So, here we go, settle in, time for the race report for
Challenge Iskandar Puteri, the what, where, when, why and maybe a few things in
between. As is often the case for my race reports, this is not a short read, so
if you have somewhere pressing to be you might want to make a call and tell
people you will be late.
So let’s start with the what. Challenge Iskandar Puteri is a
half ironman length event held by Challenge Triathlon up in Iskandar Puteri in
Malaysia (I suspect the name of the event probably gave the location away
somewhat). The 2016 version of the race was the inaugural event, however, the
organisers stated that they are keen to hold the event for the next three to
five years at least, so hopefully the event will become a permanent fixture on
the calendar.
Iskandar Puteri is a new city that is in the process of
being built on the southern border of Malaysia, near the Strait of Malacca
that separates Singapore from Malaysia. The city itself is an interesting
place. When they describe it as a new city they really mean it. Definitely a
work in progress at the moment. There are tower cranes, building sites and
vacant land absolutely everywhere. From a race perspective, the ‘construction
in progress’ status means some parts of the city are quite empty of people It
is an interesting experience riding around on completely empty roads and big
multi-lane motorways with very few cars. Not to say there is no people. Race
weekend had good crowds and support around transition and the finish line. It
just makes for some quiet training rides. A nice benefit is that I rode the
entire course a number of times before the race and never really felt
threatened by traffic.
Plus, whilst the city is new, it really does have everything
you need. We had no trouble getting to a pool to swim in, shops to buy food
from and restaurants to eat in. I even nipped out to a Garmin dealer when my
Heart Rate monitor broke and was able to catch a taxi, buy the monitor and be
back in my room in an hour.
From a race logistics point of view, the proximity to
Singapore makes getting there nice and easy since you can simply fly to Changi
and get a transfer across the border. The drive takes between an hour or two
depending on traffic (an hour and 90 minutes were my experiences), Being able
to fly into Changi certainly makes coming from Australia nice and easy and
relatively cheap.
So as you can see, as a race venue it has lots of things
going for it.
So, what about the race itself?
Well, the swim looks like this:
The swim is a single lap of the marina. The water is warm
salt water. I never heard an official temperature but I did hear talk of 29
degrees. Not sure if it felt quite as hot as that, but it is warm. Warm enough that is will probably slow you
down. Safe to say that I don’t think this will ever be a wetsuit legal swim. Water
quality is not stellar. Being a marina there was a bit of rubbish etc in the
water. I didn’t think the water was that bad, but I wouldn’t be spending more
time in it than I had to. There were a number of people who had stomach issues on race day and whilst they could be caused by any number of
factors, the one thing all the people have in common is that they took part in
the swim course familiarisation on the Thursday (I skipped it and had no
stomach issues). In terms of distance my Garmin lost its marbles and measured
the course as being 2800m. I heard some talk about the swim being long, but it definitely
wasn’t 900m too long. Looking at times etc, if the swim was long it wouldn’t
have been by far. One thing to be aware of is that the swim is entered off a
pontoon and is excited via ladders. In 2016 there was three exit ladders. The
ladders weren’t a bottle neck for me, but they easily could be.
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| Photo Credit Running Magazine Malaysia |
Transition for this race is along a promenade and so it is long
and narrow, with only a single rack of bikes. As a result, once you are out of
the water you have about a 300m long run to reach your bike. Plenty of time to
start getting out of your swim skin. Not so good for fast transition times
though.
On to the bike and it looks a bit like this:
The course is three laps. This year we had one aid station
rather than the two on the map. The location of the single aid station is close to where the second was appears on the map, about 20km through. The aid
station provided water in opened disposable water bottles. When I say disposable
bottles I mean the sort of clear plastic bottles that you buy water in from the
shops. The problem with this of course being that these bottles don’t fit in
bottle cages. This meant that if you wanted more water you either had to stop
and refill your bottles or you had to quickly slam down the water so you could dispose of the bottle as you left the aid stations. Not ideal and it unfortunately
meant that lots of people simply skipped getting water, which then caused
problems on the run. I think the aid station just had water, no electrolytes or
gels or anything, although I must admit I didn’t spend enough time there to say
for sure.
Before the race the ride was delightfully described as flat
with a few rises, super quick, but no elevation data was provided. Whilst the
course is far from mountainous, it is not flat either. My Garmin measured the
total elevation gain/loss of the course as being 450m. Enough hills for them to
be a consideration. Oh yeah based on my
Garmin the ride is slightly short too, about 88.5km.
