The Journey to a Texas IronMan

Hi Everyone,

This past weekend was the Texas IronMan 70.3 race in Galveston. It was a warm up/training race for IronMan Texas next month. Here’s a little recap on the event.

Kicking things off was a smooth drive down to Galveston. Dr. Crane and I are pretty good travel partners so we took shifts in driving and enjoyed the ride. We arrived at the hotel which By the Way shall remain nameless. In a nutshell, it was awful. How this chain allowed that property to exist, is still puzzling to us. Worried we would have to stay at this location, we headed over to the host hotel to try our luck on finding other accommodations.

As expected, the host hotel was sold out however we lucked out as the concierge found us a beautiful property called the Hotel Galvez. This hotel is celebrating it’s 100th year, completely remodeled to celebrate the century anniversary. It is just beautiful and we both give a big thumbs up to the property.

The winds were the topic of the weekend as the seawall was the entire bike course. Just for fun, as I wrote this blog, I compared weather from last year's race to this year's race. This year, the wind was much stronger making the bike portion more of a challenge. Even the pros struggled with the wind.

Saturday, we headed out for a short ride with our friend Sonia. I learned that wet pavement which included a trolley rail does not mix with race tires. Dr. Crane and I fell off our bikes at the same time, in same direction yet had different body scrapes. Bikes were fine, knees and elbow were scraped and Sonia stared at us puzzled on what just happened. We were laughing so hard the rest of the day about the fall, it removed much but not all of the pre-race butterflies.

This was my first race swimming in salt water. I learned it is much different than lake water and really different than the pool that is for sure. We dabbled a bit in the water with our speed suits and the water was okay. I decided to use the wetsuit on race day just in case as I am still not the strongest out in open water as opposed to the pool.

Finally, race morning arrived! A lovely 4:30am wake up call kicked things off. As we arrived to transition, we were instructed to park a further distance away due to last year’s apparent parking challenge. Walking the distance made us both really miss a Sherpa, the person who hauls everything and does everything for us. Half way through the walk to transition, I was thinking a little red wagon would be awesome to carry all of our stuff but I don’t think race officials would allow this in transition.

We were the last wave of swimmers to get in the water…ugh. The race started at 7:00am and after waiting 1.5 hours, we were ready to begin. At this race, we had to jump off the pier and bobble in the water until we were allowed to start swimming. I was worried at first then I just jumped in and hoped for the best. All I can tell you is that I was glad my goggles stayed in place and I did not freak out. One thing I learned is my wetsuit is now too large resulting in a lot of movement aka chafing –ouch.

I knew all along the day was a training day so I decided to play with the waves and try to get a rhythm. It was okay although I still drifted off course a few times. I have added this to my list of things to work on for the open water swim. My time was slower than expected but I didn’t worry about it. After awhile, I got into a groove and just had fun with it. I just kept going looking for the next buoy…nice and easy.

Transition one was a snap. I jumped on Celeste and off we went for one windy ride! My bike computer was not working so I had no data what so ever. Funny, without stats, I was actually faster on the bike. This race gave me a PR on the bike even though I felt like I was plowing through each mile thanks to the wind. On the return, we had an okay tail wind but faced the wind once again when we were back into town. Overall, there was a tremendous growth in strength from last years cycling and that is pretty groovy.

Heading back into transition I joked around with Dr. Crane and then she headed out for her run and I got ready for a lovely 4 loop walk. I have to say, as much as I wanted to run, I kept telling myself to keep my promise and walk it or my coach along with my foot would have let me have it. I walked past a lot of folks jogging and kept thinking…if they walked, they would actually be faster. It was long, but it was the smart thing to do.

Finally, after four loops, I crossed the finish line and completed my fourth half ironman race. This day was tough yet we both had a great time. I am still wondering how the heck I had my best time for a half ironman given I walked the run course. Cutting 30 minutes off was huge. That is pretty groovy also.

All in all, it was a great weekend. It was a huge confidence builder and turned out to be a lot of fun. Congrats to Dr. Crane, Sonia, Lee and all the athletes who participated in this windblown race.

Talk to ya next week,
Janet