Lake Waconia Triathlon

So there I am cruising down Highway 5 on the way to the race, music cranking, enjoying my traditional in-car pre-race breakfast of champions (a banana and a can of Ensure chased with a 20oz of Coke), when I see what looked like a little painted turtle on the opposite shoulder.  Sadly, roadkill turtles are a somewhat familiar sight in Minnesota this time of year, but this one didn't look like it had been hit.  So I slammed on the brakes and pulled a really sketchy, most likely illegal U-turn and circled back to check on the little guy (more likely girl actually, as most of the turtles killed crossing roads are females traveling to/from nesting sites) with the intention of helping it cross the road safely.

Many of you who stumble upon this blog may not know of the depths of my turtle and tortoise nerdery.  Well... turtles and tortoises are my favorite animals ever.  I have a pet tortoise, I've planned vacations around turtle-related activities, and I regularly donate money to turtle related charities (the Sea Turtle Conservancy and the Turtle Hospital if you happen to have some money burning a hole in your pocket).  So it's my personal policy to always stop and make sure any live turtle I see on the road makes it to the other side.  Not doing so condemns the turtle in question to death for all intents and purposes.  The chances of a turtle making it safely across a road as busy as Hwy. 5 unassisted are pretty much zero.

Sadly, this particular turtle had indeed been hit and was already dead, so this story doesn't really go anywhere other than serving as platform for me to tell you to watch where the hell you're going when you're driving.  There's really no excuse for running over a turtle.  They're kinda slow... it's not like they'll jump out and surprise you.

Don't squish me bro!

With that out of the way...

Waconia is always a highlight of the season.  It serves as Minnesota's qualifier for the Best of the US Championship, so the field is always very competitive at the front and this year was no exception.  I finished 4th here last year and luckboxed my way into the BOUS race via rolldown when the 3 guys in front of me were unable to go.  I ended up finishing 3rd at the championship race, earning myself the somewhat dubious distinction of being the only guy in the history of the competition to place better in the national race than in his state's qualifier.  The crazy part about that is that I didn't race poorly at Waconia or out of my head well at BOUS.  In both races I did pretty much what I expected out of myself time-wise.  Dudes are just that fast around here.

This year my primary goal was to finish in the top 3 so I could qualify legit and not have to worry about the rolldown.  That would by no means be an easy mission, as you can pretty much set your clocks by Dan Hedgecock and Patrick Parish going 1-2 at this point.  The race for 3rd looked like it could be pretty epic though between me, Alex Hooke and Kevin O'Connor.  We've raced each other a ton over the last couple seasons and have proven to be fairly evenly matched.

The Pre-Race Jams


Even without the attempted turtle rescue detour, Waconia is a long damn way from Columbia Heights.  Good thing I pulled some solid tunes out of the vault for the journey.  Obsolete by Fear Factory is one of my favorite records of all time.  It's an industrial metal concept album that tells a story about a Teminator-esque future where the machines have taken over the world.  If you're saying, "Wow... that's the nerdiest thing I can imagine and sounds like concentrated female repellant," you'd be absolutely right.  But I'm old and married with a kid on the way so I can now say that I love this shit with no shame whatsoever.

Nerdrage!

The Race


Another race, another ridiculous problem.  This time, as I was zipping up the top half of my suit in transition getting ready to head down to the swim start, the stupid zipper popped open and jammed exactly like it did during the swim at Trinona a couple weeks ago.   I stood there and wrestled with it for a solid 15 minutes, but I couldn't get it put back together and the start time was rapidly approaching, so eventually I just gave up and resigned myself to doing another race looking like an absolute goofball.  Not a super great start to the day.


Since I wasted so much time with my suit, I didn't really get any sort of warmup.  I've never been a big believer in the power of the warmup anyway so I wasn't too concerned.  I lined up right next to Alex with the intention of trying to stay on his feet the whole way.  I stayed with him for maybe 1/3 of the swim, but then I lost him and was stuck swimming alone again.  Right after the first turn I got in with 5 or 6 others and we swam as a pack the rest of the way.  All in all a reasonably decent swim by my standards, but I'm starting to see a pattern where I swim like a champ for 300-400m then fall off the pace.  I'll have to add more race pace swim workouts so I can get more comfortable at that effort and hopefully hold it together a little longer.  If I could have stayed on Alex's feet I'd have gained ~30 seconds, which is a serious chunk of time in a race like this.

