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.