Shawn Burke's Blog

Okay, so it's a little late given the race was over two weeks ago, but nonetheless here's now it went...as always it's long and self absorbed. :)

In a nutshell, it’s been a little over four months since IMAZ and I’ve put in a ton of hard work. It’s easy to let goal creep set in and forget that in terms of physiology, four months isn’t that long, especially when almost a month on one end is race-recovery, and two weeks on the other end are taper. That said…

Prerace...

I totally get why people love Ironman Canada now. We had a good time being spectators up there last year but doing the race, it really is amazing. Penticton is just such a great area, the lake is a dream to swim in, the community support is unbelievable, and the course itself is beautiful and challenging. We got a nice place down at the far end of Lakeshore with a fridge and kitchen and got in there on Wednesday night.  Most athletes trickled in on Wednesday and Thursday, including some friends I hadn't seen in a while.  It was nice to spend time with people that share a common passion out side of the normal day-to-day.  This is one of the things that makes Ironman so special...for most people it really is a vacation and it's a treat to do a short swim then just chit chat with people for as long as you want to, in no particular hurry to get anywhere.

Days leading up to the race were uneventful.  The weather was very comfortable and we did some light training and heavy sleeping.  I didn't have much race anxiety but really wasn't sure how my fitness was going to come through.   My tough day at Troika kind of put a question mark into me.  But I did feel different about my second IM.  I wasn't concerned about race mechanics at all, I felt like I knew the drill for the most part.

Family and friends arrived on Friday.  We had a big crew for this race including my Mom & her husband Paul, my Dad and his wife Susan, our friends Owen & Polita, and Deb's sis and brother-in-law Stephen.  Initially there was some stress with seeing everyone and planning who's gonna be where when, but that got sorted quickly.  We had a big group lunch on Saturday before bike check in, then Deb and I focused on race prep the rest of the day.  I was looking forward to seeing everyone out on the course, in addition to a bunch of other Ironpeeps that I've made friends with over the year.

My goals for this race were pretty simple and purely execution related.

Swim: good navigation and drafting, stay focuses, swim solid from start-to-finish. Check.
Bike: Steady effort, good nutrition. Check.
Run: Go hard and hold on tight. Ouch…check.

Race Day

Up at 3:30, ~1000 cals down. We got up earlier for more digestion time; a happy tummy is worth far more than 15 or 30 minutes of sleep. Walked over to transition about 5:30 and the marking line was HUGE. Burned about 25 minutes there so by the time we actually got into transition it was all business – fuel on bike and into run bag, dry clothes off, wetsuit on, get onto beach. Stood about ankle deep in the water and surveyed the scene a bit – overcast skies, calm lake, a mile of orange buoys and thousands of people. They played the beginning of “Right Now” by Van Hagar and the helicopter swooped down just a ways off shore and I had that “this was a good idea yesterday” moment. I took a deep breath looking at the lapping waves at my feet, the 2500 amped up athletes on the beach behind me, and the thousands of spectators lining the beach.  Wow. 

I gave Deb a hug and a kiss and told her good luck and to have a great day out there.  Again, just like Arizona, this was maybe the most emotional moment of the day for me.  After all the hours and hours of prep that we've done over the year, the finality of "see you in 12 or 14  hours" is daunting.  I took another deep breath and after the pro's went out I swam hard out for about a minute, then mostly easy back in to get the blood moving.

I lined up about 3 rows back for the swim. There was no real fanfare for the start - in fact the cannon startled me because it just went off all of a sudden.  Two steps to get some space and then it was time to dive in and get to work.

The pen was really wide so it was easy to start up front, but as things constricted near the first buoy it turned into an absolute wrestling match. The swim out for the first mile was probably my least favorite part of the race. Things started to space out until the turn buoys and it got ugly again, and just as I started to think “ok, half way there” I took a heel right to the adam’s apple. Not helpful. The way back in got much better though and I purposely got out of the draft for a minute or two and really focused on forceful exhales and long strokes. This calmed me significantly and I got back in the draft and started picking off buoys and before long I was close to shore. My hands started hitting the bottom so I stood up and looked at my watch – 1:07 – but the water got deeper again and the rocks were I was were terrible to walk on. Other people made this mistake too, I should have swam another 15y, oh well. My swim time was the same as AZ but this swim felt much better at 1:09 but that’s fine with me.  I swam right on course and very solid all day.  I suspect the swim may have been a little long - I don't really care but that jives with my better effort and same time as IMAZ.  More on that later, other people thought this too.

