Race Coverage

More From the Most Interesting Man in Columbia Heights...

Monday, 31 October 2011 03:00

By Matthew Payne

Soma Half - I always swore up and down that I'd never become one of those people. You know, the ones who spam up the internets with a bazillion pictures of their kid(s). But oh well, screw it... this little dude--Mikey--is too cute to not share. He must get that from his mom...

I debated hanging up the Lycra for the season back in September after Best of the US. Going out on top and all... but that lasted all of a day or two before I found myself spending a good deal of my free time searching for a mid-October half iron race to jump into. I eventually settled on the weekend of 10/22-10/23, which narrowed my choices down to 70.3 Austin and the Soma Half, in Tempe, AZ. Soma won out on the basis of logistics. Fights were way cheaper and it would be much easier to pull off in a 3-day weekend. Doing Austin on that timeframe would've required flying on Delta, and I'll see them and their $175 each way bike fee in hell.

So... on Saturday morning I packed up the trusty Orbea and made my way to the airport for my flight to Phoenix....

Pipe insulation and zip ties... that's how the cool kids pack their bikes.

I got my favorite seat on the plane (exit row window), a rental car so new it didn't even have a license plate, and the hotel in Tempe let me check in right away when I showed up at 11AM. To top it all off, when I made it to packet pickup later in the afternoon I was given bib #612... (photo below L) totally appropriate as I'm pretty sure I was the only Minnesota resident in the race. Everything's comin' up Matt!

The Pre-Race Jams

Progression Through Unlearning by Snapcase. I'm not even sure how I can adequately describe the awesomeness of this album. It was released in 1997 (damn I'm getting old) and I'll bet I haven't gone a month since then without listening to it. And every single time I crank it up it still puts a giant shit-eating grin on my face. The best hardcore record of all time and it's not even close.

BONUS: Snapcase's "Zombie Perscription." LINK

The Race

If you can say one thing about Red Rock Co. (the race organizers), it's that when they publish a schedule they stick to it. The pro wave went off at 6:30 on the dot and the 34 and under men were told to immediately enter the water for the scheduled 6:32 start. The degree of difficulty there is that it was an in-water start a solid 100+ meters or so out from where we entered. As I was about halfway down the stairs leading to the scuzzy green water of Tempe Town Lake I heard the announcer say we had 90 seconds to get to the line. Holy crap! I'm actually gonna have to hustle a little bit not to miss the start. The end result is that I made it to the start line at nearly the precise moment the horn blew.

The rest of the swim was pretty uneventful. The field got strung out extremely quickly, which on one hand was nice because there was little to no contact, but on the other hand sucked because I couldn't find a decent pair of feet to follow and ended up breaking my own water the whole way. According to the internet, we were supposed to have the sun directly in our eyes on the first leg of the swim making it next to impossible to sight, but the sun didn't crest the surrounding hills until we were very close to the 1st turn buoy, so it wasn't much of an issue. My watch said 29-flat (official split is 29:32, but the timing mat was at the entrance to transition, not the actual swim exit) when I peeled my wetsuit off on the run up to transition. A little slower than I was hoping, but swim times seemed fairly slow across the board so I'm reasonably happy with it.

I got through transition without incident and headed out on this adventure...

Just in case you didn't bring your abacus... that's 4 tight u-turns and a whole bunch of other sketchy corners, repeated 3 times. Not that I'm complaining, it was actually a ton of fun. During every other half-iron race I've done, I've been bored out of my skull on the bike. Not this one. This course commands your full attention if you want to ride fast and still keep it rubber side down.

I figured going in that since there would be 1000+ people on a 3-loop course that it would be wall to wall bikes the entire time. It was actually pretty lonely the first lap. I picked off a few of the faster swimming guys from my wave within the first handful of km's (as an aside... I switched my bike computer over to metric a few weeks ago, so it's straight kilometers from here on out), and started working my way up into the pro field. I wasn't quite sure how to handle that since the pros are subject to slightly different drafting rules and I didn't want to pull a boneheaded move and earn myself or anyone else a cheap penalty. Do the pros have to stagger off of me when I'm in front? Would the refs not recognize that I'm in the AG race and penalize me for not following the pro position rules? No idea on either count. I just did my best to get way over to the right when I wasn't passing and trusted everyone else to sort it out correctly. Luckily it was a non-issue and everyone got along just fine.

Immediately upon passing transition and starting the second lap I was greeted with the endless sea of traffic in front of me that I was expecting from the beginning. Despite all the traffic my second lap ended up over a minute faster than my first. The biggest difference was the way I approached the turns. I took the corners on the first lap very conservatively while on the 2nd and 3rd I was able to carry a quite a bit more speed through as I'd seen it all before.

About halfway through the 2nd loop I passed pro Matthew Russell, who eventually won the race. He ended up passing me back about a minute later and we continued to battle for the remaining 40K or so of the bike, with the lead changing between us a half dozen or so times.

I hit the entrance to T2 with 2:42:xx showing on my watch, for a 2:10:something bike split. That was easily the best ride I've ever put together in a long course race. I beat my own pre-race expectations by a solid 3-4 minutes, outsplit the entire pro field and threw down for 40K with a guy who just went 8:43 (23rd overall) in Kona. Not much to complain about there!

T2 was a little slow because I opted to put on some socks, but I made it out a handful of seconds behind Russell, who immediately shot off like a rocket on the way to his race-winning 1:17 run. I was starting to feel the effects of the heat and sun right away and set out at what I thought was a fairly conservative pace, but I hit the first mile marker in 5:46 anyway. I would pay pretty dearly for that 1st mile enthusiasm later in the run (miles 10-12 were all a super-gross 7:00+). Proper pacing at this distance is some sort of level 80 wizard magic that I simply don't understand.

Somewhere around mile 9.5 I was passed by the eventual amateur winner, Dan Brienza. He flew past me like I wasn't even moving. I was strictly in survival mode by that point so I had nothing in response. I couldn't do much beyond plodding along at my own pace the rest of the way to the finish. I finally made it across the line in 4:07:27 and immediately kicked off the end-of-season celebration by spending the next few minutes leaning over a fence puking my guts out. That makes me 3 for 3 in puking at the finish line of long course races this year. Party hard!

So with that, the off season officially begins. My previous best half was a 4:11 at Chisago (and that's more like a 4:14 since the run is ~.4mi short), so 4:07 is a huge personal best at this distance. And while its great to go out with a massive PR and all, there's still plenty of room for improvement, especially on the swim and the run. So if you need to get a hold of me this winter, I'll be in the pool or on the trails! - MP