Following my excellent last-minute trip to IM Coz in 2012 I resolved to go back this year and enjoy the experience again. Training went well in the lead up to the race and I was skinny and feeling fit, with good times in the races I did in the couple of months beforehand and the right sorts of numbers coming out of the training sessions. One big difference from last year was that this time I went to the correct airport, which led to a pleasingly relaxed flight to Cancun.
Into Cancun and we found the car I’d booked with relative ease. On the drive from Cancun to Playa del Carmen, where the ferry to Cozumel island leaves from, we could see a thunderstorm hammering away over the sea. This was the beginning of a big cold front rolling through (what the locals call a “Norte”) which was to set the weather for the next few days, meaning that the weather in Cozumel was cool (20-23 degrees C rather than 26-30) and there were very strong Northerly winds. The swim practices at Chankanaab were cancelled because of the wind and we spent a nervous few days watching the weather forecasts. Fortunately there was plenty to keep us busy: John’s daughter had spent some time doing research and had organised what was essentially a gastronomic tour of the best restaurants in Cozumel (I particularly recommend Kinta, Kondesa and best of all the lovely Guido’s, with a gorgeous courtyard and really good food). When we weren’t stuffing our faces there were always lots of Very Serious Triathletes In Compression Socks to snigger at.
If you’ve ever been worried about weather you’ve probably found out that online weather forecasts are surprisingly variable: for the 1st December, however, there was an encouraging consistency and all of the forecasters were predicting that the front would be gone by race day: right up to the Saturday the forecast was for very good conditions on race day. One thing that couldn’t be left until race day morning was the swim, though: the strong winds had apparently made the current in the Cozumel channel stronger than usual, and I guess the race organisers were nervous about a repeat of the previous year’s swim difficulties. I think they were also under pressure from the Cozumel Port Authority as well, who seemed to have some serious concerns about safety, so on the Saturday they announced a change to the swim course, which would now be a 3.1km point-to-point starting from a hotel North of the usual swim start. I must admit I wasn’t happy about this, but what can you do?
Race morning and the usual 4AM start. I met John T at breakfast and after he’d got his gear on we went out to get one of the buses to the race start. This being Mexico our bus broke down and wouldn’t start, so we bailed and jumped in a taxi. The taxi was a minibus and about 10 other people jumped in, got a ride with us and then jumped out without paying. I view my $20 fare as my own contribution to the communal good and am able to sleep more soundly at night, safe in the knowledge that I have contributed to fulfilling the needs of the many. Following the broken coach event everything went very smoothly, including the coaches which the organisers had laid on to transport everyone to the swim start from T1. Once there we spent most of the remaining time in the queue for the loo, and then it was goggles and swim hat on and into the lovely warm water for the swim start. There was almost no wind at all but as soon as you started swimming you could feel the current pulling you: we trod water but everyone was moving along past the start line… as I floated there all the nervousness and stress drained away and I started grinning like an idiot. It’s on, and here I am in my happy place. I shook hands with John and then there was a kind of slow, building race start: we heard shouting from the back of the swim start, people started to move and only then did we hear an air horn.
There was surprisingly little aggro in the first part of the swim, and because we were just following the shore there were no navigational problems. A few rocky outcrops were a bit too close to the surface for comfort but for most of the swim we were suspended in about 8-10m of beautiful gin-clear warm water, with fish and the occasional diver to look at. After a bit of swimming I did get involved in a bit of argy-bargy as I tried to move out and stick to the buoy line to make sure that I had a nice straight swim with the best possible current assist. Everyone else wanted to be there too so there was a bit of nudging and pushing but aside from that all was civilised. Finally we got to the concrete dolphin enclosures at Chankanaab, round the end and up to the swim finish. 51 minutes dead: 34 minutes faster than last year so I already had a huge deposit in the time bank.
I took T1 reasonably easy, stopping under the showers to desalinate myself and taking time out to get a sunblock topup, and then out onto the bike and onto the road South towards the tip of the island at Punta Sur. The quick swim meant there were a lot of bikes in the road and a whole bunch of people wobbling around in the middle of the road who really shouldn’t have been there. I snuggled down on my aero bars and with the benefit of a mild tailwind took it up to a steady 36 kph. Down to Punta Sur and round the corner to the 20km stretch up the Eastern side of the island. This is the stretch that had the headwinds in 2012 and once again, defying the BBC forecast (how dare they) the wind was full into our faces. There was also a rain shower in the first few kms but nothing to write home about.
