RR: Women's Half Marathon
Even St. Petersburg had enjoyed morning lows in the 60s and low humidity the last few weeks. But not on race day. 70F with about 90% humidity. Definitely not PR weather.This was the first year for this event. Very well run overall. My suggestions for next year:- create real corrals before the start. The small self-seeding pace signs were woefully inadequate. You had 4000 runners but just a few pace signs that stopped at 10 minute miles. Everyone else was a walker. Um, plenty of people run slower than 10 minute miles. Forcing someone who runs a 2:20 half marathon to line up with walkers caused a lot of problems on the course.- add more water stops, make them long

Beach to Battleship Posterity Post: Nutrition
This is a self serving blog entry.  Even though my achilles tendon did not allow me to finish Beach to Battleship 140.6, the rest of the race was very successful.   So I want to record what I did, what I ate, etc, so that I know what worked when I return to ironman racing, probably in 2011 or 2012.  For posterity, I weighed 140-142 on race day (didn't bring a scale to know the exact number).  Pre-race foodThursday: Did not worry about what I ate. We were driving most of the day.Breakfast: Eggo waffles for breakfastLunch: Burger King (Whopper Jr value meal, cheapest they offered)Dinner: Hot chicken wings and beer

Beach to Battleship DNF
By now many of you have noticed I don't have a finish time for the Beach 2 Battleship 140.6 race.I chose to pull myself at the turnaround for the marathon. At that point I had been walking for 2 miles with pain, limping up the bridges. It was pretty clear that slogging out another 13.1 miles could do long term damage. To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement.Up until that point it had been an epic day. PRs all around. 1:07 Swim, 7:05ish for the bike in spite of a diabolical headwind for the last 40 miles, The first 6.5 miles of the marathon rocked. Passed it in 1:15 with energy to spare. I was easily sliding into 10:20 pace but made a point to hold back

Not excited.
The Beach to Battleship full ironman is waiting for me on Saturday.  And I could not be less excited.  If one more person dares me to race their training partner or asks me how fast I will finish, I will scream.  When you're an ironman fledgling like me, time predictions seems so arrogant. In a perfect world I'd be hoping for 13:something but that never happened.  Quite the opposite.  So much has gone wrong along the way.  My jeans are falling off but I've been sick most of my taper.  Have a sore throat and cough today, in fact. Either Gatens is right and I'm apathetic because of hidden confidence or....I'm f$cked.  But I do know that my b

Taper: the list making phase
The Taper Cold is on it's way out so I've moved into the next taper phase which is List Making.  Don't want to forget anything so I have started making exhaustive lists of every small item I could possible need over the entire Ironman weekend.Might take a break from list making to get in an easy bike ride before lunch.  Gotta test out the lungs.