Flew down Thursday night so that we could get out and
pre-ride the course prior to race day Saturday.
Got the pleasure of finally meeting Wendy Jenson in person. We have been Facebook and iamTri friends for
several years now, but have never ended up in the same city at the same
time. She got talked into doing the
sprint version of the race by her coach – and has not been on her mountain bike
in years. We were able to meet her on
Friday morning to do the pre-ride and give her a crash course in mountain
biking skills. She was pretty nervous at
the beginning of the ride and kept swearing at her coach for getting her into
this.
By the end of the ride she had
relaxed and gotten the hang of it and was looking forward to the race. What was apparent from our pre-ride was that
the conditions out on the course were much more difficult than previous
years. I guess they have had some heavy
rains down here and that made the trail much more rutted and exposed a lot more
loose rock. In a couple of the washes,
the rain washed down a lot of sand and gravel so these were really deep tire
sucking sand/gravel bogs—there is one wash that you ride for almost a mile—yup,
deep stuff the entire way.
This year they changed the race schedule – the sprint race
started at 8:30 and we didn’t start until 10:30. Oh goody – forecasted high 90 and we were
going to get to race right through the heat of the day.
I was doing a lot of experimenting with this race (I know,
nothing new on race day – but this was not a key race for me so a good chance
to try some of this stuff out when it doesn’t really matter). After listening to Chris Bagg’s nutrition
talk, I decided I would give his nutrition regimen a try and see how it worked
out. My during race nutrition, at least
for the shorter races is not much different than he recommended, but my day
before and morning of nutrition was a lot different. So Friday, I did what felt like eating all
the time, mainly carbs, big breakfast, little dinner. Saturday morning I did the big bowl of
applesauce.
Race morning we got up at a leisurely 7 am, fiddled around
for a bit and then took our stuff down to transition to get a good bike spot
(our hotel room was less than 100 yds. from transition—awesome!). We found Wendy and wished her luck and then
watched the start of the sprint race.
Then it was back to our room to eat some more and generally lounge around
until it was time to warm up.
Water temperature was reported at 58 - -but it really didn’t
feel that cold—I guess having the air temperature already approaching 80
helped. We jumped in about 10 min before
our start to get warmed up. Just before
race start the wind really started to blow—they actually had to take down the
inflatable arch at the swim exit or they would have lost it. The swim was pretty uneventful – I found a
pretty good pair of feet to follow most of the way to the first turn buoy. After the second buoy we were swimming into
the waves—a little choppy but not too bad—though pretty sure it slowed everyone
down a bit. Got out of the water in
25:56 - -not as fast as I usually like to be, but all the swim times seemed to
be a little slower—I guess because of the wind.
I seem to be really bad at Xterra transitions and this one
was no different-maybe one day I will figure it out. I was just about on my way out on the bike
when Don arrived—which is about normal.
I took off on the bike. The start
of the ride is about a mile on pavement up a gentle grade until you get to the
entrance to the trails. I used this to
get the legs spinning and ready for what was to come. Once you enter the trails you drop down a
short hill and then start a huge long climb—I would say it’s not that steep,
but everything is relative—you still end up in your littlest gear for most of
it—but you knew you could keep going as opposed to most of the rest of the
hills where you are in your smallest gear and praying that you don’t spin out,
hit a rock or have your legs give out before the top (all of which happen). The course is 2 loops with the first half of
each loop being a series of really hard climbs and a couple of tricky descents
with the mile of super sandy wash thrown in as the only flat section. The second half of the loop is a little easier
with less difficult hills and a really fun section of twisty single track along
the edge of the lake. So I get about 30
min into the first loop and look down to take my first gel and find out that
somewhere during all the bumpy sections 3 of my 4 gels have been
jettisoned. Well, adapt and
overcome. I took the only gel that was
remaining. When I got to the feed
station I grabbed a bottle of Gatorade rather than straight water as I was
planning—figured that would make up for 1 of the lost gels.