Bike course was great and the PowerTap was worth its weight in gold. No, wait, make that carbon. Anyway, my HR was high pretty much out through OK Falls but not too bad. I just started sipping water and going steady. There were so many bikes on the road it felt like a bike race, which kept me occupied. My HR finally started to come down and I settled in to my goal wattage range. When the climbs started, it was great to see people shoot away from me up them, including Richter Pass and the Seven Bitches (a set of unfriendly rollers after the pass). I’d sit on my goal watts and they’d ride away from me, and then they’d sit up on the decent to recover and I’d blow right by them. This would repeat until there were less and less of those guys around, and I knew they were burning a lot of extra gas. Nothing super eventful happened all the way until special needs at mile 75. By that time I’d gone through about 1000 cals and my stomach was good, so I put down a PayDay bar and a gel, and put a granola bar in my pocket. So far so good - was feeling kind of crappy for miles 65-80 but not especially bad.  Just tired of being on the bike.

Lots of people were complaining about the winds.  The winds were slowing us down - I remember thinking that - but that's about it.  For some reason the headwind didn't really bother me much.  It was nothing like Arizona.

We hit the false-flats before Yellow Lake and something happened – maybe it was the Payday bar but I started feeling downright fresh - yes that "oh so fresh" feeling. Certainly not like someone who’d been on a bike for 4+ hours. My HR went down and my wattages came up with only about 10 hard miles left to go (final 15 is basically downhill) I kind of threw caution to the wind (well, if you don’t count the 145 HR cap) and basically hammered all the way in, comfortably holding 230-250w on the climbs. After the first part of the Yellow Lake climb there were probably 300 people standing on one of the hill-tops, on either side of the lane, yelling with signs and cowbells. Without exaggeration it was like a Tour de France summit, it was completely amazing and another good time to keep an eye on the power meter. On the next part of the climb I saw my coach and gave him a good high-five as I went by.  From there to the top of Yellow Lake I put big distance on the folks that had been riding near me and by the top there as only one of them in sight, way back. With a bike racing background, I like to descend, and being alone allowed me to do so more aggressively. I did nearly 50 mph down to the 97 and continued to go as hard as I could the rest of the way in. It was a blast.

Seems like I really never know how my legs are going to take to running, but I started out steady and aggressive from T2, doing low-8-minute miles. Some friends were up there to register and I saw them right in the first mile which was great (as well as out on the course, they had bikes). HR was stable but a bit high so I kept a solid pace and focused on fuel and fluids. By the time I got to Skaha I was starting to get concerned – it was already starting to hurt to maintain the pace, low-8s, and I hadn’t even gotten to the really hilly part of the run yet. So I basically started telling myself “you’re going to run hard to the next mile”, and I did. It seemed impossible that I was going to be able to do that for another 3 hours, but the miles just kept ticking by. The hills were tough but actually were some nice intermediate goals to focus on, and before I knew it I’d hit the turn around and was headed back. I glanced at the overall clock and knew if I could run sub-2 on the way back I’d be in the high 10:40s on the day, so I just kept pounding away at it. A buddy from CpC camp came by on his bike around mile 14 and told me how good I looked – this surprised me given how I felt.  The alarm bells were starting to go off.

Around mile 18 things got pretty tough, but I got a lift from seeing my girlfriend going the other direction about there. I could do just enough math to know that she was rockin’ it so that made me happy. I was still doing miles on the flats in the 9:1x’s, with about 10 minute miles when there was a hill involved, which I felt OK about. The kicker was mile 22-23 which is mostly this 1-2% steady incline back up to town. This really fried me and the amount of self talk was going up-and-up. “Just run hard to the next mile” wasn’t working since that seemed too far away – so I fell back to a little more basic motivational tactics. Think Full Metal Jacket drill sergeant stuff. There was a little dip and then another few blocks of up before the long downhill on Main Street – I decided to skip the last 3 aid stations and just get home. Seeing the hotel way at the end of the street gave me a boost and I did everything I could to take advantage of the downhill, getting back down into low-8 pace.

