Lifetime Fitness Tri and a Bunch of Other Stuff

So it's been a couple months since my last update.  But hey, you get what you pay for... and I'm writing this for free. I've raced a buttload in the last few weeks. Here's the TL;DR writeups for a few races prior to a long-winded retelling of my day at LTF.

Trinona

My knee was pretty banged up after crashing at Apple and I missed some training because of it. Not surprisingly I felt kind of sluggish at Trinona and finished over a minute slower than last year. But I still managed 3rd, which is the best case scenario with DKT and Hedgecock on the starting line. Good enough.

Lake Waconia

This was one of those rare days where I was firing on all cylinders. I swam about as well as I'm capable of, biked to the front and hung on during the run to cross the line in first by a substantial margin, setting a huge personal best on that course on a day when pretty much nobody else did. Alas, the referees had other ideas. Oh well, they can take away my win, but they can never take away my giant freakin' banner.

North Mankato Triathlon

I wasn't originally planning on doing this race at the beginning of the season but ended up registering last minute. Having grown up in North Mankato, this race is basically a trip down memory lane. The race itself was pretty straightforward. I got out of the water in 5th or 6th, took the lead about 3 miles into the bike, got off the bike way out front and cruised it in on the run. The bike course is definitely the highlight of this race. It's an out-and-back that follows a really cool winding road along the Minnesota river before a pretty legit little climb out of the river valley. And best of all, the course is closed to traffic. I dare anyone to find me another race anywhere with closed roads where you can register day-of for less than a hundred bucks. I doubt you can, because that combination probably does not exist anywhere else.

Lifetime Fitness Triathlon

LTF has always been "the one that got away" for me. I've done this race twice previously and come up just short of my goal both times. The first time was 2009. Back then I had never broken 2 hours in an Olympic distance race, so naturally my goal was to finish in a time that started with a 1. My finish time in 2009: 2:00:01.6. FAIL. We got to wear wetsuits that year too so I couldn't even use that excuse.

In 2010 I showed up looking for a podium spot in the elite amateur wave. I kicked off the day with an inexcusably awful 23:35 swim and only managed to claw my way back up to 4th by the time I crossed the line. I also didn't break 2 hours again. Double FAIL.

This year was going to be different. I was coming off of strong races at Waconia and North Mankato and had been killing it in training in the weeks leading up to the race. This was the year I was going to finally stand on the LTF podium.

The Pre-Race Jams

The Safety Fire is the best band you've never heard of. You should all buy their debut album Grind the Ocean. The guitar playing on this record is SICK.  And that's in all caps for a reason. One of the hardest things to pull off in music is to write stuff that's technically interesting but doesn't come off as pretentious wankery. These guys absolutely nail it.

So go buy their record. I don't want my kid to grow up in a world where Justin Bieber is a millionaire while these guys tour in a crappy old conversion van and work shitty day jobs. Do it for the children.

The Race

I don't know what my deal is, but I've been having really lackluster starts this year. LTF was no different as I was blown off the back of the lead pack inside of about 5 seconds. Some douchelord also took a really flagrant grab at my ankle and almost took my timing chip off. Luckily I had the foresight to safety pin it before the race so it stayed on, but I could feel the loose strap flapping around back there which was really annoying.  Oh well... head down and keep going.

The whole way out to the first turn I was bumping into Sean Cooley. He had the inside line at the turn and got a body length on me around the buoy. I tried to slot in behind him for the draft but I couldn't hang and he gradually pulled away. I went solo the rest of the way and just tried to keep a good turnover rate going. I ended up getting out of the water about 20 seconds behind Dan Hedgecock and about 20 seconds in front of Patrick Parish. My official swim split was 22:12, which is about a C- swim for me. That works out to 1:21/100yd if my gorilla math is to be trusted.  I warm up faster than that in the pool, so I have no excuse for crapping out these kind of times at races. Bleh...

