The picture below does a pretty good job of expressing my approach toward the second day of the Ultra 520 K. I knew from the very outset that it would be a challenging day in ways that I could not imagine and time did not really matter that much. The day featured a 275 kilometre bike ride through the Okanagan and Similkameen valleys. Although in training, I had done rides of almost nine hours, those rides were not after a previous ten hour day of swimming and riding. I was going to be as cautious, smart, and gentle as possible on the bike, to preserve my soul for the double-marathon the following day. What you see in the picture is me at about the three hour mark, rolling out my back and hips on a yoga mat.
It seemed to work wonders for me and although that whole stop (just before the WALL in Okanagan Falls) took me about ten minutes, I think it was time well spent. In retrospect, looking at this picture makes me respect my competitors even more, and here’s why. Although every person doing the race had a crew to help them through the event, I was truly blessed to have the support that I had. I had an official crew of four, plus on this day I had an additional five people for emotional support.
My team catered to my every need. If I wanted perogies instead of gel, they were there, waiting for me at the next stop. If I didn’t like the tilt of my aero bars, I had a replacement bike ready to go. If my private parts started to get unhappy, I knew Chamois Butter was only twenty minutes away. If I got sick of F2C, I had a choice of green tea, Red Bull, or Coke at my “bicycle-buffet” as you can see here. 
I’m quite sure that I had the best support out of all the racers out there.
But in spite of all the niceties afforded me, I still had to go the distance and for me that took almost eleven hours. In that amount of time a lot can happen to a person’s mind and body. I remember doing the long and lonely climb to the Twin Lakes Golf Course feeling just hopeless. Ninety minutes later, I was still in a funk. I guess emotional peaks and valleys are a lot longer on bike rides lasting just as long as some of my entire Ironman races!
One of the things that sustained me (or distracted me) was the thought of folks like Craig Premack doing sixteen and twenty hour rides and Geo Wade doing eight and ten hours swims. Another, very tangible thing that helped me get through the day was the gearing on my bicycles. Even though my motivation and energy levels waivered a lot through the day, it was pretty much impossible NOT to keep going with a bike that had 12/32 gearing. They also gave me the opportunity to SPIN up all of the nasty hills that the course threw at me.
The two main things that I learned from Day Two of the Ultra 520 K were that even though you think you may be fully prepared to take on the challenges of a super long event, there are going to be things that may happen along the way that you will not necessarily be fully prepared for and this is part of the appeal. The second thing is much more pragmatic – comfort trumps aero on long distance bikes. Even though I thought my bike positions were optimized, my mind and body after seven hours seem to say otherwise. Perhaps a less aggressive position on the bikes would have lessened the suffering. Or maybe it is just that this princess just needs to 
toughen up!
. That’s it. A field of 14. Doing an event over such a long period of time with so few participants was very different than doing an Ironman when you are competing against somewhere between one and two thousand people. The vibe at the event was very much a laid back one. The most obvious example was shortly after this picture was taken at the start of the swim. With such a small field and such a long race, there was no fighting, punching, kicking, or biting, for the first 300 metres of the swim to jostle for position. In fact, drafting on the swim was not even allowed. The start of the swim instead was just a gentle roll out with my kayaker and myself taking a deep breath and heading out for some distant mark on the smoky horizon. 
After finishing the swim, there was still 150 K of biking to do before US got to the real finish line for the day. More on that part later.
Over the next week or so, Fitspeek will be primarily text and pictures. Fitspeek was designed to be a more permanent place than Facebook to post observations from my racing, training, and interactions with people in the endurance sports community. We start with the picture above. If you didn’t know it, you may think that this was some sort of cult indoctrination ritual. It sort of was and I bought into it 100%.
Back in the day, when these events used to have a carbo – loading dinner the tone was often like this picture. Whose is bigger, faster, longer, stronger? It gave the athletes (primarily male) a chance to let all the other athletes know (before there was Strava and Facebook) just how good their equipment was and how much they were training. Talk about Power V’s and Deep HEDs and 25 hour taper weeks were table fodder.
. Steve Brown has really crafted a family like (dare I say cult like) vibe. With only 12 other participants, there is no opportunity to be some anonymous blow hard big shot, which I sometimes am at triathlon socials. I did not see one “I raced at Kona, so look at me you poor mortals and despair” t-shirts. Instead, what I saw, heard, and participated in were just a bunch of genuine conversations about why people decided to sign up for the Ultra, some advice giving from those who had done it before, and talk about their home country (there are quite a few non-Canadians doing the race). Not once did I hear a reference to an 11/58 fixie that dude rode all winter for base training! Just like a group of junkies chatting to each other about their favourite way to rig up, by being with a group of peers who had done eight hour bike rides and four hour treadmill runs seemed to normalize or validate my experiences of the past months.
For the next few days I’ll be bringing my Ultraman Blog off of the back page and onto the front. As you may have heard or read, this is the weekend that I am doing the Ultraman 520 in the Penticton area. It’s a 3 day event that has a 10 K swim and 150 K swim on day one, a 270 K bike on day two, and an 84 K run on day three. We are in Penticton right now to do all of the prep. stuff that is required. Today we go shopping for supplies! We also get a chance to pick up the race package and meet all the folks (maybe a dozen) who are doing the event. Yesterday, Elise and I finally got a chance to see the run course. For me it is going to be so much more than a run course. It will be a walk, and maybe at times a crawl course. The stretch from km about 55-70 I suspect will be especially challenging. That is because at that point I will have been on the course for about eight hours and I suspect I will be pretty tired by then. There is a lot of up and downhill during that part of the course, so I’ll have to make sure that my pacing and nutrition are good. Of course in order to be able to get the opportunity to run/walk, I have some work to do on Saturday and Sunday. Keep checking in over the next few days, this could be quite the freak show!