St. George recap: Ain’t about how fast I get there... it’s the climb

In the months leading up to Ironman 70.3 St. George, my friend Doug and I did that thing you do after committing to a particularly long and/or difficult race.

“Wait, WHY did we sign up for this?,” we’d ask each other – and though it would come off as half-joking, really, we were totally joking. We wanted this. Wanted the challenge. Wanted the test of strength and the test of will.

Then a couple days before last Saturday’s race, I was telling my friend Meghan about the course and the expected conditions.

“Yeah, so like, the water is supposed to be freezing, the forecast is calling for a high of 90, and there’s no shade anywhere. Oh, and it sounds like we’re basically going to be biking and running up and down mountains.”

Brief blank stare. Then, with a straight face, she asked: “Wait, why did you sign up for this?”

I laughed. She must be at least HALF-joking, I thought. But she wasn’t.

So, later that day – as I thought about her straight face and her lack of laughter a little more – I started poking around the Internet for intel. I’d done this several other times over the past several months, but this round of Googling was a little more desperate than before.

I found very little reassurance.

One particular result became etched in my mind: “Be wary of the climb to Snow Canyon. It is late in the bike and isn’t easy. ... (But) the real challenge is the run. The run is brutal. Going up Diagonal Street and then Red Hills Parkway after a difficult bike is just inhuman. Hopefully you are OK with running hills; if not it will be a painful day.”

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In addition to being my first time doing St. George, this would be my first time visiting Utah, my first time doing an Ironman-branded 70.3 event, and my first time taking my bike on an airplane.

As an added wrinkle, I’d be staying in a house with 10 strangers: most of them members of Doug’s triathlon team, guys and girls who had raced together multiple times and who knew as much about me as I did about them.

And as it goes in situations like these – when one triathlete is thrust into a situation where they are suddenly hanging out with other heretofore unknown triathletes – there is that little dance we all do.

What they say: “So how many halfs have you done before?”

What they mean: “Am I faster than you?

What I say: “What other races do you have coming up this year?”

What I mean: “Am I faster than you?”

What they say: “What are you most worried about with this race?”

What they mean: “Am I faster than you?”

What I say: “Where did you guys eat lunch today?”

What I mean: “Am I faster than you?”

I mean, maybe we should all just make T-shirts with our fastest times on them and wear them to every race expo and pre-race dinner we attend, for the rest of our lives.

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For the record, I AM joking (or, at least, half-joking), and I must say that these were some of the most welcoming people I could have asked to be around for three days.

But if you’re the least bit self-conscious or insecure (like I can sometimes be, like I imagine many triathletes sometimes are), there’s always that nagging in the back of your mind – whether you’re competing against a longtime friend or someone you met the day before the race.

That, of course, is: How will I measure up against this person?

Fortunately, it was hard to become too obsessed with this nagging simply because of the task at hand.

St. George, Utah, is a magical place. It is nestled amid a landscape of red-rock cliffs and canyons, a place where a look in almost any direction produces a vista that appears as if a postcard has sprung to life.

It is also a punishing place, for a race of this distance. The city’s 70.3 is now in its third year. For three years before that, it was a full Ironman – but it didn’t survive at that distance in large part because it was just too damn hard, and organizers couldn’t get enough people to sign up.

It’s a dry heat, yes, but it’s also a hot heat. And in this part of Utah, it’s harder to find shade than it is to find a strip club or a high-gravity beer; sunburns, dehydration and heat exposure are perennial dangers at this race.

Wind can be brutal, too. In 2012, its final year as a 140.6, athletes encountered waves as high as five feet when 40-mph gusts battered Sand Hollow Reservoir during the swim.

Then there are those hills that loomed so large in scouting reports. The legendary one is in Snow Canyon State Park on the bike course, which features a climb that rises more than 1,200 feet between Miles 38 and 46. But just as nasty is the mountain in the middle of the out-and-back run course – you run up one side and down the other on the way out, then back up it and back down it on the return trip.

On each side, it’s roughly a mile long, at a 9 percent grade.

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As it turned out, the course was as difficult as I had feared – but not more so.

Sand Hollow Reservoir was downright dreamy: 64 degrees is very cool but not frosty, and the water was both pancake-flat and so clear you could see legs kicking and arms stroking 15 to 20 feet away under the surface.

