RR - USAT Sprint National Championship
This past Sunday's USAT Sprint National Championship was my first event of this magnitude and I was a bit excited/anxious for the few days leading up to the race. I knew the competition would be strong but didn’t realize it would include 2 previous winners and a top 10 finisher in last year’s World Sprint Race Champion in the 55-59 AG, who aged up this year. And to pile on, after the Saturday Olympic Nationals race results were posted, I saw that 4 of the top 10 Olympic finishers were doubling up and doing Sunday’s Sprint race too.
Time for me to just focus on how much fun it is to race anaerobically
Since backpacks are not permitted in the transition area, I spent more time than usual trying to figure out how to get all my stuff into the T-area and not forget anything. I like to just stuff everything (and then some) in the backpack and go … but here only race related stuff was allowed in the T-area. I guess this is pretty common now-a-days but it was new to me.
I was in the 3rd swim wave with all males 60 and older – there were over 120 in this wave, which was one of the largest. The swim start was at the Milwaukee Discovery Museum which has a long boat docking area along the side that faces the harbor where the swim was being held. Just trying to find a place to hang onto the dock while we waited (7 min between waves) was a challenge by itself. I guess this could be classified as a mini-mass start. I decided to go out pretty fast as a means of avoiding being pummeled – and as things sometimes go, I felt pretty good and just kept going hard for the entire 750M completing it in 13:30 at 1:38/100M pace, which is the fastest pace since the Door County Tri 2 weeks ago where I did the 400M swim at 1:45 pace.
The bike was 20K (12.4 mi) and included a 1 mile bridge climb at 4-5% grade - had to do it twice (out & back). I put a note on the EN Race Execution Forum about how best to deal with the length and slope of this “bridge-hill" and received sage advice from Tim Cronk and Al Truscott.
Tim told me for Sprints: “Swim like there is no bike..... bike like there is no run.... run like someone is chasing you.... Go all out from start to finish... bike 100-105% and try not to puke!”
Al said: “4% is nothing. You can go up that in your big ring and hammer away per Tim's pacing advice.”
And that is exactly what I did. I finished the bike with the 8th fastest time at 33:48 and was able to hammer up the bridge "hills" at better than 17mph.
The run was other worldly for me as I set a 5K PB breaking 22 minutes for the 1st time ever with a time of 21:56. This is a new VDot 5K time! But as you' might expect, it wasn't easy. Around the 2mi mark I noticed I was gaining on a competitor and started to wonder if it would come down to a sprint. At the 3mi point IT was on! I passed him with about 100M to go and then hit the red carpet going fast as I could - he was going for it too. I heard the announcer call out our names and that we were battling for 7th & 8th place. I was red-lined and totally anaerobic but not backing off - it was surreal and OS-Nov pain-cave like. Later I saw that my Garmin had me topping out at 5:07 pace when I crossed the finish line. Never been there before - Yeah!
As it sometimes goes I beat him by 0.3 of a sec and finished 7th in my AG. And thanks to the EN coaches & team and the OS & SC training plans, I DON'T have to wonder where I could have saved 1 sec during a 1:12:33 race - instead, I did it!
A few closing thoughts:
1. I had great T1 and T2 times - probably one of the reasons I finished 7th instead of 8th - practiced them a lot during taper week.
2. It was fun to be at an Age Group only event - the focus was on the AGers.
3. I did qualify for the 2014 World Championship in Edmonton, Canada - that might be fun but I need to figure out logistics.
4. I heard several people yelling out to me “Ian” which I finally got used to once I understood they were really calling out “E N” – I wore EN Red and yes, Red is faster. After the race I met a few EN’ers current and past and it was fun to talk about the team.
5. Next up for me is the Chicago Sprint Tri in two weeks.
Total Participates in the USAT Sprint Nats: 1102;
Placed 7th in AG 60-64 out of 51
Split Name Race Time Leg Time Cat Pos Pace
Swim 0:13:30 0:13:30 19 1:38
T1 0:15:40 0:02:09 6
Cycle 0:49:28 0:33:48 8 22.1
T2 0:50:36 0:01:07 3
Run 1:12:33 0:21:56 11 7:03
0
Comments