Ironman 70.3 Florida - The race against Lance [ The swim leg ]

Poster of Lance Armstrong taken the day before the race.

The wave start at Lake Eva in Haines City, Florida

It is now Tuesday morning 1:22am as I am starting to write my race report. Trying to go to bed at 10:30pm did not prove too successful as my mind is still racing with all the images and events from yesterday's race.


One of the main reason's I signed up for Florida 70.3 this year was because Lance Armstrong was going to compete. I don't usually like doing races more than once as there is always the associated opportunity cost of missing out on another great race being held somewhere on Planet Earth. The event also always falls on a long weekend in the Cayman Islands which helps with getting the time for the journey back from Florida to Cayman the day after the event. It was also a great opportunity to share my good friend Marius Deysel's first Ironman 70.3 experience with him.

My friend Marius Deysel and I in transition just before 6am. Note the convenient transition bags for our equipment.

As some may know the Florida 70.3 course was changed this year from the usual venue at Fort Wilderness just outside Disney World's Magic Kingdom to Haines City. Haines City is basically a random city approx halfway between Tampa and Orlando in Florida. It is a fairly scenic area and really liked the fact that it was more rural and that the bike course took us out on the Polk County roads. We did have difficulty finding a good steakhouse in Haines City last night. Not many good restaurants in Haines City unless we did not really where to look for the good restaurants.

The Florida 70.3 half ironman was my first triathlon event at this distance exactly four years ago. Yesterday's race was thus a good benchmark for me to see how I have improved in the last four years and to see how the average triathlete measures up to Lance Armstrong.

In my analysis of yesterday's race I have drawn a comparison between my results against Lance's results as well as my M30-34 competitors.

The 1.2 mile/1.9km swim course

Lance Armstrong's swim split = 24:52

My swim split = 29:43

That's me exiting the water with the yellow swim cap.

I must honestly say that organizers did a great job of organizing the race. One matter I do find frustrating though is that they tend to place the younger men's age groups at the back of the age group wave start. The M30-34 age group I was in was the 16th wave of the morning to start. The pro men being the first wave. This meant that  Lance Armstrong's wave started at 6:30am while my wave started at approx 7:35am. This hour and five minutes proved to make a big difference at the end of the day as it meant that I was running the last hour of my half marathon from 11:30am -12:30am where I could have been running from 10:30am - 11:30am. For those of you familiar with the Florida heat and humidity knows how hot and uncomfortable it can get around lunchtime. At 180 pounds I struggle to cool down while running in hot and humid conditions.

There were only two waves that started behind my age group, those waves being the other half of the M30-34 and the relay swimmers. Starting it 7:35am meant 15 waves of swimmers started ahead of my wave at approx 4min intervals. This meant that approx 1600 swimmers were already out on the swim course effectively jamming up the swim course. With open water swimming being my strength I found myself passing hundreds of swimmers out on the swim course and had to swim over and across many swimmers which resulted in excess energy being spent versus the pro field starting with no swimmers ahead of them.

Anyway, enough moaning or stating the facts but found the above rather frustrating as I prefer the full Ironman mass wave starts. I believe that the swim course is actually wide enough in Lake Eva to accomodated a mass wave start.

As my good friend Marius Deysel and I had time before our wave start we could watch the pro field swim which meant that we could watch Lance exit the swim in 5th place. The transition from the swim to the bike course involved an uphill run. It was interesting to see that Lance actually did look like he was working hard when he came out of the swim as his breathing was fairly laboured which is expected after such a hard swim and running uphill into the transition zone.

At 7:35am my age group was eventually off. The course layout was pretty cool as it we swam in the format of the Ironman logo "M". As mentioned above I do not have too much to report on the swim except for the fact that it was really congested and had to maneuver  my way through countless swimmers. My main goal for the swim was to break 30min as I swam 30min for the Ironman 70.3 Florida swim course back in 2008

I finished the swim in 29:43sec which was 4min and 49sec slower than Lance. I placed 5th overall out 178 triathletes in my age group which is a result I was really happy with.

I will be posting the race report section of the bike course tomorrow.