IronMan NYC Race Report: A Review of the Misery

Of course it is reasonable to fork over close to $1000 for a race.  Of course you should swim in the Hudson River mere days after a sewage spill.  Running up the flights of stairs of the George Washington Bridge after 16 miles of hills would be ok.  Why wouldn’t you do an Ironman in August in New York City?

Let’s talk about that, shall we?

I signed up for what was my second full Ironman with cheerful anticipation and dreams of grandeur.  It really did seem convenient to do a race right in my own city, and yes, I suppose I did save some dough on avoiding spendy hotel stays.  Unfortunately it ended up being a pretty disastrous day despite my imbecilic optimism. 

The Swim:  I had been in the Hudson once before to do the NYC Tri the year before.  It was gross then, it’ll be gross until the end of time.  What is consistently surprising about the Hudson is that it is brackish.  One doesn’t expect a mouthful of salt water in a river; it just seems weird.  One also doesn’t expect a strange aftertaste with hints of oak and diesel fuel, yet a bright finish with locker-room musk undertones.  And yet the Hudson delivers.

Ok, it isn’t THAT bad I guess.  Can you see your hand underwater as it’s pulling through?  Not on your life.  This water is not clear.  More accurately, this water is an impressive cloudy brown that is surely impenetrable to human senses.  That said, it wasn’t terrible.  This is an Ironman.  Man up and swim, Woodard.

All was going well until I temporarily went blind.  I was approaching the swim exit feeling good about myself when the world went black.  Not dark, black.  “Well,” I thought to myself, “that’s interesting.”  Wait, wait, when I lifted my face out of the water to breathe, I was back to crystal clear vision again.  Stroke-stroke-stroke of blind; head turn to breath and the bright sun in my eyes. 

What was happening was that as we were getting close to the swim exit, the 2000+ thrashing and struggling bodies were stirring up God knows what on the Hudson floor.  I can’t be positive, but I think I saw Jimmy Hoffa in there, but I won’t go on record saying so.

More surprising than the lack of color and life in this muck was the exceptionally noxious taste.  While you try not to get the water in your mouth, it just happens.  It’s like smoking without inhaling, and unless you’re Bill Clinton, that’s impossible.  After one good swig of the black-death goop, I opted for a reasonable doggie paddle for the last 100 yards or so.

Best part of the swim: I did it in 58 minutes.  What the what?  I am many things, but a sub-1 hour IM swimmer, I am not.  This should have taken me about 1.5 hours.  As I was scrapping what was left of Jimmy off of my wetsuit, I quickly thanked the Hudson for it’s very generous current.  Perhaps it was disgusting, but the day was off to a good start!

The Bike: Nothing like starting a 112 mile bike ride with a quad crushing hill, but that’s what we had coming out of transition.  I climbed with all I had and crested the top triumphantly, making a note about how much that was going to smart when I had to run it at the beginning of the marathon. 

But never mind that, I had a mind-numbing bike ride to get through. 

And for the most part, mind-numbing it was.  The bike route was along the Pallisades Parkway, which with a few glorious exceptions was a lonely road.  And with that, there isn’t much to report about the bike portion.  It was a lot of low grade, yet lengthy hills.  The few pockets of spectators were welcomed, but seemed bizarre considering a city of 8 million people was enticingly close by. 

As for my performance, my coach told me to be pretty aggressive on the bike and rely on my run.  It ended up being a pretty solid strategy overall.  I finished with an average speed of about 18mph, closing off this portion of the race in 6 hours.  Not too shabby; not too shabby at all.

But hell was waiting in the wings…

The Run: never have I experienced a marathon this tough, much less at the end of a freakin’ Ironman.  As eluded to earlier, that hill coming out of transition not only burned up the legs, but it took a big, juicy bite out of my spirit.  I, along with everyone around me, was walking.  Not even a mile into this race, and we were walking.  A somber start.

But that’s what an Ironman is all about right: managing the moment you’re in and doing your best.  True to form, I kept my head high and walked to the top.  Had this been the only punishing hill to negotiate, things might have gone differently.  But punishment abounded for the next 16 miles.

The one positive was that it was shady, and in mid-80 something degree heat and some nasty humidity, shade is a welcomed bonus.  That was the only positive though.  The hills just wouldn’t stop.  If you weren’t killing yourself on a climb, you were hammering at your quads with a descent. 

Half way through this mess stood two young, lovely, eager volunteers.  Their job was to ask if you were on your first or second loop and would then radio ahead.  Hearing them ask me if I was on loop 1 or 2, having to answer I was indeed on 1 and had to go for another round of this crap, and dreading what was ahead of me made me furious.  What the hell was I doing to myself?  Why was I punishing myself like this?  How can I get some of this anger out?  I savagely bit the shoulder of the nearest volunteer.  She was just standing there asking for it.  And as it turns out, it’s not that hard to bite someone hard enough to draw blood.  I congratulated myself on what surely was my ability to survive in the wild.

Lap 2 was expectedly worse.  Towards the end of it I came up on one of my teammates who was, for lack of a better word, running.  A better description would be weird looking slow walking with funny hops in between steps.  I was walking and caught him.  The absurdity of the situation was rich, but on questioning him, I learned that his goal was to finish this race without having walked at all.  Impressive, albeit foolish.  On hearing this goal, I was reminded of mine.  I wanted to finish this race in under 12 hours.  Doing some math in my head, I realized I had to keep my pace at about a 9 min/mile to do so. 

Let me tell you where things stood at this point in the day.  My timing chip, conveniently strapped to my left ankle, was chaffing something terrible.  I pulled to the side of the road to move it and realized I was unable to bend my legs far enough to reach my feet.  Physically unable to do it.  Whoa, I was in bad shape and still had 10 miles to go.  Getting the help from a curious, yet gracious volunteer (not the one I bit, mind you), my timing strap was moved and I was back to shuffling along. 

And then at mile 17 or so, you hit the bridge.  Never has 4 flights of stairs looked more impossible.  If I could get one photo from this day, it would be of me climbing these stairs.  I imagine such a photo would be nothing short of award winning, conveying an idiots desperation to climb for his life to finish a race he knowingly subjected himself to for no other purpose than personal glory.  It would have been beautiful, people.

After the bridge however, the elevation map promised pancake flat roads.  That got me through.

That map lied.

While compared to what we just went through it was much better, but by that time you were so burnt that even a curb was akin to Mt Everest.  I’ll never forget rounding a corner, let’s say about 20 miles in, and seeing a short, yet steep, incline.  I cried.  No sarcastic rhetoric here.  No artistic license to make this a better read.  I actually cried tears.  This is what is called hitting a wall my friends.  Each race has low points that all athletes have to contend with, but this was my lowest.  I vowed, with God and General Grant as my witnesses, that I was not doing this race again next year.  I just loved myself too much.

The math calculations were still going on, and somehow I was maintaining the pace needed to hit my goal.  How I mustered this amount of sheer will, I may never know. 

I crossed the finish line in 11:59:08.  52 seconds to spare to hit my goal.  Unreal.

While there was a tremendous sense of accomplishment from this, there was also a crushing amount of unadulterated self loathing.  The ratio of punishment to elation was not at an ideal mix and my previous vow to never do this race again was repeated like a mantra at a Buddhist monastery. 

As we know, the powers that be at the Ironman Corporation saw the error of their ways and cancelled the damn thing after the first year.  Good move.  And while I can honestly say I am proud to have been one of the few to have put this race on my resume, I’m much more proud to know I will never be given opportunity to do it again.