the soft flexible straw!
I’ve always been told that things will go wrong during a race of this length. It’s not a matter of “if,” but of “when.” Well, my “when” was “now.” But life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it. It was time to figure out a solution. I couldn’t go another 8 hours struggling to get proper hydration and taking in a bunch of air. Ok. There’s an aid station in a few miles and they have mechanical support and minor medical support. They’ll have tape of some kind, surely.
Not so much. I stopped and asked for medical and mechanical. The aid station volunteers looked at me like I was crazy. After trying to translate my issues via pantomime, they knew I was looking for tape. After a few minutes, it became clear there was no tape to be had. Ok, pantomime scissors. Not gonna happen. Unless I could solve my problem with water or Gatorade, I wasn’t going to get any help here. So I pulled my straw completely out of my bottle, gnawed the end of it off, and shoved the stub of a straw back into the bottle. The straw was much shorter than it used to be, but it worked. And maybe I would be more aero now with a shorter straw.
I wasn’t very happy with this setback, but I had a long day ahead of me so I had to let it go. It was pretty much fixed and I was about to head into the wind for the first time. Self-pity wasn’t going to keep the pedals turning. As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, put them in your pants and do the lemons in your pants dance (Aaron King, 2001).
As it turned out, going upwind for the first time wasn’t bad at all. I knew what to expect from my Friday course preview, and the wind was actually lighter than Friday. There were plenty of people around, so I always felt like everybody was dealing with the same conditions. At my pace it was still about an hour of upwind drudgery though. The bigger factors were the false flats and the complete lack of spectators. There’s no way to draw energy from the spectators if there aren’t any spectators!
Except for Team Z, that is. They had a group cheering about 5 miles into the bike course, another group just after Punta Sur, and most importantly, the group at Mezcalito’s at the end of the upwind section. After quite literally not seeing a single person cheering for almost an hour, the energy that Team Z supporters added was fantastic. They are a group out of the DC area whose supporters cheered for everybody on the course as if they were on their team. And they intentionally went to the most remote locations to make the biggest difference. It really helped. The guy wearing only a sombrero and a speedo was a nice touch. It was good to laugh a bit every few hours on the bike.
Rounding the corner at Mezcalito’s, the wind became kind of a cross-tail wind. But the trees kept it pretty mellow. When I did the course preview, I felt like Superman after rounding that corner. My speedometer went from 12mph to 18mph at the same heart rate. So I rolled with it and went a bit faster as my heart rate crept up. I knew I couldn’t do that on race day, so I was glad I got that out of my system on Friday. What’s that? A freight train going pretty fast but not too fast?
Shortly after rounding the corner, the pro women began to lap me. I wonder how fast they’re going? Let’s find out. I was going 18mph when a few of them went past. I stayed well behind them, but matched their speed at 23mph. They’re not going that much faster than me. Oh wait, that’s almost 30% faster than me! After watching my heart rate leave the sustainable zone, I backed off and settled in.
After a few miles I was heading back into town. The energy was crazy! The people of Cozumel really turn out for this race. “Si se puede” can be heard all throughout town. Great energy! And there goes the heart rate again. The energy was so fantastic it was hard not to get a little caught up in the excitement. The roll through town was great. A few lefts and rights and I was at T2. Nobody is getting off their bike, so at least I didn’t get double lapped!
I start heading out of town down the main drag, knowing that I’ll see my wife in a few miles. There was an aid station right in front on Hotel Cozumel. Unfortunately that meant we could hear them setting up the aid station late into the night Saturday night, but it also meant that my wife could watch the race from our balcony! When she knew I was going to be coming by, she would cross the street and see me right before the aid station.
How did she know when I would be arriving, you ask? Well, I decided to get a MyAthleteLive tracker. Ironman has some tracking, but that’s based on timing mats that are few and far between. MyAthleteLive uses GPS and cellular data to transmit real-time position! It’s a great technology and a great company. I rented one pretty late and they don’t ship to Mexico, so I had to figure out how to get it to me and if I could return it about a week late because we were diving after the Ironman. I got very quick, actual human being support and they were very amenable to the peculiarities of my travel. It’s a bit pricey internationally, but they have great customer service.
