Last Sunday I participated in the 6th Annual Texas Motor Speedway Duathlon for my second time. Last year that was my first big endurance race that I had competed in in about 9 years. For the two weeks leading up to the race this year I did very little cycling and only ran twice to try and give my hamstring a chance to recover from a hard weekend workout in Ft. Worth where I think I would have pulled the muscle had I not backed off.
Anyhow, I felt really good before the race and had gotten my warmup in, but we had a 30 minute delay due to lightning and heavy rain. Before the actual start I ran to my transition and emptied my half-full helmet of water before getting another warmup in. At the starting line I took off pretty quickly to get away from the pack and not have to worry about the congestion and possibility of getting tripped up. For the first 400-500 meters I was in 2nd and then started easier off that pace until my friend, William Ritter, passed by me. I then locked onto his pace. My first mile was about a 5:09 and my average for the first 2 miles was a 5:19, which was the 6th fastest run for that leg. I felt like I took forever in transition, but my time turned out to be 47 seconds. I did a flying mount (running with bike and then jump on it) and wasted a few seconds getting my shoes into the clips. After that incident I think I might try practicing my mounts with the shoes already clipped in. We'll see. Once on the bike I felt pretty good, but could feel my legs fatiguing a little early due to lack of riding in 2 weeks. William ended up flatting after starting the 2nd lap on the bike and I saw him walking it back in the grass. As I went by him I let out an "Oh s@!# man!" He probably would have finished in the top 5 had he not flatted. My old Texas Tech teammate, JP Barrandy, passed me on the 3rd and final lap about half a mile from the turnoff to enter back into the speedway. That motivated me to push it a little harder and by the transition I had caught up to him and with my flying dismount right at the line I was side-by-side with JP. Last year he placed 3rd overall to my 47th. My second transition took 34 seconds and as I was crossing the mat out of T2 he gave me a friendly pop on the butt and said, "Lets go!" I then picked up my pace a little as my legs felt looser and ended up passing him in less than 100 meters with his reply of, "Go catch Cam! (another Tech teammate of ours). Cam had blown past me on the bike towards the middle of the last lap I believe, but on his second run had some issues with his knee really bothering him from an incident earlier in the week involving him riding his bicycle and going down due to some ice on the roads. Going onto the infield track for the run there's a verrry slight ramp/hill that almost caused my calves to cramp up after running up it. That scared me for a split second because I didn't want to slow down, but soon worked out. The only thing that bothered me the rest of the run was my right arch. At the half-way point of the 2nd 2 mile run I ended up passing Cam. Before I finished my first lap though Will Brewer, another Tech guy, passed me barely breathing hard. I didn't realize it at the time, but he was in first place and ended up winning it overall. My average on the 2nd two miles turned out to be 5:49 and I finished with a decent kick at the end, but would have gone harder had someone been close to me. I ended up 13th/300+ overall and 3rd/25 in my age group out of a very competitive field this year. The first two guys beat the old course record and my time this year would have yielded me a 7th place finish the year before, but I was 47th last year. The Texas Tech team was 2nd as a team behind A&M, but took home the male and female overall finishes.
Overall I'm very happy with how I did last weekend. I was a bit nervous going into the event and really didn't know what to expect on the bike, seeing as how last year I was on a bicycle that had a small frame, small wheels, and weighed about 2 pounds more than this one. I'd like to thank the Ironhead people for putting on a well-organized race as well as the volunteers and local police officers that helped on the course. I need to throw a shoutout and thank Marc Noble for letting me borrow his Zipp 1080 race wheels for this event and my father for driving me and purchasing the hotel room in Ft. Worth. I realized from this race that I need to do more brick workouts from the bike to the run so that the next race won't take as long to get my pace up to speed. Said race will be the Athens sprint triathlon in a little over a week.
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