  It turns out that’s about all I had left because when I turned onto the flats to head to Lakeshore, it got really hard. The .6 mile run away from the finish line really is not cool, but the support from some friends on that section was awesome.  There were so loud!  As I'm running back, I can't see the finish line, as the road curves gently left along the water.  But I can see "the Peach" on the left side of the trees, and it's right at the start of the finishing chute.  All that's going through my head, over and over, is "The Peach is getting closer.  The Peach is getting closer.  The Peach is getting closer."

With about a ¼ mile to go my coach appeared and ran with me for about 30 seconds. He gave me some good words of encouragement followed by – of course – “now run a little faster to the finish, ok?”. Nice. Turns out I missed a 4 hour Marathon by just over a minute. Drats, would have been nice to see a 3 starting that number.

My main issue here was that I just didn't take in enough cals on the run. The gel wasn't sitting well and the coke/gatorade at each station wasn't enough. I'm going to focus on this a bit more next time, I think that I may have been able to finish a bit stronger - it's easy for me to confuse fatigue with fatigue+bonking at that point in the day.

I had this weird moment of confusion right after I crossed the line. It takes a bit to switch from race-brain to normal-brain (esp after almost 11 hours on the rivet), but for a second or two I wasn’t sure what to do after I crossed the line. Do I run more? Do I sit down? Who are you people? After I snapped out of that it was good to see my whole posse right at the end of the shoot waiting for me with smiles and recovery drink at the ready.  Getting something into my stomach quickly (it didn’t like it but it was good for me) a massage were key.  The wind was strong off the lake and I started getting really cold though, so it worked out that I had time and got my bike out of transition and went back to the room to clean up.

This time, it wasn't much of a wait for Deb.  She took 2 hours and 15 minutes off her IMAZ time.  Wow!  She darn near finished in the daylight.  She worked very hard for that race.  Now I think she's got the potential to go considerably faster even.   But she raced hard, and it was the first time I saw her truly hurtin' after an event.  Good times.

At the end of the day I cut 9 minutes off my IMAZ time clocking in at 10:54, but I felt like IMC was a significantly more challenging course overall, though it did match my strengths a bit better (e.g. a flat 5 hour TT isn’t my gig). 

This was a more competitive race though.  Here's how I stacked up relative to the field at this race versus Arizona.

So that’s what 600 hours of training over about 11 months ends up with. Looking forward to a little break, but I'm already starting to feel motivated to get to work on some limiters (esp run) over the winter. Physically, I bounced back from this race much quicker than from IMAZ, feeling basically fine by the Wednesday after the race.

The next morning I was pretty fried and didn't even want to think about doing an Ironman.  But it's an insidious disease, by Tuesday I was starting to think ahead already.   Of course, that's after I packed in a root beer float, a peanut butter shake and a big greasy hamburger and fries on the drive home.

Big thanks to Mom & Paul, Dad & Susan, Owen & Polita, Stephen & Bethany, Julie, Steph, Hack, and Jonser for all the support out there.  It was great to see everyone on the course and gave me something to look forward to as the day progressed.  I really do love how much people get into watching an Ironman.  It doesn't seem like its that interesting to watch, but people really do have a blast in large part because it's such a unique environment.  The athletes get a chance to compete on a grand stage and be super-stars for a day, and the supporters get to be rabid super-fans as well.  That dynamic is a complete departure from normal life and one that's based on something that's both meaningless - it's just a race, after all - and full of meaning - it represents so much to so many - all at once.  I've been on both sides of the fence now and both are a lot of fun.  Honestly, following an IM all day is darn near as tiring as racing one!

Yep, looking forward to IMCDA.  Only 10 months left.