Stay aero, keep going and don’t let the speed drop too much. The road is right by the beach and the pain of riding into the wind is tempered by the glorious views, with low lying trees and bushes on the left, white sand beaches with big breakers coming in on the right, and coming past on your left the first big packs of drafters. Cheating losers. Eventually I got to the right turn at Mezcalitos and onto the Transversal, the road back across the island, where I came across one John Taylor, who’d had a faster swim than me and was now going quite nicely thank you very much. Shortly after that the same rain shower that I’d already met once showed up again on its transit across the island and this time got a bit more serious with a good old tropical downpour which had the side effect of raising the humidity up to “really sweaty”. Through that and back into town, John and I were riding at about the same pace and went through San Miguel almost together which made for an easy spot for the families outside our hotel.
Lap two and onto the southerly road again and here the drafters started to get ridiculous. Big packs, 30 to 40 people, riding in pacelines and shamelessly cheating. Far worse than last year. Not only are these people breaking the rules and gaining an unfair advantage over competitors who ride clean, they are also very annoying and off-putting. They do things like overtake you and then for some reason the pack will slow down a bit, meaning that you have to either back off and ride more slowly than you want or burn a load of matches trying to overtake them. They also make it very difficult to get what you want from the aid stations: trying to get a bottle when a pack of 30 drafters has gone through an aid station like a plague of locusts and picked it dry is not easy because all the volunteers are scrabbling to get new bottles and you can miss out completely.
John and I got caught behind a particularly large group, and after a few kms of this I was annoyed enough to try to get away, so I rode around them and put the hammer down for 10 minutes or so, after which I looked over my shoulder and there they all were, strung out behind me in a nice line. All I’d done was to give them a free ride. I pulled off the front and drifted back, suggesting to some of them that they should tell their mothers that yes, they did an Ironman but that it doesn’t count because they cheated on the bike. They all stared at the backside in front and pretended not to hear me. Then I came across John who had acquired his own personal leech who I gave a bit of a mouthful to. He actually acknowledged my existence and claimed to be “just looking for some space”: I pointed out that we all know there’s a difference between riding a bit close because there are a lot of bikes in the road and sitting six inches off someone’s back wheel. No answer to that. Bah.
Back around Punta Sur and my time for the first 90kms was 2:46 and I was feeling good and hoping for a split in the low 5:30s. The Atlantic weather systems had something to say about that, however, and the wind was now really strong, and definitely worse than last year. I was riding hard and only managing about 26kph, and this is where the cheating drafters really had an advantage, so I got to watch a load of them cruising on past. Bah again. Round the top of the course and back through San Miguel again, down the road south and onto the third lap. I was feeling OK and riding at what felt like a good effort but I was worried about the wind on the final leg. I also came across a couple of aid stations that had already run out of everything except water. Not good and very different from last year.
Round the point and back into the wind which was even stronger. The airport on the sheltered western side of the island recorded a windspeed of 27kph with gusts up to 40 at midday on the 1st December: we were getting the wind raw off the Atlantic and unfiltered by any island, and it was hard work. I was wary of making another big effort so I just knocked the bike into the small chainring and spun along. Everyone else (at least the honest riders) was doing the same and it felt like a strange slow-motion race as we all rode along at 22-24 kph. Of course, the inevitable group of drafters came past but this time Hallelujah! there was a marshal on a motorbike who started handing out penalties. One guy in a suit with”Guatemala” up the back and a lime-green Rudy Project helmet was most incensed at his penalty. I’d been watching him soft-pedalling at the back of his pace line and I had a quiet snigger when I saw him in the penalty tent a few kms later.
Finally, and with great relief, I swung round the left turn and onto the Transversal again. Back up to 32-33kph and a nice fast run in to town for the last 20kms. It was hot and I knew I’d lost a lot of time… once the Garmin was reading 180.5kms and we were past the roundabout and heading for T2 (the bike course is slightly long, total length is just short of 182kms) I slipped my feet out of my shoes and got ready to get off the bike. Total bike time was 5:53, so I’d lost something like 20 minutes over the second half of the bike. Oh well.
