Race Coverage

Tuffles, Pit Boards & Energy Pellets

Friday, 21 April 2023 00:10

By Ted Treise

Ironman 70.3 Augusta - The 2022 version was year number... FOUR for me at Augusta. Crazy to think I’ve raced each running of the race since 2018. Each year’s been special. 2018 was my first overall amateur win, 2019 was my first pro race, 2021 I had a breakout day with a sub 3:50 time. This year my goal was to have a fast swim and invest everything I had to make that front group on the bike then whatever happens happens on the run.

Swim

Augusta’s swim is a notoriously fast downriver swim. For the pro’s its typically non-wetsuit meaning we’re all in swim skins. Knowing how important it was for me to make a good group, I went all in with my tri suit down under my skin for max shoulder mobility.

After the national anthem, we jumped in, warmed up and jockied for position on the dock. Last year I lined up towards the middle of the river and it seemed like the shore side got a better jump in the current so this year I did the opposite with an inside line. The gun went off and for the first 5 minutes it was mayhem. Typically, in a deep water start you can tread water and be horizontal, but Augusta its more like AG nationals with everyone hanging on a floating dock then scrambling to get horizontal. To my right, Filipe went out of a cannon leaving a nice gap that became prime real-estate for clean water. A few of us got in a tuffle for it and lost a bit of time. After organizing ourselves a group got away and we were the third pack from what I could see....

Bike

I left the water and got a time from Dani on our pit board. I wanted to know where the front pack was and any big groups in between. She had on there +2 & +:55 which was awesome. 2 min down from the front group and a pack in-between to bridge up to is, like, perfect!

With high hopes I got through transition on onto the bike course going all out to catch that :55 pack. Well almost all out ~ 380 watts. After about 10 minutes I got a sighting of the group & their motos on an uphill. I timed them at about :60 ahead. Have I lost 5 seconds hauling the mail like this..? no.. Again, I double down and kept smashing. 10 minutes later, no sight. At about 30 min in, I was passing people who were shelled from the group then got another glimpse on a long uphill.. STILL around a minute up.. come on! I was getting a little tired but decided to, I don’t know, triple down(?) and hit the gas for another 30 minutes. I held 360 watts for that first hour and didn’t sniff them. Pretty disheartened at this point, I backed it down and went into solo TT mode. My goal at this point was to basically not give up, and see how the run shakes out.

Run

After a solo bike 2:10ish bike I got rolling on the run defiantly feeling those matches from the bike. Again, the goal here was to keep fighting the whole race even though I was in like 14th. My reoccurring thoughts were positive. A.) ‘I’m going to keep hammering my way and just maybe I can run my way into the top 10’ and B.) ‘Some day in the near future you’ll feel like this when it really does matter and you’ll think about the solo fight today’. Between my positive talks and seeing Dani & Tanner on the course, it was like little energy pellets here and there. Then before you know it, runs over! (13th - 3:54:49) Back to non-racing life – work, taxes, our cat/s expensive organic, Non-GMO, food. Take me back to life on the race course! .

My last race of the year will be Waco 70.3. It’s been a blast of a year and I’m looking forward to putting icing on this cake.