We love to read a good race report…and this one is fantastic! Awesome writing from Matthew Hartley. There’s parts in this report that we can all relate to and I’m sure have all felt, whether you’re a sprint or ironman triathlete. Grab a cup of tea and enjoy!
Ironman Nice 2014 – Race report Matthew Hartley
(photo of Matthew in action ©FinisherPix.com )
The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck.
Channing Pollock
I am a very lucky man; I have a highly supportive family to tolerate and live with my mid-life change of lifestyle and all the kit, washing and nonsense that goes with preparing for and attending (mainly longer distance) triathlon races. I have few real friends but that suits me, and they all also either understand, or accommodate my training whims and tantrums! I can also claim to have crashed a bicycle in the wet, in a straight line, at close to 40kph, over 1000 miles from home and still finished the ride and the race…but more on that later.
Ironman Nice, France was booked and paid for by my wife and biggest fan Nicola, within weeks of my finishing Ironman Austria last year. Nice wasn’t my first choice, the speed track of Roth in Germany was. Since that race sold out to anyone who isn’t German within three minutes of opening the entry page, and working away from home, I missed out and was content to enter the classic i.e. tougher, Nice event.
The Nice race has a reputation of being tough by virtue of its single loop 180k (112 mile) bike course which goes uphill for virtually the first 80k and the remaining 100k is punctuated by shorter rises and concentration sapping, daredevil, technical descents. The pan flat four lap run route is staged on the sea front by the Promenade des Anglais (PdA).
Nice, being a popular Mediterranean seaside resort, is a hot spot for sun seekers due to its sustained sunshine and delicate warm zephyrs that maintain a cool 25°C near the sea. Consequently there is no place to hide from the sun as you complete your Ironman journey to the finish line in Nice. Be fast or cover up! The two lap swim in the Med is punctuated by an “Australian exit” where swimmers leave the water to record a first lap time and provide atmosphere and entertainment to their supporters on the beach.
My training for this included; a coach, Lee Thomas – having never had a coach before and knowing that I had some specific goals, I decided that a coach would be best placed to help me achieve them; a week in Lanzarote – mainly cycling into warm 30mph winds up to the summit of del Rio, or battling Atlantic waves over a metre high in search of some sea swim experience and rhythm!? – a week on a triathlon training camp (with my coach) at Tri-topia in the Brenne National Park, South West of Paris, France. – all combined with multiple months and weeks of cycling around Derbyshire valleys of the Peak District in the rain and the cold. I also escaped for more rain and cold East of Sheffield towards Lincoln, but without the same violence of terrain. I lost count of the number of times I arrived home cycling on ‘stumps’ as my feet became numbed and frozen from the cold. I experimented with different types and quantities of socks and shoe coverings without success, although some motorcycling Sealskinz gloves appeared to work well for my hands in keeping them warm but far from dry. Indeed on more than a few occasions I arrived home so wet through I could have been swimming! I did do some swimming, maybe too much some could argue, but with a second attempt at the Pond’s Forge 10k pool swim on my calendar this was more of an excuse to tick this small event off and build some swim strength, endurance and hone my technique at the same time. With the 10k swim behind me I felt confident that my swim would be ok in Nice.
The Etape de Dales is a 112 mile cycling sportive including nearly 11,000′ of ascent in the Yorkshire Dales and after completing this last year I entered again hoping to improve my time…and also log some more training! A beautiful sunny day saw me stripping away mudguards, shoe covers, lights and hi-viz jacket to spend the best part of a day, but an hour less than the previous year, razzing round the Dales in a short sleeved shirt and shorts earning my “cycling tan lines”.
As a triathlon training event I entered the Coniston Olympic distance race to simply see how fast I could go with the sole intention of going as fast as I could for the whole race. On another stunningly beautiful day with sunshine and still skies I managed to blast round the course in less than 2.5hrs and achieve a place in the top 20 overall. To say I was pleased with this is a huge understatement.
