Cryptozoology
Did you know Lake Champlain has a legit lake monster? Yep, sure does. His name is Champ. And he has his own Wikipedia page, several fan sites and is the mascot of my new 2nd favorite minor league baseball team. My favorite minor league baseball team would naturally be the Beloit Snappers. I judge minor league baseball teams purely on the awesomeness of their mascot.
Anyway, I recently headed out to Vermont to
He's still in the Frankenstein/straight arms and legs stage, but I have faith that he'll adopt my trademark T-rex running style soon enough.
The Pre-Race Jams
How hard do they party in Sweden? This hard...
The Race
Swim
My swimming A-game is a little like the elusive Champ. Somewhere I'm sure there's a grainy photo of me exiting the water in an Olympic distance race in under 20 minutes. Some less than credible people (they get in a pool at 6:30 every morning, so they must be at least a little nuts) could tell you about sets I've done in practice that indicate I should be a sub-20-in-a-wetsuit kind of guy. But somehow on race day I tend to find a way to make that not happen.
I got excited looking at the map of the swim course before the race this year because it looked like they got rid of the first turn. In 2011 there was a 90 degree turn right about at 200m. That turn buoy was the mother of all aquatic mosh pits. I probably would have had better luck standing up and walking over the top of people like a lumberjack on a log jam than I did trying to swim through there. On the map it looked like USAT listened to the complaints and gave us a straight shot out to ~600m, which would give the pack plenty of time to thin out and make the 1st turn much less of a fistfight. I was a bit disappointed when I showed up on race day to see that they set the course exactly the same as last year, shitty 1st turn and all.
What that all means is that the best way to swim this course is to go 100% balls out to the 1st turn and hope to get through ahead of the bulk of the pack. Sure, it sucks to start a 2 hour race completely smashed, but it beats the alternative, which is getting slowed to a standstill and punched in the face repeatedly.
Given all of the above I decided to line up toward the inside for the in-water start and did my fair share of elbowing and kicking to hold my position on the front row while we were treading water waiting for the horn. Once the horn went off I put my head down, windmilled my arms and kicked like a maniac trying not to get swallowed up by the bulk of the pack. It worked fairly well as I stayed toward the front got around the dreaded buoy with no real issues and surprisingly little contact.
After rounding the turn the swim got nasty. The wind was blowing hard out of the Northwest producing 3-4 foot chop and we were swimming straight North, which is a problem for me since I breathe left which meant every breath was a roll of the dice as to whether I'd get a mouthful of air or a mouthful of lake. This was easily the toughest conditions I've ever had to race in. To make matters worse I tend to veer right even in calm water, so given an even harder push to the right from the wind and waves I promptly found myself way off course. Looking back the smart thing to do would have been to cut straight back over to the left and try to get on some feet and let some other chump fight his way through the chop for me, but I rarely do the smart thing in the water and kept trying to re-sight on the buoy line to minimize the extra distance, which resulted in me swimming that entire leg of the course completely by myself.
Eventually I found my way to the 2nd turn and managed to navigate between there and the 3rd turn without undue difficulty, although by this time I was right in the thick of the earlier waves so there was a bit of zig-zagging to get around people. Once I rounded the 3rd turn I again found myself completely alone, with everyone else 10-20m off to my left, only this time I was right on the buoy line. It seems the wind was pushing everyone else over to the left and my tendency to pull right was keeping me swimming straight. Alright! My time to shine!
I got around the last two turns fairly easily but took them very wide to avoid traffic. Again I ended up way over to the right on the final leg leading into the boat ramp, which kind of sucked because there were weeds over there that felt like barbed wire on my face, but at least this time I didn't add much extra distance. I finally ran up the ramp amidst a sea of folks from previous waves without a single cap from my wave in the immediate vicinity. I chose to do the race sans watch so I had no idea what the damage was, but at the time I figured it had to be substantial. I was actually pleasantly surprised to see 22:32 for my swim split in the results after the race. That's 30 seconds faster than my 2011 split in way, way, way worse conditions (and likely a non-trivial amount of bonus distance). Still not the elusive A-game because I easily left a minute or two out there by wandering off course and swimming alone, but I'll give myself a B-minus for the effort.
T1
I was racked toward the far end of the space allotted for the M35-39er's, so I was able to get a pretty good assessment of where I stood relative to my age group as I ran toward my bike. There were very few missing bikes and Mark Harms was pulling his bike off the rack right as I ran by, putting him only 30 seconds or so up on me. Mark is historically a much faster swimmer than me, so if we're in T1 at the same time I'm doing alright. I got stood up at the mount line for a few seconds by some people from the earlier waves, but that's pretty much to be expected with a wave start so no big deal.
