Derrill was in the next wave, 3 minutes behind. I had a healthy margin of 45 seconds on him out of the water. That was immediately halved as Derrill’s T1 was 27 seconds faster. So just like that my lead was cut to just 18 seconds. Well guess who ended up with the fastest bike split of the day? Yep, Derrill; his split was 12 seconds faster than mine (25.8mph avg!). As he entered T2, I was still up by 6 seconds—which evaporated as his T2 time was 17 seconds faster. Boom, now I’m behind by 11 seconds. He put another 3 seconds in on the run and got me by 13 seconds overall! If it wasn’t for transitions, I would have beaten D-train by 30 seconds. Dang it!

In the end, an outstanding day; D & I both got 1^st in our age groups and 7&8^th overall. I highly recommend this course; a total blast for about 1 hour worth of effort. Next year I’ll be doing some transition training though!

Donner Lake Triathlon 7/26/15

We normally plan a week-long family vacation around the DLT.  This year, we convinced Lily (13) and Maggie (8) to do the kid’s tri on Saturday. Lily’s race was  a 300 meter swim, 9k bike, and 3k run. Maggie’s was 50 meter swim, 2k bike, and 1k run.

Lily didn’t want to do the run but, thankfully, Lyndsey, Jimmy’s daughter, agreed to do the run portion. Unfortunately there wasn’t an official “relay” for the kid’s race, so it was a bit dicey figuring out how to do the pass off of the race chip.

Race day was crazy; they had the Sprint (Jimmy got 2^nd!), a 1.2 mile swim, 2.4 mile swim, and then the 5 kids events.

It felt so disorganized; we had no idea where the kids would get in and get out of the water. The whole morning was stressful. Anyhow, Lily’s wave is the first to go off. She is standing toward the back, wearing her green swim cap. Gun goes off.  

“That kid is breast-stroking” I heard a guy say. My heart sunk, oh geez, it’s Lily. Well lo and behold, she found her rhythm and started going around everyone, picking her head up to site for the buoy. Suddenly, she was in 3^rd place. As the came in to the finish line, she surged past the guy in second – and popped out in 2^nd place, first girl! I sprinted with her over toward the transition and, my God, I think my heart rate was hitting 200!  I think I was even more excited than her!

She had a quick transition (we’ve been practicing because I am terrible at them) and then off on the bike. She managed to take 2^nd for the girls on the bike and Lyndsey did an awesome job, also taking 2^nd on the run. They ended up in 2^nd place overall for the girls and would have been 6^th in the boys division.

Maggie’s race was nuts; there must have been over 50 kids. The wave was so big and rowdy that the made the boys go after the girls. Maggie hung at the back but had perfect form. For that age group, parents were allowed in to transition. So I raced up to the bike with her and we set out on the bike course. By now, there were a ton of cars on the same street as the kids with very few volunteers around. So I started running, a stream of kids on bikes behind, then quickly passing. Around ½ mile, I was gassed and told Maggie that I’d wait for her after she did the turnaround. Meanwhile some idiot was trying to park his car while all of these little wees were pedaling by. I relegated to directing traffic until Maggie came back through. Finally on to the run, we headed out in to a neighborhood where I’ll be damned but Maggie starts to strike up a conversation about how hard the swim was. I didn’t engage but encouraged her to keep going. Finally on the way back, she passed a girl on a down hill and then put the hammer down, sprinting all the way to the finish! Not sure what her place was but she had a million-watt winner’s smile at the end!

My race was a total disaster. 

I’m doing Nationals in 2 weeks so I didn’t want to go too hard, especially in the run. That said, I thought I could hammer the swim and bike. Well, things didn’t turn out that way. We got up early enough but left too late; arrived at 7:20-race started at 7:45. I was too busy with setting up transition and wasn’t able to get a pre-race swim in. I couldn’t even find Jimmy. Suddenly we had to line up for a shore start. It was a huge wave of “all men 49 and younger”. The gun went off and we were jogging through the shallow water; some started swimming while others kept walking; it was chaos. Finally it got deep enough. I was trying to stay calm but was suddenly freaked out and hyperventilating. I could not keep my head in the water. I tried to breast stroke but I wasn’t going anywhere. So then flipped on my back and kicked for a while. If there was a boat or surfer near by I would have dropped out. Finally by the first buoy I relaxed and took it easy for the rest of the swim. Time was 24:38; I should have gone around 22 mins.

Well, on to transition.  We had to run the bike out along a dirt path for around 100 yards. As I was about to get on, someone yelled “you don’t have a helmet on!”. Dropped the bike and ran back to transition, had to take my timing chip off first, got the helmet and ran back. By the time I got on the bike, my heart rate was off the charts. The climb up wasn’t pretty. Though I was climbing pretty well, I got passed early on by my buddy Ciaran who was just flying (he went on to win his AG and get 5^th overall). I ended up getting passed by 3 people on the climb; I have never been passed on the climb before! Fast forward to the descent – I was looking forward to a fast descent because I was riding my road bike which has better handling on the down hills than my tri bike. Well on the initial downhill I slammed a pot hole which somehow f’d up my front brake; there wasn’t any play in the lever. Of course I was worried that maybe the wheel was knocked loose. So I pulled over, checked the quick release and fiddled with the brakes. Couldn’t figure it out so I just grandma’d down the friggin hill. Disaster! 1:22 bike split was 4 minutes slower than what I normally average.