• Race Results
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My Oliver race day started with an early morning wakeup from an Oriole at our bedroom window; with 4am Oriole calls who needs an alarm clock. After the 45 min drive from Summerland, we arrived in transition. I hooked up with Bronwyn, Colleen, Stan, et al for a ten minute warm-up jog. Coming back to my bike, I discovered that all of my transition gear had been pushed aside and a new towel, shoes, and helmet had taken it’s place. “Who would move my stuff?” I declared with an appropriate amount of disgust.

The women across from me starting blabbering and looking at me with stress in her eyes. I felt for her. She had a serious case of the pre race jitters. She had set up her transition area behind her own bike (moving all my stuff in the process). She was not feeling the same confident calm that I had going. I explained that she probably wants to put her gear at the front of her bike so she could just pull out her bike and go. Even in her pre-race panic, she could see the logic in that. As she moved her stuff (and I put my stuff back exactly where it had been), you could almost feel the collective sigh of relief from the other four women on my rack. As everyone moved their transition gear to more logical locations, I escaped to put on my wetsuit.

Waiting for our turn, I enjoyed joking around with Deb. The swim start was insane. In retrospect, Bronwyn, Deb, and I started in the stupidest spot: right up at the front and in the middle. Bodies, arms, punching, kicking. At one point, a hand grabbed my foot and pulled me right under water and I thought, “I’m going to die!” Yup, I freaked out. Once I realized I was freaking out, I turned 90o to my left and swam over top of everyone to get to the edge. Once on the outside, I started breast stroking and tried to convince myself that I WASN’T going to die.

I breast stroked to the first red bouy. Heading towards the green roofs I tried to swim front crawl but could only manage 1-2 strokes in a row. I thought, “Oh man, I’ve really screwed this day up.” I used the visual of my solo swims in the outdoor pool at UBC to bring me away from the stress of the crowded swimming. Slowly the panic subsided and I began swimming. I felt myself gliding through the water and focussed on pulling. Now that I’d given everyone a head start, I started to reel them back in. By the end of the first loop, it was still pretty crowded but I managed to find open water. For the whole second loop, I got back to swimming, this time out on the edge. I caught all kinds of people on that second loop. Coming back to shore, I saw Bronwyn ahead of me and even tickled her toes for a bit before deciding that I wanted back to the open water.

Coming out of the water, Coach Drew’s cheers about “your super strong swim” caused an almost instant switch to a positive head space for me. I went into the bike feeling good and realizing that my swim wasn’t as big of a disaster as I had worked it out to be. The full racks in transition were another clue confirming that my disastrous swim was pretty all right.

Starting off on the bike, I was feeling good. I kept my HR at 160 and found myself passing tons of people. Adjusting to the dry air and heat, I changed my hydration plan to drinking every 5 minutes. I resisted the urge to hook onto the big drafting groups that were zipping by and kept with the race plan.

After about an hour and half of tempo riding on the bike, I started to get hot. My quads started to ache and feel tired. At the next available aid station, I grabbed a water bottle and dumped half of it on my head. I started to think about IronMan and how I couldn’t ride this pace for that day. With those thoughts bouncing around in my head, I took the intensity way back and dropped my HR down 15-20 beats. Instead I focussed on the training ride, enjoyed the sprinklers in the orchards, and worked on getting the bad taste in my mouth to go away. I kept drinking gatorade every 5 minutes and ate a gel every 30minutes (~7-8 consumed).

For the last hour of the ride, I started to think about the run. There was nobody passing. Everyone was just chugging along like a big train. Every once and a while, a rider would scream by (mostly women – interestingly enough) and I just rode that train to the finish. I was really tired and hot coming off the bike, so I wasn’t sure how the run would go.

Right from my quick transition, I knew I was feeling good for the run. Racking my bike, I could hear Stan’s name announced as he started off. As I started out on my run, I gave a high five to my Uncle. Once into the rhythm of running, I felt the relief from thinking to myself, “Only 2hr to go!”

At every aid station, I grabbed one ice and two waters. The waters were immediately dumped on my head. Then I dumped the ice in my hat and cramped the hat back on my head. The ice gave me brain freeze, but it also saved me. A couple of times, I put ice in my bra (and once, even in my shorts). It was 37oC and this run course was out to kill people. At one point, I had to use my hand to block the view of some guy hurling in front of me (dude, you almost made me puke). On the long turn around between aid stations I could feel myself wilting. But as soon as I made it back to the aid station and did my ice/water routine, I felt better. I sipped gatorade from my fuel belt – that was my trick.

I had a damn good run. I passed Stan at the second water station. I saw Andrew coming back from the turn around and he was looking good. I passed Chung at the end of the first loop and told him about the ice in the hat trick – and he told me he was going to hurl.

During the run, my inner mantra was “go forever pace” (as in running at this pace, I could go forever). My HR was hovering around 170. If I got excited about chasing someone down, I would relax back into my own rhythm by repeating “go forever pace, go forever pace” in my head. I didn’t push hard. I ran my own relaxed pace.

On the second loop, I saw a few more of my LETC friends. Bronwyn was looking particularly good. At the turn around, Andrew was still going well just ahead of me. Marnie and I exchanged cheers. Brian was cheering on Deb, “Just keep moving forward.”

Let me step aside, for a moment, and explain how hard this day was. The weather was 37oC, hot, and dry. The run was open with hardly any shade. Almost all the racers that I saw on the second loop were walking. Multiple people were hurling. This day took it’s toll. Finishing under these conditions is a serious victory. As Deb told me afterwards, “It’s all about the hardware, baby!” I’m really proud of our LETC group this weekend. We had some really tough days, but every one of us finished. That’s a serious victory.

For me, I was lucky to be having such a good day. When I saw Coach Drew on the run and he asked me how I was feeling, I was almost giddy with my response. I came into that finish running super fast. I was so excited. I was literally jumping down that hill, whooping it up, cheering and punching my fists in the air. It was fun. Torbin says that I should finish every race like that. You can’t help but smile. It was a good day.