Sunday, April 14, 2013

XTerra West Championships



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.

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