Now I'm the idiot...
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Possibly! I am going to keep asking around before I commit. And swooning over Poconos in my mind.
It really has to be a wave start... there's not much way to get in the water other than off the dock. I always fantasize about a mass start and just waiting until I am the LAST person in the water.
I was just rereading this thread and, funny. We did a wave start treading water at my sprint this weekend, and I was in the last wave. I actually had my dreams come true and it sucked.
I hung back so I was the last one in the wave, which was a mistake even for the swim, and then there was way too much dodging and passing on the bike and run. Live and learn.
Did you ever decide on a tuneup race? Pocono? Steelman?0 -
Steelman is not 100% flat, but it IS a fast course. The hills are nothing terrible, but there are some hills.
I admit my opinions on when to do tuneup races might be skewed by experience at the distances. So perhaps my thinking might not work for you. An Olympic distance race for me is a good workout when used as prep for a half. I might throw one in 4-5 weeks ahead of a Half if I find one that happens to be the right day, then the next two weekends finish the long distance training.
I went back through my training logs and pulled up my garmin files for the Steelman and Pocono courses:
Steelman Bike
Steelman Run
Pocono Bike
Pocono Run
It's pretty obvious that the Steelman bike course is modestly rolling and the run course is dead flat.
The Pocono (Oly) course has a couple of significant hills and the run course has a monster right in the middle. The Half course at Pocono actually isn't any worse - the hills are all concentrated in the early and late part of the course and the half just goes farther out.
Dunno if that helps any
I guess I missed this first time through, but after seeing those profiles, I'm REALLY excited about Pocono. Sub 3-hr PR, here I come!!!0 -
Rev3 Poconos!!! I have a little band of my club doing it with me.0
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Racing Pocono Oly? Sweet!
I am racing the half there.
Since I just rode the course this past weekend I will give you a fresh-in-my-mind blow by blow of the bike course:
T1 is at Smithfield Beach. You will mount your bike and ride the beach access road to the ranger station. There is a speed bump there so just keep your wits about you. Then the road climbs up out of the beach for about a quarter mile. You hang a right onto River Road. This road is rough chip seal and not terribly pleasant to ride on. It is a false-flat upgrade of about 1.5% for about 2 miles here. There will be a couple of good rollers over the next 2 miles, followed by a reasonably significant climb. I wouldn't call it a mountain, but it's a small-ring climb for sure. Once you hit the top of this climb, you roll down the back of this hill and get onto Community Drive.
The Park Service has gone and repaved Community Drive. Last year this road was a terrifying moonscape and was all downhill here. Controlling speed and maneuvering the potholes was not fun. Regardless this road is now CLEAN and FAST. You will head down this hill for a while. Community Drive will come to an end, and you make the turn onto Rt209.
Rt209 is the main park road and it will be CLOSED to traffic for the duration of the event.
You will go about 4 miles up Rt 209. The Oly course turns around here (You can skip my next paragraph as the Half course re-joins the Oly then)
The half course then keeps going out Rt209 for about 20 miles. Nothing terribly interesting here to report. The road is clean, fast and gently rolling. Plenty of places to pick up downhill speed and momentum to carry back uphill. Nothing even remotely close to a small-ring climb on this section. At the mile 24 turnaround you simply come back the way you came and re-join the Oly course.
The courses coincide again at Oly mile 9 and Half mile 41. You will make a right turn onto Creek Road and this section is clean, fast and rolling. There are a couple of sweeper turns in here so bring your high-speed turning skills with you. Creek Rd ends at a T about 1.5 miles in, you turn around and go back to Rt209, turn right, then turn left back onto Community Drive
Community Drive is now a climb back up (duh) and it is the last climb of significance. You will keep climbing when you get to River Rd as you turn left and get to the top of that hill. Now the interesting part begins. Back on River Rd you have some VERY fast sweeping downhill turns that you previously did uphill (so they weren't a big deal).
The road here is in not-awesome shape so you really need to be careful where you are riding and keep an eye on the road conditions. You are now headed generally downhill back towards Smithfield Beach. You will go past Smithfield and keep going on River Rd to the Shawnee Inn where T2 will be. This section of road is a bit messy, but I found the left side of the lane to be cleanest. Just be careful of people behind you trying to pass. There is one last "gotcha" hill about 2 miles from the end. It's short (100 yards long or so) but it comes out of nowhere and is a steep grade.
