EVANGELINE OAK DUATHLON - Duathlon

Always hard for me to find the right pace, tried to stay at a comfortable/hard pace the whole way, might have even backed off a little at the end.

Nothing.

Pretty uneventful, smooth but slow getting into the shoes once I was up to speed, need to continue working that aspect.

Nothing.

Wind was out of the north, 17mph with gusts to 35, meaning it was a brutal headwind on the first part of the course. Still managed to hold 15-17 mph while passing maybe a dozen or so riders, had no one pass me. Coming back was a lot more fun, stayed over 22 the whole way, spent a lot of time in the 24-26 range.

Garmin says this was 8.9 miles, but I'm sticking with the official distance. ;) Official time is longer than Garmin, so we'll go with official.

Edit: Don't know if anyone else is geeky enough to do this, but I downloaded the results into a spreadsheet to get my combined times for the first two segments. What I find is that I was in 63rd place after the first run, and moved up to 35th after the bike and the two transitions, meaning that I passed 18 people during gthe bike/transition. Of course, I had four pass me back in the second run, to finish 39th overall.

Draft behind some big guy.

Again, uneventful solid transition.

Nothing

This was as hard as I could go, good to see it was only 14 seconds slower than the first run, thought I might have left to much on the bike. Pace on both runs was surprising as I haven't run a training mile much faster than 9 minutes in over a year.

Passed a guy in front of the church, then heard him coming behind me after we turned on to the homestretch. Thought he was in my age group, so I went into an all-out sprint and held him off (barely). Poor guy pulled something doing that, as he was limping badly the rest of the morning. Turns out he was in the age group above mine. ;)

Speed work in training?

Decided not to puke (I was tempted), then downed some gatorade and watched the rest come in.


Quality training, though this was a good race. Never thought I would break an hour on this course with the wind.


Good little race, second year, but these guys have it down. Good course for the area, wind sucked but I did request a perpetual tailwind for next year.

I was fourth in my AG, but too far behind (2-1/2 minutes) to have any podium envy. Did beat my friend for the first time.