Race Report Ironman Canada August 29th 2008

I have no idea why I signed up to race the 2008 version of Ironman Canada.  Initially, it was to try and qualify for Hawaii – again - and good memories from the 2006 race may have contributed to the decision as well. Regardless of what inspired me, it was a bad decision, as I clearly wasn’t at a good enough level of fitness to compete anywhere near my best and I was just setting myself up for a very tough day.

My swim was typical of my US season – far from disastrous, but not all that satisfying either. I had a reasonable start, but just failed to bridge to a small group of quicker swimmers. I was then in no-mans land for approximately 500 metres before being picked up by a group of swimmers that I joined and stayed with for the balance of the swim.

There were a lot of athletes around at the start of the cycle leg. In fact, every man and his dog seemed to be in the vicinity and it meant that it was going to be hard to break away in the first 60 km on the flatter part of the course. That was fine by me though, as I soon found I didn’t have the fitness or firepower to break away anyway, and I nestled myself into the chasing group of ten or so athletes.

There were a few athletes out the front riding solo, and, included amongst these, was the eventual winner, the Kiwi, Bryan Rhodes, who raced solo all day and deserved the win.

Jason Shortis was doing this race, and to his credit, he was on the front of the pack for a lot of the first 60km. I was at the tail end - legal of course - but laughing my head off all the same.

The group stayed together for much of the 180km journey, but a couple of athletes managed to break away on the final climb of the day up to Yellow Lake. These included Matt Lieto and Scott Curry.

I tried a small breakaway move myself on the final climb, but only succeeded in blowing my quads up, and those that I broken away from caught me on the long descent into town anyway. I limped into Penticton and realised straight away that I may be in for a very long and difficult run.

This was confirmed when I took my first steps out of the transition area.

At this stage of the game, Rhodes was well up the road and running very well and everyone else I entered T2 with was running away from me - and there was nothing I could do about it.

Sometimes I experience good and bad patches on the run, but on this occasion it was all bad. After DNF’ing every Ironman event I had entered in 2008, I was determined to finish this event, regardless of how much physical and mental anguish I had to endure to complete the task.

The worst part of the day was gradually reducing the gap on the run to Matt Lieto all day, and then, when I could finally reach out and touch him with 5km to run, I ran out of gas and watched him run away again. The hopelessness of it all was something to behold. It was pretty funny looking back at it.

I was very happy to cross the finish line, but, as is often the case, I was in terrible shape and had to lie down in the medical tent for significant period of time before I felt well enough to move again.

It was at this point that I decided that even if I did get a roll down slot for Hawaii, there was no way I was going to accept it. As it turned out, the slot did roll down to 8th place and I wasn’t there to collect it.

The journey to Canada wasn’t a very successful one in terms of my own personal performance, but it was satisfying to a degree as I had toughed it out and crossed the finish line, something I had not done in four previous Ironman events.

Although I wouldn’t be racing in Hawaii myself, I was looking forward to supporting my wife as she raced the world championship event.