Using their mobile app, my wife was able to see when I got to town, and had an estimate of when I would get to the hotel. So I stopped to say hi, dropped off a pair of empty Ironman Cozumel water bottles (yes, they give out real cycling water bottles on the course), and headed on down the road. After a few miles, lap 1 was complete.
But first I had to negotiate just a bit of traffic furniture. There was a row of reflectors across the right half of the road spaced at about 2 inches apart. I didn’t really want to slip off the side of one or get a pinch flat, so I swerved left. I probably put a good scare into one of the pros that was just about to pass me. I apologize, #60.
Ok, lap 1 complete! A few more miles of downwind, then rounding the corner for the stretch to Mezcalito’s. There was an aid station around mile 52, so I emptied out my bottle cages and grabbed some more water. There’s no need to look down to do this; just grab a bottle and toss it to the side. Except when you accidentally grab your nutrition bottle and toss it without thinking! Well, that was stupid! Lemons in your pants dance, lemons in your pants dance. Ok, I’ve got another 5 hours of Perpetuem in my special needs bag, just 4 (upwind!) miles ahead. No problem.
Except the special needs bag is at 61 miles. That’s 9 (upwind!) miles from here! It’s going to be 45 minutes without nutrition. Well, I was pretty hungry by the time I hit the special needs bag. I had a couple of gels with me that I should have eaten during my 45-minute fast. But I restocked my nutrition, put on my arm coolers (I really should have done this earlier since I’ve been carrying them for 61 miles anyway), topped off the chamois cream, and got on my way. The wind on the second lap was a bit worse than on the first lap, but still manageable. And there were still a lot of racers on the course.
Team Z was fantastic at the turn west once again, and it was back into town. This time there were a lot of people getting off their bikes and starting on the run. The volunteers were even trying to flag me into the T2 chute. Oh was that tempting, but alas I had another lap to go. The bike course got a lot emptier after passing T2. Except for the guy that had been sucking on my wheel on and off for about 20 miles. I needed to get rid of him for my own psychological benefit, so I took a bit longer of a break to stop and say hi to Barb. I handed off another two empty bottles and continued on with lap 3.
Though the course was a lot emptier, I could always see someone within a few hundred yards ahead of me. Now that it was only slow people out on the course, I was actually passing a lot of people. I was the fastest of the slow people! I think I passed about 50 people on that last lap and only got passed once. Small victories!
I think most people still on the bike were starting to fatigue, but I was going slowly strategically. I had carefully measured my effort all day, so I was feeling pretty good. I didn’t want the rental car to run out of gas and be stuck on the side of the road. The wind on the third lap was noticeably stronger than the first two laps. It still wasn’t horrible, but it took a little more effort to keep on keeping on.
With about 10 miles to go I got passed by a pair of riders that I had passed earlier. They were moving pretty quickly. I decided to let the horses run and see if I could keep up. I could and my heart rate was only a few bpm above my target, so I kept going. It felt pretty good to finally ride with some pace. After a few miles the guy passed me again and mentioned that we were up against the bike cutoff. But the bike cutoff is at ten and a half hours, not ten hours! Now I know why they were riding so fast.
We were about to get off our bikes, but not before a local gentleman walked out in front of the other rider and nearly took him out. Luckily that didn’t happen and we rolled into T2. My stretch goal for the bike was 8 hours, and I came into T2 at 8:10. I’ll take it. I had a minor mechanical stop and had to stop 6 times to use el bano (#1) due to my attention to hydration.
Just as I dismount my bike and hand it to a volunteer, I hear “You. Are. An. Ironman!” Those beasts that can finish these things in under ten hours are done. And I still have to run a marathon!