IRONMAN 70.3 Chattanooga Race Recap: 8:44:02 and a Flag I'll Never Forget

The night before, I sat in my in my bed with my bike already checked in and my transition bags already racked.

There was nothing left to do.

No more training. No more prep. No more “I’ll be ready when…”

The cannon was going off in the morning whether I felt ready or not.

I stared at the ceiling for a while thinking about everything that had led to this moment. The truck. The early mornings moving my bed aside to set up my indoor trainer. The sprint races. The mechanical issues. The bad workouts. The 100 pounds I’d lost. The name I was carrying.

Staff Sergeant Seth Michael Plant.

I was racing the next day as part of the IRONMAN Foundation Gold Star Initiative, carrying an American flag across 70.3 miles in his honor.

That thought settled something in me.

This race was already about more than me.

Time to sleep. Time to find out what all of this was worth.

Race Morning

I was up before 4am.

That kind of quiet that only exists in the hours before something big. You move slower. You double-check everything twice. You try not to think too far ahead.

I went through my checklist the way I always do.

Bike shoes. Helmet. Nutrition laid out. Flag secured.

The Tennessee River was dark when I walked down to transition. Lights everywhere. Athletes moving around in the dim. Everyone locked into their own pre-race routine, their own private conversation with whatever was about to happen.

I set up my transition area and tried to stay calm.

Tried being the key word.

Because standing there, looking at 56 miles of bike and 13.1 miles of run sitting between me and a finish line I’d been chasing for over a year — calm wasn’t exactly what I felt.

Ready enough, though.

That’s all you need.

The Swim — 1.4 Miles in the Tennessee River

Swim Time: 50m 59s

The Tennessee River at race start is something else.

Point-to-point, downstream. You enter the water and let the current work with you rather than against you. It sounds simple. It’s not simple. Open water is never simple.

There’s the chaos of hundreds of bodies in the water at once. Arms everywhere. People finding their line. The sound of water and breathing and the low hum of everyone trying to settle in.

I focused on one thing: get calm and find a rhythm.

A year before this race, I was still learning how to swim without panicking in open water. I had a competitive swimming background growing up, but that’s a pool. This is different. This is dark water and no lane lines and the current pushing you sideways if you’re not paying attention.

Within the first 200 meters, something clicked.

I found my stroke. I found my breathing. I found the rhythm.

The swim wasn’t fast. It wasn’t supposed to be. The goal was controlled and confident — get out of the water with something left in the tank for what was coming.

Mission accomplished.

I hit the exit ramp and jogged toward T1 and thought:

Okay. One down. Two to go.

T1

T1 Time: 9m 55s

Transition one is organized chaos.

Wetsuit off. Helmet on. Shoes on. BATHROOM BREAK

I rolled out of T1 and into 56 miles of Tennessee hills.

The Bike — 56 Miles

Bike Time: 3h 39m Avg Speed: 15.6 mi/h Elevation Gain: 2,323 ft

I knew the bike course was hilly.

I had driven it. I had studied it. I had trained on elevation.

I was not ready for the bike course.

The first 10 miles felt good. Heart rate managed. Legs fresh from the swim. That early race energy where everything feels possible.

Then the hills started.

There were multiple points out on that course where I looked at my heart rate and thought that number is too high and I still have 30 miles left. Trying to bring it back down on a rolling course where the next climb starts before you’ve recovered from the last one.

The bike humbled me. I’ll be honest about that. There were long stretches through the middle miles where it felt less like racing and more like survival, just keeping the wheels moving, managing the effort, counting down the miles.

But I kept moving.

Mile 40 felt like I’d been riding for three days. Mile 50 felt like I could finally see the other side. Mile 56 felt like relief.

I rolled into T2 knowing the run was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done.

I was right.

T2

T2 Time: 5m 44s

Bike racked. Running shoes on.

Legs already questioning every decision I’d ever made.

The thing about the bike-to-run transition in a 70.3 is that your legs don’t feel like your legs yet. They feel like they belong to someone else, someone who just spent 56 miles pushing against hills and now has to convince themselves to run 13.1 miles.

I grabbed the flag.

Took a breath.

And started running.

The Run — 13.1 Miles

Run Time: 3h 58m Avg Pace: 18:11/mi

The run course in Chattanooga runs along the Tennessee Riverwalk. Relatively flat compared to the bike. Beautiful, actually.

I did not notice the beauty for a long time.

The first two miles I was just trying to figure out if my legs worked. They did, barely. The run shuffle is a real thing, that awkward half-jog where you’re trying to convince your body to shift gears after hours on the bike.

By mile four, I hit a wall.

Not a gradual slowdown. A wall.

My body wanted to stop. My brain was looking for any excuse to walk. Every aid station became a negotiation.

Run to that tree. Okay, walk through this aid station. Now run to the next corner. Just the next corner.

That’s how I got through 13.1 miles. Not with a plan. Not with a pace strategy. With corners.

One corner at a time.

There were miles in there, I won’t pretend otherwise, where I walked more than I wanted to. Where the gap between what I trained for and what my body had left didn’t line up the way I hoped.

But I never stopped moving forward.

And the flag?

When my legs hurt, the flag stayed up. When I wanted to walk the whole mile, the flag stayed up. When the emotions started building somewhere around mile 10 and I realized I was actually going to finish this thing, the flag stayed up.

Because Seth Plant’s family carries something heavier than a flag every single day.

The least I could do was keep mine in the air for 13.1 miles.

The Finish Line

I heard the finish line before I saw it.

The crowd noise builds. The announcer’s voice cuts through. People cheering for runners they’ve never met because that’s what triathlon people do.

And then I turned the corner and the finish chute was right there.

Red carpet. Lights. People on both sides.

I don’t fully know how to explain what happened to me in those last 200 meters.

I know I started crying somewhere in the chute. I know I held that flag as high as I could. I know I crossed the line and heard my name over the speaker and thought about Seth Plant and his family and what it cost them. I know I found my family on the other side and just kind of fell into a hug and couldn’t talk for a minute.

Official Finish Time: 8:44:02

Truck driver. College freshman in my 30s. USAF veteran. Over 100 pounds lost. IRONMAN 70.3 finisher.

That sentence doesn’t feel real.

But the medal around my neck was real. The flag in my hand was real. The finish time on the board was real.