My Weekend Adventure - Golden State Race Report

This past weekend, my Dad did his 2nd triathlon! In leading up to the event, I decided to turn it into a little adventure of my own and ride down to the race (about 35 miles away), do the race, and ride home. That way, I could see my Dad at his 2nd event, and have a fun diversion to keep my training interesting (and as a result of me also racing, I have no pictures – sorry). The last 3 weeks have been a big build, so this weekend would cap it off – a commute, race, commute and then long ride/run the day after.

The race is draft legal and has 3 laps of a 5-mile course. I decided to ride my road bike, but that was mostly because I wanted it for the commute down in the AM in the dark. I put my race wheels on it and decided that was sufficient for a race rig! I left early in the pitch black and stayed on streets mostly for the first part of the ride. I rode down Folsom Blvd and planned to get on the bike path at Rossmoor Bar. However, there is a stretch of Folsom that is really bad for bike tires and I took a calculated risk. More streetlights, no traffic, but more risk of a flat. And sure enough, I got a flat in my back wheel half way down. I pulled off to the side and fixed it and then motored on. Because of the delay, though, I got to the race a little later than I had intended and missed my Dad’s swim start. I did manage to find their car (that had my stuff in it), get over to the swim finish, and see him come out of the water and head out on the bike. The swim in the river had a strong current and was pretty cold, but he hung tough and made it through! Once on the bike, he did great and motored on for his 5-mile ride and then 1-mile run afterwards.

My Dad finishing his run.

Meanwhile, I had to head down to the water and swim over to the start across the river. I hadn’t been in open water for a while and was using a new wetsuit, so I wanted to get in the water and give myself some time to swim a little bit. The swim is in the river and the current was pretty strong against us on the way up; plus they made us swim in the middle of the river where it’s strongest. After they sent us off, I got going and felt pretty good. Smooth and steady. I practiced sighting while breathing to both sides and just worked on swimming as straight as possible. There were a few times I tried finding some feet, but it didn’t last long, and was just resigned to doing my thing. I made the turn buoy and then felt like I was being pushed down river on the way back. You could basically just float in your wet-suit and enjoy the ride! Well, apparently the lengthy swim up-stream was enough to make me very slow. I came out of the water in around 20 minutes, but I tried not to let it bother me as I felt fine and haven’t really been swimming that much. So I climbed up the stairs out of the river and headed to my bike. Got my wetsuit off, bike gear on and motored out of the transition area.

Getting going on the bike.

Just a few minutes into my first lap and a guy in pink motored past me; I put in a hard effort and got on his wheel. This draft legal stuff is great!! It gave me a chance to recover, catch my breath, and get ready for the rest of the hard ride. The ride was really fun, had lots of turns, and I stayed on that guy’s wheel for big chunks of time. I also saw Rebecca out there and she was able to hang on my wheel for a while! In hindsight, had I had my tri-bike, I probably could’ve gone faster (but also would’ve probably worked more on my own), but the ride was still solid. The guy in pink (yes, it was a guy in pink) was in the wave before me and finished after my 2nd lap. Fortunately, on the 3rd lap there was another guy who I could work with and the two of us shared the effort to the end. I ended up averaging ~270 watts with a norm of about 280. I would expect a sprint to be a little higher, but my legs were tired from the previous weeks’ training and the commute down, so I wasn’t quite as peppy. Plus, the course was quite technical so there weren’t large stretches to lay down the power. In any case, I was happy with the effort.


T2 was uneventful. Not as quick as I could’ve made it, but I don’t do this short stuff very often! Out on the run, my legs took about 2-300 meters to adjust. Felt like bricks initially, but then I settled into a rhythm of hard work. I started trying to pass as many people as possible and keep the effort up. I find that I don’t really have that extra gear for events like this. I’m just too zeroed in on longer efforts to push to these sprint-length efforts. Regardless, I was in the low 6-minute/mile range and kept the pace up as best I could. The turnaround came quickly and I motored back. My watch was reading 6:10/mile on average so I just pushed hard through the finish. I ended up running under 19 minutes, so was content with that. A nice hard effort right near the end of my 3-week build.

Finishing

Results were not stellar, though – I got 8th AG out of 33 and 24th overall out of 436 finishers. My Dad, on the other hand, was 3rd AG, picking up some hardware in only his 2nd attempt!!

My Dad with his new hardware!

In my case, sprint races are tough for me because I am just too far behind out of the water. The guy who won (a pretty elite athlete), put like 10 minutes into me in the swim alone. The strong current really suited the strong swimmers. On the bike, he beat me by 4-ish minutes and I suspect a large chunk of that is time in transition. On the run, however, he put less than a minute on me (and that was on tired legs from IM training) and I had the 6th best run in the field (and one of those 5 faster was a relay). Nonetheless, I am still resolved to keep working on swimming. It keeps the sport interesting!

After the race, I chatted with a few people, then got my stuff ready to head home. The ride home was less eventful – no flats. I did manage to find 2 guys on the bike path to work with and motored along with them for a while. I decided my legs couldn’t handle that pace very well, and just took it easy after that. All-in-all, the whole experience was great fun! An awesome race and a fun way to do it!

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This weekend marked the end of a ~3-week block of training for Florida. In the last 22 days, I’ve managed:

Swim: 05:45:00; 13430 yds;
Bike: 52:21:55; 923 miles;
Run: 12:26:58; 100.1 miles;
Total: 70:33:53

Not a lot of swimming (my pool(s) were closed for a whole week of this), but decent work on the bike. All of this amounted to a TSS of 2680 for the 22 days. Here’s a shot of my Performance Management Chart from WKO+... it covers the last 2 seasons.

Blue is CTL, Pink is ATL, Yellow is TSB - for discussion on the Performance Management Chart, go here:
http://www.peaksware.com/articles/cycling/what-is-the-performance-management-chart.aspx

I’ve had decent training for IM races before (at least given the balance and constraints in my life), but have not yet been able to pull together a marathon to what I feel is my potential. I think the bike focus this time around will help improve the physical aspects in that I’ll be fresher coming off the ride, but the mental challenge lies ahead and I am really looking forward to another shot at it!! Bring on the race!