Monday, August 3, 2009

Trying Duathlon

OK so I showed up to my 3rd sprint tri of the year yesterday knowing that it was really going to be my first Duathlon ever.
The lake at Indiana Downs had an unsafe e-coli levels so the triathlon was converted to a duo by substituting a 2 mile run for the 600 yard swim.

I had come down with a case of swimmer's ear that got infected on Monday and so this was a mixed blessing. While the Dr had said I was ok to swim, I was not looking forward to that split.

So we started out with 2 laps on the Indiana Downs horse track, which for some reason was a bit daunting. I was not able to put out the speed that I really wanted to only averaging about 9 minutes per mile on that split.

I got on the bike after a sub one minute T1 and was ready to rock n roll, when I pulled the strap completely out on my right shoe when trying to shove my foot in. Apparently I had neglected to secure it in the open position.

So I had to waste some of my hard core pedal time, threading threading the strap back through the top of my shoe while coasting. I finally sorted it out, dropped into my aero position and began picking riders off. (in the course of doing this, I also got picked off myself twice, but I didn't give those up uncontested and ended up getting both of those riders back in T2.)

It dawned on me about half way through the ride that all of the people I was passing were faster runners than myself and that was why they were ahead of me...... the implications were that as soon as I jumped off of my bike, they would be chasing me down in the final run. So I lowered my head and rode even harder. I had a pretty good ride overall, it was a windy day and the course seemed crowded, but I only had to hit the brakes one time from leaving T1 until coming back to T2

Speaking of which, I had a pretty fast entry into T2 and started on the 5 k run. I felt like I had more juice left, but my legs decided that I was going to continue running at the 9 min / mi pace. The good news is that I only had about 6 people pass me so I maintained most of my bike advantage and ended up with a 112 placement 10th in my age group and a time of 1 hour 32 min

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