Island Wheelers take on Ironman Austria – Full Race Report

Four Island Wheelers travelled to Austria in June 2013 to compete in Ironman Austria, one of the world’s toughest one day endurance races. The race itself involves a lake swim of 2.4miles (equivalent of 152 lengths of the pool), 112 miles on the bike (of which there was over 6200 feet of climbing on the Austria course), finished off by a full marathon run of 26.2miles. You have 17hrs to complete the race.

Gareth Donnelly, Kieran Talbot, Roy Burnside and Dean Burnside all trained  hard for 6 months leading up to the event. This is the race report of the event that will hopefully give insight into the race for any other club members thinking of trying out triathlon from within the club and at some point attempting an Ironman race.

Race report by Gareth Donnelly
I’ve only purchased my own professional photos currently – as the lads purchase and supply me with theirs, I will update the news item. But you can see the proofs at marathon-photos.com – search for Ironman Austria then each of the lads surnames to see them in action!

Training & Build Up
We decided early last year that we wanted to be well prepared for this event. Not over trained, not burnt out – but well prepared. This involved a good base winter training block from October until January and this definitely set us up nicely going into 2013 with a good level of fitness already in our arsenal. We then planned out a 27 week training plan (of mostly 6 training day weeks, with one day off in the week – with perhaps 9-10 training sessions per week.) Each of us concentrated early on  working on our weaknesses and definitely trying to strengthen our bike endurance and strength as this is key in the long distance event.

Training went mostly to plan, with a few injury niggles here and there from us all but nothing serious thankfully! We all travelled to Austria fresh and chomping at the bit to race. A few days before we did a recce ride of the first 20km of the bike. It was so difficult to turn around and ride back to the hotel as the scenery, roads and route was so damn good – you just wanted to keep riding!

We did stop though and added a bit of IWCC graffiti to the road as you can see in the picture!
But we had a race a couple of days later and need to rest the legs. Picture of us below with the lake behind us that we would be swimming in with 2800+ other competitors a couple of days later!

Race Day
Race morning arrives and we all have various states of sleep between us. I personally always sleep just lightly before a race. It’s difficult sitting at 4.30am trying to force food down the gullet. Adrenalin is pumping with a mixture of nerves and excitement and it does not make eating easy! But we all took on the required calories to get us well into the bike leg where our nutrition plans would kick in then and it all seemed to work well. Our bus dropped us down to transition where we all inflated our tyres to race pressure, done last minute checks over our bikes and it was off to the lake with wetsuits on to face the first leg of our Ironman.

Swim 3.8km (2.4mile)
All four of us decided to start far right and it definitely was a good option. As the cannon fired we rushed into the water with the 2800+ other competitors and as soon as I’d taken the first few strokes in the crystal clear waters, all nerves were left behind on the beach and auto pilot training kicked it. Damn it was a nice swim! I manoeuvred my way through alot of bodies as we made our way up to the first turn buoy over a kilometre away. All was going smoothly until this point with no real argy bargy! But as we neared this first buoy, the boats really pushed all the competitors into a very tight turn, and so it was fists, arms and legs all over the place. It was definitely a tight turn and fairly rough. This was repeated on the next buoy until we were facing back towards shore, heading for the canal entrance and with a bit more space again, I could concentrate on getting a good stroke going again and gunning it for the shore.

 

The canal entrance came fairly quickly where we had to swim up a narrow canal for about 800 metres and had been promised a fast, exciting, exhilarating, beautiful swim up the canal as the crowd cheers you on! What we actually experienced was what I can only describe as swimming up a tight tunnel with hundreds of others trying to clamber over the top of you and constant banging of limbs and bodies! Damn it was good to get to the end of the swim without losing your wetsuit being pulled off you!

Swim Times
Gareth – 1hr 06mins 59secs
Dean – 1hr 10mins 31secs
Roy – 1hr 10mins 46secs
Kieran – 1hr 22mins 37secs

Transition 1
From what I heard, transition 1 from swim to bike went smooth for us all. We had all planned to take it steady, keep heart rates down, relax, get prepared and get to bike and go. Apart from me spraying two full pumps of sun cream into my left eye, all went fine!