I haven’t mentioned my run training simply because there wasn’t any. During November of 2013 I developed a lump on my left Achilles tendon which was very very tender to touch and so prevented me from doing any serious running for nearly five months as it healed. I also had some anxiety over my fragile left knee which had in the past spontaneously ballooned overnight with fluid, associated stiffness and pain. Consequently when I did start running there was no structure other than to log consistent, short, easy runs – hardly ideal prep for an Ironman marathon. My run ‘sessions’ were substituted with gentle resistance/weight training. Running isn’t my favourite activity and weights even less so, however I believe now that my perseverance with the weights helped immensely when I did start running.
Arriving in Nice was a shock at first as I witnessed the palm trees at the airport being blown over into a horizontal position with pictures of Lanzarote or the top of Bamford Edge in my mind! The ‘light’ sea breeze appeared to be anything but. Red flags on the beach indicated that no swimming was allowed. I’m sure Sir Ben Ainsley would have found it an entertaining challenge though.
The next couple of days proved to be more normal for Nice with a lot less wind and a rainshower one morning!! I did manage to squeeze in a couple of runs and bike rides plus a short swim as pre-race prep in the days before the race.
My longest ride of just over two and a half hours eventually took me North out of Nice after I had negotiated the ‘chessboard’ crossroads of central Nice where the apparent lack of traffic lights made getting past these things into a game of ‘chicken’. The activity of cycling a skittish TT bike along bumpy, narrow roads with parked cars on both sides, negotiating one way systems and a tramway were all fraught with potential disaster. Thankfully I made it out of the town on a quiet, smooth road uphill and into the sunshine. My very easy ride in the intense heat had me dripping sweat onto my bike’s top tube and handlebars after 5 minutes … and this was before 10am!!!
Much the same happened on my short runs along the seafront. However it was here that I noticed the super skinny, well tanned (and shaved), blinged up kit wearing, Oakley modelling runners skipping along in the sun next to my shuffling, furry, fat whiteness in prescription specs dripping sweat from the fabric of my t-shirt in less than five minutes!! I ran back to the hotel using the backstreets and gazillion crossroads with bizarre green lights for pedestrians and cars to cross the same road at the same time!!!
My brief swim in the Med was more helpful as I learned how to enter and exit the water at the 3′ drop over the loose pebbles and the now much smaller waves crashing into shore. The visibilty was predictably nil apart from where the waves landed on the pebbles. The temperature felt just right without being too cold or too warm in my wetsuit.
The day before raceday I seemed to spend more time emptying my bowels than seemed possible. Had I really eaten that much? Did I have diarrhoea? The answer to each of these was yes and no respectivley. It was simply my body’s way of coping with the ever increasing complexity of the gymnastic floor routine my stomach was doing and the pre-race anxiety of needing to start ‘empty’.
Race morning dawned, for me, at 3:30am to consume the obligatory 1000 calories, some final pfaffing to make certain that everything I had I needed and that I didn’t have something I didn’t need! hence the pfaff…post race attire including dignity towel and recovery drink (for T3), and everything I would need for the swim, wetsuit, prescription goggles, ear plugs, race swim hat and pre-swim gel. I was already wearing the chip, sunscreen and anti-neck chafing wax. (All the bike and run gear was at transition having been left there the day before).
Wow! Once in the bike park of transition the French had either got the toilet numbers right or something was wrong as there were no queues at the portaloos, so I took advantage and made a final toilet visit, really! A quick pump of air into my bike tyres and then I was off to the ‘streetwear’ drop off zone. It was here that my day nearly ended before it began. I stubbed my right big toe into a bent up ‘foot’ on one of the barriers as I handed over my streetwear bag. Thankfully all I did was break its nail and nothing more – but this could’ve been nasty.
Five minutes later I was warming up in the sea along with about 30 others as the remaining 2,500+ competitors waited patiently on the beach. Before the 15 minute warm up finished I practiced my exit from the sea again and found myself a perch between the self-seeded swimstart ‘pens’ for the time between 1h15m and 1h20m. I know that I can swim faster than this but wanted to avoid as much of the open water, ‘tadpoles in a puddle’ scrap in the ‘washing machine’ start as possible. Seeding myself out here would mean that I had slightly further to swim, but that, to me, was a small price to pay compared to losing some teeth…or worse!
