Back in the saddle,
Between work and life there just hasn’t been much time for racing. I’ve been training from 12-18 hours per week so my fitness level feels pretty good. Hopefully I’ve had very few junk miles thrown in the mix. Lots of zone 2, low zone 3 training, a few interval sessions on the bike and run and weights once per week. I’ve dropped about 12 pounds since January, plus, I think I might finally have the asthma under control.
I was pretty nervous going into the race. I’ve been racing for the last 10 years or so and have been competing in various things for the last 20 years, and I’m still nervous about a little sprint tri. Go figure. Maybe it’s just because this was my first race in the last 7 months?
I donned my wet suit only to decide 5 minutes before the race to swim in just my skin suit. I’m still not sure of the wisdom of this move but T1 was blazing fast – very cool. The swim felt a little awkward because all of my open water swimming has been in a wet suit. Right at the turn around for the buoy I remember that, in fact, if I’m not wearing a wet suit I sink. Note for next time; don’t stop swimming when turning around a buoy.
The bike was great! I finally figured why my QR doesn’t climb very well. I always thought it was me but as it turns out my front chain rings are a 42-52, not the standard 39-53. Wow, what a difference, the hill coming out of t1 was actually not that bad to climb, and I had some extra speed coming down the hill, should have figured this out a long time ago!
I saw fellow Outlaw Wingman bobbing and weaving his way up the hill and decided that I really
needed to pass him right away to set up a fun game of cat and mouse. Unfortunately he didn’t respond and I had to find other’s to play with. As it turns out I was catching the back half of the previous wave (Oh, did I mention that I’m now in the OLD man wave?) and couldn’t find any suitable targets so I decided to try and track down my arch nemesis and see if he would play. I put the pedal down and started passing lots and lots of folks but never my nemesis, Hummm, maybe I’m in front of him, naaa, he just did an IM and he looks like he’s in great shape, but still….I passed fellow outlaw Brian on the way into T2 (he was heading out of T2), since he’s not in the old geezer age group he got to leave 5 minutes before me. Ah, a new target.
Coming in to t2 I felt great, I’ve been pushing the bike, breathing hard but no tightness like normal, my legs felt great and I wanted to see what I could do on the run. After a bonk on my recovery run a few days before the race I was a little nervous about the run. Yeah, paranoid but true. I looked around and there was MuffinMan, right in T2 with me. Pretty cool, it looks like we are going to have a show down!
Heading out of t2 I decided I didn’t have much time to get my legs under me, Muffinman was right behind me and did I hear my arch nemesis coming into t2? Darn, he’s a lot faster runner than me. The pancake flat run is always hot and it’s tempting to stop at the aid station and take a nice drink of water but I could feel eyes on my back and Brian was still out front some place. I saw what I thought was an Outlaw uniform in the distance so I decided that I needed to catch him, who was it? I pushed hard until I met Brian around half way into the run and decided that the uniform wasn’t an Outlaw. At the turn around point I saw that MuffinMan was right behind me so there was no way I could relax, a little while later there was Paul, darn they are going to catch me! I pushed pretty hard on the way back and finally managed to shake them.
That was a hard race. The distance always lends itself to an all out effort and I was wasted but it sure felt good to be back in the saddle. Seven months is just too long to go without racing!
As it turns out I think I did PR for that course, 50 minutes flat, the previous two years I was at about 52.40ish. The official results won’t be out for a little while yet but still, the race felt great and even if I didn’t do a PR I had a great time.
Placed second in my age group, with the first place winner also the overall winner, darn those old fast men! I think I was in the top 10, maybe even the top 5, with a bunch of other Outlaws finishing in the top 10 and almost every outlaw taking home some metal.
Great race, now I can’t wait for the F1, maybe we can get another Outlaw pace line – Le Train Black? (sorry, I have a Le Train Blue, poster of the Postal time trial in my office)
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