World's Toughest

When I woke up the Thursday before the World's Toughest Half and realized that I didn't even own a pair of tri shorts anymore it really hit me that I hadn't been a triathlete for quite some time. I hadn't even walked into a transition area since I lay in a heap at the Ironman Cozumel finish line almost 18 months ago, and before that I hadn't followed a triathlon through to the run phase (although I'd done a bunch of aquabikes) for another year or more. Now that I found myself mixing among tri-geeks again I bristled a bit, but it was more like coming home. As much as I griped and complained about how much the event cost and how much shit I had to pack, triathlons are familiar and tactically simple compared to some of the odd stunts I've gotten into since.

I signed up for this triathlon in part because it fell on a weekend when I had nothing better to do, and in part because I wanted to stalk a fellow blogger, Gretchen whose trail photos and stories I've been eating my liver over for years. Since Auburn is only an hour from where Gretchen lives in Truckee, it seemed like a great chance to track (stalk) her down and meet the legend behind the screen. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the week before the race I was experiencing a new sensation that has begun since my drunken hiatus from training last summer and fall: feeling tired. Now that I work about 12 hours a day running, demonstrating, and putting weights away, as well as a minimum of 3 spin classes and a boot camp class a week, I just don't get time "off." By my estimate, I probably do at least 100 squats a day, 50 deadlifts, a football field of farmer carries, 40 sets of stairs, and dozens of miles of walking before it even gets time for me to make the decision whether to do my own training or not. Sometimes it just catches up, and this week was one of those weeks where my hamstrings were tight, my butt was out of juice, my quads felt creaky, my core was achy, and my back needed some serious cracking. Also, this week I got another year older. Coincidence? Maybe not.

Now that my excuses are out of the way, I turned up in Auburn just as I was for the race expo not entirely sure what I was getting myself into. I hadn't been able to find an elevation profile on the event website, so I pulled a few guys over at the expo to explain what the climbing would be like. "Well if you've been out of it for as long as you say you have, you sure picked a doozy to start," a SMOFo told me as we walked back to the parking lot together (we were best buddies from the time we met, of course). "But this is only the World's Toughest Half because the other halves are so flat."

"Oh," I said. "I thought that they got the name because hadn't been copyrighted yet." I mean what did they do, go and check out every half ironman distance race in the whole wide world?! Based on a complete lack of evidence either way, I had decided that the race's name was an exaggeration. Still, it didn't bode well that I saw more drop bars in the parking lot than I saw bullhorns. I have done hilly triathlons before and even at those I felt like the only one with clip-on bars. But here some of the riders hadn't even bothered with the aero bars at all. Gulp.

Then I went to drop my running stuff down at T2, which was separated from T1 by about 7 miles (I hate it when they do that! The logistics are such a nightmare for a single person.) All my chores done for the day, I went to check into the hotel and scare up some dinner and breakfast for the next morning. I'd forgotten to bring a breakfast that met with my standards, and with no fridge, no silverware, and no plates or bowls, I was at a loss for what to have for breakfast before the race. I wandered around the upscale supermarket for half an hour before I finally located a breakfast burrito which I purchased and took home to have half for dinner and half for breakfast.

Once I bit into this "burrito", I found it to be was THE WORST BREAKFAST BURRITO EVER ASSEMBLED. It was made with what might have been a microwaved egg back in the mid-90's but now was just some yellow plastic, a slice of cheddar cheese from the sandwich bar, and some nasty white starchy rice that was so overcooked that it was the size of mature maggots. The second half of this culinary aberration found its way to my tummy at 4 o'clock on race morning, 2 1/2 hours before the start and sat there undigested until after the swim. I drove to the start, did my whole getting ready for the start thing, and then made my way down to the water with a few minutes to go.

They were shoving everyone into the water for a "mandatory warm-up," but I knew better than to go in past my ankles. It was a good thing too, because one of the buoys kept drifting off course and they had to start the race 5 minutes late so that they could re-set it. By the time the second wave (my wave) went off 10 minutes after they cleared the water, all the people who had "warmed up" were shivering and their lips were blue. I on the other hand was nice and toasty warm in my pee-filled wetsuit.

My swim training has been spotty at best, so I really, really, really didn't mean to take it out too fast. But I just got so frustrated by all the feet in my face in the washing machine that somehow I wound up out of breath and feeling queezy by the first turn buoy (of which there were six, three per lap for two laps). After that, "too much breakfast" said in a queasy voice pretty much sums up my whole swim experience.

