Hey… so this is a couple of very short race reports, and a short retrospective on 2012.  I raced Ironman Lake Placid on July 22.  It went well, so I tried to throw together a pretty tough double, Rev3 Cedar Point on Sep 9 and the Leadman Epic 250 on Sep 22.  This proved to be a poor decision, as I found out I was just too fatigued to race well at 3 ultra-distance races in such a short time period.

Race #1 – Rev3 Cedar Point.  It was a choppy, non-wetsuit swim, which is never a good sign for me.  I had a huge deficit coming out of the water, and I was a bit deflated at the beginning of the bike.  Jeff Paul caught me at mile 30, and that snapped me out of my funk.  I actually rode pretty well the rest of the way, setting a 112 mile PR of 4:47:xx (23.4 mph), and I got myself back into the middle of the pack.  Out on the run, things were going decently.  Around mile 14, I realized there was no way I’d get into the top-10 (prize money went 10 deep), so I shut things down and just jogged it home for the last 12 miles, in an attempt to save my legs for Leadman.  The end result was a miserable 3:14 marathon, and a 14th place finish (9:15:xx total time).

Race #2 – Leadman Epic 250, Bend, OR.  Holy moly… this race was epic.  Lifetime Fitness absolutely hit it out of the park.  Amazing venue, creative distances, very well produced… I could go on and on about how great of a job they do.  It was a 5 km swim, 223 km bike, and 22 km run.  Here’s the swim venue, and bike course .  Crazy nice!

Things started out well, as I made it to a swim group, and got out of the water about 8-9 minutes behind the leaders.  I was right where I wanted to be… until I wasn’t.  Instead of going out and riding with the pack, I insisted on being conservative and riding strictly by heart rate.  This was a mistake, as I was quickly riding by myself, and “the race” was several miles up the road.  At mile 50, I got a case of really bad speed wobbles, and I was weaving uncontrollably back-and-forth across the road at 45 mph.  I’m still surprised that I didn’t crash, and it scared me so much that it all but took me out of the race from a mental perspective (on a semi-related note… I’m looking to get a new wheelset this winter…).  I got myself back together on the run, but it was far too little, far too late.  I ended up crossing the line in 9:09:53, good for 10th pro.

Thoughts 0n 2012

2012, by and large, was a disappointment.  I had one good effort (IM Lake Placid), and everything else was sub-par.  I won’t sit here and list several paragraphs of excuses.  I’m just going to say that I pushed things too much in training, I didn’t have the discipline to stop myself, and it turned into a giant negative feedback loop, affecting me both mentally and physically. I know what went wrong, and my coaches (Jesse Kropelnicki, and Tim Snow) know what went wrong.  It’s not going to happen again in 2013.  I refuse to let it happen again, and that’s that.   I know what I need to do to be fast in 2013.  Expect a big leap in my performance, because I have lofty goals, and I’m not going to let anything get in my way.