Second race of the year, warmup for Kona.  One more race on the agenda – an Olympic (which I have never done before) – which I am not sure if I will do again.

Swim: Luckily, I was in the first wave of six.  I got out to an early lead on the swim and was passed by the eventual winner (John Kenny) after about 800 yards.  I went on to finish second in the swim overall posting a 23:54.  That is a pretty fast time for me and largely due to a current on the return trip to land.  The return leg of the swim was not well marked at all.  The water was very shallow as well which allowed me to do butterfly pushoffs for a long way out at the start and again on the way in.  This definitely uses up a lot more energy but also provides a much bigger bang for your buck.  

First transition was slow and sloppy.  Gave up about 25 seconds.

The bike course is very hilly and I didn’t feel great on the bike.  My legs felt heavy and spent pretty much the entire way.  However, I was able to match my time at Timberman on a much harder bike course.  So maybe I was pushing that much harder.  Or maybe I was just tired from a hard week of training.  Either way, the end result was a 2:24 (avg: 23.3mph).  I was still in second place but the leader had put some additional time into me and there was another biker about 50 yards behind me.  At this point I knew it would be difficult to overcome the leader but I also felt pretty confident that I could take the guy behind me on the run.

Second transition was again slow and sloppy!  The guy in third passed me in transition and was about 20 yards ahead of me on the run start.

Run went pretty well.  I moved back into second very quickly and never saw number 3 again.  I held about 6:25 pace all the way through except for one or two miles that were up steep hills.  This course was very hilly with 2 of the longer hills being on trails, not pavement.  No mile was over 7:00 and I was comfortably able to hold pace without pushing my limits - hopefully a good sign for Kona.  I finished the run in 1:24:30.  My goal for this race was to hold off any challengers and finish in second once I realized first was out of reach.  Because I felt so slow on the bike, I thought I had gone a lot slower then I did.  Seeing as this course was much harder then Timberman, I was guessing I was about 5 minutes behind my Timberman time of 4:20.  Happily, I did much better then that. 

I ended up second with a 4:15:05.  The leader finished in 4:03 if I remember correctly.  3rd pace was a 4:17 (different wave) and the biker on my tail finished about 8 minutes behind me in fourth overall. I compared some times of folks who did both Timberman and Toughman this year and each person was about 3 to 7 minutes slower at Toughman so I was pretty happy – although I guess that means I wasn’t going hard enough in NH back in August.

Overall, this is the most difficult half ironman distance course I have done.  I do not have a ton of experience; however, this is certainly a challenging, hilly course.