An Early Season Win

It's a pretty amazing thing when everything seems to fall into place exactly when it needs to. I don't remember a time in the last three months when I haven't had some nagging injury, and a week before this race I was at the campus health center with a fever, but Sunday morning, everything was perfect.

The VT Triathlon team traveled to Gainesville, FL for an early season olympic-distance triathlon to try to sort out who our top seven men and women would be to send to Collegiate Nationals this year. Having already earned myself a spot on the team, I did the "Long Distance" race, which was twice olympic distance: 3k (~2 mi) swim, 80k (~50 mi) bike, 20k (~12.5 mi) run. There were only 15 other people signed up for the "long" race, with about 100 doing the olympic distance, 20 or so from Blacksburg.

The race had a beautiful venue of Lake Alto, outside Waldo, Florida, which is apparently the speed trap capital of the country. It was put on by State of Mind Sports, a pretty small production company, but very smoothly run race. I was a little sketched out about watch timing instead of electronic, but they had the results up faster than most races that use chip timing systems, and they look pretty legit.

The olympic and "long" started at the same time, so I was near the front of the swim pack with some faster people in the olympic race for the first two loops of the swim. When they got out and I kept going for two more loops, I found myself completely by myself, and definitely way out in the lead. After the swim I had put several minutes on the next people behind me, and carried that lead into the bike. The bike was an out-and-back, completely flat, to be completed four times, which I actually kind of enjoyed. Somehow it seems more managable to break a race up like that, plus I had some friends who came to watch so it was nice seeing them fairly frequently.

After the first couple loops the olympic distance people cleared off the course and I was able to start to keep track of how everyone else in my race was doing. I timed about a four-minute gap to the second place person on the third loop. It was a women in a pink jersey, and I had been pretty sure I had more than four minutes on everyone coming out of the water, so I wasn't excited about that. However, when I clocked it again on the fourth loop, she was about 7:30 back, so I had put some time into her there. The next person was about 11 minutes back, which means they'd have to run nearly a minute per mile faster than me to catch me on the run, which seemed unlikely if I didn't blow up.

Off the bike, the first few minutes of the run were pretty tough. I felt my quads start to cramp, a little more with each step. Fortunately, after a couple minutes slow and chugging some water, the cramping started to go away, so I just kept pushing it. The two sweet things on the run were the race director's 12-year-old son was leading me on a mountain bike for the whole run, and the whole VT team screaming at me as I came around for every lap. Despite it being almost 80 degrees and sunny the whole time, these things made the run pretty fun, and go by pretty quick.

In all, there are two things to which I attribute feeling great all day. The first is my boy Aaron's (our homestay in Gainesville, FL) Sealy Posturepedic bed (amazing, he slept on the fouton downstairs and lent his bed for the weekend, thanks buddy). The second is Hammer Nutrition Endurolyte Powder, which I loaded my water bottles with (and tasted like drinking saltwater all day) and I attribute to being able to even-split the run in 80 degree weather when three days before I was biting ice off my water bottle riding in 20 degree (seriously) weather in Blacksburg (and hadn't trained above 60 degrees yet this year).

Anyway, very fun race, and I couldn't have traveled to a nicer place for the weekend to get my first overall 1st place in triathlon. Results (Long Distance). Congratulations to the rest of the VT Triathlon team for outstanding performances in the Intermediate (olympic) race (everyone with Blacksburg, VA beside their name).

Thanks to everyone for the support.