Duathlon Nationals - Road Trippin’ and Suffering

First off I’d like to thank everyone who wrote me comments. I tried to read as many as I could before leaving on Thursday September 13. Thanks again!

Joining me in the elite race was Chris Gairns as well as age-groupers Evan Pemberton and Mike Davis, all from Fredericton. We left Thursday morning driving to Kingston for the first night, about 10 hours. The drive consisted of a lot of pee breaks, traffic jams and my favorite, walkie talkie chats between our two vehicles.

On Friday, we started from Kingston and drove to the race site, another 5 hour drive with pee breaks. Seguin is basically a road with some houses on each side so we stayed about 10K from the race site in the town of Parry Sound. We had to wait until 6pm that night to ride the race course because of the pounding rain. It also seemed like most of the athletes were staying in our same hotel.

So race morning came early in our room. Since Evan and Mike were racing at 8:30am they got up and ate at 5:30am. Our race didn’t start till 11:30am so we had some time to kill. This mostly consisted of watching TSN and shovelling in as much food as possible! We also went to support our friends at the race.

The weather was super cold, 6°C! Very windy as well. The age-group race finished with Evan taking 1^st and Mike taking 3^rd overall. Great job by the Fredericton crew!

My nerves up to this point were pretty good. I didn’t know what to expect, besides the usual suffering that goes into a race. I’d done very well in the Olympic distance (10K run/ 40K bike / 5K run) this year. Also, typical duathlons are non-draft legal.This means that you cannot work together on the bike and if you do a penalty is assessed. So they are very much an individual race. The format of this elite race was draft legal, so we could work together. This makes a very different race! If you have a pack of guys all working together, they can distance themselves from everyone else. Little did I know, it was going to be just the opposite!

Now it was our chance to race. My nerves were quite good as the countdown was on. The speed was fast through the first lap of 2.5K. I knew today was going to be a personal best. As we motored around the course through laps 2,3 and 4, I started falling back of the leaders. I entered into T1 with Chris and a 2:30 minute deficit to first.

Getting onto my bike and entering into the unknown of draft legal duathlon racing (I have raced in cycling races before so drafting is not new to me). Chris and I had agreed prior to the race that we’d work together to catch the leaders. We showed awesome teamwork and were able to keep the gap even for the first lap. The bike course itself was 6 loops of 6.66K with a couple nasty hairpin turns. The terrain was quite fast but with the wind it was hard for the lead rider.

As we floored it on our bikes we were joined by others getting dropped from the lead packs. I was vocal with the guys asking them to take their turns up front. We had a decent pace on the way out on our 3^rd and 4^th lap but the guys stopped working together on the way back. It was disappointing because we had a chance to catch the groups ahead if we had all worked together. Sadly, our group just couldn’t figure it out and we entered T2 wayyyyy back of the leaders. Oh well.

The last run was tragic. I couldn’t do anything. It felt as if my ribcage was banging on my legs. I’ve had stitches before and run with those. This was new to me. I was sad because I couldn’t run hard enough to make my legs hurt. I wanted to prove to people that I could compete. In no way am I making excuses because I don’t believe in them. I just wanted to run the last 5K as hard as I knew I could.

At least I finished! Chris ended up with a hamstring injury and couldn’t run at all. We both shrugged our shoulders said, "That sucked….. where’s the beer?!?"

Our night ended in Ottawa where I got to see my girlfriend. Believe me, seeing her was just as good as if I had won the race!

So our road trip produced the Age Group National Champion, 30-39 Age Group National Champion and 2 new Elite Athletes. I think we will be back next year to redeem ourselves. As for now, maybe a little sleep?

Thanks again for the support, Happy Training!

Cliff