THAT WAS AWESOME!! THE COURSE WAS FREAKING BEAUTIFUL!! THE CROWDS WERE LIKE BOSTON WITHOUT ALL THE BOOZE!! MY FAMILY WAS THERE CHEERING!! WOOHOO!!
It really was an extraordinary weekend, so much so that I may send a note to the editor of the local paper with my thanks and congratulations to that community on a day well done. Differences from other venues? No local animosity toward the event whatsoever, despite nearly closing the town down for nearly three days. Extremely broad local volunteer engagement. Great cheer and course marshall support, on a hot, shadeless day, even miles away from town. (Contrast Louisville, which course boasts the legend "Ironman go home" scrawled on the pavement.)
St. George is lovely. The town is built in a broad canyon carved by the Virgin River from painted desert sandstone. It is green and even in places lush. The scenery on all sides includes red mesas and mountains rising in some places many thousands of feet. As you leave town you almost necessarily go uphill; the one exception is heading south toward Las Vegas, following the river through the extraordinary Virgin River Gorge and far northwest Arizona.
On an Ironman bike course you see lots of scenery. After a cold swim -- my feet and hands went numb half-way through -- we left the transition area at Sand Hollow Reservoir and followed Highway 9 toward St. George and away from Zion National Park. After some rolling hills and winding through the town of Washington, we took Red Hills Blvd. over the bluff above St. George (we'd see this road again on the run) and into Snow Canyon. That's the point where the loops begin. More gentle rollers and plenty of flats until we hit Highway 91, where begins the nearly constant uphill climb from about 2800 feet to 4600 feet. We crossed a tributary of the Virgin River and turned onto Route 3184, where the real climbing begins. Beyond a continuous uphill grade, I counted four climbs of progressive difficulty, the last of which is called "The Wall" and came at miles 45 (first loop) and 90. Route 3184 passes through a beautiful valley and Gunlock State Park, past the Gunlock reservoir and through the town of the same name. If you were taking time to enjoy the scenery, as I was, it was a marvelous tour through some of the prettiest desert landscapes I've encountered. And I haven't yet mentioned the downhills: once each loop we gave back the 1800 feet of climbing over a 10-mile stretch of Highway 18. Summarizing my cycling effort: I've blown up on more than one Ironman bike course in the past, I was only marginally in shape for this (with a longest ride going in of about 55 miles) and I knew it was a hard course. I followed the mantra "coasting and soft-pedaling" -- and it worked! Getting off the bike at the end I felt almost fresh.
Which is good, because I knew the run would be hard. The course is two out-and-back trips from downtown St. George, up the bluff on Red Hills and down the other side where you reach the turn-around. It includes four quick tours through Pioneer Park, which has just enough hills to be insult to injury. It also got hot and there was no shade. That run seemed to break everyone. I looked around on my second loop and at any given time within my line of sight, I might have been one of only three or four people actually running. And there's why I'm exited about the race: over my previous five iron-distance triathlon starts, I quit two races after the bike leg (Great Floridian, Louisville) and folded on the run in the other three. In St. George I assessed my legs after three miles, felt nothing, and decided, for once, to run a marathon.
The picture I put on my wall from this event will surely be a well-timed shot from a professional photographer when I'm climbing a hill on the bike against a backdrop of painted sandstone hills. I'm pleased to leave the impression for most that such battlefield heroics is what went on out there, but I'll confess the truth here. St. George was my best (not fastest, though close) long-course race because I held a slow and steady pace, and with five miles to go on the run I realized "I could do this forever, but that I'm about to faint, and please, please don't let it happen before I get to the finish." After the finish, of course, anything goes.
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