Ironman Lake Placid Race Report

As many of you may already know, I qualified this weekend in Lake Placid for the 2007 Ironman World Championships in Kailua-Kona Hawaii. The championship race will take place on October 13th 2007, and I'll be competing with the some of the best triathletes in the world. Here is a race recap on how I qualified!

Ironman Lake Placid Race Report

Imagine pure chaos, the blast of the cannon, 2200 bodies swimming in every direction possible, and you now have the swim start of the Ironman Triathlon. The swim was held at Mirror Lake in Lake Placid New York, and consisted of two 1.2 mile counter clockwise loops. I got off to my best swim start ever with little congestion and easily found my rhythm. As I finished the first loop, I glanced at my watch and it showed a split of 31:20. The second loop took slightly longer, and I exited the swim and final 1.2 mile loop with a time of 1:04:55, and an overall position of 368th place. As I exited the water, I felt really strong and happy with my swim time and knew I could make up more time on the bike. I hurried through the transition area, into the changing rooms, and headed out on the bike.

The bike course travels through the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and has some of the most incredible scenery imaginable. I hammered and played catch up the first 56 miles of the bike averaging 21.82 mph. On the second loop I backed off slightly, and finished with an average speed of 20.5 mph and had jumped from 368th place into 64th place overall. At this point I had no idea where I placed in the field, and all I knew was that I felt extremely good for having biked 112 miles, and swimming 2.4 miles. As I arrived back into Lake Placid, I knew I had to shave off another minute or two in transition and was out on the run in less than two minutes.

The marathon (26.2 mile) run course travels out of town and past the famous 1980 Olympic Ski Jumps an then sends you out and back through rural roads, and rolling hills. There were two significant hills on the run course but nothing similar to the hills I'm used to training on in Pittsburgh. I went out on the run pretty hard, and was clipping off seven minute miles for about the first 8 miles or so. I felt really good on the run until about mile 18, and my pace began to suffer. I started ticking off 9:00 minute miles, and I said to myself, it's now or never. I sucked it up, and tried to run the remainder of the marathon sub 9:00's. I finished the marathon in 3:38:30 bettering my overall and final position in the race to 58th place, and a total Ironman time of 10:17:39. I had a feeling that I placed high up in the overall standings, but had no idea what I was soon about to find out.

The previous two years at Placid, Ironman has taken the top five slots in my age group, so I figured that I had a shot at Hawaii. When I got back to my hotel room later that night, I did some research on the five guys ahead of me, and luckily one of the five had already won a Hawaii slot so I thought my chances of getting to Hawaii were a shoe in. When I showed up at the Hawaii registration booth the next morning, I soon found out that they only gave my age group four slots, and I had to rely on someone not showing up to get the last roll down spot. As the watch second hand moved ever so slowly, only two of the four people showed up and I got the final Kona Slot.

I signed up with Paula Newby-Frasier (eight time Ironman World Champion), and it's now official. I'll be heading to the big island October 13th, 2007 for the Hawaii Ironman Championships.

Special thanks to my beautiful wife to be Jennifer, for supporting me and allowing me to realize anything is possible. Also a special thanks goes out to all of my family and friends and Jim at Trizilla Triathlon Equipment Company for supporting and believing in me!

Chad
www.chadholderbaum.com

posted by Chad Holderbaum @ 8:13 PM Comments: 0