With all the construction going on something to keep an eye
out for on the bike course is debris. I didn’t see any glass but there are plenty of
little stones, dirt etc. I certainly saw plenty of people with punctures in the
days leading up to the race. Keep your eyes open and stay out of the gutter.
The road surfaces are generally okay with reasonable bitumen
but there are also a number of potholes out there, some of them significant. Once
again you need to keep your eyes open. If you can get some time out on the
course before the race so that you can find the worst of the pot holes before
you are racing, then it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Also worth mentioning is that lap
includes a stretch of paving stones that is about 2km long and which you ride over three
times. Pavers and aero bars are not the most comfortable combination, so you
need to take care. If it had rained and the pavers were wet then oh boy, I
would be slowing down.
Finally, I will address a question about the course that we
all had before the race, but never got a good answer for until we were out on the
course. Look at the map above, you can see that the ride starts on a side road
before you head out to the main loop. The question was ‘does the course head back
down the side road every lap, or do you stay out on the main loop and only go
down the side road at the end as you ride back to transition. The answer to
that question is yes, you go down that side road every lap. That is the section with the pavers. I am not sure how many times I asked that question, but I think
I got a different answer every time. In fact, when I asked one of the race
directors at the briefing the night before I was told ‘no we do no head down
the road’. It wasn’t until I went to find the mount line on race morning that I
found out that we did. So now you know too.
So that is the ride done. Now onto the run.
The run looks roughly like this:
I say roughly because this isn’t actually the run course. In
fact, I don’t have a map of the run course. The only accurate map of the run course
I saw was outside the race registration office. Even the map in the event guide we
were given at registration was wrong. It looks mostly like the map above
though, just not exactly the same.
Okay, so firstly the run is a single lap. That is another
question that took a surprisingly long time to answer. Different sources of
information either described the run as a single or double loop. Similarly
questions to officials gave conflicting answers. You can now rest easy though,
the answer is that it is a single lap. Elevation wise the gain/loss over the
course is about 75m. That doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t really, but the
course does head up and down a number of long gradual slopes. Tiring. It certainly
doesn’t feel flat.
During the run you spend a little bit of time on footpaths,
but most of it is spent on roads with almost no tree cover. You will notice that the run course looks a lot like the bike course and that is because it is. You spend most of the time running on the same roads as you ride on. The run and ride courses are divided by a line of witches hats. I will get to the
weather in a minute, but it will probably come as no surprise to hear that this
run is hot. On this run course there is very little shelter from the sun. You
will be out in it and you will be hot.
The heat brings me to my final point about the run course.
In 2016 the course had only 6 aid stations, roughly 3kms apart (although the 3rd
one was a bit futher). Anyone who has done a Half Ironman before will know that
6 is not a lot for the run leg, particularly the run leg of a hot race. I would
usually expect at least double that. For me this lack of aid stations crosses
from unpleasant into plain dangerous. I am not going to labour the point too
much though since I know the organisers are painfully aware that this will need
improvement for future races. The aid stations gave the usual water, gels and
electrolytes. Things they did not have was coke or sponges. A couple of them
had iced water in jugs that you could pour over yourself.
So that is a description of what the course looks like. Now,
the last piece of the puzzle that needs to be discussed is the weather. This
race is in Malaysia so you can probably guess what the weather is. Yep, it is
hot and humid. The forecast for our race day was 29 degrees which sounds a lot
more pleasant than it really is. If you haven’t raced in humidity before you
need to know that it makes temperatures feel a lot hotter than the thermometer
says they are. 29 degrees with humidity probably feels more like 35 degrees.
Although it isn’t quite as simple as that. You see your body isn’t really
designed to race in humidity. Racing in 35 degrees dry heat is hard, but can be
easily managed. In 35 degree dry heat your body sweats, the sweat evaporates and your body cools you down. You keep drinking and your body will keep sweating to cool
itself down. When you race in humidity your body does the same thing, however,
because it is humid the sweat doesn’t evaporate and you don’t get any cooling.
Because your body is not cooling itself it gets hotter. What is your body’s response
to getting hotter? You guess it, it sweats more. See where this is going? As a
result, unless you are really careful it is very easy to end up extremely dehydrated
during a humid tropical race, which makes for a very hard day out.
