Ironman Wisconsin

Quite a bit since the last post! First and foremost, Ironman Wisconsin...

On September 8, 2008 I spent almost $600 to register for "IMOO" or Ironman Wisconsin (moo because of the cows and cheese famous for those parts). It was over a year in advance that Anna and I signed up for this race, we knew it was quite the commitment! We began training immediately. Right after we began training, we stopped training... it was way too far in advance, we were going to burn out too quickly. Time passes, we get race ready for the season and have our first few sprint races of the summer. After one of the races my knees began hurting, bad. To the point where I wouldn't be able to walk for a day or 2 after a race or even a run workout, bummer. One race I even had to pull out of the run because I didn't want to hurt myself too much.

Anyway, so race day comes and I'm thrilled about it! I don't know exactly what to expect because I've never run more than 13 miles at one time, but I'm thinking I'll survive. I even rented some VERY expensive wheels for the race, Zipp 404's (which saved me tons of time on the bike course!). I began the swim at 7 am, about 1/2 mile into the swim my knees start hurting (what? why?) so I knew they weren't going to last the whole race. I finished the swim in about 90 min and ran up to transition. Got dressed, grabbed my bike and off I go! After the first turn on the bike course there's a straight section, I was thirsty so I grabbed my waterbottle, then dropped it on the ground and watched it skid across 2 lanes of open traffic... bummer again. It's ok, there was TONS of great support on the course, bottles of water, gatorade, bananas, anything your heart desires while on a bike course! The first 40 miles I averaged about 19 mph, then came the hills... uh oh! They were tough but I conquered! The second 40 I averaged about 16, same with the last 40ish miles... overall I did about a 6:30 bike.

During the bike one of my knees was hurting pretty bad, but I could push through it. The knee that hurt wasn't the worse of the two knees, so I kept going. As soon as I stepped off the bike, the one knee that already hurt began flaring up big time, and the "worse" knee decided it wanted to act up too, so I hobbled my way into the transition area, found a race official and turned in my timing chip. My race was over, I didn't want to even attempt running a marathon on 2 busted up knees when I couldn't even walk straight on them.

FAIL.

I'll do it another time. As of today, I'm not an Ironman :(