Once you get into the Shawnee area you make a series of quick turns through a condo development and into T2.1 -
That's FANTASTIC. Thank you!!! Now I need to develop high-speed turning skills. I can't find a place to practice those! 0
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I'm practice riding the Rev3 Poconos course on Saturday! I have no idea what to expect and it think it may be a real wake up call. We'll see!0
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Oh, and endless thanks Glevinso... we have been poring over your maps and your ride recap!!!!! I cannot thank you enough.0
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Posting a race report separately.... LOVED IT!!!!!!0
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I guess I have to ask again! How did IM AC go for you? It was your first half right? I happened to hear the announcer shout out your name as you got into the water. That must have been pretty cool.
I was out there for a good part of the day on the boardwalk cheering you guys on. I have the worst headache and sunburn from that.
Oh wait that headache was probably from overindulging in beer and whiskey after the race was over...0 -
Okay, so for starters - I did NOT hear the announcer!!! What a bummer! I am just going to try to remember it as if I did. I also didn't hear my name at the finish. I was in the ZONE.
Thank you so much for spectating. That run was brutal for me and I needed every shout out and cowbell I got! Evidently I got scalp burn myself.
I guess the big take away is that it is amazing what a difference a year and mediocre training can make. I felt 100% confident in my ability to finish, and meet a reasonable goal, by the time I toed the line on Sunday - and I was right. You might remember that as of last year when I signed up I had never done a tri with more than a 400m swim in a lake, other than an abysmal attempt at an ocean sprint tri. Longest bike ever was 35 miles.
I stayed local and left early so I didn't deal with ANY parking issues at all (which everyone is griping about). I had at least 90 minutes to set up transition and I have used just about every single one. That setup up was TIGHT though. I went from some ridiculous 8 minute T1 at Rev3 to 4:30 - still not fantastic but I was pleased. I practiced transition and took some basic tips and visualized it and got it down to a science.
I won't lie, the swim gave me a moment of grief. I liked the tiny swim out to the tread water start to warm up. I stayed in the back far corner. But then this woman was backstroking in a zig zag pattern back and forth across the whole swim space! I saw a guy in the wave behind us posting about it too. She was going fast enough to somehow keep cutting in front of me. Once I shook her it got better, but then I hit the red buoys, which in later waves have been called "death buoys." I think I got lucky - I struggled at the buoys and it made me panic a little, but I settled in once I got past them. I didn't actually *stop* like I did at Rev3 because, well, when I stopped, I started quickly sailing backwards. They shortened the course, more than the .2 they had announced they were cutting off, and it was quite clear to me that they had - I knew I did not swim a mile. That was juuuust fine with me.
Ladders out were great, no complaints. Tripped on someone being stripped. Out on the bike I felt held back on the long stretch before getting on the Expressway, there were just SO MANY cyclists trying to claim space. Tons of people passing three abreast, "drafting" was unavoidable... a little frustrating. I have no idea whether that's normal because I've never been in a race this big. Once I got out into more open space I was feeling good, so I kept my speed a bit higher than I had intended (heart rate was just a tiny bit higher though). This course was FAST especially around the first half. My splits were nuts - 18.9 mph on the way out, 16.5 on the way back - but everyone's were like that due to the wind. I averaged 17.7 on my road bike, no aero bars - pretty proud of that. That's my typical pace in the crowded, twisty sprint I do every spring. My goal had been 16mph! The course was beautiful - I really love my home state and especially the rugged piney woods where I grew up. The bike just flew by for me, loved every second of it. My nutrition was dialed in. Grabbed bottles like a champ! On the last few miles before transition a guy pulled up and asked if I could spare any water - I was able to give him the half bottle of Endurance I had left that I had decided I was done drinking anyway.
Definitely took it easy into T2 but was totally happy with it. Felt very organized. There was a 2 mile run up and down and up and down an air strip for starters, and I kept thinking "this is here to separate the wheat from the chaff." Ugh that was awful. But I kept my pace exactly where I had planned, at 9:55. At the end I popped into the porta potty and I'm glad I did. Timed it - lost 1:24. But in the end that was completely irrelevant because my time goals for the run alone went out the window by mile 4. I had been mentally adjusting my overall goal while I speeding along on the bike but that proved totally irrelevant too. Wow, I don't know if I underestimated the challenge of running off the bike for that long, or if it was just tough conditions, or what, but that run was a big eye opener. Actually, I can compare my performance to women in my tri club whom I compete against all the time, and I know that my performance on the run was spot on where I would have hoped it would be, maybe even a tiny bit better. AND it was my strongest leg in comparison to my age group. But man, it's a tough hit when your half marathon PR is at an 8:41/mi pace and you finish this at over 11:00/mi! More than half an hour slower. Well, when I say it that way it doesn't feel quite so terrible. It was painful. I felt it in my quads - I think my system would have been fine to push harder but my legs held me back. I want a tri bike. There's a woman from my club I would really have liked to have matched, but she beat me by 7 minutes. A tiny bit on the swim, a tiny bit in transition - I beat her on the bike despite her fancy carbon aero nonsense - but she got me on the run. Because she saved her legs with her bike, or so my speediest friend tells me.
