Heather Wurtele’s DQ at Ironman Coeur d’Alene

Heather describes what happened to her yesterday.

Rogerhospedales June 25, 2012

Kelowna’s Heather Wurtele, was on her way to taking the win at yesterday’s Ironman Coeur d’Alene but was DQ’d and pulled off the run course with 8 km to go. Why? Find out the details from Heather. Here is a portion from Heather’s blog post today:

Well, yesterday SUCKED. I’m sure you’ve heard snippets from the twitter-verse, etc. but I wanted to give you the run down as it really happened.

Short version:

I was pulled out of IM Coeur d’Alene at mile 21 of the run (while in 2nd) b/c I rode another athlete’s wee bike back to T2 after my crank arm fell off and I couldn’t get any assistance.

Long version:

I was 3 min down from 1st – Meredith – out of the water, and managed to catch her at 40 mi or so on the far south end of the 2 loop course. She has this pesky habit of tenaciously hanging on, and it wasn’t until the second loop, heading out to the far turn that I was finally able to open up a decent gap. I was happy with my race, how I was feeling, and stoked to be in the lead hammering the last stretch back to T2.

Then… my left pedal stroke started feeling kind of wobbly. Looking down I could see the wave washer and spacers had a rather large gap than they should. I thought “oh no, oh no, oh no this isn’t happening”. I stopped briefly to see if I could thump it back in (not one to carry a 10 mm allen key on my race bike) but no. It did seem, though, that it wouldn’t come completely off, so I got back on and kept riding – trying to keep even, inward pressure on the cranks. The drive side started pushing out, and rubbing the chain on the derailleur to such an extent that it popped into the small ring. I un-clipped while rolling to tap it back in with my right foot, and that’s when, POW! the left crank-arm went flying off.