FIRMman Half Iron Triathlon
Narragansett, RI, September 12, 2004
1.2 mile swim / 56 mile bike / 13.1 mile run
One of the issues, I now find, with traveling around to do your triathlons, gather material for another book, visit your friends, promote your first book, see exotic locales, eat delightful food, and deplete your savings account while avoiding gainful employment, is that your focus on the actual training and racing part of the adventure tends to become attenuated. Perhaps you are thinking, "Well, duh." And you would be right to do so. But as is often the case, sometimes you don't really get the most elementary concepts until you actually live through them.
Another thing I really didn't think through is that all the travel was going to interfere with training. Not just the actual days that I travel, but the day before, which is often spent in frantic preparation, and then the three or four days afterwards, when I'm so pooped from the combination of racing and traveling that I just hang out in the living room answering email and watching Law & Order.
Still, I was determined to complete a half ironman distance race this season even after the one in Fairbanks got moved and changed at the last minute to an Olympic distance because of the rampaging forest fires in the area. I was like, "Dood, I didn't do all those three and four hour bike rides just to go out and race Olympics and sprints." I also wanted to see if another year's training would help to mitigate the discomfort of a six or seven hour race effort.
If you want to skip all the long descriptive bits, the short answer to that question is no, not really.
However, there are mitigating circumstances. The stiff, sore, cranky lower back that started bugging me in August refused to go away, no matter how much I stretched, iced, heated, rested, saw the chiropractor, exercised gently, and took various over-the-counter medications. It never really got worse, but it didn't get better. So as my departure date for FIRMman approached, I was busily revising my expectations. I set a semi-lofty goal for myself based on a happy back, but in another recess of my mind I was thinking, you know, seven hours would be ok, the way the back is feeling. I even had a back door exit all ready in my head, giving myself permission in advance to stop racing if it got really bad.
I had a good setup on my way to Rhode Island. I flew into New York and hung out for a couple of days with Chris and Nan and their son Jake. Nan does acupuncture and bodywork and Chinese herbs and stuff, so after we went to a yoga class, she stuck needles in my back and let them hang out and tingle for a while. Plus staying with those guys is fun and relaxing, so that's got to be good for having the muscles let go of tension, right?
Keeping the low-stress motif going, I threw my "Triathlon In A Box," as Chris dubbed my bike case stuffed with wetsuit, tri duds, helmet, shoes, gels, etc., into the rented SUV and cruised out along Long Island to the Orient Point ferry terminal. So much more mellow than driving through Queens and the Bronx and up I-95. The ferry glided along the calm waters of Long Island Sound, providing picturesque views of rocky islands, lighthouses, fishing boats and other nautical whatnots. I lay on a sunny bench on the top deck and congratulated myself on my choice of route. Off the boat, onto 95 briefly, but then we were off again on rural 138, which cuts over to Narragansett pretty directly. I had no idea there were farms in Rhode Island. Little stone walls, lush fields, neat houses, farm stands with flowers and fruits and corn. Idyllic.
Once again, my directions from Yahoo! maps were wrong in some important details (they had already failed me on Long Island, and lots of other places in the past), but I was able to kind of fake my way into town and right down to the beach pavilion where we were doing registration. I got my packet quickly and went back to the car to put my bike together. I'm getting pretty good at this now, to the point where I really expect the bike to work smoothly right away, no messing around with additional adjustments after a test ride. Task accomplished, I went inside the pavilion for a course talk, since I wasn't planning to drive the course for scouting purposes. Fred the race director was amiable and a little hyper, and great at describing the details of the route. I really felt like I knew where I was going after he was done. I was also surprised to learn that there were about 630 people registered for the race. Since I hadn't heard of it until I started searching for half-Ironman races in New England, I kind of assumed it was small time. But 630's a pretty decent size for a half. All in all, it seemed like a well-run, professional outfit, which made me happy, because the description of the race on the website seemed like it might have been written by, well, let's just say by someone who wasn't paying a lot of attention to detail. Here's a sample:
At this point there are bikes crossing each other so the people farthest along Burdickville Rd heading sough will have the right of way (same as last year) Its then down Kings Factory Rd taking a right onto the highway Route 1 South again till you get to the first set of lights in Westerly where the Police will turn you around 180 degrees and head you back North and the second water bottle exchange. You nove have about 18 miles back to transition staying on Route 1 North except taking a right onto Camp Fuller Rd which will connect back onto the highway. Its then back to the overpass that you did early on taking a right onto the Wakefield exit, [and so on]
I mean, I kind of got the idea, but it wasn't the clearest set of directions ever. So like I was saying, I was really pleased to find out that these guys seemed to know how to run a good race, even if they didn't have the cleanest web site copy.
Thus prepared for the morrow, I set off to find the Holiday Inn in South Kingstown, a few miles away. This time it was the Holiday Inn's own directions that let me badly astray, and I ended up way over at the University of Rhode Island. A charming campus, but I wanted a shower and a place to lay out my race stuff, and I was starting to get tired, sweaty, and cranky. I hadn't slept that well the night before - too much exciting conversation with my publisher in New York and with Chris and Nan in the evening, added on to my growing pre-race jitters.
Finally I got situated, cleaned up, and ready to go, and I started feeling a little ambitious about seeing my surroundings. I was almost as close to Newport as to Narragansett, so I decided to drive over the two bridges that straddle Narragansett Bay and see what the historic seaport had to offer in the way of a pre-race dinner. Newport is kind of touristy, and kind of really cool. Lots of old brick and clapboard buildings and a huge harbor, but also lots of T-shirt shops and places to buy fudge. Not that I'm against fudge, but it seems like too great a concentration of fudgeries portends a pretty high tourist quotient. So I settled into being a tourist myself, albeit one with a very early bedtime and an imperative not to walk around too much and tire out my legs.
I found a promising restaurant within a couple of blocks, and since it was only about 5:30 or so I had no problem getting a table outdoors. The waitress and I compared our eating needs - mine as a triathlete and hers as a pregnant person. My needs at that exact moment in time included lobster-corn chowder, fresh bread, and a lobster salad sandwich. It really kind of amused me that lobster, which I think of as such a rare delicacy, was here something that you'd mix up like a can of tuna and plop onto a roll. It was tasty, too, without being really heavy. I recommend it for the pre-race meal.
The sun was setting as I headed back to the car, and the sky was so dramatic that I started snapping pictures as soon as I got to the waterfront. I had parked near a non-touristy municipal pier, smelling very authentically of fish bits and tar, but out on the end of that pier was a great place to watch that sunset build into a crazy crescendo of light. I felt like a sunset this good had to be a good omen for the race.
It was still only around 7 or so, so I decided to take a quick drive around town before bedtime. Quite by chance, I happened to turn onto Bellevue Avenue, where all the old merchant families who made tons of money in the slave-sugar cane-rum trade had built their mansions. And there were so many mansions! Just one after the other - Georgian, neo-classical, gothic, romanesque, pretty much every style of old stately enormous freakin' residence you could think of, surrounded by carpets of perfectly green grass, gracious arrangements of trees, and wrought iron fences or stone walls. I drove along with my jaw fixed firmly in the "Dropped" position, exclaiming to myself. "Holy Crap!" "Jeezus H. Christ!" and so on. And still the western sky blazed in psychedelic glory. I was impressed.
But soon it was dark, so I bought some bananas and water and such at the Bellevue Avenue Stop N Shop - now doesn't that seem out of place? But Newport is a compact town. I drove back to the decidedly unglamorous Holiday Inn, fiddled with my race gear, set two alarms for 4:27 and 4:29 a.m., and eventually drifted off to sleep.