Thank you for sharing your honest insights Joseph! This means a lot since this is not your first Ironman experience or preparation. Like Nicole, this race meant something much more to you than just your finish time. This allowed both of you to walk away from IMLP and be proud of your effort. This is what Ironman is all about…
A couple of good lessons learned in here.
- Swim – While the rolling start is still better than the mass start, there are still many people that want as much time on the course as possible. Thus they do not line up honestly. It’s a shame but there really is no good way to address it but recognize it and manage as best as possible just like Joseph did.
- Transitions – Nice work getting your HR down. And your advice about taking an extra minute to do your i’s and cross your t’s is a good one. You could end up saving that minute or two later in the race.
- Bike – Nice work using the different metrics available to you and recognizing what you needed to do to execute your bike as best as you could. Ideally, your HR and power should be correlated so that if you can’t use one, you can use the other (or better yet, use both). However your situation was one where your HR was running high (nerves, heat, nutrition, etc could all be at play) and following power would have pushed it through the roof. This is an opportunity to make sure that you are racing like you are training and staying on top of all of the elements that could affect your metrics (obviously, those that are in your control). And you did just this, so again, nice work!
- Run – As you said, you got it done. Sometime that is all that there is to do. There is nothing that the Garmin is going to tell you that is going to help this. You just needed to put one foot in front of the other and move forward. You did just that!
- Overall – You got it done, crossed the finish line and achieved all of your goals. This is why having other goals besides time allow you to still enjoy your accomplishment of finishing one of the most challenging IM races out there! Congrats Joseph! Thank you for sharing your experience and allowing us to continue to learn more important IM lessons!
Now get that injury healed up!