The Swim
You can’t win it in the swim, but you can lose it.
Anonymous.
At 0625 the pros were allowed to set off from 25m out in the water and nearly 5 minutes later, the age groupers could chase them.
The tapes holding us back were dropped and almost immediately, i.e. before the horn, the dash began. I hesitated momentarily to wait for the incoming wave to stop dead the two blokes who jumped in either side of me and then dived between their bodies into a gap that didn’t really exist… a couple of dolphin kicks underwater and I bobbed up at least a body length ahead of them with flat water ahead of me. Woohoo! I almost cheered but knew that my work was not yet complete. I had committed myself to this and now had to make it stick. My plan was to swim ‘long and strong’ for at least five to ten minutes i.e. quite hard. As it turned out I swam faster in those first ten minutes than I have all year in training – such was the benefit of race adrenaline, a top of the range wetsuit, and the enhanced buoyancy of sea water. My plan had worked and I enjoyed an almost contactless swim. There were a few stray bodies that I caught up to as I merged with the faster swimmers from the faster self-seeded ‘pens’ but these were easily dealt with as they were swimming off course and I merely pulled myself over them…or did I pull them under me…? either way I was maintaining the effort level and pace. The first lap passed in just over 31 mins. Another cheer inside my head as I started the second lap which would be shorter.
At the turn back to shore I picked up a drafter as he touched my feet about ten times. To say I found this frustrating is rather an understatment. Kicking harder would be a waste of my energy and swimming faster may not be enough to ‘drop’ him, so I simply stopped. As he came alongside he lifted his head and as I saw his beard I bellowed loudly to him using those famous two words meaning, “Please go away and play somewhere else!” He got the message and my swim continued without further molestation.
The last 750m of the swim were however giving me cause for concern on the right and back of my neck as I became aware of a large hotspot developing. This later manifest itself as a fairly large chafe because I had put the sunscreen onto my neck first and the anti-chafe wax on top of it. I never stood a chance as the wax had never stuck to my skin.
It was still dark or cloudy as I ran the 400m or so through transition to my bike happy with my swim improvement over last year bringing my time down to 1h4m – later analysis would reveal that I had actiually swam 280m over distance, but swam reasonably straight – which meant that the swim was ‘long’.
The Bike
The advantage of the rain is, that if you have a quick bike, there’s no advantage.
Barry Sheene
There are two types of cyclist: those who have fallen off and those who are about to.
The bike route starts flat and fast to the airport before turning North to the moutainous loop which commences with a short, steep incline to prepare you for your day in the chair. After this, the surface was smooth but the incline stealthlike to begin with. Using the big ring to go uphill isn’t something I’d normally do but here it made sense as I was spinning and not using more power than my race plan. Then the climbs got more serious and their stealth was no longer covert. Gravity has a way of letting you know when its time to increase your effort and here, under the cloudy skies, my own effort grew to overcome Isaac Newton’s science.
Many people came past me and I was content to let them go as I wanted to have something left in my legs so that I could run most of that marathon. Once over the top of the longest climb, and a few spots of rain had cleared, the fast technical descent came easily to me. I was in my tucked position on the aerobars clipping apexes and passing people at every opportunity and I wasn’t the fastest as others came past me. This was a concentration festival of turning in to the respective apexes and powering out and onward to the next series of bends. I had a great time cycling down under the trees and in and out of shadows and sunshine, passing folk and getting cooled by the faster and faster breeze. The descent wasn’t as long as I’d hoped however as there were a couple of villages with speed bumps, tighter blind corners and a few more rises to contend with.
(A point to note for anyone reading this is that the organisers neglected to mention either at the Friday night Pasta Party pre-race briefing or competitor notes that EXTREME caution should be exercised along the bike route as there may be vehicles coming in the opposite direction – I saw three near misses of cyclists in front of me swerving and vehicles locking up wheels as they exercised high levels of optimism negotiating the inside line on left handers. What they did say was not to cross the solid white line, but in my mind anyway this was not emphasised strongly enough.)
