As a follow-up to Eagleman 70.3 in 2016 I signed up for Florida 70.3 in April in Haines City. Eagleman was pretty brutal with the heat and my sub-par training so I finished in a little over seven hours. My goal for Florida was worst case to beat my Eagleman time and ideally finish in under 6 hours.
To improve my training I signed up for the TriDot preseason project. Over the course of four months of solid training I was averaging about 10 hours a week. This is similar to what I did for Eagleman but considerably more structured and incorporating power metrics and heart rate targets. Given training took place over the winter in the DC area, bike training was done almost exclusively on a smart trainer using Zwift. Running was a mix of treadmill and outside and unfortunately all swim training was in a pool, which would come back to haunt me later.
Pre-Race: My father and step-mom live outside of Tampa so my husband and I added a couple of days to the trip to vacation and sight see. On Saturday we made our way over to Haines City for check-in. Given I had only done pool swims, doing the practice swim was critical. At the time of the practice swim the water temperature was just below the cut-off and was wetsuit legal. I suited up and got ready to go. There was some issue with getting the ambulance to the lake so we ended up standing on the shore baking in the sun in our wetsuits for a good half hour. I should also note that my prior experience told me to never swim in lakes in Florida due to alligators but we were reassured they would not be an issue. How exactly that reassurance was arrived at is a mystery other than the logic that the splashing would scare them away.
Immediately after starting the practice swim I struggled to maintain an even breathing pattern and kept having to stop to try and regain composure. After swimming around a couple of buoys in the wetsuit I came back in and took off the wetsuit and swam some more in just my trisuit. This was much better and didn’t have the panic and breathing issues. After the swim we grabbed some lunch at one of the food trucks and then I picked up my bike from TriBike Transport. Using TriBike ended up being a wise decision and made it a breeze to pick up the bike and walk over to bike drop.
That night we stayed at the Rodeway Inn which was just a few minutes from the start line. Nothing fancy but clean, close, and relatively cheap. For dinner since the options in Haines City were relatively limited we drove to Celebration, Florida and had dinner at a nice Italian restaurant.
Race Morning: I was tossing and turning by 3:30am ready to go but laid in bed a bit longer before getting up, gearing up and eating some breakfast. We all hopped in the car around 5am and heading over to the start. It was pretty busy so my family dropped me off and went to find a place to park in the neighborhoods. I made my way into transition, got marked with my numbers, put a little more air in the tires, and laid out my gear. The swim was wetsuit legal and hoping for a little extra speed and saved energy decided to wear the wetsuit.
I made my way over to the swim start and reconnected with the family. The start was a rolling start with everyone self selecting based on anticipated swim time. Based on my training and prior results I was anticipating something in the 35-38 minute range. I went to the restroom, put my wetsuit on, and then realized I needed to go to the restroom again naturally.
The Swim – 42:09 (2:11 pace) The swim waves started a little after 7am once there was enough light for the alligators to make out the easy targets. My time came and I took off running into the water. Immediately I started panicking and couldn’t get my breathing under control. It felt like the wetsuit was choking me and I couldn’t expand my lungs enough to get air. I kept this pattern of swim to a buoy, stop to try and catch my breath and swim to the next one without ever getting in a rhythm. As all this is happening, in my head I am now worried about even finishing the swim and certainly blowing my target time for the race.
Half way through the swim I made my first intelligent decision and unzipped the back of the suit. The cold water rushing in and extra room in the chest made a huge difference and I was able to get into a regular rhythm and swim non-stop to the end. Getting out was a bit of a trick as there were a number of holes close to shore so learning from the folks in front of me, knew to swim father in before standing up. My swim exit photos show a clear relief to be done with that. In hindsight I should not have worn the wetsuit given I hadn’t practiced in it all season and hadn’t grown comfortable with the different swim feel and style. It was a stupid gamble that thankfully only cost me 5 or so minutes.
T1 – 4:51 Nothing too eventful about T1 other than the usual fun of trying to wriggle out of a wetsuit.
Bike – 2:46:58 (20.13mph) The first half of the bike was very fast and flat with little wind. I was able to get down on the aero bars and power away. After the issues with the swim I went out a little slower than I should have on the start of the bike and was toward the lower end of my target heart rate zone. For the first half of the bike I averaged 20.6mph. For nutrition and hydration on the bike I had water in an X-lab torpedo mount, and then a bottle of custom Infinite nutrition on the downtube and a another Infinite bottle in the rear mount. I decided to go with all liquid nutrition for this race so had a custom blend with chocolate flavor and protein for the bike with about 250 calories per hour. I knew from training experience I needed to switch to exclusively water for the last 30 minutes of the bike to avoid GI issues.
Halfway through the bike I had a major success in the bike handling when I was able to grab a water bottle on the fly at an aid station and refill my torpedo bottle without wiping out. However, I did almost wipe out when I decided to take it too far by trying hard to fling the mostly empty bottle into the dumpster and misjudged momentum.
Second half of the bike was considerably hillier so my speed dropped a bit below 20 mph. Ultimately I was happy with my final bike time and glad I was able to average over 20 mph.
T2 – 3:09 Pretty uneventful.
Run – 1:55:14 (8:48 pace) The run was my undoing in Eagleman especially as the day started to warm up so was looking for redemption in Florida. The heat for the run was not too bad, especially compared to Eagleman. The run course was 3 loops through mostly neighborhoods. This was nice as it allowed me to see my family multiple times on the run and especially as I started to get tired this was a great boost. The first part of the run course had a short but steep hill, but after the first loop you could mentally prepare yourself for it.
It was great to see many of the locals out cheering in full force and some were even gracious enough to setup sprinklers. For the run I used a lemon lime Infinite custom nutrition blend without protein but with a bit more caffeine than the bike. I had some Gu chews with me as backup but didn’t need them. I felt pretty good on the run and was able to stay in the prescribed heart rate zones. I found the hardest part to be that last mile where you know you are close but are not yet in the final chute to the finish. I can tell I was pretty spent by the end because most of my final push to sprint was coming from exaggerated arm swings vs any leg power left. I was thrilled with my run time given it was only one minute more than my open half marathon PR.
Finish (5:32:19) – Overall I was very happy with my finish time and beat my Eagleman time by almost an hour and a half. Had I not had the issues on the swim or pushed a bit harder or the bike I most likely would have broken 5:30 but it leaves me a goal for the next one 🙂 I would highly recommend Florida 70.3. The course was fast and mostly flat and was very well organized with good energy from the neighborhood. It also makes for a great race-cation with Disney so close by.
