USAT Age Group Nationals Race Report
Monday, August 22nd, 2011
After a nice easy real week filled with massage, stretching, fruits and veggies and extra sleep, I could actally feel my quads again and was feeling like I might actually be able to have a solid race. And I didn’t go crazy or get sick either!
Sam and I drove up to Vermont early on Friday morning, hit up registration, some free samples at the vendor booths and made or way to our hotel. I decided to skip the host hotel and go for one MUCH closer to the actual race. We didn’t need our car all weekend and I could see the whole swim course from my window. It was pretty sweet.
The swim course and the Adirondack mountains on the other side of Lake Champlain.
And yes, the sun looked EXACTLY like that streaming through the clouds in real life. Pretty cool, eh?
RACE MORNING
I was up and at ‘em at 5:30. I dressed, drank some EFS and took down a banana and some yogurt before heading over to transition. My swim wave went off an hour after the first wave and transition didn’t close until late, so I was in no rush. There was a lot of waiting around and sitting on the dock with Sam as we watched the other waves go off, but no real stress.
The minutes leading up to my swim wave is usually when the butterflies start kicking in, but nother this time. Despite being my biggest and last triathlon of the year, I was pretty relaxed. We watched about 5 or 10 waves go off before I even put on my wetsuit. I drank a flask of First Endurance Pre Race then lubed up my neck, shoulders, arms and legs with Tri Slide and I gathered with the rest of my age group to dive on in.
SWIM
We only had a few minutes to warm up in the water before our wave went off. Just enough to get the shoulders loose and do any last minute wetsuit adjustments before lining up for the gun. I warmed up the interior of my wetsuit, and just floated until they sent us off. Despite being in a pretty wide start line where our group was probably only 2-3 people deep at any one point, it was a pretty aggressive start. Elbows and feet were flying everywhere. I did my best to push through ‘em and keep on some fast feet without taking a heel to my eye or fist to the back of my head.
It worked, I managed to stay out of any brawls with other adrenaline fueled athletes and still push the pace. The course made a hard right turn. Due east and right into the sun. UGH. I couldn’t see a damn thing except for a group of splashing feet and elbows about 25 meters ahead of me. I followed them until they realized they were WAY off course and took a hard turn to get back on. Frustrating. While the water was pretty calm in the protected harbor, I think some of the waves in one section where there was a gap in the barriers helped throw me off course too. After some more diligent sighting, I was back on course, hugging the buoys and out of the water.
Going into the race, I knew that I had the fitness to set an Oly swim course PR as long as I stayed on course. I was right. Poor sighting and no PR. Frustrating. Oh well. Onward and upward.
Time: 28:27
Pace: 1:54/100m
Bike
After a respectable, but not blazing fast T1 (1:33) I was off on the bike. The first third of the bike had some decent (short) climbs and was into a headwind. I kept pushing to try to catch up to some faster swimmers, but going uphill into a headwinds S-U-C-K-S. I felt like my brakes were dragging or something. If it wasn’t for catching up to people in earlier waves, it would have been easy to get down on myself, but everyone was stuck facing the same conditions.
Fortunately, on the back half was treating me much better and I fell into a good rhythm. Nice rollers, pushing hard and a little tail wind sent me home 3.5 minutes faster than my last bike course PR. Big smile on my face. Nutrition wise, I just took one 2oo calorie bottle of EFS.
Time: 1:07:39 (22 mph)
Run
What I did NOT know is that they were live streaming video from the race. My mom, Rachelle and Jill were all watching and cheering for me as one of the cameras caught me coming into T2. If I had known, maybe I would have picked it up a little because they were NOT very impressed with my speediness through transition. Then Jill and Rachelle proceed to heckle me over Twitter. Gotta love teammate support. 
Out of transition and onto the course was the only real hill on the whole course, but it was a biggie. Half of the people were walking! Seriously people? Walking in the first 1/4 mile of Nationals? Let’s get this thing done!
I had a pretty slow first mile because of the hill (around 8:00) but after that I kept ticking off each mile at around 7:25-7:35. I kept chugging along and feeding off of everyone’s energy. People were laying it all out there and destroying their bodies just to get to the finish line, way more than any other race I’d been in. It was awesome to be around.
My final time was 46:19, which was 40 seconds faster than the stand alone 10k that I did at Beach to Beacon two weeks ago! Not too shabby, eh?
Edit: Rumor is that the run course may have been a little short, but I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that.
Total Time: 2:25:28
Yes people, that is a HUGE 15 minute PR. I had never even broken 2:40 before. A good day, eh? I feel like this was the race where I was finally able to pull off the race performance that I was capable off. Other than a little zig zagging on the swim, it was just the race I wanted.
And I had expected some fierce competition, but NOTHING like what actually showed up. If I had been lucky enough to PR by only 8 minutes, I would have been dead last. I lucked out big time with not ending up DFL!
The rest of the weekend was spent enjoying local beers, burritos the size of my face, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream sundaes and laying in my hotel bed with Sam watching awful movies on TV. I can’t imagine a better weekend.
Enjoying the post-race beer garden. Cheap beers AND they didn’t need my ID. They just looked at my calf. Kinda awesome.
Chipotle burrito from Bueno y Sano
Big B&J Sundae
One of my favorite beers: Switchback Ale
And It only took me about 12 hours to think “Damn that was a fast race! I wonder how much faster I can go next year?!”
I think I already have a goal for the 2012 season…
Tags: burlington vermont, Triathlon, usat age group nationals | Posted in Race Reports, Triathlon, Videos | 9 Comments »
