Lake Macatawa Triathlon Race Report

6/7/08 Lake Macatawa Triathlon 1/2 mile swim, 22.8 mile bike, 4.8 mile run.

This was a memorial race for Rachel's cousin Ryan Los who tragically passed away earlier this spring. There was a wonderful turnout of family and friends there to show their support, many of us wearing white t-shirts with Ryan's #43 on them which was his number last year when he did this race. My family was there as well as Rachel's family and many of her relatives on the Los side, this made for an interesting experience on my part as I have never had that many people out cheering for me at a race, it was fun. The swim was predictably bad, my typical glacial pace was evident in my 22:06 time (rank 114/168) and I was dodging dead/disintigrating Carp along the way which was kinda gross. T1 went fine and I was quickly out on the bike and back to having fun. Unfortunately I'm still adjusting to my new Cervelo P2C and still dialing in my position to maximize my power and comfort in the aero position so my time was quite a bit slower than I had hoped. The bike leg took me 1:06:51 for an average of 20.5 mph (rank 43/168). After a quick T2 I was out on the run and ready to make up some time. As usual it took about a mile for me to get my legs under me and get up to pace but I was feeling great and ended up running negative splits for each mile of the race. The run took me 35:03 for a 7:18/M pace (rank 40/168), and I'm pretty sure that my last mile was a bit closer to 6:45/M as I was able to put out a really strong kick to catch a guy that I thought was in my age group. The whole race took me 2:04:02 which I was fairly happy with, I knew that I had spent more time in the water and on the bike than I needed to but for my first tri of the season I couldn't complain too much. I was alone in my age group so I took home a really cool set of little Dutch wooden shoes for 1st place in the 20-24 age group. My overall place was 54/168.