Swim: 33:58 [1:36.5 /100 yd]
Start was rough, didn't have time to properly warm up, sighting was tough due to sun & fog. Put myself mid/right about 3 rows back... in hindsight, maybe that was unnecessarily aggressive considering that I was not warmed up! 2 loop course, first loop was tough all the way around fighting for position. Right goggle leaked, cleared it once right at start. Second loop much better, got into a good rhythm. Was looking for Laurie D. doing a relay swim as I was sure she would swim over me... not that I would have recognized her among the 500 other swimmers trying to drown me. Run to T1 was up a STEEP hill to transition... timed hill climb challenge... interesting, but decided not to race
up that hill, kinda pointless for the my overall race I figured. Props to Jess D. who gets fastest BTT'er up the hill (and yes, she also beat me like a piƱata in the swim for her relay!)
Bike 2:34:37 (my Garmin had distance of 54.56 mi. giving an avg. of 21.2mph)
Felt good starting out the bike, noticed right away that my HR strap was not transmitting and after fiddling with it a bit, just decided to use RPE. Not that I had another choice... but I didn't want to waste time trying to maybe reset the computer or stop and mess with it! So I figured if I have a good race, great... even better since I've never raced by RPE. If I don't, and completely blow up... then I have an excuse! I very quickly caught up (or he caught me, I forget) with Will Bruce who I know had a very similar time at Timberman and we are generally pretty similar pace. That was good news so I thought if I pretty much stick with him I won't over pace... maybe... still wanted to beat him though (duh!)... was gonna save that for the end.
on the run.
Legs felt pretty heavy right off the bike and running out of T2... thought I maybe pushed it bit too hard on the bike, I don't remember my legs feeling like that after Tman. That went away almost immediately though after about 2 minutes or less... the first .5 to 1 mile was a decent downhill so pace was very fast but I kept it under control. Was basically shooting for 7:30's for first 5k. My knee felt fine for first 20 minutes and then that low grade pain started just like during training... since this was a race, I figured things are supposed to hurt so F*&% it!
Will's official time reflects that he was 3 minutes behind me but in reality he beat me by 1:36 and I'll give it to him... so now we are sort of even, since I beat him by 6 seconds at Timberman! At some point early on when he was a little ahead of me I saw the bike marshals ride up along and stay next to him for a while. From what I could see he didn’t appear do be drafting but things got a bit bunched up at the base of a hill and apparently they gave him a drafting penalty. Totally undeserved in my opinion!
The race turned out to be incredibly fun and the post race turkey dinner was amazing, BTT closed down the beer tent, making sure to uphold our reputation, and stuck around to cheer for the last finisher, which was nice! Surprisingly, no BTT'ers podium... I'll try to make sure that doesn’t happen next year... though Esprit in Montreal is the same weekend and looks like a lot of fun.
So to sum it all up, yesterday I peed on myself twice... and got a medal and a
turkey dinner for it. I'm ready for a break now!