T1 was pretty meh.  I fumbled with my helmet strap for a few seconds and almost ran some girl over at the mount line, but didn't have any major F-ups.

One of the coolest things about Waconia is the banana yellow trike with the giant American flag on the back that serves as a lead vehicle on the bike course.  You can spot that thing from a couple miles away, so you always know exactly where you are relative to the race leader.  Once we got out of town and onto the open road I was pleasantly surprised to see the trike not more than 30 seconds or so up the road with only 5 bikes in front of me.  That meant that with a decent ride I could get to the front of the race by T2, and if I'm on the front at T2 I'm in pretty good shape for a podium spot.

Of course seeing the lead vehicle off in the distance and actually bridging the gap up there are two different things entirely.  I caught the first two guys within 3-4 miles and found myself in 4th behind Dan, Alex and Kevin.  At around mile 6 I caught Kevin and was sitting in 3rd about 20 seconds back from Dan, with Alex maybe 3-4 seconds up on him.  At around mile 10 we turned into the wind and it felt like someone filled my tires with cement.  Luckily I was still closing on the guys in front, so they must've been struggling with the wind a bit too.

I finally caught Dan around mile 16 or so.  There were a few rounds of back and forth passing as we bridged the gap up to Alex, and I came around and assumed the race lead at about mile 18.  I got to revel in the excitement of leading the race for all of about 15 seconds before Alex re-passed me, but hey, for that brief moment in time, I was winning.  Some days you've gotta celebrate the small victories.

Maybe 1/2 mile out from T2 Patrick came blasting by seemingly out of nowhere and Dan, not willing to give up an inch to Patrick, bombed down the hill into the park with him.  All 4 of us hit T2 together.  Patrick and Dan leading the way, then me, then Alex, all spaced less than a second apart.

I got through T2 without incident and hit the run course a couple strides behind Dan and Patrick.  I couldn't hear Alex's footsteps behind me, but I knew he should be close.  I drilled it out of T2 and managed to stick with Dan and Patrick for the first half mile or so.  I was fully aware that given their NCAA D-I run pedigrees I wasn't beating either of them to the line, but I can't be that close to those guys that late in the race and not even try.  This also had the nice side effect of putting a decent gap on Alex behind me, with the obvious not-so-nice side effect of me feeling like a cramping, puking pile of dog crap only 1/2 mile into the run.

Once the track stars had broken me off and started disappearing toward the horizon I settled into a more appropriate pace.  The run course at Waconia features near constant rolling hills.  Nothing super steep, thankfully, but just enough so that you never really feel like you can get into any sort of rhythm.  At the turnaround I saw that I had a solid 30 seconds on Alex, so I was still in pretty good shape to grab the final BOUS slot, but I really felt like I was on the verge of falling apart.  I must've looked back a dozen times on the return portion of the run, but thankfully nobody was ever there so I was able to cross the line in 3rd.

There's no prize money on offer at Waconia, but they have the next best thing... beer mugs!  Crashing out on the couch with a frosty cold one the afternoon after a race is one of life's greatest pleasures.  And it's even better when you can drink it right out of your trophy.

I don't always drink beer.  But when I do, I prefer whatever cheap swill is on sale.

So in review... pretty much par for the course:  swim was OK, not real good, but not embarrassingly bad, bike was decent, run was poorly paced (although that was a conscious decision on my part) but otherwise serviceable.  The end result... the ticket to BOUS is punched and my cupboard has one more beer mug in it.  I'll take it!

Lake Waconia Triathlon Results

Trinona

The second weekend in June is a tough one for Minnesota-based triathletes.  There are too many races to choose from.  Liberty, Manitou and Trinona on the same weekend?!?  Three competitive, professionally-run triathlons, from sprint to half-iron distance, all within a couple hours driving from each other, all at essentially the same time?  There might not be a single other location on earth where that happens.  The weather may suck balls here for 8 months of the year, but we make up for it by going hard during the other 4.

For the second season in a row I chose to race Trinona.  Its tough to believe that this race is only on it's third year. Race director Dave Schutz has ambitions to make Trinona one of the premiere events in the area, and he's doing a bang up job so far.  One of the places where this really shows is in the strength of the field.  This year there were three pros on hand: David Thompson, Patrick Davis and Nathan White.  On the amateur side we had me, Alex Hooke and Sam Janicki.  Looking at that list I'm thinking 4th would be my best case scenario, but really my primary goal was to beat my time from last year's race.  You can't control who else shows up, and given the choice I rather race my balls off against the best and lose than cruise to an easy win by default.

