Meech Lake Triathlon…

So this one was a bit of a doozy! 

Description: Swim was a 1200 meters which went in a anti-clockwise parallelogram.  T1 was 400 meters from the beach so you had to get a pair of sneakers (an extra set which I will explain down below) and then run over a fair size hill to get your bike.  The bike course had a monster of a climb right off the bat followed by 22K of other rollers (think St.George esq).  T2 was in another location where you had to give your bike to some volunteers and then go find your real running stuff.  Confused yet? 

IBesides the craziness of the logistics, the race course was fairly well marked.  There were set waves based on your swim times.  I thought mine was going to be around 22:00 so I was in the fourth wave.  Each wave was released a minute apart.  The swim started off really well.  My sighting was a different story as I kept going off course.  I actually had the kayakers keep on my course because I kept veering off!  After my estimated 1300-1400 meter swim I exited with a 21:54 swim time (very pleased).

Grabbing an old set of sneakers it was on to T1 which as I mentioned was 400 meters away over a pretty big hill.  Exiting T1 I was now in uncharted waters for the first half of the bike course.  I had never seen what was coming but found out soon enough.  I had wondered why there were a lot of road bikes with clip ons and this was the reason.  One huge hill!  Thank god I’m a climber thats all I can say.

The bike course was nice and the Cervelo rolled nicely over it.  I got back to T2 (after passing a flood of people) with the 5th best time of the day.  But this wasn’t to be mine.

Starting the run I got a stitch.  Nothing big as I’m pretty good with handling pain.  However, the pain progressed to an unbearable level (this was the same thing that happened to me last year at Duathlon Nationals) and it caused me to walk in sections.  It felt as if someone was stabbing me with a hot poker in my abdomen.  I had a shortness of breath which made it hard to run.  Running also caused my abdomen to jar which then caused the excrutiating pain.  I know, I know, suck it up.  I did, I finished instead of taking the DNF but it wasn’t done at full speed.  I’m currently looking into the problem so it won’t come up again. 

Overall I finished 1st in my age group and a disappointing 17th overall.  Damn race!Oh well, the money is on next weeks race.   

Thanks for reading.  

Happy (TDF Watching!) Trainin!

Cliff

This clip is a summary of me while I ran (besides the drinking game of course).