ATHLETICS
My First Ironman By Fiona Mioriarty
I
ronmans 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.
52 | The Wınged M |
JANUARY 2021
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.
