Xterra Miami 2012

I still didn't get any pizza but I did get a first place.

The venue for Xterra Miami

The race was the last event of this trip which was originally planned to attend my niece's wedding on Grand Cayman Island. The race moved its date to the second weekend in March and happily coincided with our return from the wedding cruise in the northern Carribean. So, with the airfare already paid for in a sense I decided to do the race and get an early start on my triathlon season.

Something tells me that spending a week drinking lots of beer and relaxing on a cruise ship is not the best way to prepare for a triathlon. Combine that with spending the previous three weeks having work travel and other commitments wreaking havoc with one's training schedule resulting in very little actual training getting done and you're definitely not standing on the beach in top form. But there I was, well rested but definitely not well prepared.

I did feel like I was in better shape, both in terms of my fitness and my mountain biking skills, than the last time I did this race three years ago.  My first thought when my brother first brought up the idea of doing Xterra Miami three years ago was, "It's Miami, the course has to be completely flat".  I ended up having a terrible race then because I wasn't prepared for the almost diabolically technical bike course and almost equally difficult run course. This time though, I felt like I was a much better mountain biker.

My brother, Scott,  and his friend, Kevin, accompanied me as we pre-rode the course on Saturday afternoon after debarking the ship in the morning and putting our bikes together in the parking lot at Oleta State Park, on the northern end of Biscayne Bay. The pre-ride went well, giving me much more confidence in my ability to handle the course than the day before the race last time I did this event. I was still a little nervous about my fitness and there's always an element of uncertainty before a race because anything can happen during the mountain bike ride and often does. As it turned out, this race would be quite eventful.  But I went to sleep the night before the race feeling pretty good.

The first thing that went wrong on race day was the time change. I changed the clock and got a wake up call on time but I lost an hour of sleep, getting up at what my body thought was 3:30am but was actually 4:30am on order to get to the race venue in time.

We left the hotel on time at 5am and headed for the race.  I realized a few minutes later that I had left my Garmin in the charger plugged into the wall behind a chair in our hotel room. Thinking I had no time to go back to the hotel since I had to pick up my brother and his wife I drove on, resigned to do without the Garmin. As it turned out, Scott's buddy was picking him up and after finding this out at Scott's hotel I realized that I had time to go back to our hotel and get my Garmin.  That crisis was averted.
Just as we approached the entrance to the park it started raining, hard. After we got into the huge park and drove towards the venue the rain stopped and I realized that the road was dry. I thought it was just a passing, isolated shower.  I parked the car and before we could get out, a torrential rain started to fall. This was going to make for an interesting race.
 
Thanks to the switch to daylight saving time it was pitch dark when I rode my bike to transition after waiting out the storm for about fifteen minutes.  I got a good spot, left my bike and returned to the car. Shortly after returning to the car it started to rain some more. The rain finally stopped for good a few minutes later and I grabbed my gear bag and lugged it to my spot in transition right near the bike in/out. I laid my stuff out in the pre-dawn light, lubed my chain and fixed my misaligned front wheel.

My brother had come down with a nasty case of bronchitis on the ship and had decided not to compete. I had not realized that the swim would be wetsuit legal so I hadn't brought my wetsuit. Since Scott wasn't competing and we're about the same size I tried to get into his wetsuit.  No such luck. He's a bit smaller than I am through the shoulders and even if we could've gotten the zipper up, the suit would've been too restrictive to swim in.  The swim was only 800-meters so I wasn't terribly concerned about having a wetsuit. The small time advantage from wearing the suit would have been largely eaten up by taking the suit off after the swim anyway.

I made my way down to the water and got in an excellent warmup. The water was 72-degrees so, although wetsuit legal, it wasn't uncomfortably cold at all and I got used to the water right away.

After the warmup swim

As is typical of this race we didn't start anywhere near on time. I would find out later that that wasn't the only organizational problem with the race. We finally got started at 8:10 instead of the advertised 7:30.
After waiting around so long for the start I had forgotten to lower my goggles, realizing my mistake after getting a stinging shot of salty Biscayne Bay water in my eyes.