The Pre-Race Jams


Winona is just over the threshold of what I consider a reasonable morning-of drive, so I made the trip the day before.  Therefore the drive down was mostly spent listening to a Twins game.  I like my metal and all, but 3 straight hours of it on a sunny Saturday afternoon is a bit much even for me.

When you wake up before the sun on a race day however, you've gotta be prepared to go hard.  And you cant go much harder than 300 Percent Density by Candiria, so that's what I popped in for the short drive from the hotel to the race site.  This is some next level shit.  If you're into heavy music at all, even a teeny tiny little bit, and you haven't heard Candiria, you need to rectify that situation immediately.

Level up!

The Race


I swam the entire race solo last year, so this year I was really determined to fight for a good position at the start, go out super hard and get on some fast feet.  I nailed the first two items on that list with a pretty epic fail on the third.  About a hundred yards in I found myself on the left side of Janicki with a few more guys right in front of us.  As it turns out he only breathes to the right and tends to veer left.  I only breathe left and tend to veer right, so we spent the next couple minutes swimming into each other every couple strokes.

Eventually I had the brilliant idea that dropping back behind Sam and having him tow me around the course would be a better idea than a 1.5K floating fistfight. And it was, for the 10 seconds or so I lasted back there.  Before I knew it, Sam had a good 10 yards on me and I was relegated to no man's land again.  I have no idea how I could swim directly next to him for a decent length of time yet completely fail to hold his draft.  Maybe the contact slowed him down more than me.  Or maybe I started running out of gas at the precise time I tried to slip in behind him.  The rest of the swim was a decent solo effort and I got out right around 20-flat.  Not my worst, but damn it would've been awesome to stay in that draft and pick up some free time.

It just wouldn't be a race if something weird didn't happen, and this time around it was a wardrobe malfunction.  As I was running through T1 pulling my wetsuit off, I noticed that the zipper of my one-piece trisuit had come undone.  No problem, I'll just zip that back up and get on my way.  But wait, the zipper already is up.  WTF?!?!  The zipper was jammed at the top and busted open at the bottom.  I have no idea how that's even possible, but it was jammed solid and wasn't going to move.  The net result was that I hopped on the bike with what amounted to a giant hole in the front of my suit, putting my pasty white 1-pack of a stomach out there for all to see.  I realize I'm probably doing a piss-poor job of describing this and I don't have any pictures, but suffice it to say it looked really, really, really, incredibly super dorky.  And that's on a scale calibrated to where a scrawny pale dude in a tiny little Lycra outfit is completely standard.

Wardrobe malfunctions aside, T1 went pretty well.  I got to the rack just as Alex was leaving (just like last year), and Sam was there too.  Thompson, Davis and White were long gone.  I rode the first 1/4 mile or so of the bike sitting up no-handed giving my suit-fixing effort one last try, but that went nowhere so as soon as I made the turn out of the park onto the road it was down in the aerobars and back to business.

The first part of the bike went well.  I felt like I had decent legs and manged to bridge the gap up to Sam within the first couple miles.  There's a u-turn about 6 miles in where you get a good look at the field, so I knew I was sitting in 5th with DKT, Davis, White and Hooke in front of me.

About 10 or so miles in we got to the infamous Garvin Heights climb.  About a mile long at a 9% average grade.  Last year I swapped out my usual 11-23 cassette for a 12-25 and the extra granny gear enabled me to stay in the saddle and spin up pretty comfortably.  I ended up selling an old wheelset with the 12-25 on it a couple weeks ago, so this year it was stand up and stomp in the 23 tooth or bust.  It ended up not working out too bad.  I could see White and Hooke right in front of me the whole way up the hill and I put pretty good time into them on the climb.  I ended up catching and passing White right at the top.

At this point the race between Alex and me was playing out like a replay of last year.  He had a 20-30 second gap on me at the top of the hill and I steadily closed it over the flat stretch on top and the fast descent back into town.  I ended up passing him with about a mile left, within 100 yards or so from where I caught him last year.

Alex came up along side me running through T2 as I was wrestling with my malfunctioning suit trying to get the top portion off and just like last year, we headed out onto the run course right next to each other.  Last year I went for broke in mile 1, opened up a decent gap right away and held on for dear life for the rest of the race.  I'm running much better now than I was at this point last year, so I figured if that strategy was good then it should be even better now and drilled it hard coming out of T2.