If you are coming from a cooler climate and think you will
race at your normal speeds at a humid race then you are very much mistaken.
Racing in a tropical climate will make you slower for a given intensity. One of
the tricks to racing well in the conditions is letting yourself go slower and
learning to race off intensity rather than pace.
Having said all that, this race is no hotter or harder than
any other tropical triathlon. Iskandar Puteri seems to pick up some nice
breezes which can make it a really quite pleasant place to sit and relax. I
have done a number of races which are hotter and more unpleasant. So the
weather is not insurmountable, you just have to be very careful, plan a good
hydration strategy (which will be easier with more aid stations) and slow down
a little bit on race day.
One last thing I should say about the weather is that over
the 5 days I was there it rained on three of them. The rain ranged from light
sprinkles on race day to a proper torrential down pour two days before. If a
torrential down pour had arrived during the race it would have made the course
an interesting place to be, particularly the bike. Not something you can necessarily
do much about but definitely something to be aware of.
Okay, so that is what the race is like in general. What was
the race like for me specifically?
I think you could sum up my race day best by calling it
mixed. After the swim and the bike I thought I was having the worst day of my
life and was ready to never do another triathlon again. The run however
salvaged it a little for me and in the end I was quite happy with my overall
result.
The day started, as they usually do, with the swim. Up until
race day I had had a nice relaxing few days in Iskandar Puteri, I had slept
reasonably well and had a relaxing morning, so I got to the start line feeling apprehensive
but good. Having not raced for 9 months I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect
from myself, but training had been going well so I was feeling confident of
having a good day.
I got down to the start in good time and had a bit of a warm
up. After a bit of standing around, we all lined up on the edge of the pontoon,
the horn blasted and we were away.
For the Pro groups the swim was a dive start from a pontoon.
I don’t do dives very often and so when we had found out about the dive start
Stef Puszka and I had spent a bit of time at one of the local pools practicing.
I thought I got it pretty dialed in, but even so I was very relieved when I
hit the water and my goggles stayed on.
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| Photo Credit Running Malaysia Magazine |
I have been working hard on my swimming and so I was keen to
slot in, find some toes and stick to them for a good swim leg. At first this
plan was working well. In fact, early in the swim I thought to myself that
the pace was nice and sustainable. However, after about 200m a gap started
appearing and then growing and then before I knew it I was off the back. From
there the swim was a very lonely affair as I led Brad Wauer around the course. As
the gap seemed to grow and grow, the negative thoughts started up in my head.
They would be playing a prominent part in my day.
Other than being off the back of the main packs the swim
went okay. I felt fine, but it did not feel quick and it felt like it went on
for an age. I eventually made it to the finishing ladder and was keen to get on
the bike and get on with it. Time for the swim was 26 min 33 seconds and I was 9th
out of the water. Looking back at the results I wasn’t actually as far off the
pace as I thought I was, only about a minute off the second pack. Things not
being as bad as my mind was making them out to be turned out to be a common
theme of the day.
Once I was out of the water I did the long run to the bike
while pulling on the top half of my sleeved trisuit. This is a new trisuit so I
was a bit worried about getting it on quickly enough, but to my relief I had it
done by the time I hit the bike. Number on, water bottle down the back of the
jersey, helmet on, away…
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| Photo Credit: Jack Ah Beh |
Wait a second, did I forget something? Damn, my swimskin, I
didn’t take it off again. After a quick pause I made the call to stop, strip
the swimskin and rush it back to transition, after all I was only just outside transition
and it would mean one less layer to ride in. Sorted. However, in the time it
took me to return the swimskin Brad Wauer mounted his bike and was away and I
missed the chance to ride with somebody The next 90km proved to be very lonely and I had plenty of time to rue my mistake.
Straight up on the bike I was struggling with power. I am
still not entirely sure why, but I was about 20 watts down on what I was
looking for. I quickly decided to ignore that for a while and focus on heart
rate instead. The swimskin incident had rattled me and I just wanted to get on
with the ride. The further I went though the more I felt like I was riding
terribly. I simply wasn’t going as quick as I needed to and I was going to
slipping further and further behind. At one of the early turns I saw that the
field was broken into a group of 3, a second group of 4 or 5 and then Brad and finally myself.
I was never going to be able to compete against the groups the voice in my head
told me.
