Some more comments:
13. Be wary of low temperatures in the mornings…and at night when the sun sets! Not so bad in the morning with a wetsuit on, but if you’re still out running and the sun starts going down, better KEEP RUNNING or else walking will potentially make you hypothermic, given your clothes being damp from sweat and then your body just cooling down tremendously.
14. I hate 2 loop swims. Running out on the beach slowed me down by 2-3 minutes I think.
15. Panama City Beach is on the panhandle of Florida, which is actually in CENTRAL time while the rest of Florida is in EASTERN time. My watch was all messed up in calculating the local time and almost messed up my pickup time at the airport!
16. Watch out for 728 lbs. Mako Sharks when you swim….Just kidding.

Thinking back to IM FL, I thought I’d put down some notes regarding the race independent of the race report. Here they are:
1. Logistics were very well done. T1, T2 and the expo were all in one place so there wasn’t much walking around.
2. Since T1 and T2 were in the same place, this is a very good spectator race. Spectators don’t have to drive miles between transition areas to watch the race. The one loop bike makes it tough to see your competitor on the bike, but 2 loops on the run makes it easy to watch them on the run, as also for the swim which is also two loops.
3. Aid stations were well stocked. Nobody ran out of anything as far as I could tell.
4. Spectators were friendly and rowdy. This makes for keeping competitors’ spirits high as they aim for the finish line.
5. There were 2258 people who started the race. This makes for a huge pileup on the swim as they head out. Be wary of swinging arms and kicking legs, but enjoy the massive draft around the buoys!
6. There were 1000+ first timers. This makes for challenging elements. First timer swimmers tend to be very messy swimmers, with swinging arms all over the place. On the bike out, there were guys who didn’t mount until much later, which caused a backup since they were running with their bikes right in the middle of the lane. Once you get past them, then it’s not bad at all.
7. Big packs of bikers make drafting benefits almost impossible to avoid, even hanging back the required distance.
8. Lots of Ironman merchandise available; a shopper’s paradise! For some items, you don’t have to get there right at the moment the expo first opens. But still get there early to get your size. Contrast this to international races where they never order enough stuff and run out pretty quickly. For finisher’s gear, there was a line out the store to get in, so get there early to get great finisher’s gear. At least they let us order this cool shell jacket since they ran out of our sizes.
9. Eating healthy is a challenge. Panama City Beach is filled with fast food and bad eats. Rent a condo with a kitchen, go to the local Walmart and buy fresh food to eat, although one could argue that the produce at Walmart wasn’t all that great. No Whole Foods in this town!
10. The food at the awards banquet could have been better. It was a bit ordinary and didn’t taste all that great. They had pork ribs and sauteed fish. I had the fish which was OK, and ate more salad and pasta alongside.
11. I’d rate the course a 10+. Very, very low hills broke up the bike course and allowed you to take a small break from constant pedaling/watts output, but it wasn’t totally flat like IM WA which made for a pedaling challenge to keep constant watts with no breaks at all. Running was totally flat and very shaded. In some ways, I’d say the course was faster than IM WA.
12. The local airport is PFN which is 15 minutes away, but you can also fly into Fort Walton Beach which is about 1-1.5 hour drive away, but potentially gives more options to fly.

It’s been 1.5 weeks after IM FL. Sometime yesterday, my aerobic system recovered fully and I didn’t have that funny, “cool” sensation in my lungs any more. Muscularly, I am a bit sore on the top of my quads down by the knees; this was bugging me prior to Ironman and now it’s acting up. I have not done any high watts training for the bike but I did do some leg extensions and it was a little painful to do those. No more leg extensions until this is healed! Luckily I do not have a need for high watts bike training; I’m in the off season now and will do other types of training to let my body recover from the abuse of Ironman training. Also, it seems that running doesn’t bother my quad/knee area so I will ramp up on form training and also neuro-muscular run training.
So heading into:
1. weight lifting
2. a bit of Bikram yoga if I can get time to go
3. run form training and neuro-muscular training
4. bike neuro-muscular training and training strength/form with Powercranks
5. swim strength training with one arm swimming and paddle swimming
6. core exercises, like planking and stomach/back muscle building
7. balance exercises, simulating running stance and motions
Looks like I’m about at 1.5 weeks to recover from Ironman now. Feel pretty good about that after 5 Ironmans! Adaptation is coming along nicely.

One more:
Negative split and descend training really helped my ability to deliver high efforts even towards the end of the race, or the end of each segment. On the bike, I would train hills up to 5 hours and then go ride for an hour, completing intervals at high watts with rest in between. This helped me be able to accelerate and pass at the final stretch of the bike, even when I was tired. For the run, I would descend my long 6 mile hill loops so that each loop was run faster than the last. This trained my muscles to not collapse after many miles, but to be able to still give more when I demanded more speed nearing the end. Thus, after 24 miles of maintaining pace, I was still able to accelerate at the end to have a strong finish.
Tiring your body out for a long stretch, and THEN picking up the pace at the end during training is painful, taxing, and hard, but extremely great training for not fading during a race and potentially even going faster at the end.

