The bike actually was the hardest course I'd ever done, even more so than Diamond in the Rough up in Perryville with it's monster hill coming out of Port Deposit. Ft. Ritchie climb was 75.5 ft/mi and Diamond 49.6. My weekly long rides, now up to 45 miles are typically 65 ft/mi. Waterman's will be 4. The worst thing was that around mile 14 give or take a couple, my back started to spasm along with my top shoulder muscles and biceps starting to hurt. The back was by far the worst. The only way to get relief was to coast standing-up straight and tall over my front wheel and stretch my back. Unfortunately, there was many opportunities for coasting especially after the turn around and the 3.5 mile long hill on the way back with a 3.6% grade. Actually, that was quite doable for me in my lowest gear. If it'd been much longer, it would've become grueling, any much steeper I might not have been able to do it. However, I think it did drain me quite a bit and it really made my run suffer. My bike finished 111/135. I also lost time early on by a contact slipping out of place. The might have taken me 3 minutes or so to fix. That is fine.
The run was the worst of all. My spasming back forced me stop half a dozen times to lay down and stretch out my back which really did a good job on relieving the pain. However, it would always work it's way back, especially on hills. And the tough bike ride forced me to walk a lot more than run. I almost decided on the first loop that I was done because I knew I couldn't continue with the back pain. However, on the last time I stretched my back I told myself that I know what I need to do to be able to finish. Don't worry about when the back pain comes back, just stop and stretch it out and run as much as I can, then walk. It doesn't matter if they give me a medal or not and I go past the 4 hour cut-off, it's just finish the course that matters. I ended at finishing at 4:04:14 and got my medal. Yeah! Here's the profile of my pace during the run. You can see when I was running, walking and stopped to stretch. (Faster is up.) There's a few down spikes and those are when I stopped at the water stops. The drop of at the end is me forgetting to stop my watch.
I'm pleased that under the circumstances I was able to keep my chin up and finish. I finished 134/135 in the run. There was a guy that passed me while I was stretch who said was battling leg spasms, so maybe he was the 135th. Of course. I estimate maybe I lost 6 minutes stretching my back. If I hadn't, then, I would've moved up one place.
I finished dead last overall and that's fine considering my battle. Taking out the stretching time, I would've come in 132nd. Of course, the stretching time was also resting time, so maybe not. In the end, my bike performance was the killer. I'm not sure what happened there that I got bad spasms and other muscle pains. The cropped up before I got to the hard part of the ride. On July 27th, I got a new demo seat to try out and also some aerobars. On the 29th, I did a 45 mile run with them and didn't have any problems. The only real difference today is I swam 1500 meters beforehand. Maybe if I had my aleve on me I might have been able to fix the problem with that, but I'm not sure about that. The only other thing I can think of is maybe I wasn't drinking enough water. I drank maybe 1/2-3/4 of the rate usually do on my training runs.
Another lesson learned as that I almost went out of T2 without my bib, but luckily the volunteer at the exit pointed it out. I lay out everything so I can see everything I need so I don't have to think about what I need. It's all there right in front of me. But, this time, I layed my wet suit over my stuff and during transitions I grabbed underneath it for the things in my head I needed to get. Today, my bib wasn't in my head, so I had to run back and get it. It wasn't a big deal, just frustrating that I screwed up my plan and that I had to run back while at the same time my back was killing me. Lesson learned it don't put my wet suit on top of my stuff.
Next is North East on the 29th. The bike looks like 16% less climb than today and the run is about the same.
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