As I tried to picture where I was on the course and if there was much more downhill the heavens opened and down came the rain. Before the road was fully wet, the volume of rain seemed to double and when the road was wet, the rain doubled again!! The road was still going downhill and with increasingly tighter turns. Why did the French road designers put cast iron manhole covers in pairs right at the point where I want to turn into the respective corners? This meant that all of my lines weren’t my first choice and therefore slower, plus because of the rain and the runoff from the surrounding hillside some corners had a river, not just of water but mud and silt running across them. All of this combined with the beautifully smooth surface made each corner as slippery as baby oil on glass. I was sideways at least seven times that I remember with my brakes off!!
On a couple of occasions I was juggling the position of my bodyweight with traction as the rear wheel spun under accleration out of the turns. I lost count of the number of bikes and riders stranded at the roadside with bikes upside down and wheels out, or holding bits of chain in despair.
Finally I recognised the point at which the out-route joined the in-route for the bike course and relaxed slightly as I knew the hills and turns were behind me – it was still raining hard. I had used almost all of my bike handling skill to negotiate the treacherous downhill grease and remain both upright and making decent progress. I was riding a time trial bike with conventional gears and brakes where you change gear or brake using different handlebars which means that braking and changing gear can’t be done with one hand you have to momentarily ride one handed and lift one hand off the bar. Added to this I was using carbon fibre wheels which have weight and aerodynamic advantages but don’t tend to brake so well, particularly in the wet where there is no initial braking effect and then its a lot like hitting a brick wall!! You can imagine my relief when I saw that there was a mere 20k to go to the finish with one corner and a flat road.
Sadly, when I say that I had used almost all of my bike handling skill, the bit that I didn’t use I now needed. The rain had made the road a uniform colour and my sunglasses – always interesting in rain – enhanced this effect by making the road appear ‘flat and level’. Consequently I didn’t notice a long groove and bump in the surface which my wheels tracked perfectly, but not without a jolt at the same time. I was travelling at nearly 40kph (25mph) which doesn’t sound too fast until you are launched off the seat, out of one pedal and the back wheel sliding in a skid fashion out to the right while your right foot is ‘skiing’ along in front of you on the floor and you are on a collision course across the carriageway. I must have grabbed the brakes and after nothing from my brakes they grabbed and stopped the bike launching me over the top to land on my back sliding head first. I remember having the time to think as I slid along that there was some blue sky above me and even though I hadn’t yet banged my head I was glad to have a helmet on – as soon as I had this thought the back of my head touched down and I came to rest in a bush or hedge at the roadside with my bike on top of me. I stood up almost immediately fearing the worst, but willing to accept my fate. A quick look up and down what I could see and feel of my body revealed nothing of any importance. A quick look at my bike had much the same result other than a missing water bottle and a bent computer mount. Bars were straight, wheels ran free, the chain had come off, but went back on willingly and the gears were also straight. I swore out loud in disbelief. Two other riders had gone past in this time, one shouted something but I didn’t get what he said and just shouted back, “okay.”
I realised that I had joined the first group of cyclists after perhaps being in the second group long enough. (According to my heart rate monitor my pulse didn’t change during all of this excitement – no adrenaline rush whatsoever!)
After such a spectacular dismount I remounted somewhat cautiously feeling my way onto the seat and nursing my feet gently to clip back into the pedals. Amazingly everything worked. I stopped again to make a minor adjustment to the front brake and after that simply carried on and overtook about five more riders on my way into T2 with a time of 6h2m. Some riders were even sitting up and merely rolling into the finish. The final couple of miles along the PdA was made from a coned off lane (one of three) next to the central reservation which was occupied by hundreds of spectators but no barrier…the other two lanes formed the out and back element of the run course.