In reflecting back on my training for and racing during Ironman Florida, I thought about what worked well and what didn’t work so well. Here are some thoughts:
1. I switched drinks from Accelerade to First Endurance EFS. Accelerade was upsettng my stomach. I think it was their use of soy protein and the way it froths up when shaken that caused stomach problems. First Endurance EFS remains a flat, non-bubbly fluid and uses whey protein which both don’t upset my stomach.
2. More long hill climbs really strengthened my legs. I started doing laps up Kings Mountain, which is about a 4.4 mile climb versus Old La Honda which is about 3.3 miles. I also added intervals up the climbs to stimulate getting my legs out of pedaling at only one speed.
3. I did many threshold workouts this time on both the bike and run. For the bike, I went through a series of high watts, long interval sets which strengthened my tolerance at lactate threshold for longer periods of time. On the run, I did fartlek sets which ended with hard intervals of long duration. This also helped bring up my LT tolerance.
The downside to this was I believe that doing too many threshold workouts and not getting enough rest between them helped set the stage for some lung constriction that developed.
4. Swimming in indoor pools placed in small rooms increased the chlorine content of those rooms and caused some lung constriction to develop. Medicine helped get me out of that condition, but now I try to avoid swimming in indoor pools as much as possible.
5. Neural muscular run training early season helped increase my leg turnover. Fast running for short duration on the treadmill helped train my nerves to fire faster and to be conditioned to do so.
6. Emergen-C upwards of 3 times a day helped keep me sickness free to whole season.
7. One arm swimming really helped build up my swimming strength and helped correct an imbalance in my stroke in my left arm. Pulling with paddles helped support this strength development. Focus on the left arm also helped build it up, although it was still behind in endurance relative to my right arm on race day.
8. I also worked a lot on head and body positioning while swimming. I tried to keep as relaxed as possible, work on the body roll and adding power to my arm while stroking, and also tried to keep my head and energy moving forward, not up or down or to the side while stroking. I am a definite hip dragger while swimming and think I’ve improved this a lot.
9. The disc wheel was amazing. It’s aerodynamics and mass helped make pedaling at speed a dream. I did not experience the sail effect on this race, but someday I hope to make use of it.
The Powertap on my disc wheel was a disappointment in that it was reading inaccurately. I hope to return it this week back to Zipp/Saris and get it fixed.
10. I wore compression sleeves on my lower legs during the run. While inconclusive as to whether they made a big difference, I believe that they did help a lot and contributed to my Ironman run PR of 4:19.
11. I ran more weeks at 3 hours, which amounts to be about 18 miles for me. Dealing with the energy and mental drain of long distance was something I really needed to do, to ensure that I would not collapse mentally or physically when I reached that point in the race. I was also fortunate to not have gotten injured during the process, but good form, regular ART/Graston treatment, and running on trails helped mitigate injuries. I also did these runs mid-afternoon, during the hottest part of the day to increase my heat tolerance. Didn’t really need that at IM FL this year, but you never know when you’ll have to race Ironman in 80-90 degree weather.
12. I subtly altered my running form to reduce my up and down of running. I found that my normal stride, while more comfortable because I was used to it, also wasted energy in my legs absorbing more up and down energy. I tried this time to maintain a level head the whole way and to focus on my legs churning underneath my body. This really felt better in terms of the reducing the pounding against the pavement. During the race, I also was able to maintain pace better this way; at moments when I felt that I had switched back to my old style of running, it felt more strained and taxing. Switching back to this style of running kept me going more comfortably. I do need to practice more with this form in order to increase speed.

So my finish time was 11:36. I looked at my watch and noticed that my stopwatch read 11:32. Where did 4 minutes go? I’m pretty sure I would have remembered starting it again if I had noticed it stopped. All my splits were pretty consistent, with the exception of T1 where I forgot to hit the split button. Weird. Was I running so fast that I entered a time warp and lost 4 minutes somewhere in local Dshen time?
[Please play Twilight Zone music here]

From ASI Photography. Some pics of me on my bike:

Here is me running:

Here are some of me crossing the finish line, and happy with my medal:

And yes, I thought I was grimacing when I crossed the finish line. Look at that roar of happiness!

Some pics of the awards banquet, with Mike Reilly announcing, Graham Fraser CEO of Ironman, and Greg Welch with some of the Janus Charity Challenge winners:

These guys are amazing: the 75-79 men age groupers who finished Ironman. They just blow me away:

Here are the women pros with Bella Comeford coming in first once again:

Here are the men pros with Tom Evans winning:

By the way, Tom was kind enough to show us what was caught in the waters off Panama City Beach just the week before:

A 728 lbs. Mako shark! Holy moly! And here we are, us triathletes in our wetsuits looking like a big school of a shark’s favorite food, seals!
One more shot of the two pro first place finishers, Tom Evans and Bella Comeford:

Getting up this morning wasn’t too bad. I think my body is adapting to the abuse I give it every Ironman!
I drop off my bike at TriBike Transport and then head to the expo. There I pick up my pics which I will post later once I get home to my scanner. I also go to get my finisher’s certificate.

Walking then over to the store, I wait in line to get in to buy finisher’s gear. What a zoo that was. I did buy a cool finisher’s jacket which I can use during cold Ironmans. I hope to get that 6-8 weeks from now since they ran out of my size.
Then, Dan and I go to get lunch at a strip mall which actually makes Panama City Beach not look like a redneck riviera but like a normal place. We stop in at the Hofbrau Beer Garden where we buy 1 liter beers and some Roladen and Bratwurst to celebrate our PRs at Ironman yesterday:

Those beers were huge! I don’t think I’ve drunk a liter of beer in…decades?