Bringing home the hardware.....well totem.
Now I don't have much belief in my sprint abilities, lets be honest I'm a go long type of guy so I wasn't exepcting much at today's 2008 Escape From The Rock sprint triathlon (Mercer Island, WA). Really I just wanted to start to get me in a racing frame of mind heading into Kona in 5 weeks (gulp....5 weeks).
The day was supposed to be sunny with temps in the mid to upper 70's, perfect conditions. Morning broke cool, cloudy and breezy. The transitions and starting waves are pretty casual affairs. Get there and find yourself a spot on any rack you choose. I was awake early so I just headed over to the race site and get set up and found myself on the first rack by the T1 bike exit.
Due to the schedule I didn't do any pre-swim as they were doing athlete instructions and wanted everyone out of the water 15 minutes before the start and I didn't want to get chilled and lets face it 10 minutes of swimming wasn't going to really get me warmed up. The start is a self seed in waves and I went off in the first wave not that I'm the fastest swimmer (although I think I was actually pretty fast) I didn't want to be spending the day negotiating my way around slower riders.
So with the deep water start for the 1/2 mile swim heading directly into the wind and chop it was a bumpy start. I quickly tried to find my rhythm and found some feet to follow unfortunately they weren't the straightest of swimmers so I was a few yards wide at the first turn (triangle course). After the first turn I settled in my rhythm and was swimming with a group of about 5 or 6. The second turn was perfect I swam right under the buoy around the anchor line, I sighted the beach and kicked it in pulling away from my small group. Out of the water there was a long 300 yard run to the transition and I picked off a few more in the transition run.
My transition was perfect. Off with the suit, number belt on, glasses on, helmet on and off for a 100 yard run to the bike mount line. I had a great running mount to the bike and even managed to slide one foot right into my shoe.
The bike course immediately climbed and had several sharp technical turns as we exited the park and residental area and headed for the I-90 express lanes (yes we had them all to ourselves). I hit the on-ramp and hit the gas trying to get my bike up to speed as quickly as possible. Looked down and saw 32 mph, mission accomplished. Now I tend to be a guy who needs a little warm-up time. In an IM that might be 45 minutes to an hour, no such luck here it was hammer the entire way. There are several tunnels on the ride and I have to say everyone in front of me knew I was coming with the big thumping coming from my disc wheel echoing in the tunnels. I started to make up ground pretty quickly and was about 3 minutes back of the leader at the first turn and I estimate I was sitting in about 20th place at the start of the bike. As we came across the floating bridge I could see a small group of 6 ahead of me on the western highrise (part of the bridge that connects the floating part with land) and I powered up the highrise at 22 mph and into another tunnel. I could now see the leaders they were holding their lead but just as hit the second turnaround I had moved into 6th place. Back through the tunnel and onto the bridge deck this time into the gusting wind. The disc was getting blown around and couldn't wait to get off the bridge. About mid span I moved into 4th. I finished off the ride with a perfect running dismount.
T2 was good as well racked the bike, off with the helmet, slipped the shoes on and I was off and running. Almost immediately I was passed by another athlete who had been right behind me coming off the bike. The run immediately climbed uphill for the first 1/4 mile and I tried to find my "fast" running legs. Here's the thing again I do Ironman races not sprints so my "fast" legs are all relative. Despite this I was moving along pretty good opening the first mile with a 6:10. I passed one other runner who was actually part of a relay team so I was still holding 4th place overall. I started to loosen up at about 1.5 miles and then really strided out to the finish but held my position of 4th overall finishing in 58:21. Not sure what my splits were but it doesn't really matter.
Overall I was really happy with the 4th place finish and 2nd in my Age Group especially given that there were close to 700 in the race. Interestingly the top 4 guys were all between 39 - 43 years old a little strange given the number of younger athletes in the race I would have expected some young fast guns but the old guys prevailed. The body feels good after the race and I'm looking forward to racing longer next weekend at the Grand Columbian Half Iron.
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