IRONMAN California 2025: the second full distance

I want to be honest about this one before I get to the numbers: the marathon at the end of it was the hardest thing I've done in a race. It took me 6:45:54 to cover the 26.2 miles, and by the card that's the hardest leg I've had in any race on this site, and the card isn't wrong about that.

We'd said the full distance is a season with a bedtime attached, and in 2025 we did two of them. Texas in April was the first, and this was the second, six months later in Sacramento, with a river swim, a flat bike through the delta, and a marathon along the American River. We signed up three weeks out, right after Augusta, because Michael, Jake, and Tony were doing it and we thought we'd surprise them, and because at that point we honestly thought we were invincible. My swim was 1:07:36 in water that was ice cold the whole way, and worst of all where the American River meets the Sacramento and the temperature drops something like eight degrees in an instant. Jay had a sweatshirt waiting for himself in transition, and I'm still not sure how he thought of that. The bike was 7:04:51 on a course that's completely flat, back country and vineyards, and not much to look at for that long, and then the run started, on some gravel and some uneven ground, and it kept going for almost seven hours.

I finished it in 15:26:59. My hip went on the run and I walked a lot of it, and I've been dealing with that hip, and my back, ever since. I'm not going to say much more about the run than that, because I'm still not sure I have the words for it, but I finished and I'm proud of that.

Jay finished in 11:16:13, thirty-six minutes faster than Texas, and he did it with a 3:59:24 marathon at the end of a full Ironman. He looked at his watch at mile 24, saw he had sixteen minutes to make four hours, and ran the last two miles at 8:35 and 7:53 by Strava, two years after missing four hours by 35 seconds in a plain marathon, and I've stopped asking how.

Three weeks before this we'd raced 70.3 Augusta, and two months before that we'd ridden 112 miles around Oahu. Six weeks after it we ran the Honolulu Marathon together, slowly, as a victory lap. That's what a full-distance year looks like when you write it down, and when you do two of them in one year it looks like this page.