IRONMAN Muncie 70.3: What to Know Before You Race

If you’re thinking about signing up for IRONMAN Muncie 70.3, here is everything you need to know about this toasty midwest triathlon.

Packet Pick Up: Occurs on the Friday before the race. There are plenty of volunteers manning packet pick up and the line moves relatively quickly. The best piece of advice I can offer relates to parking for race day. There are a couple of houses directly across transition that offer race day parking for $20. I would highly recommend purchasing one of these spots on Friday when you go to pick up your packet. The distance you will have to walk from your car to transition will be minimal compared to parking in the free parking. The home owners are usually sitting out in front of their home selling parking passes for their yards. If you choose not to pay for parking, there is a good chance you may have to walk half a mile to a mile from your car to get to transition race morning.

Swim Practice: Prairie Creek Reservoir does have a beach house, which is open for swim practice on Friday. There is a section of the reservoir roped off where you can do a practice swim. This same portion will also be open race morning for athletes to warm up.

Photo by Chris Thornberry – @irunyourrace on Instagram

Pre Race: I would recommend arriving early to transition on race morning. There are only two roads that filter into race parking. I have completed this race six times, and every year the most stressful part of the race is waiting in the line of traffic to get to the parking lot. If you have purchased parking in one of the yards across from transition, you will have to wait a bit longer in the line of traffic to reach the yard.

Swim: The swim takes place in Prairie Creek Reservoir and is basically a giant rectangle. The swim start is an age group wave start from the beach. The main thing to know about the swim is that after you make your final turn to swim back toward the beach, you will be looking straight into the sun. This makes sighting very difficult.

Other information of note: The beach house does have bathrooms with showers for use pre- and post- race. Usually the lines for these bathrooms are much shorter compared to the porta potty lines.

T1: When you exit the water, there will be wetsuit strippers. You will then have a short run from the beach to T1.

Bike: This is a straight forward bike course. From T1, you have about 6.5 miles until you reach the highway out and back section of the course (which you will ride twice before heading back to T2). The loop portion of the course is on a highway, which is closed to traffic for race day.

Photo by Chris Thornberry – @irunyourrace on Instagram

This bike course is relatively flat and the roads were in great condition for 2017. My Garmin recorded 951 feet of elevation gain.

T2: Once you hit the dismount line for the bike you only have a couple hundred feet to get back to transition.

Run: Deceptively hilly! This is an out and back 1 loop course, also closed to traffic. There are a lot of little rolling hills on the course that don’t seem bad on the way out. After the turn around, however, those same hills can seem twice the size. My Garmin recorded about 460 feet of elevation gain for the entire run course. The run course can also get very hot. There is very little shade as the day progresses, so make sure you hydrate. The final thing to note is right before you make the turn into the finisher’s chute, you climb a small hill at about a 7% grade.

Post Race: Don’t get your hopes up for pizza. The last couple of years, the post-race food options have been chicken and potatoes.

For Spectators: The race venue is at a reservoir. There are only 2 roads (one from the north and one from the south) that feed into the reservoir. The north bound road is used for the bike portion and the south bound road is used for the run portion. I have never spectated this race; however, I would imagine that it could be difficult to leave the race venue once the race starts unless you park farther out. There are food vendors set up in the Ironman Village and the beach house also offers some snacks.

How I Trained: I raced Ironman Muncie as a mid-season race leading up to Ironman Chattanooga. I wrote my own training plan for this Ironman. The general format of the plan was having a short interval, long interval, and tempo/TT for the swim, bike, and the run. I also utilized workouts from Power Speed Endurance. My work schedule only allows me to get in my swim/bike/run workouts every other week. On my work weeks, my workouts consisted of two Tabata style (short and long) bike workouts and a hill workout ranging from 2.5 to 5 miles. You can download my full training plan here: Ironman Chattanooga 2017 Training Plan.docx.