The transition from bike to run passed harmlessly enough in the rain with me spreading copious amounts of vaseline around my toes and feet before donning dry socks and run shoes – careful packing of these items in the pastic bag ensured that they had stayed dry during the rain as they hung out in the open. These measures ensured that I remained blister free and happily retained all of my (remaining) toe nails after my “run”.
The Run
I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible.
From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.
Jesse Owens
The first 5k of the run seemed to take an eternity and the next 20k passed much more easily.
In amongst all this, the pleasure of running through the cold showers before each aid station was pure bliss…apart from the sore spot on my neck!
As I lost momentum in my run speed I still managed to get through the first half of the marathon in around 2 hours which amazed me given my lack of run training. My bogey point in the previous two marathons was around the 20-25k point and I spent all of the second 10k telling myself that I was going to run through this today and not be held up by either the third lap blues or the knifeman who struck me down in Austria a year ago – I had fed the knifeman wine, beer and curry in my training up to this point and hoped that he would stay away…or had he already had his ‘pop’ at me out there 20k from home on the bike route? Either way I steeled myself to maintain some momentum back out to the airport for a third time. The sun was now shining and I managed to smirk to myself in a gloating fashion that being short sighted had its merits as I was one of a very small minority still wearing sunglasses and sun visor – others had ditched theirs in anticipation of the rain and clouds remaining for the afternoon and were squinting hard against the sun’s rays.
I made it to 25k at faster than a walk and promptly stopped for a pee, my first of the race. My reward for this was to stand still for a long time…and then to find it increasingly difficult to get momentum back as my legs began to wither beneath me. My target of a sub-11 was slipping away fast with each feeble step. Suddenly, in the bright afternoon sun I looked up and around the bay to see where the gazebos and tents of Ironman Expo and the finish were…they weren’t where I expected to see them…they were at least twice as far away. This realisation and the fact that I had to make it to this point once more took a huge piece of my remaining spirit away. Physically I was fine, there were no after effects of my crash, no imminent muscle cramps, my stomach had accepted my gels and energy drinks without protest, the water I was sipping at the aid stations wasn’t sloshing about giving me unwanted GI issues, I was cool and not overheating, knifeman was away attacking easier prey – I know as I’d seen three others bent double vomiting at the roadside, one of which I’d seen wretching for the third time! Put simply my legs just didn’t have much, if anything, of a run left in them. Had I used too much on the bike? No, I don’t think so as that was all within my planned targets. Did I run too hard for the first 20-25k? Possibly but I had run harder for longer in training. Was I carrying an injury? My continuous physical checks from the start of the run had all yielded a positive answer…apart from a growing sensation of a pebble under the ball of my right foot – which I thought I’d fixed for good. Even without this my legs just refused to lift at the hip enough for me to graduate from 12mins per k to 8mins to complete the last 10k and be in with a chance to finish in under 12 hours. I even calculated that running alternate kilometres in 7 minutes and walk/shuffling the next one in 9 minutes would give me the average I needed with a bit to spare. Disappointingly my legs simply couldn’t match my mental arithmetic at this late stage. It took almost all of the journey back from the airport for me to summon the will to run in over the blue carpet to the finish. I even had a couple of ‘practice’ runs to see how my legs responded to will over physical impairment.
The trot I made down the finish chute to a 5hr marathon and 12h20m total passed without any major drama until I crossed the finish line and then all hell was let loose from the skies above. The volume of the clap of thunder was enough to make my chest shake. The rain and frozen pea sized hailstones that followed it had everyone running for cover as everything and everybody got a severe soaking over the next five minutes while the ‘storm’ passed over. Biblical could be used to describe what I witnessed, but that would be too mild as Noah would have needed a bigger boat to survive this particular deluge. I chuckled from the shelter I had in front of the Ironman backdrop for finisher photos as this was almost exactly what we had cycled through up in the mountains, and precisely as bad as that which I had completed some training rides in.
Ten minutes later the sun was working its magic to dry everyone out and I was having a quick massage to ease the fatigue in my legs.