Bike
About 200m into the bike course there was a fairly rough railroad crossing. I felt something brush my leg as I crossed the tracks, but didn't think anything of it as I looked down and confirmed that my bottle was still in place. I found out what had hit my leg a few seconds later after I finished strapping into my shoes and got down into the aerobars. It was one of my aerobar pads. Oh well, nothing to do but keep going, so I did the rest of the ride with my left arm sitting on the velcro about 1/2" lower than my right arm, which was still on the remaining pad.
I scooped up a few guys from my wave within the first handful of uphill miles and caught sight of Mark somewhere around mile 8-ish. I rode absolutely as hard as I could while passing him in hopes of building a gap. I fought the urge to look back all the way out the the turnaround where I saw that I had a pretty good sized gap, maybe 30-45 seconds or so. There's not much to say about the remainder of the ride. It's net downhill from the turnaround back to transition, so I rode hard-but-not-too-hard and started thinking about setting up a good run.
T2
I was happy to see that there were zero bikes on my rack when I arrived. My position was confirmed by the race announcer who said that I was the first M35-39 off the bike. The actual transition was pretty crusty. I had some trouble getting into my running shoes which cost me a few seconds, but I managed to get all the way through transition before Mark or anyone else from M35-39 got off the bike, so that was nice.
Run
This run almost killed me last year. It starts out with a very steep ~1/4mi long uphill straight out of transition. I heard people after the race saying that it's a 17% grade, but that seems a little generous. It's goes up 150 vertical feet in roughly 1/4mi, which my back of the envelope math tells me is on the order of 11%, which seems a bit more realistic. Either way, it is not a pleasant stretch of road to run up.
The correct way to tackle this course is to go relatively easy up the hill, recover a bit on top and then let 'er rip the rest of the way. Last year I did the exact opposite. I attacked the shit out of that hill and continued to run like a complete maniac for the first couple miles only to completely and predictably fall apart in the last mile of the race and put up my most disappointing run split of the 2011 season.
This year I had my head on straight and kept myself in check on the hill. It was more of a walk/shuffle near the top than a proper run. Once I got over the top I was able to open up my stride a bit and start clicking off 5:30-ish miles. I started in wave 5 and waves 1-4 were the 50+ age groups, but there are some fast old dudes out there so I had plenty of targets up the road to keep me motivated. I would also be lying if I said I didn't sneak a few looks back to make sure Mark wasn't sneaking up on me.
Taking it easy up the hill paid off and I was able to keep it together over the last few miles and finish strong. I ended up reeling in all but 2 of the early starters, both of whom went off 25 minutes ahead of me in wave 1. The final time was 1:57:52, with a 34:39 run split which was especially satisfying after not even cracking 36 minutes last year. At the end of the day that ended up being good for 10th overall.
Since I was only the 3rd guy to cross the line and the first under 2 hours the announcer made me feel like a big deal. They even put up a finishing tape, which was a new experience for nationals. In both of my previous nationals I started in one of the back waves and came across the finish line as just another anonymous face in the cast of thousands. This year I finished all alone with nobody within a minute on either side with 100% of the attention focused on me. I clowned around a bit in the final 100m delivering a few high fives to the spectators, which was fun, but getting to the line 3 seconds sooner would have bumped me up to ninth in the overall standings. Ah well... lesson learned for next year. Go hard all the way to the line and pretend you're in a finish line sprint, because you probably are.
The Aftermath
Mere moments after crossing the line I was whisked away to the doping control tent by a USADA official. That makes me 3 for 3 on being selected for drug testing at AG Nationals. This year I had the foresight to have them take me through the bag drop on the way so I could get into some dry clothes. That made the process about a million times more tolerable than it was in 2010 or 2011. I made it out in just a shade over 2 hours this year, which is a massive post-race drug test PR.
The awards ceremony was later that night at the host hotel and I had the pleasure of climbing up to the top step as the new National Champ of the M35-39 age group. The Minnesota contingent was loud as always and we made sure to class the place up with a couple styrofoam coolers full of PBR. Not a bad day for me at all.
I'll end this one with a huge shout-out to everyone who helps to make a trip like this possible. TCMC for general awesomeness. Grand Performance bike shop for keeping me geared up properly. My Aunt Val and Uncle Bob for outstanding hospitality and being extra cool about having a one year old wrecking machine unleashed on their house. And last but not least my beautiful wife Tiffany and awesome son Michael who inexplicably see nothing wrong with me flying across the country to compete for a prize purse of zero dollars. You guys are amazing!
No comments:
Post a Comment