Since the run is an out-and-back you get a good look at the entire field at the turn.  DKT and Davis were way out front, but I had a 30+ second gap on Hooke and a couple minutes on Janicki and White, so a podium finish was in order providing I didn't totally implode.  Luckily I didn't and I held on for 3rd, crossing the line at 1:57:44, a 34 second improvement over my 2010 time.

Trinona 2011 marked a major milestone in my triathlon adventures -- my first ever oversize novelty check!

Money momentum!

What the above picture doesn't show is a hastily scribbled-out typo that is conveniently hidden behind the gear shifter (5-speed manual FTW!):

All man, baby!

I was unaware that they even had a female-to-male transsexual division, much less that I was in it.

This brings my total prize money haul for the 2011 season to the princely sum of $600.  Which on one hand is totally awesome because I usually do this for no prize money whatsoever.  But on the other hand, given all of the time spent training:

Actually Napoleon, it's probably less than that...

Even so... it's nice to know the post-race burrito and beer fund is being maintained by the racing itself.

Overall this was a very good race for me.  I lost a little bit more time on the swim than I would've liked and my bike split was a handful of seconds slower than last year, but I more than made up for it by knocking almost a full minute off of the run, and Trinona was definitely one of my better run efforts of the 2010 season.  Hopefully I can stay healthy and keep running well as the season wears on.

Buffalo Triathlon

It's Monday evening, I feel like I just lost a fight, and I can barely breathe.  That can only mean that the Minnesota tri season is now in full swing.  I'm apparently virulently allergic to whatever that green scuz is that grows in our lake water, because every time I do a local race with an open water swim I get completely knocked on my ass for a day or two afterward.  Good times.

Buffalo has always been one of my favorite local races.  It's one of the bigger races in the area in terms of attendance (~1,500 between the sprint and Olympic distance races), and it seems like whenever you get that many people together for an event you get a critical mass of energy that the smaller races just can't quite duplicate.  Despite the large field they still manage to run the event smoothly and keep the entry fee reasonable.  Basically, you get the "big race" vibe (tons of spectators, great organization, prize money, etc.), without the big race bullshit (high entry fees, mandatory day-before packet pickup, long lines for everything, etc.).

Buffalo always imports a big name pro to headline the elite field.  This year it was Chris Legh, winner of multiple Ironman and 70.3 races.  One of the coolest things about triathlon is that it affords regular schmucks like me the opportunity to race head to head against guys who have their own Gatorade commercial.  There aren't too many sports where that holds true.  If I were to show up at a Vikings game, throw a helmet on and run out onto the field, I imagine I'd end up getting my ass kicked and tossed in jail.

Obviously, absent a mechanical or something really weird, Chris would be well off the front.  Looking at the rest of the names on the start list I expected the remaining two podium spots to be fought out between me, Sam Janicki and Jon Balabuck.

The Pre-Race Jams

On Sunday I went with Reroute to Remain by In Flames for the drive out to Buffalo.  If you don't like In Flames, you probably shouldn't tell me, because I'd be liable to light a guitar on fire and break it on your face, and then I'd have to go to prison, and you'd have a burned up broken face.  Not cool.

In Flames We Trust.

The Race

I'm pretty sure I was the last person in the elite wave to check in.  Of course all of the racks were jammed full by that point.  There was however a sliver of space open on Chris Legh's reserved rack right next to bike in/out, and he was nice enough to let me weasel in there.  Lesson learned -- show up late, get the best spot.  Suck it, early birds.

After an abbreviated warm up jog I maneuvered into my wetsuit and made my way down to the lake.  I got about 5 minutes of easy swimming in before I had to get into the start corral.  The swim start was weird.  They announced one minute to go, and then nothing at all until they blew the horn.  Usually they would give a 10 second warning or something.  I was caught completely unprepared.  According to my wife I was looking up on shore when the horn blew.

Not surprisingly, being that I was pointed the wrong direction when the horn blew, my start sucked balls.  I took a couple solid kicks to the face in the middle of the scrum, had a few nice big gulps of Lake Buffalo, and just churned my arms and legs like a maniac for a minute or two.  By the time I finally settled down and started sighting, I found myself a good 30 yards off to the right of the buoy line all by myself.  Not solid.