I was initially very pleased to have finished but somewhat deflated with ‘only’ achieving an improved swim time from my day. This sensation wore off as I learned more from others about their experiences and I heard that many competitors’ fate was sealed, not only in the last throes of the marathon – every bed in the two medical tents was occupied with horizontal athletes wrapped in foil blankets as drips were administered, but also on the bike course. I saw two runners being carried away on stretchers! There was an ambulance going down the PdA at least twice for each of my out and back efforts on the run (i.e. at least 16 ambulances). A runner was reported to have raised both arms in the air as he ran past his cheering supporters and crossed the cones into the bike-in route towards his fans without first checking to see if there was anything coming and was promptly floored by two oncoming cyclists! Many many cyclists came in wearing bin liners over their upper bodies. One cyclist I saw was riding one of the ‘VeluBlu’ city centre hire bikes but wearing all his tri racegear and the bike even had a number on it. This is of course not forgetting the cyclists I’d seen stranded out on the 112 miles of bike course with bicycles in bits and the many others I’d seen on the run course sporting plasters, dressings and bandages of all descriptions and sizes. I even heard the familiar tales of folk being lifted out of the swim before they’d got to 100m!
As I said at the start, I AM a very lucky man. My deflation turned to elation upon realising that I had succeeded in spades where others’ fate had ended up significantly worse than my piddly 5hr marathon effort.
Ironman is indeed tough. Very tough, and today this was shown to me yet again that it commands such a high level of respect that if you falter for a nanosecond, the results may be with you for considerably longer. Leanda Cave, 2012 World Champion, was first lady out of the water but forgot to put her race number on when she left transition essentially ending her race. More positively, I was shamed by a man who not only overtook me on the run but had also completed the bike course faster than me, which on its own is nothing extraordinary, but he only had one arm! The winner of the race had somehow crashed twice on his bike in the moist conditions, but still needed nearly 15 minutes more than last year’s winner!
The true sense of satisfaction for completing one of these doesn’t come to you straight away, it takes time, perhaps the same amount of time as it does for you to forget the level of suffering you go through in that last 15k of the “run”. Only then does the magnitude of your achievement begin to hit home as each element is added together synergistically combining to make the whole thing almost unbelievable.
I have been asked why do this? Articulating an answer should be easier than making the finish line but it never is, and each time I try, it either sounds like BS or justification with clichéd pleasantries. I will try again here:
Ironman doesn’t appear cheap, (unless you compare one Ironman race with an equivalent distance of sprint triathlons) and I reconcile the expense by comparison with motorcycling – a hobby I had before children – or golf – something I’ve never done; both are expensive in their own way. The worthwhile part for me is borne out of the camaraderie, the sense of achievement, the lifestyle changes to nutrition and heart health, an annual goal and the challenge of multisport on your cerebral and cognitive abilities leading up to raceday as every detail of that which you can control is tested. As an escape from the relatively mundane elements of day to day living its a pursuit that few would choose I agree, but that also makes it unique for those of us that are prepared to suffer a bit to gain a lot. I am a huge fan of inspiration – both feeling inspired and, if at all possible, for me to possess the capacity to inspire others. I have noticed that as the sport of triathlon becomes more widely recognised and accepted, the notion of combining three easily recognisable activities into one event raises eyebrows and interest which, in turn, becomes awestruck disbelief as the suggestion of long distance/Ironman triathlon is raised. Some are inspired by the knowledge that they know someone who has completed such an event.
Would I do another? is also a question I’m asked. Right now I’m not sure, but do have an invitation to Ironman Barcelona in October, and I’d really like to put the run gremlins in their place…I don’t know…yet!! What I do know is that I am a very very lucky happy man.
Between October 2nd and June 29th (39 weeks)
Total training hours: 410
Made up of: Swim 102, Bike 223, Run 85
With distances covered/kilometres: Swim 317.5, Bike 5540, Run 854.88.
Maximum 5 second bike power – 1040 Watts
Weight loss – 2.4kg
Maximum calories burned in one day – 7720 (Raceday)
Average calories burned/day – 2650 (Training)