Motor City tri (Page 2)

FYI...just did a brick there today...the trail is a huge obstacle course of fallen trees and branches and the pavement back there is quite uneven and broken up, so watch your footing. There was a bit of glass in the bike lanes, but the main car lanes were pretty good. The pavement for riding was awesome!

Didn't check the water...anyone know the temp?

decided to do motor city, see everyone there.

Good decision man. I'll see you there. I'm pretty excited about this race and I hope all goes well for tomorrow.

Best of luck if I don;t see you there.

Lead The Way!

I'lll be wearing number 584 placcard and Sarah will be number 350 tomorrow. Weather looks perfect. Hopefully a fine day. See you all there.

hope to meet some bt peeps tomorrow! i'll be there early with my 2 pups, red hair, and green shirt. if i don't see you, say hi!

Fun time yesterday, would have been better had I taken a better mental note of my spot in T2, not turned into T1 too early and had Kenny transfered my entry properly. I had to re-sign up day of and I have no results but my watch gave me a 1:17:xx after adding some distance for myself.

I emailed them my chip # and info, hopefully they can actually get me a result. At least I got a jersey still.

I had good day, with the results I was hoping for but also left early only find an AG award. THe only person I saw was Dave, who noted that I look pretty good for a 57 year old (that I'm 37 is something of a problem). I stayed comfortable on the bike, and didn't give chase so that my run would be solid. Given the 15 hour training week, I'm super happy about my times.

My report is up...

Great job!  What, did your age blur on your leg, was that Ranger's faux pas ??

Hopefully I wasn't too harsh BUT one of my many faults is I'm uber organized and meticulous -- they don't call me Monk for nothing (if you're a fan at all of the USA Network's series)

Anyhoo, I'm not a race organizer, nor do I play one on TV so don't know what goes into putting one of these gigs on, and can only compare to one other organizer, Elite Endeavors, who in my brief four encounters IMHO does a fantastic job, from course maps, to volunteers, to race results to post race yummies.

Maybe it was just a bad day, as someone noted that they did Interlochen and thought it ran quite smoothly so I'll try not to judge on just one event.

Edited by travljini 2008-06-16 9:03 AM

Sunscreen makes numbers look funny I guess! I don't know what goes into organizing an event either, but I still love a bottle of water and people to be nice to me.

That was a great race but I freakin' flatted on lap four of the bike and was out. Man, that hurts....

Now I'm really pissed for Maumee Bay....

Sorry Kim you ran by so fast had a hard time reading the numbers on the back of your legs, they where moving so fast.as I was also on my last breath. Great to see everyone yesterday.
Can not find my results, they are not on the d3 website. Sent an email,????

Weather was awesome and the race was great. They lost my chip time and it took my an hour to get my results but in the end it worked out. A little irritated with the poor explanation of the T2 entrance. They should have flagged the area after my first lap I followed a group of bikers into the T2 area because this is where the crowd was moving. I lost about 90 seconds. But all in all it was a fun race and i learned a lesson. 

That absolutely killed me. Especially when I saw the overall results this moring and kind of played that awful game where you guess where you think you would have been.

Ouch. When I climbed off my average speed on the bike was well over 25 M.P.H. Now I'm just pissed. I can't wait until next weekend.

I was doing 19.5 to 21MPH in to the wind 25 to 26.5 MPH with the wind on the other side of the island. Rather than dealing with mechanicals I had severe brain fade and popped into the return road for T2 too early. I probably added a quarter to a half mile to my ride and I know the people ho I had blown past earlier were wondering why I was back again.

Here's a cut n' paste of a race report I put up on another triathlon forum. Note that Ken from 3D already has addressed the porta-john issue for next year:

Detroit's historic Belle Isle Park played host to the 3 Disciplines Motor City Triathlon on Sunday, June 15. With a total of 733 registered athletes in all events this is one of the largest single day events in Michigan.