I struggled on the run with whether I had pushed too hard on the bike. But seeing that I performed right in line with typical performance against my friends, and knowing how much slower everyone was, I think I did the right thing. I felt FANTASTIC on that bike and it honestly would have been an effort to go more slowly.
So... out of the 70 or 80 women, not counting relays, from our club who did the race, I came in 8th!!! I am so stoked about this. Not that I'm trying to compete against my friends but it's such a good barometer or my progress. Okay, who am I kidding - of course I'm trying to compete against them! The women who finished ahead of me are all way tinier and/or trimmer than me, so of course now I'm trying to work up the motivation to shed some pounds because I know it's working against me. I am very very bad with the food. Unlikely to really happen. But I do need to get some my upper body shape back, work on my core, and get rid of the five extra pounds I put on during this training. Ugh; nothing like triathlon photos to show you what you really look like.
My club won the Ironman Tri Club program for our division; we are Div 2 but we had way more Ironman points than any other clubs. We missed the local Delmo Cup though - it only gives extra points to those finishing in the top 10 AG, and we only had one.
So my goals increased over the course of the summer. I started this process with the goal of 7:30, expecting to make it, with a B goal to finish. By the end of the summer I was at 6:40 A goal, 7:00 B goal, finish C goal. In the past couple of weeks I mentally was thinking 6:30 was possible but still sort of looking at 6:40. So I finished at 6:17, with a much faster bike and slower run than I expected. The swim was shortened to about .7 miles, so depending on the conditions I would have finished the full 70.3 right around the 6:30 mark!! Feels pretty amazing. I was a few spots shy of the top third of my age group for my first 70.3 without fancy wheels and as a terrible swimmer. (The swim didn't really impact much though, it was such a small segment of the race.)
I saw a few athletes with disabilities out there who blew me away; the police were awesome supporters despite having to deal with outraged drivers; the volunteers were second to none, with aid stations every 1.2 miles with ice, sponges, hoses, you name it; there was great crowd support.
I loved it, and the race distance itself feels totally manageable to me. It's the training that I'm not sure I would take on again anytime soon. Next year I'm going to focus on developing my bike and training hills and speed so I can try to PR my local sprint and the Rev3 Poconos Olympic, and I think I will do Survival of the Mills in October, a 7 stage race. Depending on where I get on my MTB over the winter I may try this Xterra that I deferred entry in this summer.
What a year! I have to thank everyone here for the encouragement that I was ready to step up to this distance - you were totally right and I am thrilled that I did this. I definitely relied on all of you to get me through. Oh yes - and now I have to go run, because I signed up for the Philly Marathon in two months!!!!
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Awesome report. Thanks! Glad you had fun.
The swim issues were reminiscent of the 2014 Challenge AC Full. You guys were going to swim out to what us CAC2014ers have dubbed the "treadmill buoy". Plenty of us got stuck swimming at it for 10-20 minutes making zero progress.
The report I heard from standing around the officials/directors was that the life guards out at the far turn buoy saw a huge whirlpool forming. They essentially said they couldn't even station-keep the motor boats, let alone the guys on SUPs. So they called it in that they were moving to a spot a bit short of that whirlpool. About 4 waves in we heard again that the AC beach patrol was struggling out there, and that there were swimmers making no headway. So they had everyone turn even earlier.
That swim venue is just tough with the currents. People look at this course and say it is dead flat, therefore it should be easy, however it has one of the most difficult swims to deal with, a very windy bike and the run is going to be HOT no matter what reasonable time of year you choose.
Congrats on your first half iron!0 -
Yes! I am quite familiar with treadmill buoy stories. I heard that all the beach patrol were struggling, and once I thought back it explained why I would sight and have plenty of room between them and me, and then the next time I'd look up I was about to run into one. The drama on the facebook page is so hot and heavy. DelMonte was hilarious in one his videos - "none of you are going back to the Olympic Training Center at Colorado Springs, you all went back to work, and you got there safely." Get over it, essentially. I loved that he pointed out that it's an AG race full of amateurs, because people are flipping out about OA rankings because of the mid-swim change. There are no OA rankings!
I'm so glad I didn't try to maintain my pace on the bike. Everyone is talking about how tough the second half is - I just went by feel and heartrate. It helped that I was so far ahead of my goal pace.
Thank you!0
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