6/14/08 Flag City Olympic Triathlon 1500m swim, 22 mile bike, 10k run.
Well this was my first Olympic distance triathlon. I went with the Ann Arbor Tri Club travel team (of which I am a member) that is working to win us the USA Triathlon (USAT) Mideast Region Championship Race Series (MERCRS) for clubs which are endorsed by USAT. Going into the race I was most worried about the swim, particularly given my abysmal time at Lake Macatawa the previous week. The setup of this race was a little unique in that the transition areas were in two different locations, about a mile apart, unfortunately this proved disastrous for my training partner and teammate Julie Parrish. While carrying her wetsuit on her bike over to T1 where the swim start would be held, her wetsuit got sucked into her front wheel and fork flipping her onto her head and shoulder instantly. She had a fairly major concussion, a dislocated shoulder resulting in a torn rotator cuff, and a variety of other bumps, bruises, and road rash. Anyway, back to the race. I went out with the first wave for the 1500m swim, it was two rectangular laps. After the first lap I checked my watch and was surprised to see that I had completed it in 16:00 minutes, this boosted my confidence and kept me motivated through the second half. During the second lap I found someone that I could draft behind which kept my pace from degrading too far and got me out of the water in a total time of 32:43. The swim clearly went much better than I was expecting but it also left me feeling much more tired than I typically am coming out of the water. T1 was pretty quick and soon I was out on the bike course. Jon Sherman the owner of my bike shop, Cadence Cycle, was doing the race and was a vendor as well and he happened to have an extra disk wheel in his trailer that he wanted to lend to someone so before the race we had put that onto my bike for me to demo, so I was pretty excited about that. The course was fairly flat, mostly closed to traffic, and otherwise fairly unremarkable...except for the railroad tracks which caused my water bottle to eject early on in the race. This proved to be bad for me. No Gatorade, no water, bright sun, steadily climbing temperatures and me on a bike is not a recipe for success. The bike went okay, but it could have been better, I finished in 1:11:19 for an average speed of 18.5 mph. Not what I was hoping for with a flat course, especially when I was testing a disk wheel that should have saved me a few seconds. Anyway, the lack of Gatorade on the bike didn't bother me too much while I was actually biking, where it came back to bite me was on the run. By time I was off the bike I was really really thirsty so I drained Julie's aerodrink bottle of whatever it was she had in there as I was putting my shoes on and then I headed out for the run. It was two laps of a 5k course. I grabbed some water at each aid station to try to get rehydrated. But it was too little, too late, and I paid for it with an added minute on my run pace and with a nagging injury to my right Achilles. The 10k run took me 52:17 for an 8:26/M pace. My overall time was 2:36:19 and I placed 40/59 overall. Not a good race for me. I'm still paying for the dehydration with an irritated and sore right achilles tendon which I will likely have to baby until the NYC Triathlon and Steelhead.
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