Ready, set....GO? ...and my California 70.3 race recap

First and foremost, what's on my mind is tomorrow...Friday, April 15th, at 9am PT to be exact.  No, it has nothing to do with taxes...but it does have to do with TAXING your body for 140.6 miles across the Kona lava fields in October!

For the sixth year in a row, I've applied for the Kona Ironman World Championship Lottery.  Basically where about 7,000 or more apply to try and get one of 200 lottery slots.  By my calculations that's less than a 3% chance of getting in.

Of course there is a long-standing debate about how worthy a lottery slot is versus actually qualifying for a spot to toe that magnificent start line...but I'm not going there today...maybe some other time.

In past years, I have queued up the internet on ironman.com and waited for the clock to tick over to 9:00, desperately scan the list about three times for my name (even looking at the bottom of the list...which makes no sense, given they list the names alphabetically!) and hang my head in disappointment.  I'll be honest, the first few times I was bummed, one year I was more relieved than sad, and last year I cried.  That is what tells me in my gut that I am ready.

So, with that, I'll dive into the latest race.  The California 70.3 in Oceanside was just a little less than two weeks ago.  It was my fourth time of doing the race and I went into it not really knowing exactly what I was capable of.  I had a shoulder injury that took me out of swimming for nearly a year and a half, I hadn't been on my bike much these past two years, and to top it off, my one and only road-ride was three weeks before the race!  I was relying solely on my running, three months of swimming Masters, some resistance training, and weekly pilates reformer classes.

The swim in this race is my weak spot...mainly due to the wave start and getting pummeled by 30 - 40 year old competitive (and aggressive!) male swimmers that are in the waves after me...but also due to the fact that I tend to zig-zag in the water without a nice solid black line below me that I can follow.  In true-Brenda-consistent-form, I finished that swim in 50 minutes.  Same as 2009, same as 2008, and same as 2007.  I really do feel as though I'm a much stronger swimmer these days, but clearly I need to work on my open-water swimming and learn to be more aggressive myself in order to keep my pace and not get hung up and interrupted by others.

I had a theory that though I didn't do much bike work (hardly any!) that all the consistent running will play a successful part in the biking; and I was right!  I won't go on too long about it, but there were a couple 9-10% hills that initially I doubted whether I was going to be able to handle...but I did!  Awesome!  The last 10 miles coming in had a very strong headwind, that's usually where most people slow down and have a hard time.  I was on my big ring and my little rear cog and POWERED it in, huffing and puffing (you should have heard me, it was really quite ridiculous!)  I ended up coming in off the bike in 3 hours 40 minutes (only 4 minutes shy of my time two years ago, when I actually did train pretty hard on the bike!)

My first mile of the run felt pretty good, legs were not heavy and I felt like I moved right into a great pace.  I was surprised because I figured with pushing on the bike so hard, it would all come back to bite me on the run.  Well, about 6 miles in, it did bite, hard!  I was not feeling great.  I managed to walk/jog/walk/jog and bring it in the last mile at a respectable pace with a nice solid stride/sprint to the finish.  My run time was 2 hours 25 minutes (and only about 2 minutes slower than two years ago!)

All in all, a solid finish.  Not a PR (slower by 7 minutes total) but I'll take it.  As with every race, I learned something.  I think I learned to push a bit out of my comfort zone on the bike and run (a few times) and that I can keep on going.

I can't help but think about how good my times could have been if I had taken the bike training more seriously.  And did my run time suffer as a consequence of beating up my under-trained bike-legs on the bike course?

With that said, I'm sure that 2012 California 70.3 will be on my race list next year.