By the second lap I had slowed down considerably and was still wondering whether I would need to take my face out of the water to puke or if it was possible to just puke right down into the water. I came around the second turn buoy, pointed toward the third and started swimming, and then I could see... THE BOTTOM! If you don't know, THE BOTTOM is where The Monster lives, and I really, really don't want to see that shit. I couldn't see THE BOTTOM on the last lap. What gives? I could see THE BOTTOM the whole way to the last turn buoy (the one that had been drifting at the start), and I certainly didn't remember that buoy being so close to the edge of the water the last time I passed by here. As I passed, I could see a kayaker holding on to the corner of the buoy so that it wouldn't float out of the water and onto the rocks altogether. Great. So now the swim course was long and me trying to hold down breakfast all this time.

As I aimed back toward the swim exit, I looked up and saw a paddleboarder next to me. Now what was he doing there? Was I swimming off course (I'd been doing a lot of that today too)? I breathed over my other shoulder to see what I could see over there and SPLASH! The lead sprint swimmer who was just passing me kicked a huge wave right down my throat. Now I really felt like I was going to puke. I cruised into the finish, and about 100 yards away I looked up to see where I was going and... 50 orange caps were coming right at me! As we were coming in, we had to cross through the "mini tri" competitors who were just setting out for their swim.

When I finally hit solid ground, I stood up and I walked. I had stepped on my foot funny and it really hurt, but that wasn't really why I was walking. I walked slowly up that chute until I was quite sure that that nasty excuse for a breakfast burrito would stay in my stomach where it belonged. Then I slowly puttered into transition to put on my helmet, sunglasses, socks, and shoes. Then I looked around to see if there was any other way I could put off riding. When I saw there was none, I took my bike and jogged toward the bike exit.

I mounted my bike and began to ride away. We began a roughly 10-mile, 2000 foot rolling climb right out of transition. Before we were even out of earshot of the transition area, one of the guys riding near me veered off to the right, hit the curb, and turned his right side into hamburger meat on the concrete and grass. There hadn't been anything in the road, he hadn't been in his aero bars, he hadn't been reaching for anything, there were no errant bunnies crossing the road to avoid, the road was relatively straight, we'd been moving at about 8 mph up the hill, and there were spectators who didn't seem to recognize him sitting about 3 feet from where he ate shit. So there was no reason to cut close to that particular spot on the side of the road. What's with triathletes and bike handling?

The SMOFos at the start had warned me that the hardest climb on the course was the climb out of the swim, but for some reason the difficulty still annoyed me even though I knew it was coming. It wasn't the hardest climb I'd ever done, or even the hardest climb I'd done in the past month, but in the first 7 miles it lurched up some 1000 feet, then topped it off with another 400 over the next 3 miles or so. The grades maxed out at about 12%, which was enough to have me breathing hard and push my heartrate into the high 180's. I felt like I was breathing through tissue and my aero set-up felt uncomfortable underneath me. Then this girl in a Cal skinsuit rode by me like I was standing still and I had no energy or desire to follow her. What was wrong with me?

I took a moment to beat myself up before I realized that I hadn't trained for this race. I had no right to get pissed about results unless I'd done some specific preparation for this race, or even this sport. I also realized that even if I chased someone down on the bike, it would all be over once we started running. Forget it! After that I just tried to enjoy myself and ride only exactly as hard as I had to and no harder. Make no mistake, there was no 'phoning in' this race. The total elevation gain in the first 30 miles was some 2000 feet (more like 3500 with all the crinkling up and down), and when it was time to go downhill it was usually too fast to even pedal. And while I'm complaining about the elevation, of the 2000' elevation gain, we only got to give about 1000 of it back because the finish was some 1000' higher than the start. So in short, even though I was dragging my feet, I was earning my lunch!

Right from the very beginning I felt a deep, not quite stabbing pain above the top of my illium (the big wing-like muscle in my pelvis). It was a familiar old feeling that I had always assumed was caused by yoga because I stopped doing yoga regularly around the time I stopped doing a lot of tri riding which was right around the time that the pain went away. It felt like I needed to twist and crack my back, or like someone was sticking a dull knife right into the spot above the bone, and the pain started radiating down my leg to my hamstring, putting a hitch in my pedal stroke. It started immediately on one side, and by the halfway point it was there on both sides. Was this what old guys meant when they said their backs were tight? Whenever I could, I stood up and tried to move my hips around, but by the time I drifted into transition my back was so tight that I could hardly move.

I hung my bike up and looked forlornly at my stuff in the grass. How was I going to reach it? Slowly but surly I got on my shoes and visor, tied my shoes deliberately (yes, I'd decided to skip lace locks) then grabbed a bottle and my race belt. Before waddling off I gave my back a quick twist and got a very unsatisfying crack, but my traps cramped up int he process. Fantastic. Now I would be running like Frankenstein rather than like a pirate with two peg legs.

