Ironman 70.3 Puerto Rico

Background

Doing an Ironman 70.3 as a relay team has been bouncing around in my head for as long as I've been doing triathlons with Tif and Cait. The three of us train together, there are three triathlon disciplines, and it makes too much sense to do one as a relay.

There was never really a question of who would do what discipline. This was always going to be Tiffany swimming, Caitlin biking, and me running.

The struggle was where to do this.

Do we do a race we’ve all done before where we’re already familiar with the course? Do we pick somewhere new and risk FOMO for the other two disciplines?

At the end of last year, we finally settled on coming to Ironman 70.3 Puerto Rico, a race none of us have ever done before.

I had a long 2024 season, certainly needed to downshift into an offseason, and starting 2025 with a relay was a perfect way to do that. I spent my winter months recharging by sleeping in later because my calendar was free of longer swims and bike rides. Those will resume next week! But since December, I’ve primarily just been running.

Race Week

The weather made for a bit of a travel headache. I flew out of Nashville on Thursday. My second flight from Orlando to San Juan was two hours late departing before having a bumpy and stormy landing. When I got to our condo, there was no power from the storms! We were staying on the 8th floor, which made for a great view from the balcony, but it wasn’t so fun without an elevator.

Thankfully, power was restored around 9. Tif and Cait landed at 10. It would have been an adventure if the power was still out and we had to find a way to get Caitlin’s bike up to the 8th floor.

The luxury of being the runner is that it only took me about 5 seconds to unpack the following morning. With the arduous task of taking my race shoes out of my bag completed, I then sat and watched Caitlin rebuild her bike. 😆

We went off to packet pickup, which was thankfully inside with air conditioning. One fun thing about being a relay team is that while you’re only doing a third of the work, Ironman gives you everything that all the other athletes get. I’m the only one who needed a race bib, but we got three of them.

The run course is three out-and-back laps. So with one lap being a little over 4 miles, I ran the course to get an idea of what awaited me. This is one of the hilliest run courses in any of Ironman’s races. But it’s no worse than any of my routes I run back in Nashville. However, it was the dang humidity that was a shock to the system. Back home, I’m still running in long sleeves with gloves. That said, it’s a gorgeous run course. The views are as surreal as the humidity.

In the spirit of “nothing new on race day”, we all practiced the timing chip exchange the night before the race.

Katy arrived on Saturday evening. We all got dinner after she got here, and then it was off to bed for the usual pre-4 a.m. alarm…with one big difference. I wouldn’t have anything to do for nearly six hours after waking up.

Race Morning

This is the start of my 6th triathlon season. I have a race morning routine that is pretty set in stone. But today, I didn’t know what to do exactly. When and what do I eat? How much should I be drinking? I didn’t even know exactly when I’d be starting my run!

Our goal for combined team time was 4:59:59 or faster. (It's also my personal goal for a 70.3 during the 2025 season, but today I'm just the runner!)

Swim

The strangeness of being the runner on the relay team reaches its peak right here. Tiffany went off to the line of athletes waiting to jump into the water. Caitlin went to wait at her bike. As for me? I just wandered around and watched the race begin.

The Puerto Rico swim course is so picturesque and also very spectator-friendly. Not only can you watch from the shore, everyone swims under a long bridge that’s closed to vehicles on race day. You can look right down at everyone swimming.

As relay athletes, our discipline times (understandably) do not rank in our respective age groups. But in Tif’s age group, she swam faster than everyone. Not only that, 36 minutes is a time I can only dream about achieving.

She started the day off as well as we could have hoped.

Transition 1

Still standing around doing nothing. LOL

The relay cyclists all wait in a tent by the entrance to transition. When Tiffany ran in, Caitlin grabbed the timing chip from Tif’s ankle and slapped it on her own. Then Cait ran to her bike and headed out onto the course.

Bike

The bike course in Puerto Rico is two out-and-back laps with timing mats halfway and at each end. So I’d be getting 7 updates on Caitlin’s location over the next few hours in the Ironman tracker app.

While Cait churned out watts, I sat under a palm tree.

I’ve NEVER worked harder during a swim or a bike.

In terms of race day traditions, I really don’t have many. The only two that are top of mind are that I always race in my Braves World Series hat and I start my day with two Pop-Tarts. Instead of eating them before dawn, I munched on them while watching the waves crash into the rocks.

Meanwhile, Caitlin was turning in a terrific ride. Each time she went over a timing mat, her ETA was moving a few minutes faster. It started by saying around 10:45 a.m. But as she hit the last turnaround, that estimate had come down to 10:20 a.m.