 

Bike – 180km (112 miles)

This was the part I personally was looking forward to the most. Getting out into the open road, seeing the beauty of Austria, tackling the climbs they had in store for us. This bike course is known to be a ‘fast’ course but it still was tough if you hadn’t of training appropriately for it! It still had 6200+ feet of climbs over the 112miles so it was by no means ‘easy’ even if it was a ‘fast’ course!

The game plan for us all was to ride the first 30km or so very very steady. Not to be getting too carried away with things and paying for the expended energy later in the race! The last thing you want to do in this race is blow up or bonk with no energy left. Looking back at my splits I did average 25mph for the first 25km…. so perhaps adrenalin was pumping a little too hard, but I can honestly say that at no point was I in red zone so things were going good. The rest of the lads bike legs were going also going to plan as the morning progressed.

Unfortunately a puncture and 2 other mechanicals messed up Kieran’s bike time a bit. This is always something that we fear on the bike course and it does happen. Thankfully in each instance Kieran stayed calm, repaired the problems professionally and got back on his way again to finish the bike course albeit a fair bit down on what he was more than capable of. Kieran’s an extremely strong biker and deserved a better time than he got because of the puncture and mechanicals – but we are thankful none of the mechanicals were race ending, so he was able to continue.  The main plan for us all was to finish the race and let the time follow, so none of us wanted a DNF whatsoever! So it was good to see all the guys finish the bike course safely and pull into transition. They were on their way to becoming Ironmen. They just had to tackle a full marathon run now.

 

Bike Times
Gareth – 5hrs 18mins 27secs
Dean – 6hrs 06mins 15secs
Roy – 6hrs 20mins 52secs
Kieran – 6hrs 36mins 01secs

Transition 2
Trans 2 from bike to run went with no hitches at all from all four of us.

Run – 42.2km (26.2 miles)
Damn it was hot when I hit the run. Looking back at the weather reports it hit a high of 27 degrees. Not good for a pastey white fella like myself. Thankfully I had decided to wear ‘arm coolers’ on the bike and run legs – these work in such a way that when you sweat or wet them, the air cools your arms – and they definitely worked well! There was a certain stretch of the run course which was about 8miles in length and you had to do it twice – it was like running through hell – it was just so hot and there was very little shade on these parts. Every breath you took was dry and warm. Every 2km or so there were aid stations, so we all used the water sponges to soak ourselves and shove into our tri suits just to try to keep the body temperature down – these were a God send for sure! The other 2 loops that you did took you into the town centre and back – thankfully there was plenty of shade on these stretches!

The crowds was awesome – thousands lined the course! You had your flag and forename on your race number, so as you ran past Irish supporters they shouted and cheered your name, this just give you that extra buzz and kept you going. I worked on a staple diet of gels throughout the run, taking on water at each station and then started on cola near the 20mile marker which got me to the end strong. Kieran followed the same nutrition plan and ran solidly throughout the marathon and he actually ‘enjoyed’ the run as he said after it! He LOVES running! I enjoyed just getting to the end of it! 🙂 Dean and Roy also ran solidly and produced excellent times.

Run Times for Marathon
Gareth – 3hrs 57mins 32secs
Kieran – 4hrs 02mins 54secs
Dean – 4hrs 27mins 50secs
Roy – 4hrs 04mins 31secs

Final Thoughts
I am just very happy and glad to see the lads all solidly complete their first Ironman race. They worked so hard throughout this year for this race and went into the race fully prepared and motivated well for it. They deserve that impressive medal they now have in their possession. I’ve a feeling they will all be doing another Ironman race sometime in the future 😉 Perhaps we can encourage more Island Wheelers to try out triathlon?

Final Race Times
Gareth – 10hrs 35mins 50secs
Roy – 11hrs 57mins 14secs
Dean – 11hrs 59mins 53secs
Kieran – 12hrs 17mins 11secs