To make my mental condition even worse, about 20km through
the first lap I looked up to see a car coming towards me. I had just come
through a roundabout and so my frazzled mid race brain concluded that I must
have somehow gone off course. Why else would there be a car driving towards me.
Once I had avoided the car I did a quick U-turn and headed back to the roundabout.
When I got back there I found that I had been correct and in fact it was the
car who was in the wrong. Frustration piled on frustration I turned back around
and resumed my lap, fuming to have lost yet more time.
The lap of the bike course ended just in front of my hotel. At
the end of the first lap all I could think was that if I jumped off my bike I could
be inside my air-conditioned room within two minutes. I stayed on the bike.
The second lap went better but my mental state didn’t really
improve. The voices in my head were at full volume. ‘You are too far behind’
they were saying, ‘you are embarrassing yourself’, ‘you tried coming back from
injury, it was a good try, but you don’t have it’. I was not in a great place.
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| Photo Credit Jack Ah Beh |
By the third lap I had started to relax a bit. I upped the
gearing and dropped my cadence in the hope that the change might prompt a bit
more power. It did a little. I was also mindful that even though the power was
low, the heart rate was about on target, so it was possible that the ride wasn’t
a complete write off. The time was not going to be special, but by the third
lap I was nearly through it and so was willing to let it be what it was going
to be. Also by the end of the third lap I had started to think about the run, telling myself that I had
to finish. In hot races you can never know what is going to happen, so I had to
finish to find out.
I rolled into transition feeling mentally beaten but
physically okayish (other than being pretty hot). I had passed Braden Currie just
before T2. Braden was suffering badly from food poisoning and had somehow made
it all the way through the bike before wisely withdrawing. I had also passed Eric
Watson somewhere, who had a drafting penalty to serve. Passing Eric and Braden
meant I finished the bike in 8th place, my time for the leg was
about 2 hours 22. Not flying.
Once I hit T2 I got my shoes on, poured a bottle of water over my head and took a moment to get my head
together. The commentator was yelling at me to get on with it so I briefly considered
placing the his microphone in a place that would require surgery for him to remove, but thought better
of it. Instead I grabbed a couple more water bottles, got up and started
running.
Before we go through the run, time for a brief interlude to
discuss hydration. When we had found out about the lack of bidons on the bike
course and there only being 6 aid stations on the run I had freaked out a bit.
I could only carry about 2 litres on my bike and for a hot race I would usually
like to have had three litres by the end of the bike, more if I can. Given that
I knew I would be getting dehydrated on the run I wanted to try and start it as hydrated
as possible, that simply wouldn’t be possible with only two litres on the bike.
The solution I came up with was this:
I had my two litres on the bike, plus I chucked another
bottle into the pocket of my top. When I finished my front bottle on the bike I
grabbed the pocket bottle. This meant the water I started with was enough for
about two and a half laps. Despite that I finished all that water by lap three
and had to use the aid station to get a bit more. I did this by slowing down, grabbing a bottle, pouring most of it over may face, some of it in my mouth and then discarding it. Not ideal but it worked out
okay.
On the run I started out with two 500ml bottles of water. I
hate running with that sort of weight in my hands, but I knew I would need it.
I held those bottles and used them as I needed between the aid stations. They
lasted me until about the 12km mark. Once again not ideal, but it helped me
survive.
Okay so that was hydration, now back to the run.
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| Two water bottles |
I knew from the start that pace was going to mean nothing on
the run and it was all going to come down to pacing. With that in mind I
focused on my heart rate and made sure it stuck to the upper limit that Daryl
had set for me. Sometimes doing so felt like I was just shuffling along, but I
knew it was going to be important.
The run gradually passed as a progression of shuffling along and ticking off aid stations.
1km, 2km, aid station, repeat. I slowed down and walked nearly every aid station
to make sure I was getting as much water and cooling as I could. From the
second aid station onwards they were giving us big 1 litre bottles which were a
godsend. The big bottles meant that we could sip and soak ourselves for a
little while after the station itself. It helped a lot to keep the core temperature
down.
While I felt like I was shuffling I was surprised to see
that the pace wasn’t actually that bad. I was also pleasantly surprised to find
I was feeling okay. Once I hit the 10km mark I almost began to enjoy myself. I
passed Alex Polizzi who was having a very tough day running around the halfway mark and found myself in
7th.