Once I got myself back on course the swim was pretty uneventful.  I managed to latch onto some dude's feet and basically rode him all the way to the end.  It was really easy sitting back there, but the couple times I did try to go around, I'd redline for 20-30 seconds and only manage to get even with the guy who was pulling me, so I'd drop back and get on his feet again. I got out of the water a couple ticks under 20 minutes, which is decent for me.  I could've got out of the draft, worked my ass off and maybe come in 15-20 seconds faster, but the net result for my race likely would've been pretty lousy had I chosen to go that route.  Overall I'll give myself a D- for the first 200 meters and a B+ for the other 1300 or so.

T1 at Buffalo feels like a neverending uphill deathmarch.  That transition area is huge.  This was my maiden voyage in my new wetsuit, but it came off without incident and then it was on to the bike.  I did see Sam running out the bike exit as I was approaching my rack, which was encouraging.  He beat me by 30 seconds in a 500yd race at a masters swim meet back in January, so I was expecting to be at least a minute behind at T1.  But if I'm seeing him in T1 I know I'm only 30 seconds or so back at worst.

The race almost went completely off the rails about 30 seconds into the bike.  I was reaching down to strap into my left shoe and took my eyes off the road for a second.  I rode into a manhole cover which was slightly below flush with the pavement and was treated to the not-so-awesome sound of my water bottle skidding down the road for the second race in a row.  Being that there wasn't a cloud in the sky and I was already thirsty and hot as hell, I had no choice but to stop and pick it up.  Spotting the field 20-30 seconds at the start of the bike portion of every race is no way to go through life.  To make matters worse, there was a group of 4 guys coming up behind me that I had to sit there and wait for before I could safely get myself back out onto the road and moving.  Craptacular.

Artist's rendition of me stopped on the course picking my bottle up off the ground.

Once I finally got going again the bike went pretty well.  The course is slightly long (41K), but it's just about dead flat and there's enough space on most of the turns to take them full speed.  I reeled in a few guys on the first loop and ran into the mother of all traffic jams on the second.  The course was new this year and was a two loop affair for the Olympic distance competitors with the sprint folks doing one.  By the time the Olympic race hit the second loop, the entire sprint race was out there.  It was actually kind of fun.  Almost like weaving through backed up city traffic except it was bikes instead of buses and SUV's.

I finally caught up to Sam and Jon with about 5 miles or so to go and went around for the pass.  I could tell going by that it just wasn't Sam's day.  He looked like he was in some serious pain for the pace he was riding and didn't really contest the pass at all.  I later found out that he was hanging tough just a handful of seconds back from Legh on the first loop when his legs cramped up.  A couple salt tabs and a few more miles in the legs and the days of my old ass riding away from Sam should be just about over.    

Jon passed me once with 2-3 miles to go, but I went for the re-pass as soon as I had dropped back and we came into T2 together.  I had a blazing transition by my standards and got out about 10 seconds up on him.  My bike split was 59:10, which works out to 25.9mph.  I would have easily been 26+ had I not made that unscheduled pitstop for the bottle.  Not that they hand out prizes for bike splits or anything, but big round numbers are cool.  Still, that's an encouraging split given that I haven't felt super strong on the bike this season.  I'll give myself an F- for the first mile and a solid A- for the remaining 24.

Jon's 10K PR is several minutes faster than mine, so I had but one card to play at this point:  go kamikaze pace out of T2 and hope like hell I catch lightning in a bottle and hang on.  This worked out great for the first half of the run as I was sitting on a 30-40 second lead at the first turnaround and was predictably a disaster for the second half as he gradually reeled me back in as I faded.  He passed me for the final time with about 1.5 miles to go and that was it.  I was in survival mode by then and was damn happy to still be on the podium at all.  If I'm going to get passed by anybody in the final miles of a race, it may as well be Jon on account of the fact that he may be the nicest guy on the planet.

I didn't catch any mile splits on the run, but I'm guessing it would've been something really ridiculous like 5:15 for the first mile fading to 6:10 for the last.  That's every bit as unpleasant as it sounds.  Still, the 35:37 I clocked is the fastest I've ever covered this course by nearly a minute, so I cant complain too much.  I'll give myself an A for effort, and a B- for execution.

When I got to the finish line I was very surprised to see 1:56:xx on the clock.  I barely got my goggles on in time for the swim start, so I paid no attention to starting my watch.  I had no idea what my overall time was at any point during the race and was expecting something much closer to 2-flat at the finish.  I'll happily take a 1:56, especially given that I left a few seconds out there on the bike.

Next up is a few days of unintentional tapering (AKA business trip) followed by another Olympic distance bloodbath at Trinona.