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!!
Super congrats! Awesome to see you picked up a win even though they cut your best leg off!
congrats ben. What does the y-axis represent? I’m not able to discern what this graph means.
Big congrats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry, I’ve been posting these graphs so frequently that I forgot to explain it this time. The y-axis is the time gap from the winner. A positive value is a lead at that point in the race over the winner, a negative value is a time deficit to the leader at that point in the race. Since the only time someone crossed a timing mat in front of me was Gemmell running into T1, and that was only by a second, there’s no line visibly above the x-axis this time. Check out some of my race reports from previous races to get an idea of how these things can look when a race plays out differently. All my race reports should have the tag “races” so just click on that tag above and you’ll see them all.
Congrats Ben Collins.
Way to be, big guy. I dig the graph. You should add a ‘Like’ button to your blog, I would ‘Like’ this data.
Big congrats Ben – awesome!!!