Into T2 and I hopped off the bike, handed it to a volunteer… and found that I was unable to jog into the change tent. I’d felt OK on the bike but now I was suddenly melting in the heat and feeling horrible. I walked into the change tent and slowly got my running shoes on. There were two people lying on the floor having cold water poured over them so it could have been worse but I could feel my planned PB melting into the hot tarmac. Out onto the road, a wave to Pam and the family Taylor at the T2 exit and off I jogged. I could hardly manage a survival shuffle. With some ice down my top and a lot of cold water tipped over me I felt a bit better but I was still moving really slowly and confused about why I was so broken. I’d biked at about the same effort as 2012 and I was at least as fit as I was then, so why couldn’t I run?I kept up something approaching a run for the first half of the run but it just got harder and hotter and harder and hotter. I needed the loo and couldn’t find one: where the hell were the damn toilets? Eventually I found one a little before the turnaround and stopped off for a brief, painful and unpleasant “comfort break”. I dragged my sorry ass round the far end of the run course and then just as I got to the point where I couldn't take any more I came across John T once again, walking along and not in a good place himself. He’d had mechanical nightmares, been ready to pack it in, then been given a tube by a spectator, then (final insult) been given a penalty for accepting outside assistance by a marshal - particularly ridiculous given the hordes of cheating scumbags who were getting a huge advantage by drafting and mostly getting away scot-free. I stayed with John and we kept up a decent run-walk while the heavens opened and the roads flooded. I was so knackered that I could hardly keep up with John when we were walking - I could jog along when we were running but for some reason the walking was murder.
We stayed together for a whole lap, and I have to say that if you need someone to share a fairly miserable grovel around the darker end of an IM run with then John T is highly recommended. I’d been very discouraged by the combination of the shortened swim, the hard bike and the knowledge that several hundred people in front of me in the race had got there by cheating and finally by my crash and burn on the run, but John cheered me up and by the time I had 7kms to go I was back in the game. Round the turnaround in the dark now and run for home. Oh dear it hurt. I managed 2kms and had to stop for a minute. I was feeling sick, the dark wet road was spinning and my legs just wouldn’t go anymore. OK, one minute and then another 2kms. A one minute walk and then only three kms to go, run it in the whole way… 800m to the finish and I could hear the announcer calling people over the line and my abs cramped up so badly I had to stop dead in the middle of the road to stick my fingers in the spasming muscles until they let me go again and then I finally made it to the finish for an 11.02 finish after a PW 4:07 marathon: 4 minutes slower than 2013 despite the swim being over half an hour faster.
So what went wrong? I was as fit or fitter than last year, I rode the bike at the same perceived level of exertion as last year, it wasn’t as hot as last year so why the problems on the run? Looking at my bike speed you can see how much harder it was on the sections into the wind, but you can also see that on the other parts of the bike I was riding at almost exactly the same speed, and conditions were almost identical in those parts of the bike course to last year. Was it just the extra hard headwind that made the difference? Possibly, but the second graph shows my heart rate for the bike in 2012 and 2013. For some reason my heart rate was on average a massive 10 BPM higher in 2013 than in 2012 (once the flaky Garmin HR strap had decided to behave). What’s going on there? Three possibilities. Firstly, the HRM was reading high this year, or low last year. That’s possible but unlikely: I certainly didn’t see any surprisingly high heart rates in races or training before the race. Secondly, I was badly dehydrated, which would cause a raised HR. Also unlikely: I drank a fair bit, didn’t feel particularly thirsty at any and generally didn’t really seem overly dry at any time. Final possibility, I was ill and didn’t know it. I’d had a not very serious slightly fluey cold two weeks before the race which I thought had cleared up - could it be that there was a more serious lingering effect of it than I realised, or could I have picked something up in Cozumel that I didn’t notice until I made myself swim for nearly an hour, bike for nearly six and then try to run a marathon? I think this is the most likely explanation for my GRF (General Run Failure).
So, all in all a very different day from 2012. The rampant drafting really left a bad taste in my mouth and the hard hard “run” section was testing to say the least, but by the time I finished I was smiling again and all in all I did enjoy the day (this was my 10th IM: I just have a particularly perverse idea of what “fun” means, I think). I’d decided pre-race that if I went under 10:30 I was going to quit Ironman for a while and get back into running ultras but that’s not happening now. Next up is IM Wales…
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