Best of the US!

Well once again I'm 3 races behind in the ol' race report queue...

The good news is that everything has been going pretty well, there just aren't nearly enough hours in the day to write these things in a timely manner.

A couple weeks ago I raced the Best of the US Championship for the 4th time.  Long story short, I won!

Trudy is super pumped.

The Pre-Race Jams

  

Australians are weird.  But in a totally good way that makes me want to party with them.  Exhibit A -- this live performance by Parkway Drive.  This has it all.  And by all I mean a guy on stage in a turtle suit.

The Race

One thing that makes the Best of the US race really cool is that race director Trudy Marshall tries to go the extra mile to make it special for the athletes.  To that end, instead of having packet pickup in some stupid hotel ballroom it was at the Flat Earth Brewery, which was serving up their tasty beverages for FREE.  Of course, since this was a meet and greet for tri-dorks the free beer went largely undrunk, but I made a point to have a few.  Y'all motherfuckers need to learn how to carb load.

Kevin O'Connor also had a surprise for me in the form of some hilarious T-shirts, one of which is being modeled by Mikey in the photo below...

The shirt reads, "Sometimes you have to endure the Payne," with the subtitle, "I'm rooting for Minnesota's Matthew Payne."  This is awesome, because who doesn't want t-shirts with their name on them, am I right?  It was also very motivational because I'd feel like the worlds biggest tool if I raced poorly while several dozen people were on hand wearing those shirts.

The race actually started out in the dumpster.  I had a horrible jump off the line and was immediately boxed in with other racers on all sides.  This led to something akin to a low-grade panic attack, where I was hyperventilating and actually had to stop swimming for a few seconds to collect myself.  At the end of all that I was last man in a large pack of 10 or so.  I've heard of this happening to others, but this was the first time in 80+ lifetime starts that I've experienced it first hand.  Not something I'm looking to repeat anytime soon.

Once I recovered I got a bit of my mojo back and was able to swim up through the pack a little.  At one point I was right on the feet of Dan Stubleski, who was considered to be the co-favorite to win the race along with me. Dan is the 2013 USAT triathlete of the year and has a sub-9 Kona finish as well as several sub-4 70.3 finishes to his credit.  He is also a much faster runner than me, so if I was to have any chance of getting to the finish line first I would need to build up a significant advantage on the swim and bike, therefore drafting off him in the swim is not where I needed to be.

After making the last turn of the first lap, whoever was leading our pack did me a huge favor by breaking toward the wrong buoy.  That may be the exact point in time I ended up winning the race because the entire pack, Dan included, kept going the wrong way while I, in a completely uncharacteristic state of aquatic awareness, quickly sighted on the correct buoy and went that way.  I ended up coming out of the water roughly 30 seconds in front of the pack I was swimming with, which coincidentally happens to be roughly the margin of victory I took to the finish line.

I ended up being the 4th guy out onto the bike course, with Kevin O'Connor, Marcus Stromberg and Jens Beck out in front of me.  For all the difficulty I had at the swim start, it was immediately clear I had my best stuff with me on the bike that day.  I went by Kevin and Marcus on the 1st of 3 laps, then finally made it to the front near the halfway point of the 2nd lap.  I kept riding super hard all the way to the end knowing that I'd need every second if I wanted any hope of holding Dan off during the run.

I was a little skeptical of the 3 loop bike course when it was announced, but I have to say I ended up a huge fan.  It's really cool to go back through transition 2 additional times.  It also makes it way better for spectators, since they get to actually watch the race develop on the bike.

There's like a dozen people in this shot.  That's infinity times more spectator support than you typically get on the bike.

Ross is excited anyway.

T2 went by quickly and I set off on the 1st of 2 loops around Lake Phalen.  Since I didn't really hold anything back on the bike my legs felt like hot garbage pretty much from step 1, but I still managed to start off at a fairly optimistic pace.

This is one of the least goofy looking pictures of me running I've ever seen.

By the time I came back through transition to start the 2nd lap I was starting to struggle a bit and the pace was noticeably slowing. The cheering from the spectators was a nice little shot in the arm and really helped me keep it together.  Although that sneaky bastard Devon Palmer attempted to sabotage my race with an unauthorized donut handup.

Rule 3.4(d) to be exact.

It wasn't too hard to pass up the illegal doughnut.  Anything other than water that went into my stomach at this point was destined to be insta-puked back up.

The rest of the 2nd lap was a bit of a death march, and there was much looking back on my part.  Luckily I had enough time in the bank that I was never in serious danger, but Dan ended up taking 2 minutes out of me on the run and was only 30 seconds back when it was all said and done.

Another finish line shot.  Because getting to break an actual finish line tape is awesome.

It's always easy to give a race a glowing review when you do well, but this was a really fun course to race on.  I really hope this race catches on and increases its numbers over the next several years, both for the qualification/invitation-only BOUS championship and the accompanying open-to-everyone Capitol City Sprint.  So if you've got the goods to race in the championship, consider making the trip in 2015.