Ironman Lake Placid

Lake Placid, NY
Sunday July 25, 2010
by: Charisa Wernick

Going into Lake Placid I had several goals, the main being sub-10. I knew this was a hard course, but I also believe on a day when everything falls into place, sub-10 is there. My other goal was to race hard, especially on the bike. I wanted to cross that finish line and know I had left 110% on the course.

The water was 74 degrees, so the swim was non-wetsuit for pros and was not the highlight of my day. I found feet, realized they were slow feet, passed them, chased the next group to no avail and ran into multiple large triangle buoys.

Seven Ironmans later and my illusive 1:06 swim barrier remains. If anything this motivates me to work harder on figuring out how to swim, so it might not be a bad thing in the end.

Onto the bike and I wasn’t giving up my sub-10 goal. I knew I would have to bike around a 5:25 and it would hurt, but I also believed I could do this. I came through the half right on schedule. And then I hit mile 80 and imploded. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, I’d been eating every 20-30 minutes, drinking, etc. but all of a sudden I knew calories were not getting into my blood stream.

I switched from racing to crisis-management. Multiple girls I had passed re-passed me while I slammed about 5 gels and a banana in the course of an hour. At this point I watched sub-10 slip away and wasn’t sure if I’d be walking the marathon.  I was also worried that throwing down that many calories over an hour would make my stomach extremely unhappy on the run, but I figured it was the only way to possibly salvage my race.

I felt semi-recovered from my implosion by about mile 100 and got off the bike in 5:38.

It took me until about mile 6 on the run to figure out that I had recovered from my bike implosion and would be able to run hard. At the end of the day I would run myself from 10th into 7th with a 3:22 marathon.

My overall time of 10:13 was a PR for me, so no complaints about the day. The course was beautiful and challenging and I look forward to returning.

You can view more pictures of the day here:
http://charisawernick.blogspot.com/2010/07/ironman-lake-placid-race-report.html

~Charisa Wernick