Today I raced the 5150 New Orleans… duathlon. The swim was cancelled due to high winds. Apparently they couldn’t even get the buoys to stay anchored. I was bummed, but what can you do? I flew all the way here, I’m fit, so I just warmed up like I had been planning to do a Duathlon all along. The new format was 2mi / 40km / 10km; run / bike / run. I took off and ran with Kris Gemmell for the first 2 miles. I was pretty ecstatic to be running with such a great athlete, and even more stoked to see everyone else falling off the pace while I was wondering if we were going hard enough. After (what is becoming my normal) fumbling through T1 I got on the bike, caught Gemmell (he passed me out of transition while I was fumbling) took the lead and never looked back. It was the windiest race I’ve ever done, and really hard. I had a giant lead going into T2, but that was completely unknown to me. I just kept running. At 5k I had over a minute on Gemmell and the rest of the boys, which was great because the last couple miles hurt like no other race format. Duathlons are hard! I won with a pretty big margin.

I’m really happy with where my fitness is right now. I haven’t done anything special in training, I’m just working hard. I haven’t rested for a race yet, but I’m learning just how much work I can do and still perform well (I put in 24 hours this week in 5 days before the race, and did a hard track workout Thursday.) I feel like I’m finally making progress toward being an all-around triathlete, and being able to run away from a strong field at a duathlon certainly helps reinforce that. I wish we could have swum, I think there were some talented guys that didn’t get to show their strength today because of the course change. Still, being able to win under any circumstance is the type of athlete I want to become.

A huge thanks to K-Swiss, Garmin, Powerbar, Rudy Project, and Blue Seventy (even if I didn’t get to use my swim skin today) for helping me get there, along with all of your support, my family, my friends, and everyone that tells me to kick butt before my races. You all are awesome!

Here’s my reward for the day: a graph with myself as the zero axis!!

I just signed up for two more races in May: 5150 New Orleans on May 15th and the Capitol of Texas Triathlon (CapTex) on May 30th. It’s going to be an awesome month! Training is going very well, the weather is getting nicer, I don’t seem to be allergic to anything in Colorado (a clear nose in May is a delightful change of pace from Washington), and I don’t have to travel over an ocean any time soon. Life is good!

Here’s some photographs of the past couple months. (Just click on the image to see a bigger, uncropped version.) It’s been a nice Spring so far.


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This Map with Route Data was created using a Garmin Forerunner and TrainingPeaks.com, and exported into Google Maps. You can zoom and pan and view the course in great detail.

Sunday I raced the Saint Anthony’s Triahtlon. It’s one of the oldest, most historical professional triathlon races in the world with 28 years behind it. The race was run as well as any race I’ve been to, and this is certainly going to remain part of my calendar in years to come. The start list was intimidating, to say the least, but I went into Sunday’s effort with very little stress, and a insatiable hunger to prove that what I did in South Beach and Ishigaki were not indicative of my fitness and athleticism. I was looking at Olympic medalists, 3-time Olympians, World Championship Series medalists, and instead of being scared I was just excited to see if I could give them a solid race. And I did! I was 5th, behind Filip Ospaly (2010 lifetime Fitness Series winner), Matt Reed, Cameron Dye, and Stewart Hayes. I worked my butt off for it, and I had the best race I could have on the day.

The swim was the only major disappointment of the day. Saint Anthony’s Triahtlon has had some trouble in recent years with the choppiness of the swim course, so when the winds were blowing on race morning they played it safe and moved the swim to a more protected area. This also shortened the course to about an 800 meters swim. You can see in the map I posted the line I took. It was supposed to be a trapezoidal course, but at the end I swam straight in and ran up the beach. The run to T1 was probably longer than the swim itself, and the entry was very shallow and not great for short legged guys like me. I lost a lot of time going to the first buoy and was 7th out of the water with a gap in front of me that Cameron Dye capitalized on in making a break for it early.

The bike was flat and scenic, taking us through the neighborhoods of St. Petersburg, Florida. The roads were smooth, clean, and closed to traffic with plenty of police keeping us safe. I rode hard trying to get away from a large group of riders including Potts, Gimmel, Docherty, Reed, Ospaly, Hayes, and a few other intimidating names. It didn’t work, and I only ended up with about 15 seconds on those guys at T2. I started the run with Matt Reed with a 90 second deficit to Cameron Dye. Reed dropped me from his heels heels toward the end of the first mile. Ospaly came by me soon after that and caught up to Reed. The two of them eventually caught and passed Dye and Ospaly took Reed in the final stretch. While I was suffering in the middle third Stuart Hayes came by with a definitive surge. In the last third of the run I came back to life a bit and tried to close in on Hayes. He was hurting as much as I was, but he kept the gap he’d created taking fourth, while I held off a menacing Potts, Gimmel, Matthews (a.k.a. Barny) and Docherty who were all right behind me. It was a fast hard race, and the most fun I’ve had racing all year.

Now, here’s the graph (click on it for a larger view):

The horizontal axis is timing the point. The 20k bike split is an estimate, there was no timing chip, but since there were two timing points on the run I wanted the bike portion to have at least as much horizontal space as the run. The vertical axis is the time gap from the winner, Filip Ospaly. Negative values indicate a lead over Ospaly, positive values indicate a deficit. An intersection point between two lines indicates the estimated point when those two competitors changed positions.