Last year when I did Putrjaya 70.3 I really fell in a hole
in the second 10km so heading into this race holding it together in the second
half of the run was one of my aims. As I hit the 12km aid station I felt like
holding it together was going to be possible. Actually it turned out that the run was a negative split.
Getting from the 12km mark through to 18 was a bit of
suffering. I had finished the water I had started with and the course was
starting to feel hot, but I also knew that I was on my way home. I let my heart
rate ceiling creep up a bit and I kept working. With 3km to go I knew I was
nearly there, just one long downhill to go. I knew it, but it still felt like a
very long way to go.
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| Photo Credit: Jack Ah Beh |
After what felt like a very long time I finally got through
the last 3kms, not looking or running pretty, but still moving. I ran through
transition and headed for the finishing chute. Running up that red carpet
rarely feels so good, then finally I was there, across the line and done for the
day. Run time of 1 hour 28min 30 for a total time of 4 hours 23min 39, 7th
in the MPRO. Done.
So that was it. My day out in the hard, hot sun in Iskandar
Puteri. A day where I visited some very dark places mentally and definitely did
not go to plan, but ended up pretty okay in the end. I couldn’t have asked for
a better return to racing.
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| Looking like I felt |
For me I will take a few things away from this race.
Firstly, you can get rusty at racing. Heading into this event I hadn’t given
much thought to the fact that I hadn’t raced for 9 months. But after making
some silly mistakes and some poor decisions in the race I have to say you definitely
get out of practice. I am hoping I don’t have a long layoff from racing again,
but if I do I will have to keep this in mind.
The second thing is to always account for the conditions, on
both the ride and the run. I am still not really sure what happened on the
bike, but I suspect the conditions played a part. I had made allowances for the
hot conditions in my run pacing, but not for the bike. On the bike I was still
expecting to produce the same power that I do in Perth. In hindsight perhaps
that isn’t realistic. For me heart rate is always going to be king when it
comes to racing in these conditions and this race was another reminder of that.
On a side note, I suspect that as bad as my ride was, the low intensity might
also be part of what allowed me to have a good run. A bit of a silver lining
there.
By far the biggest take away for me from this race though is
the value of perseverance, what can be achieved if you don’t listen to the
voices in your head and you just keep on going. If I had listened to those
voices and pulled the pin on my race the outcome would have been so much worse.
By sticking with it though and just racing on, no matter how slowly, the race
actually ended up being a very positive one. Negative thoughts are part of
endurance racing, the tricky part is how you deal with them and whether or not
you let them beat you. These are all lessons I have learnt before, but this
race was a great reminder of the power of perseverance.
So that’s about it. But before I finish up I have to address
the elephant in the room. You will have seen over the course of this review
that this race was not the smoothest sailing ship in terms of organisation.
This is the first running of the race so teething problems are to be expected,
but the issues this year go beyond what I think can be excused by that. I
think in this case the first year race issues were possibly exacerbated by
inexperienced race organiser issues too (I don’t know that for sure but it is
my suspicion). Certainly there were a number of issues with the race that
anyone familiar with a Half Ironman could have told the organisers would be a
problem. The issues the race had were fairly plentiful. There were minor ones
like no exhibitors turning up for the expo, no live tracking of the event, poor
lighting in transition and a few more that aren’t that big a deal. But some of
the issues are more fundamental, things like:
- the lack of water on the run,
- the lack of proper bidons on the bike,
- a course that was controlled but not closed,
- course maps that were being finalised the day before the event,
- Senior race official that didn’t seem to know the correct race information
- The difficulty obtaining the correct race information.
So that is that, hear we are, at the end of the review. Finally,
Before I finish, just a few thank yous and acknowledgements. The biggest thank
you of course to my family for having the patience to let me get back on this
crazy triathlon horse after falling off in such a big way last year. Putting up
with the long hours, the expense and everything else. I will never be able to
say thank you to my family enough. Thanks also to Daryl, for sticking with me
during all the months of rehab and getting me fit again. Thank you to the club
Break Your Limits for the endless support and for simply putting up with me. Thanks
also to the sponsors and supporters, Mizuno Running Australia, Hammer Nutrition
Australia (I would be stuffed without Fizz), Mako Australia, Caden Wheels and
Swim Smooth. A big thanks also to Ridley Australia for letting me ride the most
beautiful bike I have ever owned and to Churchill Cycles for getting it
together so quickly.
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| Photo Credit: Jack Ah Beh |
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