As when I did this race before, my buddy Wade joined in. It's fun to have a racing team.
It was pretty cold getting there a little before 7am and only warmed up as the sun came above the valley. By 8am for start time it was getting comfortable. Kerrianne, Ethan, Junia, Tanja, Luke and David all arrived just before start time to encourage us on.
I think both Wade and I felt much more comfortable than we did 3 years ago at our first race.
The water actually felt pretty good, not too cold. Someone said it was about 65 degrees. We were in wave 4 of 5, and headed into the water about 8:15am.
I came out feeling the best I've come out of the water 8 minutes later. My best swim time yet but I still have a long way to go to make it something I can really do. I got about 1/2 way through and found my arms had nothing more so I resorted to my normal plan of "survive the swim."
I did catch up to Wade in the transition. Here he's getting his helmet on and grabbing his bike while I'm getting my bike shoes on. This was one of my best transitions yet, likely from the shorter swim and not being as wiped out but I was able to get changed and out on the bike in 2 min 16 seconds.
I entered in the Men's Mountain Bike category, Wade was in the 40-44 year old men category where everyone was on road bikes. I haven't ridden my road bike since September so I went with the mountain bike. The bike felt good, there were really just 2 big hills and the rest was just rolling hills, I actually passed quite a few people (though I did get passed by some of the long course riders that were coming around on their second lap.)
My bike and T2 times didn't get show up on the race web site but I calculated it to be just over 32 minutes all together.
Then off on the run. I got to the end of the transition area and realized I still had my bike gloves on, I decided to save the time and just wear them. I was able to actually run the whole distance, that's a first for me for this rolling hill course. I did see Wade at one point and he was running strong, we yelled at each other as we passed on the out and back part. With about 2 miles to go I saw a guy that I was pretty sure had been on a mountain bike so I thought, "I need to pass him." I didn't want to burn out so I went with a strategy of just slowly closing the distance until the last 1/4 mile when I dug in and sprinted. I guess I needed just a little bit more, I finished 5 seconds behind him.
After the race we waited around to see the times posted. Junia wanted to sit on my bike.
Scores were posted and I came up second in the Men's Mountain Bike category, 5 seconds out of first place. My time was 1 hour 9 minutes 8 seconds.
Wade had a good race too. He ended up with 2nd place in the Men 40-44 years with a time of 1 hour 46 seconds. A very encouraging thing for me was that even if I had rode my mountain bike in the age group category I would have come in 3rd place. Which means even with my slow swim I did really well on both the bike and the run to make up time.
Here's the stats:
Swim Time: 08:08
Swim Rank: 53
T1 Time: 02:16
T1 Rank: 45
Bike Time: 32.:30 including transition
Bike Rank: 42 - 45 somewhere depending on how much of my total bike time was due to transition
Run Time: 26:14
Run Rank: 27
2nd Place Men's Mountain Bike
3rd Place Men 40-44 (not officially but looking at the times, that's where mine falls.)
Overall:
Overall Time: 1:09:08
Overall Rank: 37
There were 90 male entries overall, so I finished in the right side of the percentages.
Check out the course, be sure to select hybrid view to see the satellite picutre.
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