Motor City included a sprint and Olympic distance triathlon as the the two main events. The swim was southweat of the Detroit Yacht Club facility on a public beach while the excellent bike course did either 2 (sprint) or 4 (Olympic) laps of the island. The run incorporated historic landmarks through the center of the island in an out-and-back keyhole format, one lap for the sprint athletes, two for the Olympic athletes. A new finish venue at the casino added additional distance to run making the Olympic run approximately 6.6 miles instead of the traditional 6.2.

Conditions were absolute perfection on a beautiful Father's Day that saw many athletes complete their first triathlon. Belle Isle and Motor City are a perfect venue for first time triathletes since the swim uses a lot of safe, protected, shallow water. What current there may have been in the river (not much) ran with swimmers due to good swim course design and the fast swim splits confirmed that. This is a gem of a swim especially for new athletes.

The bike course is a feast, producing the absolute fastest possible bike splits with average speeds north of 24 m.p.h. for fast age groupers common. Nearly no wind, especially for early waves, only made the course faster. The roads were in very good condition with the re-introduction of the Grand Prix car race to Belle Isle. Ken Krell and his team from 3 Disciplines also deserve props for getting the city to sweep the course the night before the event with street sweepers, reducing debris on the course to a minimum for an urban venue. There will always be debris on a bike course for an urban race in Detroit, but as we were driving onto the island at about 5:40 A.M. street sweepers could be seen driving off the island having just swept the roads for the bike.

Pehaps the highlight of the day was the repeat overall victory of age group national champion Richard Swor of Dearborn, Michigan. Swor's splits reflected the good condition but more reflected his excellent form with a 23:43 swim, a blistering bike at an average of 26.2 M.P.H. and then a 5:45 pace on the run to seal the deal in 1:57:28.

The talented Marie Repec was the women's winner in 2:21:07. She used a strong run and epic bike split at over 24 M.P.H. average to win the women's race in commanding style.

Jeremy Hansen won the sprint triathlon in 1:05:36 with wmen's winner Lindsay Rodin in 1:12;39 ahead of Sarah Demerly at 1:14:09. Both Rodin and Demerly tripped and fell during the run on broken pavement at the top end of the course which featured a short trail section.

Overall the Motor City Triathlon was a good event. The race has grown by over 200 participants since last year alone, a challenging rate of growth for any event owing to the excellent venue, good spot on the calender and location close to large population centers. Additionally, 3 Disciplines (and participants) face the challenge of using two transition areas, requiring double the number of bike racks alone and transportation of athlete's swim gear, in bags, back to the second T2 transition. This was handled very well by race officials and volunteers.

With all these things going for Motor City it is easy to overlook a few minor glitches that can crop up in any large and rapidly growing urban race- and can be easily fixed next year. There are published standards for the ratio of athletes to porta-johns but whatever they are I think this race fell well short of that ratio. They need many more porta johns in convenient locations next year. There was simply no place to go to the bathroom. That's a serious problem, but one easily rectified next year. Distribution of timiing chips was done at the swim start after athletes picked up their packets and that created a second (long) line for athletes to wait in at T1 causing some to miss their swim warm up. The race did start bang on time though, also important in an urban setting and multi-use park- so props for that. Parking for competitiors was excellent- this is a great tail gate event. There is also a ratio of volunteers to athletes and this race needed some more trained corner marshalls. Fast athletes from the first swim wave went on to a bike course that was very well coned but drivers parked on the interior of island had no direction as they pulled out onto the bike course. As a result, I had a couple close calls during the first lap of the bike, then a bunch of close calls as the course became rather crowded with athletes finishing their swim and joining the fray on the bike course. The entry fee for this event is a bargain $65 and we wondered out loud if a venue of this quality may be better off charging $100 and $120 for late registration and closing the field at 500 athletes overall. Add some marshalls, additional volunteers and porta-johns and you would have one of the nation's very finest urban triathlons.

I assisted with producing an event on Belle Isle back in the 1980's as part of the Bud Light USTS Series so I have some first hand knowledge of what goes into hosting a triathlon on Belle Isle. With a city administration literally in the midst of a bloodless coup (Detroit's Mayor faces an ouster over a scandal) supporting an athletic event is low on the city's priority list but Ken Krell and 3 Disciplines did a darn nice job.