The start

My swim didn't go too badly but it wasn't great. I could swim quite well from the start but eventually my stomach started to get nauseous, as usual, and I had to alternate between freestyle and breast stroke.  I came out of the water last, a position I am quite used to on the swim but I wasn't far back.

Out of the water

I made up some time in transition after having probably my best ever swim/bike transition. I left transition on the bike with a slight lead on last place but that lead wouldn't last too long.

Headed out on the bike.  Notice that I am NOT last out of transition.

I hit the trail head feeling really good and ready to attack the extremely technical course. I do most of my mountain biking in the desert.  We don't have trees in the desert. We have some cactus that gives us lots of incentive to carve our turns carefully and to stay on the trail, but trees on both sides of the trail, often not much more than handlebar width apart, are just about nonexistent. Here, in South Florida, there's trees absolutely everywhere. And what do you get when you have trees?  You have roots.  Roots in abundance, ready to snag a pedal or slide a back wheel out from under you. And they were wet roots that were extremely greasy from all the rain making an already difficult course positively treacherous in spots. All went well for about two miles.  I was rocking the Casbah, dominating the dojo and generally riding pretty well, confident in the MTBing skills that I had been honing over the winter.

Then, just as I stood up on the pedals and started to attack a hill...

Hill? Did I say hill?  Yes.  Hills. Hundreds of them. Oh, nothing too high. Most in the 4-10 foot range but the course was 14 miles of twisty, hilly switchback singletrack with a few short sections of dirt road interspersed about the course to make about 15 miles total. There was almost no place to rest and the course was full of drops, ramps, and a few boardwalks that had us working all the time that we were riding.

…my pedals locked up and I thought, "What the hell is going on?"  After dismounting and dragging my bike to the side of the trail I discovered that when I unweighted the back of the bike by standing up, my back wheel, which had come loose somehow, dropped out of its mounts and bent the hell out my derailleur mount and twisted my chain.  I thought my race was over. Then I calmed down a little, caught my breath and started to figure out how to fix this thing. After 10 or 15 minutes I was able to stuff the rear wheel back into its mount, straighten the derailleur mount and get the chain re-aligned so it didn't hit the spokes on the back wheel. Amazingly, everything worked but the chain was a little noisy for the rest of the race. A few minutes later I encountered a guy who had broken his chain. I stopped to help him for a few minutes, continuing on when it looked like he had it almost fixed.

I proceeded on and rode the course technically pretty well but not very fast. I had a few close calls like when I rode over a pile of logs at an angle and almost lost my rear wheel out from under me. I was running brand new tires that I had chosen for their ability to handle soft terrain and they performed very well. I didn't have any trouble with sliding out on the hundreds of switchbacks and hairpin turns.

The roots were the biggest challenge. I was constantly pedaling to maintain forward motion up and over all the hills. It was very easy to snag a root and get my foot knocked out of a pedal which happened quite often. The only really nasty crash happened about 4 miles into the race.

I was climbing a root covered hill and just as I crested the hill the back wheel slid across the roots and went right out from underneath me. I went down, hard, on my left (why is it always the bad side that you land on?) shoulder.  I was stunned but not really hurt that I could tell. I had a little bit of flesh pain but thought nothing of it until a woman behind me asked me if my shoulder was ok since it was pretty bloody. I figured it was just a flesh wound and I soldiered on.  After the first loop of the bike course which took about an hour and a half I stopped to take a gel.

I had been steadily slowing as my lack of fitness for a long, hot and humid effort began to show.  That combined with having to stop for faster riders who were lapping me on the two loop bike course made for a long bike ride.

I did much better on the second loop. I had to walk a couple of obstacles that I could have ridden but I was too tired to attack them.  That was partially offset by being able ride a few obstacles that I had trouble with on the first loop because I knew they were coming and I set myself up better to negotiate them.