Have I mentioned the wind yet?? When the wind kicked up, I was thinking, no
big deal – you are going slowly enough on a mountain bike that the breeze
should help with the heat but not affect your bike too much. Well, I was wrong. It was blowing so hard that it could pick you
up and put you back down—not on the trail—not good given the extremely loose
conditions. You had to be super careful
descending to be able to hold your line.
Even climbing the steep hills it was tough—when you front wheel was a
bit unloaded it would grab it and try to push you off the trail. About half way into the second loop I can
over the top of a rise and saw some course marshals stopping some of the
riders—I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
I caught up to them and was also stopped. There was lady that crashed hard on the first
loop---she had broken her femur. Where
we were they couldn’t get the ambulance in so they were trying to get a
helicopter in to evacuate her. While the
helicopter was trying to land they stopped all the bikes. The helicopter gave it 2 trys to come in and
land—but couldn’t—the wind was blowing too hard. Eventually they got her immobilized and
loaded her into the back of a 4WD pickup to get her to a location the ambulance
could get to. All told I was held up for
about 11 minutes. The course marshal
indicated that they would try to correct our finish times—they wrote the time
on our race numbers—but as I see the results posted, no correction has been
made. I used the opportunity of the stop
to fish into my camelback and grab the emergency gel I had stashed there - -so
now I had made up for 2 of the 3 lost gels.
Remainder of the ride was uneventful.
The ride back down the paved road is usually a nice rest/spin to prep
for the run – but today it was not—straight into the wind. Total Bike time: 2:12:59
I did a better job at transition 2, taking a few extra
seconds to take in some calories to make up for the lost gel. Off onto the run—the legs complained but
after about a mile they started to loosen up a bit. So the first mile and a half the run is up –
first in a wash and then the top half on a dirt road—this leads you to the
trail system and we run part of the same course that we biked—including some of
those hills that you couldn’t ride your bike up because they are so steep. As I entered the trails I noticed that the
woman ahead of me was in my AG—I knew that she had been stopped for the
helicopter as I had—but she was stopped before me—so if they were correcting
the times, just passing here wouldn’t be enough, I needed to gap her by close
to a minute. I slowly started to catch
her. She was great at keeping
running—but I actually finally passed her on a really steep hill—she was
running—and I was power hiking. I guess
I can hike pretty fast. Now I wanted to
push to get the gap. There is one hill
of particular note on the course—at close to mile 4—basically it is a really
steep scree slope—the of course we go straight up—it was even difficult to walk
up it—my calves were screaming by the time I got to the top. The good news, this is the highest elevation
for the whole run course so once you get there its mostly downhill—though not
necessarily easy downhills, and of course a couple short nasty ups thrown in. I made myself push as hard as I could to get
that gap on the lady behind me—and it paid off—I crossed the finish line about
a minute and a half ahead of her. Total
Run time 1:04:27
I was really happy with my race. If I take the 11 minutes off for the
helicopter stop I was about 4 minutes faster than last year - -But that doesn’t
really show actually how big of an improvement it really was due to the
conditions. The pro’s were about 12
minutes slower than last year. The lady
that I passed, I have raced several times before and she has always been 15-20
minutes ahead of me. With the time
correction I was about a minute out of 3rd place (she made it
through before the helicopter stop)—this race was a stacked field in my AG –
the first 3 women were 1,2,3 at the World Championships last year.
I also set a first for me – usually if I compare where I
place in each sport – my swim is the strongest followed very closely by my bike
and then my run is way in the distance.
In this race I was the 113th fastest swimmer, the 177th
(uncorrected) fastest biker and the 112th fastest runner. I have never been a stronger runner than the
other sports—I guess I should be looking for races with a brutally hard
run. I also had the 2nd
fastest run split in my AG
So, I guess my training is on track. The training with my new bike coach, Kirk
Whiteman and strength training with Scott Brown at Adapt seems to be definitely
paying off, on both the bike and the run.
