Mistletoe Sprint

My third race in the Tri the Parks Series came and went this past weekend without much fanfare. It was definitely a less than stellar performance for that distance. It began with a logistical screw up. I never really knew where the race was held. I thought it was a bit closer than it actually was. To my surprise it was nearly in Augusta...2 hours away.

So Jess and I were up and out the door extra early Saturday morning for a 75 minute race. I arrived with just enough time to get checked in and racked. I didn't have the opportunity to get in a solid warmup and the two hour drive sucked the energy right out of the body. I was trying to be optimistic and just have a solid race.

I made it down to the water and had about five minutes to loosen up. I knew the swim would be troublesome that day. I really haven't swim this month. I had a shoulder/neck issue that lingered for about two weeks so I have been uber-conservative in the pool. Or I just haven't gone. I still wanted to go hard.

Swim: 12:56

I lined up right behind the big boys and right on the buoy line. I hit the water hard and immediately got sandwiched between two bigger guys. The race to the first buoy was solid but I was loosing my positioning. I moved over one of the guys and rounded the buoy on this feet. This lasted until about the half way mark where we swam up on the wave before us. I have focused really hard on keeping my head in the water this year and reducing the amount of sighting. This backfired.

I didn't quite see the group split around the slower swimmers. Instead, I just latched onto the next group of feet. This lasted about a minute before I realized we were going way too slow. I popped out of the water and saw my pack of swimmers about 20 meters ahead. I knew I couldn't catch up. I just focused on long, smooth strokes. With about 100m left the leaders from the next wave came around so I grabbed feet and glided in. I came out of the water at about 11:50. Once again there was a long run up a hill to transition that seemed to take forever.

T1 0:51

My rack was the first one when you entered transition so I jumped into my shoes and was off running to the other end of transition in decent time

Bike 32:26

I was a fumbling idiot when I reached the mount line. For some reason I couldn't clip in. I missed it three times. Oh well, finally I was off. My plan was to ride hard and pick up the pace on the way back into the return. As I exited the park, I could tell my HR was still a bit jacked up. I tried to hammer each downhill and make up time there.

I could see the pack of swimmers that dropped me. They were about a half mile ahead at that point. At each of the turnarounds I could tell I was making progress, just not enough to catch them on such a short course.

I knew I was riding hard but I definitely didn't have any extra oomph in my legs. I tried to pick it up a few times but there was nothing there. I just maintained a steady pace and cruised back to transition.

T2: 0:53

I had a very nice dismount and then ran well back to transition (30s run). Then I made a rookie mistake. I made it to the end of transition and couldn't find my rack. I have never done that in 4 years of racing. Evidently, I came down the wrong row so I moved over and threw down the bike and was off.

Run: 26:01

Blah. I knew I wouldn't have run legs if I felt that dead on the bike. And I really didn't care either way at that point. The first part of the run was on a trail that had once of the steepest hills I have ever encountered. I actually walked half of it and wasn't losing ground to the guy in front of me. The it popped out on the road for about a mile before diving back into the woods.

The funniest part was when Chuck caught me about 1.75 miles into the run. We were running downhill chatting, not paying attention. Next thing we know we stopped dead in our tracks because the trail ended with a wooden lookout point. We scratched our heads before we saw the cones indicating which direction to go. Oops.

So I just cruised along without much care in the world until I hit the finish line.

Overall: 1:13:09

I took a few minutes to cool down and then hit the road. I knew it wasn't a good race and just wanted to get back to town.