Belgrade Lakes Triathlon - Triathlon

The consensus was that this was definitely longer than 880 yards - I can't believe that I swam 1:48/100 but still placed 3rd in my age group. All the swim times seemed long, even for the overall winners, but whatever. Still felt like a great swim - I felt strong, smooth, relaxed, and in a good rhythm the whole way. I managed to not veer off to the right as I usually do, and kept a pretty straight line to each buoy.

On the last leg, I ended up side-by-side for several minutes with a left-breathing-only guy. Only problem is that I'm a right-breathing-only guy, so we got into this weird rhythm where every time I breathed he was right there with his mouth gaping open not very far from my face and my open mouth. It was like I was looking into a mirror, and realizing just how ridiculous we look when we swim :).

The time is an estimate since the race was not chip timed and so the transition times were lumped into the swim and bike times. The really long transition time reflects the fact that it was a long run from the beach up to the transition area, and another fairly long run from the transition area to the bike mount line. I was probably in the actual transition area for less than 30 seconds. The mechanics of the transition went very well - the suit flew off, helmet went right on, and I was off. I carried my shoes to the mount line since I knew we'd be running through wet, spongy, muddy ground, which worked out well since I didn't have to run with bike shoes for that distance. Hmmm, maybe the "shoes already clipped into the pedals" people actually have the right idea?

Very challenging bike course. There were very few areas where you could just drop into a good rhythm for a while and boost your average speed, and it seemed like we were constantly going up or down (mostly up). I rated gear changes as bad since I could not get the bike to shift into the two smallest cogs on the cassette without them skipping and jumping, so I had to grind up the hills in a tougher gear than I would have liked. I ended up doing more standing to climb than I would have liked, which I could feel by the end of the bike as I started getting some cramps around my hips.

So as usual I flew out of T1 with one goal in mind - hold Jeff off for as long as possible (I wasn't worried about being passed by Mike since I knew he was in a later swim wave). The bike seemed very spread out, and I did very little passing or being passed, but everytime I started seeing someone coming up from behind I would look to see if it was Jeff. I managed to hold him off until mile 20 or so, but then was able to keep him in sight the rest of the way into T2, which was great since I knew that if he didn't have too much of a head start on the run then I would have a good chance of catching him. Turns out that he had lost his water bottle/nutrition at the bike start, so I think he was running on fumes at this point. The last 1/2 mile into T2 was a gradual downhill, which made it easy to slip out of my shoes and be ready to hop off the bike.

Smoked this transition - again there was a little run to get into the transition area, but once I was in there things went really well. The racing flats slipped right on, grabbed my hat and race belt, and I was gone.

So I managed to beat Jeff out of T2, and started out onto the run, passing a few guys in my age group right off. I then settled into a decent running rhythm, but had no good sense of how I was doing since I was pretty far ahead of the people behind me, and I could see no one ahead. Somewhere in the second mile I took a long look back to see if anyone was moving up, and was a little surprised to see Jeff a few hundred yards back, which motivated me to push the next few hills a bit harder. Somewhere around the end of mile 3 I finally saw someone up ahead on the long stretch of Rte. 27, and started reeling him in. When I got close enough, I was psyched to see that he was in my age group. Passed him shortly after, and put a pretty good gap on him before too long. By the time I was between mile 4 and 5 I could see no one behind me, and I I started cruising at a more comfortable pace. I never caught up with anyone else, except one woman who was running on the course who wasn't part of the race but who was running quite well - I was surprised how long it took me to catch her :).

Hung around and quickly saw Jeff and then Mike come in. Mike had an excellent run split, over 30 seconds faster than me. I had some food and waited for Robert to come in. He did very well for his first tri on a tough course.

Eventually the results were posted, and I was completely shocked to see that I was first in my age group (two guys in my AG were the overall winners, so they did not count them). It was kind of a fluke since I was 16th overall and normally there would be some 35-39 year olds in the top 10, but still it was fun to get called up for the 1st place award. I won't let it go to my head - I know that Jeff wasn't feeling great today and will surely beat me down at some other race this year :).

One final bit of happiness for me today - I have on several occasions been beaten at local running races by a guy named Ludo. Last September he was first overall at a local 5k, and I was second. At the Thanksgiving 5k he won our age group, I was second, and so on. He's the guy that I always end up telling my wife about, as in "I would have won except for Ludo" (in a tone of voice reminiscent of Jerry Seinfeld's "Newman"). So he now has been training for and racing triathlons, and did a few races last summer. I beat him today - smoked him by four minutes on the swim, beat him by a few minutes on the bike, and only ran 13 seconds slower than him. Ahhh, revenge is sweet, even if the person who you beat has no idea that you want to beat them that badly :).


Good race for a local race - I really wish Tri-Maine would spring for timing chips, but that's a small gripe.

So this race was a great way to break me out of my "I'm sick of training for IM and doing ridiculously long workouts" funk that I was in this week. I'm pumped now to do my last few weeks of heavy training and then have a blast at LP.