My swim time was miserable only because I am a miserably bad swimmer.

I had to pull over less than a mile into the bike course for a couple minutes to investigate a mechanical issue that turned out to be nothing, then at Mile 3 began the first climb, which rises 400 feet over the course of just a mile. From the top, the lake looked like a pristine puddle in the sun-baked valley below.

Although this is a point-to-point course in an area of Utah that sees constant elevation changes, it’s pretty fair. For every big uphill, there is an equal and opposite downhill that will take your breath away. According to my Garmin, there was one section just over a quarter of the way into the bike course where I averaged 35 mph for two miles. At one point, I looked down to see I was flirting with 50 mph. (I looked back up very quickly, praying I wouldn’t see a darting rabbit or a golf-ball-sized piece of gravel in my path.)

Snow Canyon, meanwhile, IS as tough as advertised. Steep, yes, and unrelenting. They say if you’re afraid of heights, don’t look down; I say if you’re afraid of climbs, don’t look up. Since the landscape is free of trees, you could see the line of bikes dotting the snaking road for a good mile ahead and several hundred feet above. I’d say, “OK, maybe I get there and it’s the top.” Then I’d get there and I’d see a new view... just like the previous one: of tri bikes climbing up toward the heavens, waaaay off in the distance.

If the ascent had been nine miles instead of eight, I might have been reduced to walking my bike. Or crying. Or both.

But then comes the reward: 10 miles, all downhill, a great opportunity to recover if you’re reeling, to bomb down if you’re still feeling fresh, to finish fueling and hydrating for the run. It was, arguably, the highlight of the race. That much speed, for that long – it’s worth the price of admission, and the suffering in Snow Canyon.

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I got off the bike feeling... OK. Worried about the heat, but OK. Turns out the heat wouldn’t be the big problem.

The bigger issue, at first, was mental. At Mile 2, I took a quick porta-potty stop, then got back on the road and hit the first real hill: a the nasty one, on an 8 to 9 percent grade, and roughly a mile long. We were barely three miles in, and I suddenly thought I was bonking. I was reduced to jogging/walking the hill, and started wondering just how horrible my time would turn out to be.

Following the “what-goes-up-must-come-down” law, though, the slope back down the other side was alarmingly steep, so I decided to take as much advantage as I could. I got my second wind, and never lost it. Unfortunately, I also got my first calf cramp. Then my second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth.

From about the halfway point, I ended up being reduced to hobble due to cramps dozens of times. Since I’m a veteran of cramp management, I was mostly able to walk them out in about 10 or 15 steps; but I couldn’t go as fast as I would have liked (I WAS feeling fast again) without my muscles revolting. I did draw motivation to push the pain to the limit after spotting Doug and housemates Bill, Mike and Sascha on the course, which doubles back on itself in multiple spots. But my best guess is the cramps cost me about 10 minutes on the run.

As for the heat: It got up into the 80s before I was done, but there were so many volunteers on the course with so much ice – and a couple of glorious Otter Pop and Popsicle stops – that I never felt overheated. (And I’m a guy who melts in N.C. races when it’s 70, thanks to the humidity.)

The last couple of miles are a gentle descent, and the crowd support back in downtown St. George was thunderous. I high-fived every spectator I could, relieved to learn that they didn’t stick us before the finish line with one last hill.

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Afterward, I was able to find Doug, then one of his teammates, then another and another and another. Lots of high-fives, fist bumps, offers of hearty congratulations. Then, just for fun, we do that dance again.

What they say: “How’d you do?”

What they mean: “How do my splits compare to yours?”

What I say: “What’d you think of the hills?”

What I mean: “How do my splits compare to yours?”

(Just kidding! Sort of.)

In the end, though, none of those is the question that really matters. Yeah, it feels a little satisfying to be faster in one area or another than someone else, and sure, it may sting just a tad to be slower.

But that’s not the stuff we hang onto.

This, ultimately, is what we all say – and, at the same time, what we all mean. “When,” we all wonder, “can we get together and do this again?”

This story was originally published May 5, 2015 at 4:28 PM with the headline "St. George recap: Ain’t about how fast I get there... it’s the climb."