Ironman Lake Placid, Part 1

My intention last year was to blog my training for IMLP. It just didn't happen. Training for an Ironman, working full-time, taking care of family obligations (not always in that order, I hope), just ate up all of my time. If I did have a few free hours, I tried to sleep. No kidding, I barely remember last year. I'm making a promise to myself that I will blog my next Ironman. For now, I will just do my best to recall my training and the race.
When I signed up for IMLP, I knew of one regular training partner who was also doing the race. My friend, Bob, who is 20 years older than me (I'll let you do the math), and who had been a regular training partner for a couple of years, was giving the race another shot. He had raced it three times prior to last year. Turns out, much to my happy surprise, at least seven other people I knew had also signed up. This meant it was possible to have a few people to train with, commiserate with, and just generally support each other on this journey. We started out riding together quite a bit through the fall of 2014. We also ran together a lot through the winter, and occasionally met for swim workouts. We had a pretty mild winter during '14-'15, and I recall that I only did four runs on the treadmill, which is amazing for this part of the country (upstate NY, just 45 miles from Lake Placid). I truly believe that not spending a lot of time on the treadmill really helped me break out of the never-ending running injury cycle. A bunch of us did the Octoberfest Half Marathon in Peru, NY in the fall of 2014 as part of our base-building. A couple of guys from the group, Dan and Jeff are both faster runners than me, but were both battling injuries and de-training. They heard me mention that I'd like to PR at this race, so they ran with me and paced me to a 1:48:01 finish. I knew nothing about the NYC Marathon, so when they told me I could qualify with my time, I thought they were kidding. Dan had a deferral from the previous year, so we decided to sign up for 2015 when it opened. Dan and I also signed up to do the Naples Half Marathon in January--Dan has a condo in the area, and my step-son lives nearby. It was a fun, quick trip during MLK weekend in January 2015. About 2000 people do this race every year. There are cash prizes for pros, masters and five-deep in age groups. The chip-timing system crashed, and it was an incredibly humid day. But, it was fun to race on the course with the Kenyans, and it was Florida in January! No complaints. I finished sixth in my age group, and only missed my PR by two minutes.
Official Ironman training started about the third week of January. As always, I used a Joe Friel training plan. I purchased and uploaded his 140.6 Base, and then Build, Peak and Taper plans to my Training Peaks account. Outdoor riding ended by late October, and it was indoors on the trainer with Spinervals and TrainerRoad. I had read about a new web-based riding app built on a gaming platform, called Zwift. Zwift was in beta during the winter and spring of 2015, and I used it a few times to break up the boredom of indoor riding. As the slowest swimmer in the group, I only joined them occasionally for group swims at the pool. I was about a 2:17/100m swimmer heading into Ironman training. I was getting a lot of advice as to how to fix my stroke and gain speed, and while it was all well-intentioned, it had the opposite effect. Swimming 2.4 miles in open water with 2500 others athletes was basically my scariest nightmare, and one I had voluntarily signed up for. I desperately wanted to improve my swim, but trying to incorporate all the advice had the opposite effect, and this was a huge source of frustration for me. I eventually just focused on being sure I could do the distance and have a reasonable estimate of what my swim time would be. My plan was to swim two loops in Mirror Lake in the summer of 2014 to set a baseline and to Just. Do. It. and get it out of my head. It didn't happen, but I did swim 13 or 14 3500m plus swims in the pool, and I did one 2-loop swim in Mirror Lake a couple of weeks before the race.

Bob, Dan and me about to do our first open water swim in Mirror Lake. I look less than excited.

We vacationed in Florida in April that year. My friend, Dan and his wife were there for the first few days of our stay, and I rented a bicycle from Naples Cyclery. Dan and I rode a few times in Naples together, then I did a couple of rides there and in my step-son's neighborhood on my own. I also got a lot of running in, of course. Flat, beautiful weather, and my step-son's gated community is huge, with lots of wide streets to run in. The swimming didn't go as well. FGCU is only about 10 minutes away, and for a few bucks you can swim in their pools. They have a 25-yard practice/warmup pool, and a 50-meter competition pool, which is sometimes set up crossways with short course lanes. That year, they had some maintenance issues and the pool was closed. I had to make do with the small pool at the local L A Fitness gym (I think it was 20 yards), and my step-son's 10-yard backyard pool. I did 100 laps in that pool one day.
Once I was back from Florida, training was in full swing. I did several bike rides in the 70-80 mile range. I only did one 100 mile ride. It was one I will always remember. It was a Saturday morning early in June. I was meeting Bob and Dan at a park about 10 minutes away. We were riding to Lake Placid and back, so some of the ride would be on the race course. I was almost at the park and was stopped by a sheriff's deputy. She had a pump shotgun at the ready. I was clearly going for a bike ride, dressed in a tri kit, with my bike strapped to the rack on back of my Outback. She took a quick look through my windows and waved me on. When I got to the park, the guys, who came from the opposite direction, commented that they had been stopped by New York State Troopers. Same experience, quick look in the car and waved on. We agreed they were looking for someONE, not someTHING. As close as we are to the Canadian border, drug smuggling is not unheard of. But there were no dogs, and no detailed search for hidden contraband in our vehicles. I jokingly said, "You don't think someone escaped from Dannemora, do you?" Dannemora prison was about eight miles away, and no convict had ever escaped from inside the prison. Until that day. Now, wouldn't you think since we were clearly going to be riding our bikes nearby (on some pretty isolated back roads) they might have mentioned that we should be careful, or alert, or something? Nope. Not a word. We geared up and off we went. As we made our way over the isolated back roads to Lake Placid, we noted NYS Police choppers flying overhead. When we got to Wilmington, Bob (who knows and/or talks to everyone) asked a state trooper at the store we stopped at what was going on. The trooper told us that two convicts had escaped from Dannemora and were at large. I suppose we weren't really in any danger. A tri bike wouldn't make a very good escape vehicle. Still, we had money and cell phones, and Dannemora is a maximum security facility. There aren't any "good" inmates there. We made it home safely, but the next three weeks were spent finding partners for every ride and run, going through checkpoints every time I left home, having law enforcement guarding my school, and even having school cancelled a couple of days because the buses couldn't get through the road blocks. Hard to sleep with the choppers with infrared sensors crisis-crossing over my house all night. The third weekend of June I went to Syracuse to do the 70.3 again. It was a relief to sleep without hearing choppers all night, but on the way home, we got into a convoy of cars leaving Malone and headed to Plattsburgh pretty late at night. Of course, our luck, we were in the middle of law enforcement leaving Owl's Head after the convicts were spotted in the area (one was shot and killed; the other was shot and wounded and taken into custody). Did I mention they were both murderers? Yeah.

It was comforting having a Trooper outside my classroom, not knowing where the escaped convicts were.

 The only other item of note was that I tweaked my left calf on a run in Lake Placid on River Road sometime in April. We had gone up to get the bikes tuned up at Placid Planet. Dan and I were running, with my husband trailing along somewhere in the car. I was running in the dirt off the side of the road, which was still very soft from the spring thaw. Sharp snap and I couldn't even walk. We were almost at the end of River Road, so it was a good thing my husband was nearby, because I had to call him to come and get me. There was no way I was running, or even walking back to town. Of course, that messed with my head in a major way. I wasn't able to run for a few weeks, and by the time the race came, I had only done one long run of 16 miles. As I said many times that year, if you ever want time to fly by, sign up for a race you're convinced you'll never be ready for. Before I knew it, it was July. Stay tuned...