I went to warm up around 9:45 a.m. I didn’t like what I found. That humidity was just as advertised. My stride efforts felt sloppy, and the effort didn’t seem to match the times I saw on my watch. A side stitch appeared almost as soon as I began running too.

It shook my confidence and made me nervous for our goal of finishing sub-5.

If Tif or Cait had a bad day, the run becomes a bit of an stress-free afterthought, right? If sub-5 is off the table, it just becomes a goal of completion and having a fun race experience.

But the opposite was what was happening. They were hitting or exceeding their goals, which meant it was all going to be up to me to get this done, or their efforts would go to waste.

Transition 2

I got to the relay tent about 10 minutes before Caitlin was projected to arrive. I was ready to go, antsy, and jittery.

Since I’m just running, my watch isn’t going to show our overall time, just my run time. But I wanted to be conscious of both. Earlier, I had made a mental note of when Tiffany jumped in the water: 7:17 a.m.

I needed to be across the finish line by 12:17 p.m. if we were to crack sub-5.

With each minute that passed as I waited for Caitlin, my mind was busy redoing the math on what my run pace needed to be.

Honestly, this was one of the more nerve-wracking moments I’ve had in this sport. Just waiting around doing pace math, my heart rate was bouncing between 100 and 110 bpm.

Those Saunders and their bright orange race kits. 😆 There was no doubt when it was Caitlin coming in the distance.

She ran up, I yanked our timing chip off of her ankle, put it on mine, and ran out.

Our total transition time was less than 1 minute!

Run

It was a muggy enough day that before I even took that first step in the run, my shirt was pretty drenched in sweat. As you’d expect, that really was the headline of the day. There’s no shade, and we’re running on asphalt. Calling it an oven is too strong a word. But it was unlike any kind of heat and humidity I’ve ever felt during a race.

It would have been fun to say I set a PR in PR, but deep down, I knew that wasn’t in the cards today. Honestly, I felt pretty crappy in those first miles. It felt like this was heading towards a moment where my body just says ENOUGH, and I’d be left with walking a death march back to the finish line. That mental negativity even extended to pondering how exactly I wanted to apologize to Tif and Cait for ruining our sub-5 goals.

I’ve jokingly said all along that the runner in a relay is a lot like the closer in a baseball game. You won’t win the game, but you sure can lose it. Sometimes, closers come in, get three quick outs, and the game is over quietly. Other times, they load the bases with nobody out. But as long as they eventually somehow get all three outs without blowing the lead, nobody remembers much else.

That’s the best way to describe this run. It was a mess. But each mile, I did just enough to not lose the game.

Funny story, but only after the fact: around mile 11, there was a guy with a big hose spraying athletes down with water. It looked larger than a standard garden hose but wasn’t the size of a firefighting hose. Maybe it’s a commercial water hose? Whatever it was, it had been plugged straight into a fire hydrant, and he was hosing everyone down with some big-time water pressure.

As I ran by, he had a bit of a misfire. He sent a big and intense stream of water not at my chest, but a special and sensitive area just below my waist.

There’s never a good time for a blast of water to hit you right in the nuts. But mile 11 of a half marathon is an especially terrible time. 😆

Somehow I managed to keep moving along, and mercifully, the finish line awaited soon enough.

Post-Race

This race didn’t have a matrix board over the finish line. It was just counting the time from the first swimmer jumping into the water. I had finished, but I was in this weird limbo where I didn‘t know our actual finisher time.

When I looked at my watch, it said 12:15 p.m. I think we did it?!

I weaved through the crowd beyond the finish line to where Katy, Tif, and Cait were standing. They asked how I was feeling, and I think my response was just to forcefully respond, “WHAT WAS OUR TIME?!”

4:57:33!

We did it!

My run had been a mess and we had almost no margin for error. But I’d done just enough for us to accomplish our goal for the day.

Outside of my first 70.3, first full, and first Worlds, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a race where I felt such a massive sense of relief crash over me after crossing the finish line.

Only one thing left to do now: I had two medals to hand to Tif and Cait. They'd already showered and changed clothes. Meanwhile, I looked exhausted in the photo that Katy took.

Final Thoughts

I’m writing this as we are on final descent back into Nashville. When we land, I guess that’s the moment I switch from relay runner back to triathlete. All three of us are registered for Ironman 70.3 Chattanooga in almost exactly two months. I’ll need my goggles and bike that day!

But before I turn the page, this relay experience was such a fun twist on a traditional race day. In a lot of ways, it kind of felt like an exhibition game where the results didn’t count. There were no AWA points to be gained, no Worlds slots possibly out there lurking for us, and an open field of all relay athletes across all ages and genders. In a lot of ways, this was more just about us and enjoying this silly sport in a new way.