Confessions Of A Flabby Ironman

June 22, 2002

blah. home from the double century. About 20 miles in, I blew a spoke on my back rim... heard a metallic clank and didn't know what it was. Just after that happened, we saw a road closed, bridge out sign and kept going because there might have been a way to get across it, and the ride leader had called the highway department where they told him they were positive that there weren't any bridges out on the route we were going.

Because of this stated fact, we proceeded to ride into the road closed to thru traffic and ended up traversing a couple miles of sandy-muddy-road in construction. It was SUCH a mess. I have photos of it that I'll post. We end up with a detour which pushes the mileage for the day to 225 and we keep going. At the first convenience store we come to, I stop because I think my wheel is out of True, not realizing that of course it is because I've broken a spoke, which is automatically going to make it unTrue and make it wobble. The ride leader properly tensions the other spokes around the broken one to compensate and I take off again.

I can feel my tire starting to wobble 20 miles up the road when I pull up to the next town and I realize there are loose spokes again. I try to tighten them the best I can and ride out of town figuring I'll try to flag down teh ride leader as soon as I see him. A few miles down the road, I hear a "CLANK!" and realize that I've broken another spoke. Two broken spokes on a wheel that only has 20 spokes to begin with because it's a racing wheel lead to having a REALLY wobbly wheel, so it's absolutely impossible to continue past the 70 mile mark. I've never DNFed a ride. I really didn't want to start today.

Had to call my mom and have her come get me an hour and a half away. Felt bad that I made her go out of her way. Marched the bike right back to the bike shop when I got home. A brand new bike with only 70-80 miles on it SHOULD NOT be breaking spokes. Really frustrating. I'm doing alright though. I got more hours on teh bike in than todays training called for, so that's a bonus, and I was averaging about 20-23mph for the first 70 miles which felt really good. What felt even better is that I did most of it around 150 bpm on my heart rate monitor... which is way below my Max. Heart rate.

I still need to do some seat adjustments because lowering myself into the aero position on my aerobars is causing a little too much pressure on my testicles (sorry,TMI) and it's a little painful to stay in the position for too long.

I'm beginning to think though, that I could really excell at the Ironman. Based on today's performance, if my bike works properly, I should be able to get a really decent split in teh bike portion of the race, and hopefully by doing this longer mile stuff, I'll still have legs by the time I need to run the marathon.

Ang is buying me a commiseration dinner tonight, so y'know, that's not
such a bad thing.

More later.