Toward the end of the second loop, as my arms were getting pretty tired, I took a turn too wide, ping-ponged off a tree, bounced across the trail, ricocheted off a tree on the other side and fell down pretty hard.  Clearly I have a lot of work to do on my arm fitness (and my overall fitness) before my next race. I was definitely ready to be done with the bike.

I rode back to transition just as my derailleur started to act up. I'll be doing reconstruction when I get the bike home.  Second loop of the bike course took about an hour, aided by the fact that, out there all alone, I didn't have to let faster riders pass and I wasn’t slowed down by anyone in front of me.

Back from the bike.

I had an excellent bike/run transition, heading out on the run feeling good but with some pretty heavy legs.  The first water crossing came about a quarter mile into the run. It was a good 30-40-yards across and the water was well over my head.  I put my Garmin in my hat and “swam” across in an upright position.  I got out on the other side and started to run with waterlogged shoes.  

Headed out on the run.

The first 5 miles of the run course was marked pretty well as all the Xterra races I have done but that would soon change.  I negotiated another water crossing about a half mile from the first one.  This one was twice as wide as the first one and featured a rope with which to pull ourselves across.  A while after the second water crossing I came upon the first run aid station manned by two young boys.  As I drank some water and took my second gel one of the boys asked about my bloody right arm which I had cut when I slammed into a tree while impersonating a pinball.  I told him I had injured myself when I fell off the bike.  With a completely straight face and a bit of an incredulous look he said, “And you kept going?”  I just smiled and said, “Hey, this is Xterra.”

I felt pretty good as the spring in my legs had returned and I ran most of the next three miles which included another aid station where I stopped briefly to get some Gatorade having lost my Gatorade bottle on the second water crossing when it floated out of my water bottle belt.  After negotiating about a mile and a half of twisty, rocky but mostly flat trail I exited the woods expecting to cross a road and be directed by signs and volunteers to the next aid station.  Instead the open field where the aid station was supposed to be had a van where they were loading up said aid station.  I yelled “Where do I go?” but got no response so I ran across the field, got some more Gatorade and the guy said, “Go that way.” as he pointed to the other side of the field.  “You’ll see the signs as you go through the trees.”  Well, I went that way but there were no signs.  I looked around a bit but there were no markers anywhere.  Xterra courses are clearly marked with blue “XTERRA” arrows for the bike course and red “XTERRA” arrows for the run course.  The first four miles of the run had been well marked.  I wandered around generally following the route I remembered from the last mile of the course when I did it three years ago.  I kept looking for a red arrow but there were  none to be seen.  I managed to find my way back to the finish but I know I didn’t go the right way although, according to my Garmin, I covered more than a mile and a half instead of the mile that I should have gone from the last “aid station”.

The finish.  Notice that there is no chip mat.  This race doesn't wait for all the competitors to finish.

Clearly, I have a lot of work to do on my overall fitness.  I think I performed better on this edition of Xterra Miami though with a better swim, a better bike (minus the mechanical) and a better run if you factor out getting lost on the last mile of the course because of the missing markers.  Still, it was a sucky performance that I’m not happy with.

The shoulder doesn't hurt as much as I thought it would.

This race was intended to be a gauge of my fitness level going into the triathlon season.  It looks like the arrow is pointing closer to empty than I thought.

Oh, and the first place award for 60-64?  I was dead last in the race and I found out later that some other people got lost on the run too because of the lack of trail markers..  My only competition on the sign up list was my brother and he decided not to race because he was sick.  So I was the only competitor in my age group.

EPILOGUE

After replacing my seriously bent derailleur hanger my bike still wouldn't shift right.  I adjusted the derailleur but it still wouldn't shift properly so I took it into the shop today.  It turns out that I have a severely cracked rear triangle.  

You can see the crack just to the right of the weld.  Had I ridden much more it probably would have broken clean off.  No wonder that it started riding poorly toward the end of the bike ride.