1/2 IronMan Weekend 2

On Friday, Graeme, Andrew and I escaped from the city and drove down 101 to Lake San Antonio. The ride was uneventful other than for a pit stop at Denny's in King City where I loaded up with fish and chips, onion rings and a vanilla milkshake in preparation for Saturday's big event. King City was one of the places that we had camped last summer on the AIDS ride.
As expected it had started to rain, and by the time we got to the camp site things were looking gloomy. Fortunately, we found a decent spot to camp in near some of the IronTeam who had established quite a nice little set up. I quickly realised that I was out of my league when it came to camping. Apart from my tri gear, all I had bought was a tent (borrowed from Brandon), a sleeping bag and food. Everyone else had come better prepared. Most had larger tents with annexes, camping chairs, and cooking stations. One team had even brought a generator and a TV. It is hard to believe that they could not go without TV for the weekend.
I had a very restless night. For some reason, I do not sleep very well when I am camping. The rain didn't help as I was worried about touching the sides of the tent and letting water in. Also, we had to get up at 5:30 which played on my mind a little.
Come 5:30 AM it seemed like most people were already up and about. It was wet but the rain had stopped. It was odd eating breakfast standing in the dark by my car. I had pre-prepared a bowl of oatmeal overnight which tasted rather good.
By 6:15 we had driven down to the lakeside to get our gear sorted out and our transition stations set up. As it became lighter it also became apparent that the lake was covered in fog. Obviously this was a big problem as nobody could see where we were going to be swimming. After some discussion, our coach Tom declared that we would swim a modified course consisting of four shorter loops. This was a little disapointing in that the distance turned out to be a little shorter than the 1.2 miles that were originally planned.

The lake was cold but nowhere near as cold as the Bay. It only took a few minutes to adjust to adjust to the temperature, afterwhich it felt fine. The swim went well. As the course was shorter there were a lot more turns to negotiate and more jossling to contend with which was fine by me as I need to get used to this. After four loops, I headed back to the shore and over to the bike transition.
The bike ride was a tough but scenic 56 miles. As we climbed out of the valley the fog lifted and the sun came out. It was great to see blue sky after so many weeks of rain. The course was rather hilly. The first 2/3rds were made up of rolling hills over which I managed to keep an average speed of 17 mph. The latter part of the ride was more challenging. At about mile 40 we encountered 'Old Nasty', a notorious hill, with a false top. In fact it had two false tops which nobody had warned me about. The hills took their toll on my overall speed which dropped to 16 mph. Overall, I completed the bike course in 3 hours 25 minutes.
The run was something else. It started off well with the first couple of miles around the edge of the lake but got tougher as we headed inland and up onto some rain drenched meadows. Some of the hills were just too steep to run up. However, apart from a couple of short walks, I managed to keep running at a steady sub-10 minute mile pace. After about 9 miles we were back on the road running down a long hill only to have to turn around and run back up it again. The run was rather lonely as I only saw one other runner until we rejoined the road. For some reason I kept thinking about mountain lions.
I completed the run in 2 hours 5 minutes, a little under 10 minutes per mile, which I was extremely happy about considering how hard the course was.
In all, the course took about 6 hours 20 minutes with transitions. I came in 9th out of the 100 or so of us that participated. Overall, I am quite pleased with how things went especially as this is supposed to be one of the hardest 1/2 Ironman courses in the country.

The rest of the weekend was uneventful. On Sunday we manned a waterstop for another TNT team who were running a 1/2 marathon in preparation for the Wildflower in a few weeks time. It was quite a hoot. Apparently we could be heard for some way off.