My First Ironman

By Fiona Mioriarty

Ironmans are hard. A missed gel, a dropped bottle, or a flat can unravel months’ worth of training. No matter how fast you are, it’s an incredibly long day.

If you manage to do more than one, most athletes say the first Ironman is still the hardest. You don’t have the experience to mentally prepare for what’s about to happen and you have no idea how your body is going to hold up over the course of many grueling hours of racing.

As if that weren’t enough to manage, I decided to do my first Ironman as a professional during a global pandemic. Brilliant.

A quick aside to tell you who I am before getting to the nitty-gritty of what happened in Panama City Beach. My name is Fiona Moriarty and I’m a professional triathlete and newly minted MAC athletic member. I also work full-time at Salesforce as a lead technical writer. This balancing act requires me to train about 25-30 hours a week while navigating the avalanche of emails and responsibilities that come with my job. It’s a lot.

Anyway, back to the race.

Before getting to the start line, it’s incredibly important to stay calm, prep your bike and finalize all of your race nutrition. It’s not a good idea to dash through transition to unsuccessfully find a disposable mask, miss the pro briefing, lose your timing chip and break your race kit. And yes, all of those things happened before I even got to the start line. Thankfully, there were spare chips, no one missed me on the walk over, and I fixed my zipper. And somewhere along the way, I remembered to breathe.

In the swim start corral, we all tried to figure out where the buoys went and where the swim exited before heading to our individually allotted swim starts (thanks, COVID). I had one of the last slots to be drawn, so my spot was less than ideal. Realistically, I wasn’t going to make the front pack of former-collegiateborderline-mermaid swimmers. So, my plan was to make the second pack and see what happened.

As far as swimming goes, it’s my biggest weakness. Pre-COVID, I spent six days a week in the water averaging about 25,000 yards a week. After everything shut down, I was limited to two or three swims in the Willamette River per week. I lost my confidence and swim strength. Even when MAC reopened, slots were limited to an hour. I did my best to get prepared, but never felt confident that it was enough.

Nevertheless, I realized about 800 yards into the swim that I hadn’t made the second pack, I was leading it. I got a brief thrill out of my better-than-expected position until I realized something important. I was helping other women save energy while I sighted for buoys and broke the chop for them. Oh well.

The swim was a two-lap affair with the pro field starting their second lap behind a large wave of slower swimmers. It was absolutely brutal to contend with the waves and packs of folks who would take two hours to swim the distance I was hoping to cover in one. Yikes. I’ve never been happier to feel the soft sand under my fingers as I scraped my way onto the beach and out of the water.

Things start to improve for me the moment I get on the bike course. I just love riding my bike. The speed, the position, and passing hordes of people on the course just makes me smile from the inside out. This 112-mile ride was flatter than a board, but fairly tricky because of aggressive winds. The wind made the ocean swim a nightmare because of the chop and took about 60 miles of the ride straight into a headwind.

I give myself a pat on the back for working as efficiently as I could. I let others take the brunt of the bad winds, then really let it fly when the wind was at my back. I rode my way from 13th to 6th by the time I racked my bike and was actually excited to tackle the marathon. As I dropped my helmet, I realized that a massive dragonfly had hitched a ride in one of the vents and felt like it had to be a sign of good luck for the run to come.

Most people consider running 26.2 miles torture enough on its own, never mind swimming 2.4 miles and riding 112 beforehand. Add the Florida heat into the mix and you’ve got yourself a seriously challenging marathon even if the course is dead flat.

So it was an absolute surprise that my legs had come around and I was running really well. I started to break up the race mentally by aid station because they were few and far between.

Those oases of cold water and Coke gave me hope and brought my heart rate down so I could keep running consistent splits. The miles blurred together outside of those stops.

At one point, I saw my partner, Josh, who excitedly told me the fifth place woman was fading. I couldn’t dare to think about it, I just had to keep running my pace and my own race. And then she dropped out. I put a hand to my mouth in surprise, I was in fifth place and there were only six miles to go.

The final few miles passed in a mix of pain and happiness. I knew I could make it, I knew I wasn’t in bad shape, and all I had to do was keep moving forward. With the final turns toward the finish line, the desperation to be done kicked in. I collapsed over the finish line with the biggest smile on my face as my hamstrings locked. I laughed and cried while someone put me in a wheelchair and handed me a face mask. It was over.

And that was the anticlimactic finish. Because of COVID, spectators were far, far away and I was left to slowly wander through the maze of gates alone. With my mask on, you couldn’t see the beaming joy of a job well done, expectations met, and years of work finally paying off. My first Ironman was done and I had far exceeded my expectations.

The Tri-Run Committee is putting on a monthly virtual running race series. Visit themac.com/group/pages/fitnesstriathlonrunning for more information.