Given to Tri

This year’s race season didn’t go the way I hoped at all. After a strong start at Ironman 70.3 St. George in June, I failed to finish Ironman Coeur d’Alene and had to drop out of the Echo Triathlon in July to deal with my knee pain. My make-up race, Ironman Canada, was canceled at the last minute due to the wildfires in British Columbia. After all that, I was looking forward to this year’s Hole Half Marathon, so I could at least get one more race in the books this year and finish the season on a high note. It went pretty well, so without further ado, here’s my last race report of the year.

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At some point during our drive to the medical tent after I dropped out of Ironman Coeur d’Alene, Mike, the race official who took me there, brushed off some of the salty residue on my trisuit and commented, “Looks like you’ve lost some salt there.” I was in such bad shape I don’t remember anything else about our conversation, but that one comment has stuck with me as I’ve tried to understand what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.

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It’s been a little over a year since I started doing triathlons, and one of the things I’ve been pleasantly surprised by is how much I enjoy writing about it. Whether it’s writing a race report or about a crappy experience with a treadmill, I’ve found it’s a fun creative outlet.

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Well, this is it. After training for it since November, I finally raced Ironman Coeur d’Alene, my A race of the year and my first attempt at a full Ironman. I didn’t have any specific time goals for this race, just finishing, so the goals I had set for myself were simply:

1. Don’t drown
2. Don’t crash
3. Don’t bonk

Unfortunately, things did not go according to plan, and despite my best efforts, I was not able to finish the race. Read on for what may be my last triathlon race report of this year.

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Recently, I’ve been debating if it’s worth it to keep writing race reports for running races because I’ve done a few now, running is not my specialty, and I simply treat them as part of my triathlon training. But this one is a little special because I podiumed for the first time in my life, so here it goes.

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After a long and brutal Jackson Hole winter, it’s finally race season again, and I just finished my first race of the year, Ironman 70.3 St. George. I chose this as a B event for a few reasons: it’s within driving distance of where I live, it looked like a tough challenge, and I thought it’d serve as good race prep before my first full Ironman next month in Coeur d’Alene.

I originally planned to come to this race prepared to put in a decent effort and improve on my 6:14 finish in Boulder, but after facing some challenges with my swim training over the winter, and a potential knee injury in the past couple of weeks, I ended up downgrading my race goal from “sub-6 finish” to “just finish.”

Despite that, the race went both better and worse than I expected—read on for my first race report of the year.

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Last fall I started shopping for a treadmill so I could continue training over the winter for the races I have scheduled this year (Ironman 70.3 St. George in May, Ironman Coeur d’Alene in June, and Echo Triathlon in July), and after much consideration, I settled on the $3,750 Technogym MyRun. I don’t usually write reviews of things I buy, but while researching treadmills, I didn’t see many reviews of this particular model, so I thought it’d be worthwhile to share my experience with it, if nothing else as a cautionary tale for others who might be considering buying one.

TL;DR: It’s an awesome treadmill backed by an excellent iPad app, but unfortunately marred by Technogym’s abysmal customer support, which makes it hard to recommend.

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After a year of waiting, and six months of training, including two triathlons and two half marathons, I finally raced my A race for this year, Ironman 70.3 Arizona. I came expecting a difficult triathlon in the scorching Arizona heat and ended up experiencing a much different race, but I’m very satisfied with the results nonetheless; I raced about as good a race as I could have hoped for given the circumstances. Read on for my final race report of the year.

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This will likely be a short one: Today I raced the somewhat confusingly-named Hole Half Marathon, which is entirely unrelated to the Jackson Hole Half Marathon I did earlier in the summer. It went fine.

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One thing I never expected after racing my first triathlon in Bozeman back in June was that it would leave me so hungry for more. I couldn’t wait for my next race, Ironman 70.3 Arizona in October, so I made a last minute decision to sign up for Ironman 70.3 Boulder this past weekend. I’m just halfway through my training plan for Arizona, and signed up for Boulder too late to do a proper taper, so I considered it a B race, with the goal of gaining more experience and testing my pacing, gear, and nutrition.

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