Race Coverage

Pig Pens & Low Expectations...

Friday, 03 August 2018 23:10

By Mike Buenting (mikebuenting.wordpress.com)

Ironman 70.3 Madison Race Report - It’s the morning after myself and some friends raced in Ironman Madison 70.3 Triathlon! And sadly, I can’t sleep past 6:15am! So here I am writing and processing the events of the previous day! (My girls are sleeping still! Lucky!)

The weekend has been fun, our hotel the AC Hotels by Marriot is fabulous! And I do enjoy the town of Madison and of course being with friends and my family! But the weather well that’s another story! Had the race been Saturday morning the weather was beautiful, calm winds, dry! Sunny and warm. But of course, we could not be so lucky! Sunday morning about 1am I woke up to go to the bathroom and heard the thunder and thought ugh! Then when it was finally time to go to transition that morning it was light rain, but you could tell it had poured rain hard as the transition was mud and wet! Then as we all stood in transition trying to stay dry, trying to keep our gear dry and just laughing and saying ugh! The thoughts that ran through all our minds was will this very hilly/technical and difficult bike course be safe? With wet roads, potential puddles and flooded spots, fast downhills into quick hard left or right technical turns and then wet...

wheels/brakes, mud on tires will we have braking power? The race organizers kept saying race is on as planned so we left transition with swim gear and headed to the swim start. At this point the rain was coming down hard, we were all shivering cold and soaked! Then the race got delayed 30 minutes because of this weather and more and more people started getting bikes out of transition and going home, deciding not race and be safe! This thought went through my head over and over! This was not an “A” race for me so I really did not want to risk an accident on the course in these conditions. But after standing on the beach a bit and seeing all my friends I coach and traveled with line up to swim I said well crap I can’t be the one guy who does not give it a go! So off I went into the choppy rough waters and started swimming! The swim I’m frustrated with because I’ve worked so hard on this and know I’m a much better swimmer than my time shows! But the chop was really hard for me to stay on course and find a stroke that allowed me to breathe and not swallow in the waves. I found that stroke got into a groove but then realized I swam way off course! Even bumped into a kayak. So I just stayed relaxed and swam and fought the waves, fought around other swimmers and made it to the beach.  A 38 minute swim is nothing great but for these conditions I guess it’s OK? Clearly sighting and holding a straight line in open water is something I need to work on.

Transition 1; call this mud wrestling? Ha.. the transition area which is grass but turned to pure mud was nasty! Made it to my bike but the mud was so bad, I had to carry my bike out of transition to the mount like, not run and roll it like normal. Needless to say transitions were not fast on this day! READ MORE