T1 was slow since I had to fix the loose strap on my chip, but I managed to stay ahead of Patrick and get rolling on the bike without tripping over anything. Once I got strapped in and up to speed I could see Dan and about a half dozen other guys a good way up the road ahead of me. I rode pretty much as hard as I could for the first couple miles trying to catch up. I finally caught the group going through the roundabout in Minnehaha Park. Just as I was starting to work my way through the crowd I saw Sean peel off to the right and go the wrong way out of the roundabout. Bummer dude, I've been there.

Once I got through the pack I put the hammer down again to pass Dan, only to be re-passed about a minute later on River Rd. Dan and I would ride the rest of the race like that. As soon as one of us started slacking the other would blast on by. Between the constant back and forth between me and Dan and the twists and turns of the course that was without a doubt the most fun I've had on the bike during a race.

We caught a handful of guys on the St. Paul side of the river and finally got to the front of the race when we passed Jake Rhyner on the bridge back over into Minneapolis. The race almost came completely unglued for me at about mile 18 or so as we headed toward Lake Harriet on the parkway. Dan and I had been getting a fair amount of attention from a referee moto for a few miles, which is understandable as we'd been riding within a handful of bike lengths of each other the whole race. But we both know the drill and were riding clean (completing our passes in a timely manner, dropping back when passed, staying to the right, etc.), so I wasn't too worried about the ref being there. What I didn't account for were my greasy ass hands being unable to hold on to a water bottle. I squeezed the bottle to take a drink and the thing squirted out of my hand, right over my shoulder and damn near hit the motorcycle that was about 10 feet behind me. I didn't even see where it ended up so I chose to keep going rather than stop, turn around and look for it. I thought there was zero chance that went unseen and was 100% sure I had just torpedoed my podium chances by earning myself an extra 2 minutes.

Over the next couple miles I let Dan open up a ~200m gap on me as I replayed the bottle incident in my head and scolded myself for being such a klutz. Eventually I got my head back into the game and started hammering again. I figured we were far enough off the front at this point that even with a bonus 2:00 I could still hold onto a podium spot if I ran well. I caught back up to Dan on the back side of Lake Harriet and we did the pass/re-pass thing a few more times before finally arriving back at transition.

In T2 I did something completely out of character -- put up the #1 time. I've never done that at a "big" race. I look forward to someday regaling my grandkids with tales of that fateful day in 2012 when I bitchslapped the entire field in T2.

Dan must have made himself breakfast or something in T2, because I managed to stay in front of him for about the first half mile or so before he came around and started to fade off into the distance. At the first out and back on Cedar I saw that I had a little over a minute on Patrick and another 30 seconds or so on Jake. This was more or less the exact same gap I had on Patrick at that point of the run at Best of the US, where I managed to hold him off by 12 seconds, so this one was likely going to go right down to the wire as well.

At the 2nd out and back Dan was a solid minute up the road, while Patrick had closed to just under a minute. I never saw Jake on the 2nd lap, which was encouraging since I was still assuming I needed to cross the line 2 minutes in front of him to secure 3rd. Coming down the homestretch I knew Patrick was closing fast since I could hear people cheering for him behind me. Luckily for me the finish line came at 10 kilometers instead of 11 and I was able to hold him off, hitting the finish line in 1:57:46, which is an enormous PR for me on this course. My previous best was a wetsuit-aided 2-flat back in 2009.

Patrick crossed the line about 20 seconds back and I began the waiting game of looking at the clock to see if I had to worry about being knocked off the podium if I ended up taking a penalty for the bottle drop. I breathed a giant sigh of relief as Jake was the next guy across the line in 2:00:35, which meant I would end up no worse than 3rd.

At the end of the day all of my fretting about a possible penalty was for naught as my 1:57:46 and 2nd place stood on the final results. Apparently the ref was busy birdwatching or something. Maybe it was karmic payback for Waconia. Whatever... I'll take it. All in all a pretty solid day for me.