Sea Legs Shuffle

Sea Legs is an interesting race for me. Four times it's been either the first or second race since Ironman Lake Placid, including this year. And once upon a time, I won the race. Also, the race was one of the Force 5 Sports races before Dave died. So the race brings up a lot of different memories...

My calves having gotten shredded in LP, my strategy running this 10 miler just two weeks later was to be careful. That didn't stop me from starting on the starting line, nor from running a 5:50 opening mile despite that one short hill on the bridge. It's an interesting race, in that it is basically three courses- flat opening three miles, 4 miles of serious rollers, and three more flat miles (with that one hill about half a mile from the finish). You absolutely cannot lay down in the first mile because you'll be out of the race promptly.

I was surprised that I was running well.

The one real run I'd done, seven days after the ironman, had been 90 minutes of very painful running. You know how they talk about microtears in your muscles. On that run, I could feel them, and my legs hurt in a way that made me think I should stop, but I was running 7:50 miles so I'd stayed with it.

I was not surprised that Chris Chisholm, Jim Zoldy, and Chris Schulten passed me. I settled in and tried to limit the damage as I started slipping back in the numbers, and held pretty well through three miles.

Just before three miles, Frank Tiroletto and Shannon McHale went by me.

After watching the Tour, maybe my brain is a little warped. But I knew that Frank running with Shannon was bad, as Frank is in my age group and a guy I need to beat. So on the next hill I attacked, hoping to peel Frank off Shannon. Instead, I peeled Shannon off Frank and he went. I could have stayed with him in the short-term, but I wanted to run my own race, so I let him carry the pace and he separated. I explained to Shannon that I had nothing in my legs and if she wanted to run with someone, it should be FRank, not me. She wasted no time.

The next four plus miles were interesting, but not much to blog about. We went up hills. We went down hills. They added about 100-200 metres. After six miles, I got passed by Bill Thramann, who did his best to encourage me by telling me I was on 6:10 mile pace.

After seven miles, as the course basically flattened out again and I started picking up the effort. By eight miles, I was reeling people in again and I was told later by one of the people behind me that I really took off at eight miles.

I'm not exactly sure what I did where but I ran the last three miles in 17:42. And after giving up all that space because I was trying to be conservative and not hurt those calves, I closed to within about 2 seconds with 150 yards left.

Only to have someone yell 'Go, alan,'. That was what Frank needed. I was runny so hard I was practically wheezing and he didn't know I was there- until he got the heads up. Once he crossed the line I coasted in, so close...

Frank ran a great race, and I ran too conservatively. But I'll take a top-25 finish in a state championship, and a good 6:08 pace for 10 miles.

Oh well. Two weeks easy now, then time to get ready for the next big thing.

Reflections

The Ironman, at its core, is a selfish pursuit. You can train with friends (I don't), take your family to the race (I did), but out there, it's about you. If it's not, on race day, about you, you may struggle.

However, the next day is something different. The day after Lake Placid last July, I stood in line and kept another athlete signing up company, shattered the windshield of my wife's car (from the inside), packed the car. Still, Lake Placid is a 6 hour drive from where I live and you don't have to be up at the crack of dawn the next day.

I was up at six am the day after the race, packing my bike. The whole morning would be mostly running around getting the packing done, picking things up at the race venue, and trying very hard to put us in a position where we'd have time to go to Gordon Biersch for lunch (and beer). And unlike the previous day, I got everything done on time and we made it to the pub. I wasn't driving, so I was drinking beer.

I was also partially absorbed in self-loathing about the race when I realised that something major was going on. The TVs in the pub were set to Fox News, who like CNN, gets a single story, loops up two minutes of footage and is off and running for the next however many hours (is our news really packaged in three minute intervals because our attention spans are that short) ? Of course, the footnote during the Virginia Tech coverage, which lasted our entire meal, was how 150 people in Iraq had been killed and another 150 injured by car bombs. Perspective (or its lack) is sure an interesting thing.

Wow. What a way to get out of your own reflection- I work in higher education, after all, in fact, I'm a criminal justice major. Here you've had this bad, I mean a stinker of a race, and you have to turn around and admit to yourself how meaningless it is in some ways. Tragedy has a way of making you feel small, or at least restoring some perspective.

But there was more to come. That Saturday, a friend who'd I'd only really gotten to know at an Ironman (Florida) died during a marathon swim- Dave Parcells. Dave is someone you should google. The real deal. Double Channel crosser. Million dollar fund-raiser. Sucessful business man, first-class dad. A real guy, the sort of person who makes a difference and leaves a mark and is missed. The type of person who can't be summed up or dismissed with words at all.

I spent six months with a goal in mind, an Ironman race. Six days in the rearview, I had to admit that whatever happened out there was way less important that what was going on back east. Sometimes, a race is just a race, and life- wow, life is complicated, isn't it ?