Hillary Biscay

10 July 10: Another Rough Day at the Office!

Posted on 11. Jul, 2010 by hillarybiscay in Blog | 3 Comments

It started here . . .

and finished (well, almost) here . . .

And there was lots of pain and suffering in between–in other words, it was another perfect day here on the island!

I must admit, however, that my day did get off to a rough start. It was a start–a pre-race start, at that–WITHOUT COFFEE!! I do not recommend this. However, as I mentioned last week, I am working with Mr. Fix-It naturopath doctor here in Kona and this was his order. We are experimenting with my race-day caffeine use and he figured today’s would be a perfect test event . . .

This morning was the King’s Swim, which is a 1.2-mile ocean swim here from the Kailua Pier on the ironman swim course. It was a bigger event than last week’s, with more fast swimmer kids, so it was a great opportunity to push myself out of my ironman-swim-pace comfort zone.

The doc’s little experiment did seem to help me eliminate my problem with getting my breathing under control over the first couple hundred meters of the swim; the drawback, however, was that I felt like I was half asleep til halfway through the swim. So we will have to try to adjust the strategy a bit. Back to the race: this week I had a much bigger pack of people around me swimming at a very firm pace for the whole time, and in fact I was at the tail end of this group until after the turn boat. I had to use my legs a whole lot more than I’m accustomed to in order to push my way up along the side of this group over the last few hundred meters. Again, this week, no one seemed to be saving anything for a bike ride afterwards, and that kept me honest all the way up the beach through the finish chute. Huge props go to my Kona neighbor and dear friend Bree Wee for a breakthrough swim and also a thank-you for pushing me til the finish! When the dust settled, I had finished third, all of two seconds behind the young sprites who finished 1-2. And I needed to sit down! I sat down in my Sayonara and had a lean up against a palm tree for a minute. Now that was a good swim workout!

Then our crew headed back out onto the course to swim an easy mile warmdown.

And take pictures, of course.

This was followed by a breakfast-awards ceremony extravaganza at the King Kam Hotel.

I got my first lei of the trip and an awesome carved koa wood trophy. And as you can see, I was still speaking to the GCM even though he beat me by 17 seconds!!

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