Two miles into the run course I knew I had messed up. I had severely underestimated the heat. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to run through every aid station. I knew that soon I might not be running much at all. I had tried to go to the bathroom. Nothing could come out. I was already past the point of no return on the hydration scale. It was going to be a long day.
A week earlier, when I first arrived in Las Vegas, it was hot. Though it had gotten over 100 degrees Farenheit several times over the summer in Boulder, it had cooled off some recently and I had forgotten how hot it could be. But more than that, the heat felt more intense here. The air felt much warmer. And I couldn't just wait for cool morning or night temperatures to run in it. Particularly if I was to be racing in it right in the middle of the day.
The good news is my fitness was good. Very good. I had overdone things quite a bit three weeks ago with my last big training week, but now I was finally recovering and feeling strong. Very strong. After each workout, and throughout each day, I was meticulously loading up on fluids and a full spectrum of electrolytes. The heat had started to feel not so bad again. I was ready to race.
Race morning was hot. As soon as the sun could be seen, I was sweating. After setting up transition, I went to my car and hit the A/C to stay cool while I waited for my 8:00 AM start time. The last wave to go. An hour and a half behind the pros.
The sunrise over Lake Las Vegas on race morning.
Waiting around to enter the water, I was sipping water. I should have been sipping more. I was already losing hydration and the race hadn't started yet.
After entering the water, it was a solid 5-10 minutes of floating around at the starting line, trying not to get kicked too hard by others as we bunched up for the last few minutes. When the gun finally went off, it was almost a relief to be in the grinder of a couple hundred elite swimmers, all vying to be out front. At most races, I end up in the chase pack of swimmers that get left behind by the much stronger lead pack. Here, it was a simply constant stream of fast swimmers with no gaps for much of the first part of the race. I was somewhere at the back.
In most races this size, you can expect to get jammed up after a few minutes with all the slower swimmers from the waves in front. This was not a problem here. Almost noone was a slow swimmer. I exited the water a couple minutes slower than expected, but everyone else in the wave seemed to be a couple minutes slow as well.
On the bike, I immediately felt good. And strong. The legs were there. But I had to do what I could to contain myself and not put out too much power in the first part of the race. Especially with it being a 20 minute climb out of the transition area before heading into the monstrous hills of Lake Mead. For the first 30 minutes, it was a struggle not to go harder. I was being constantly passed, yet I was riding around threshold or higher. I had to remind myself that this was a world championship. These guys could ride.
Once into Lake Mead, I started to get a feel for exactly how tough this course was going to be. The elevation profile is quite misleading. I was often putting out 250 watts or more in my smallest gears and spinning out on the way back down. Luckily I had done a lot of riding in the mountains over the summer and was very comfortable with climbing, particularly in the aero position.
After the turnaround, it was a tailwind most of the way back, past Lake Las Vegas and the swim start, and up into the town of Henderson for the run, close to 1000ft above the bike start. If the wind had been blowing the opposite direction, it would have been a much slower day. Around this time, it was starting to get really hot. Most of my water was going on my head in an attempt to stay cool. I was hydrating by feel like I normally do for training and racing. For this heat, it wasn't enough. Not even close. Though I went thru 4 bottles of fluids, I calculated later that only around 2 had been drunk, since each bottle had been thrown out with fluid left and a lot of it had gone on my head. My normal fluid intake for 80 degree temps is around 3-4. For this race, I probably needed at least 6.
Still, I felt good getting off the bike. It was a struggle to keep the power up around my target watts for the last hour of the bike, but only a small one. My heart rate had been relatively high all day as well so when it moved to 7-10 beats below max for that last hour, I didn't think much of it. It was only after that I realized this was a huge warning sign of my increasingly severe dehydration.
The first mile of the run felt normal for getting off of such a long, hard bike. I thought for sure that after another mile or two, I would come alive and be blazing the run course. Instead, things got bad. Very bad. And the temperature continued to increase.
With aid stations running out of ice everywhere, spongues that were barely cool, and no shade in sight, the run course became a walk course for those that hadn't properly hydrated or paced the bike. And from the looks of things, very few had.
I have never seen so many people walking on a run course of any race I've ever done. And I was right there with them on the dehydration scale. Any other race, and I might have decided the damage I was about to do to my body by continuing to run would not be worth it, and I would stop at an aid station until I could properly rehydrate to jog in or quit. But this was the world championship. There was no question, I was pushing on.
As slow as I was running, I was glad to see that my form never broke.
And on I went. Running from aid station to aid station, getting just enough hydration in to make it to one more aid station, until finally, I had made it thru all 13.1 miserable miles to the finish. But though it was one of my slowest runs ever, and I wasn't able to showcase the particularly good run fitness I had developed over the summer, I still moved up almost 20 spots in my age group to hit my goal of finishing in the top half. Simply, by not quitting.