I tottered out of transition and onto a flat little footpath through the woods. The run was a 3-lap course that broke down into 3 distinct sections:

• Section 1: Flat 1-mile on a narrow foot path next to a man-made canal where the only thing to worry about was not getting so out of it that you tripped or just simply drifted into the canal.
• Section 2: 1.5 miles downhill (roughly 400') on a mostly gravel path, plus a short, steep jaunt down another footpath through the grass.
• Section 3: Run back up the way you came, then skip the path next to the canal and instead turn toward the finish, run a loop around (and through) the transition area, and back out for the next loop.

It took most of the first loop for my back to loosen up. I only made the mistake of looking at my GPS once. When I was at about a 10:37-minute-mile on a flat road and had no hope of picking it up, I decided not to look at my pace anymore. I wanted to walk, but I realized that I was so knotted up and tired that walking wouldn't really feel any better and would just drag the whole process out. I just wanted to be done at this point. Right from the very first lap all I could think about was how great it would feel to lie down in the grass at the end.

During the first lap, before my back had loosened up and I could move a little more freely (if not more quickly) I put it out there to any magical or all-powerful entity out there in the universe that I know I have the physical strength to finish this, but if he/she/it would give me the mental strength to do it without too much fussing, that would be pretty fucking fantastic. Whether it was God, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Mother Earth, the Universe, Allah, or the awesome power of my own determination that answered my prayers, it worked. When I started running, I felt on the edge of despair like I usually do at mile 23 of a marathon. By the last mile of the first loop, my discomfort and abjection had dropped back to about mile 22 of a marathon and just kind of sat there right at the point just before shit gets really bad.

A few chicks passed me on the run, but it was hard to tell how many because of the multiple-loop course. Maybe it was because I had gotten off the bike later than I used to, and maybe it was because of all the hills, but I didn't get trounced as thoroughly as I usually do in the run. Or so I thought. Ignorance is bliss.

By the final loop I was losing it pretty bad. I was hungry, my everything hurt, and I was beginning to lose track of what I was doing. My fantasies about lunch and lying down in the grass were feeling more and more real and I would snap out of it and realize I was still on this stupid hill that really wasn't pretty enough to be worth all this. Although I felt just as horrible at the beginning as at the end, now that I look back my pace had dropped from roughly 9-minute miles on the first loop, to 10-minute miles on the second loop and 11-minute miles on the third loop. Shit was going all bad and I had no idea.

"And here comes Claire [and then he pronounced my last name right] from Pacifica coming in to the finish!" the announcer said as I wandered down the finishing chute. I tried to put my hands above my head at the finish line, but more to stretch my back and open my lungs than out of triumph. A volunteer handed me a bottle and a medal still in its plastic packaging and I spotted a stool.

"Can I just sit down for a bit?" I asked. By degrees I lowered myself to the stool and sat there drinking water and being glad that it was done for several long minutes before I drifted out of the finishers' area. It took me a long, long time to get changed into regular clothes in the bathrooms, then I tried to scare up some food from the post-race buffet. Chipotle was making tacos, which meant just a little bit of cheese and a tortilla filled with pico de gallo for me (no shredded animal, thank you very much). Looking back, I think it was just lack of nutrition that kept me feeling like hell (I was dealing with some nausea again by the second half of the run), but right now I was preoccupied with another problem: my car was 7 miles away and that's where my wallet was. Until I got my wallet, I couldn't buy anything more than a tortilla filled with pico de gallo.

I got directions back to the car from a bunch of locals while their buddy threw up strawberries and tacos into the grass next to us, and then I got on my bike again with all my stuff in a side-loaded duffel on my back, and started back toward the car thinking the whole time about how fucked-up this was. My crotch hurt. Once I got back to the car, there was no way that I would have the energy to drive another hour north to see Gretchen and still be able to stay awake for the ride home. Fail!

Overall I did solidly average. I finished second in my age group, but there were only 4 women in my division. I finished 12th woman overall, but there were only about 39 women in the race. I finished 80th out of 160 overall. Overall I was 60th on the swim, 67th on the bike, and 96th on the run. It was nothing to brag about, but for once I was pretty darned proud to have finished. It hadn't been easy, and although I had a basic level of fitness in all three sports, triathlon is more than just a swim, a bike, and a run strung together. It hadn't gone as smoothly as I'd hoped, but I finished without mentally checking out and walking. So that was something.

The next day everything was sore. My back, my traps, my delts, my hamstrings, my glutes and even my SCM (that muscle in your neck that sticks out when you stick out your bottom teeth). Now I really, really, really need to take some recovery time before the AIDS ride and my 200 miler the following week. Will I do another one? Maybe some other time, but not for awhile.