(left->right) Fred Smith, Kristoffer Nielsen, some other dude
The race was a huge improvement over my Vegas showing. It answered a lot of questions for me as to where my fitness is at and what I need improvement on. I was in the right zone mentally before and during the race, having just the right amount of focus with out over stressing and draining myself. The race also offered some surprises, both good and bad, and of course it was not without its frustrations and important lessons. Overall I’m very encouraged that my performance was well balanced over the swim, bike, and run.
We arrived at the race center with about an hour and a half to setup our transitions, get body marked, and warmed up. For whatever reason the time before a race always seems to fly by way too fast and I can never quite nail down a solid routine. I managed to get a good bike warmup. I had no intention of doing a run warmup because my lower leg injury has been really flared up over the week leading up to the race and I did not want to aggravate it further. By the time I got over to the swim start and got my wetsuit on they were calling athletes out of the water for the pre race meeting. Damn, no swim warmup for me! The swim, despite the rather large deficit I came out of the water with, went awesome for me! I hit the water strong, getting through the start craziness without any problems or freak-outs. I fell into a rhythm pretty quickly despite the lack of warmup. Above all I swam constant, navigated well, and my mind didn’t wander into dangerous territory.
I came out of the water feeling surprisingly fresh and blazed through my swim to bike transition in 49sec (that’s with taking a wetsuit off). I’ve been working on my transitions and this was a big improvement for me. Out onto the bike on about 500m of paved road before hitting the first section of single track. Unfortunately for me the start of the duathlon was overlapped with our event. The timing happened to workout so that a large group of duathletes hit the singletrack right in front of me. A bit unlucky. So I went to work crank hard, coast, crank hard, coast. “excuse me, please”. Most were good about letting me by at the closest widening of the trail. A few were not so nice and decided I was a serious threat to their race and there was no way they were going to let me by. Frustrating. When I cleared that pack I of course hit all the triathletes who are just faster swimmers than I. My frustration here is that my poor swimming leads to a tiring routine of accelerating hard between riders and then slowing down and just coasting along for way too long before being able to pass. This eats precious minutes out of my bike split and my overall time. I really feel I could have gone sub 1:10:00 on the bike split if I was with the front group coming out of the swim. Will that day ever come? I think it may be time for a proper swim coach.
The big hill in the middle gave me more trouble than I would have thought it would. My training grounds in here in the Valley offers fantastic hill access and I spent most of the winter months through march working on climbing strength. However, the past 6-7 weeks I’ve focusing mostly on my technical skills on the mountain bike as opposed to getting in big miles in the mountains on my road bike. I need to create a better balance between skills training and well rounded bike fitness. I also need to introduce more focused vo2max bike workouts to better replicate the demands of racing. On a more encouraging note my skills on the tight, turny single track felt bomber. I out biked all the competitors I came across throughout the bike course and can’t wait until I have the opportunity to try and hang on a wheel of the leaders. I also totally crushed the downhills putting big distance on people. This is at least in part due to the killer suspension of my Specialized Epic— that bike just gives you confidence.
My running has been a major point of insecurity for me here in 2009. In December I tore my MCL and took 2.5 months off from running of any kind (I was biking lightly 3 weeks after the injury). I started ramping my running up slowly in late February and was feeling ok about my progress but had had no real tests. Then about two months ago I started getting some symptoms of what I believe is shin splints in my right leg. Shortly after I had to stop running because the pain was unbearable. I took 3 solid weeks off from running of any kind leading up to Vegas and was really stressing about how this would effect my race. Turns out I didn’t feel any pain from that injury at all during the race. However, because of my poor hydration/electrolyte prep in the days before the race(see vegas report) I totally screwed any chances of performing well. I lost probably 15 minutes on the run course in Vegas. So the short of it is that I’ve had a lot of self doubt about my running— NOT ANYMORE! This weekend I had the 5th fastest run split. Considering the inconsistent run training I’ve had over the past months this is really uplifting for me. The run course was on almost all singletrack with exception of the first half kilometer and the last couple of hundred meters which were both paved road. It was a turny and physical course for the first half and then one was faced with a repetitive series of longish, steep hills and rough descents. I admit this run course was tough, but I actually really enjoyed it. It had all the ingredients for a run course that suits me well. Throughout the run I made my way passed the amateur leaders until we popped out of the woods with about 500m to go. When I exited the trails I saw that there was another runner about 100 meters down the road, and so I really laid down the pace. By the time we entered the long wooded finish shoot that wound along the lake (about 200m) I could see that this was a person in my category and was even more motivated to beat him to the finish. The distance was closing really fast and I was hopeful that I could catch him by the finish line. NO! Ran out of room! Turns out he and I were the first and second overall amateurs to cross the line, he just 2 seconds in front of me.
I had a fantastic race with so many things going as they should. It burns me to have lost by such a tight margin but there’s a lot of racing left to go here this season and my day will surely come. I have many things to improve upon in order to have a perfect race and I’m highly motivated to get to work on them. My 11th place overall is very encouraging and I believe now more than ever if I can get my swimming where it needs to be and when my leg allows for consistent run training, a top 10 cup finish is realistically within reach. The Richmond Cup is 3 weeks away— I already can’t wait.
Melanie McQuaid took 1st for the women and wins her third(out of three) cups here in the 2009 season. Fred Smith, Frank Fernandez-Poss, and myself earned spots to Maui for the Xterra World Championships adding to the growing list of MelRaders qualified for worlds.