Lake Anna Half Ironman Race Report

I am usually pretty quick at posting my race reports because so far they have always been very positive. Pretty much everything has gone as planned and I have seen a nice steady improvement in my race results. Even this year the Myrtle Beach Marathon showed that I could complete a marathon in a pretty good time with the bare minimum of marathon specific training and with plenty left in the tank. The Cherry Blossom 10 miler showed that my body performed exactly as predicted by the Cadence LT testing and the race went like clockwork. My tardiness in posting a race report for Saturday’s Half Ironman is a good indication of how badly that race went.

It was my first tri of 2008 and it was the Lake Anna Half Ironman at Lake Anna, Virginia. This time last year I did the sprint race at Lake Anna. It was my first ever Tri and I was really happy with my sub 1.5 hour finish. My coach’s advice for the half was to go steady on the swim, bike and first half of the run and then to go all out for the end of the run if I had the capacity. I had only done one other half prior to this race and that had taken me over 6 hours to complete which was largely a reflection of the very hilly course. I knew that Lake Anna was relatively flat and in light of all the training I have been doing I was hoping that I could break the 5 hour barrier.

I drove the 1.5 hours south to Lake Anna with Wendy and my mum, who is visiting from the UK, and we arrived at about 6.30am. I registered and started to get myself ready. I had a few butterflies, which surprised me, and it was clear by the time it took me to get ready that I hadn’t raced for a while. I lined up with the rest of my wave on the small beach at the lake and we were the 3rd wave to start. It was a beach start and we needed to do 2 laps of the triangular course with a short run across the beach in between. As we waited for the off the announcer was trying to whip up the crowd by telling them how hard a half ironman is to complete. As he explained how are legs would be burning coming off the bike and how are arms would ache coming out of the swim we all looked at each other in disbelief, his comments were certainly not helping the competitors.

When the horn went off I did the ministry of silly walks run to try and get across the shallow water and then started jockeying for position in the water. It was a fairly big wave and there was quite a bit of pushing and shoving. I felt like my heart rate was spiking and it wasn’t until I was on the third straight of the first lap that I realized that Eric “the Eel” Moussambani would be able to give me a good run for my money the way I was thrashing around.



For anyone who cannot remember “The Eel” he was the very brave wild card entrant from Equatorial Guinea who competed in the 2000 Sydney Games. He and his female teammate Paula Barila Bolopa, nicknamed “Paula the Crawler”, set records for the slowest ever Olympic swims but it was the first time either of them had been in a 50m pool. Apparently Equatorial Guinea only has 2 pools the longest of which is 20m.

The second loop was a lot smoother but not necessarily that much faster and I finished the swim in just under 40 min. Considering that I really need to go around 70 min at Lake Placid this time is very disappointing. I ran up to transition where I struggled a little to get my wetsuit off and took the time to towel off and apply suncream. I was a bit peed off and made a point of getting past some people before I settled down on the bike.

The bike course was 2 laps on rolling roads around the circumference of the lake. Although it was a pretty quick course some of the rollers were large and there seemed to be an almost constant headwind. The first loop I overtook a number of riders at the start and one guy in his late 50’s went past me. I kept him in sight and my heart rate in the low 150s and had a fairly uneventful 1st lap. Toward the end of the 1st lap I caught up with a group containing a couple of people I knew but that group then seemed to pull away from me. I didn’t want to push too hard on the bike and let them go. The 2nd loop was even more uneventful and pretty damn lonely. My heart rate dropped a little into the high 140s and I suspect the second lap was actually slower than the first. Toward the end of the 2nd lap a couple of blokes and a woman past me and we continued to jockey for position the rest of the ride.

Sue Pearson 2008 ©

I finished the ride in 2:46 which was again a little bit disappointing. If I wanted to finish in under 5 hours I should ideally be swimming 5 mins and cycling 5-10 mins faster than I did. Not to worry, I had been very conservative and although I had not felt comfortable on the bike, saddle sore, sore glutes and sore neck, if I put in a good solid run I shouldn’t be too much over the 5 hour mark. I threw on my cap and set off on the run but as soon as I hit the first climb straight out of transition I knew I was in trouble.

I still have not worked out what went wrong but my body just refused to get going. My legs would not fire up and my body refused to speed up. I decided that I was going to have to walk as I was getting nowhere fast with the run. After a few minutes I decided to try running. This time my legs were there and they were quite happy to tick over at quite a high cadence but after a few hundred metres my chest and stomach would clench, almost as if I was going to be sick, and I was forced into a walk again. I decided (very quickly) to forget about finishing in any sort of time and to walk/jog the rest of the run. At every aid station I would make sure that I drank 2 cups of water and when I broke into a run I would go flying past people and then a few hundred yards further on I would walk until they caught me and then I would go running past them again.

Near the end of the final lap I picked up the pace and ran the last mile fairly briskly down to the finish. It was a strange experience and I certainly didn’t feel like I had completed a half ironman. There was lots of running left in my legs but the rest of me was not playing that day. As I try and analyse the problems I could probably come up with some theories/excuses. The bike ride for some reason really took a toll on my gluteus maximus which may have caused the initial lethargy on the run. After that I could possibly try blaming the heat. The average temperature was 82 degrees and was probably in the mid to high 80s on the run. This is a lot warmer than I have been training in and as a fair haired anglophile the heat can really kick me in the teeth. The other biggish difference was perhaps my nutrition where I experimented with a couple of things for the first time in a race.

Sue Pearson 2008 ©

All the excuses aside I had a bad race and will have to chalk it up to experience. It is a hard pill to swallow as this is the first time a race has not gone well for me. I am trying to think of some positives and can only come up with the following:

My face and arms are now fairly brown (I did burn myself fairly badly on the back where I couldn’t reach with the suncream).
I got to christen my aero helmet and new wetsuit.
I had no problem with the swim distance.
My gut feeling is that I could maintain that bike pace for 112 miles and hopefully a fraction quicker.
Even though I walked half the run I still ended up with a personal best for a half ironman.

Ok what is done is done. No more long course races now until I hopefully line up at the start of Lake Placid. In between now and then I have a number of Olympic distances the first of which is Columbia and apparently both Chris McCormack and Matty Reid are both racing this year. I suspect they are both breathing a sigh of relief after seeing my half results but I hope to regain some confidence by putting in a good performance during that race.

Thanks to my mum for taking pictures of my race.