It’s been a long week. Last Thursday evening, I packed and loaded up the car to go race. Dropped the dogs off for the weekend at a friend’s and headed up to Show Low, AZ for the Dueceman Triathlon. Since my training had gone in the opposite direction of good over the last few months, I opted for the olympic distance race. There is a nice little race series from the folks at Genuine Innovations, The Genuine Innovations Triple Crown. Genuine Innovations probably made your Co2 cannister and inflator. It involves three races, the Tempe Intervational Triathlon, Sahuarita Triathlon and the Dueceman olympic race. I ended up with a comfortable 2:15+ min lead over the next person. Should be in the bag. The guy in second place beat me my :14 at the Sahaurita triathlon, mainly my fault, and I had a rather comfy almost 3 min on him at the Tempe race.
The Trisports.com crew does a great job on this race. Friday they were busting ass, setting everything up. I helped a bit here and there, placeing mile markers and marking the run course. Unfortunately the pizza place didn’t do such a good job on the pizza. Trisports brought 14 or so people up to help put on this event. About 50% of them got food poisoning. Sarah was the first to go down. Since I was staying in the condo with her and Kim, I got to listen to her puke all night instead of sleeping. No worries though, being an insomniac has trained me to operate on 1.5 hour of sleep. The alarm goes off at 6:18am, I roll off the living room floor where I was attempting to get some sleep. Made a very strong cup of tea, ate a bit and watch some tv. About 7:15, hopped on the bike and rode 4 miles to transition. Everything felt good, power numbers were higher then ever on the steep hill climbing out of the condo. Of course I had limtied data on this hill since I’ve ridden it a grand total of 3x prior to this morning. Roll into transition, get numbered, put on wettie and head down to warm up. The warmup felt ok, not great.
Gun goes off, Geoff moves into the lead, quickly, I slot in second position with several people on my feet. Urmas goes by, and since he is a former national level swimmer I hop on his feet. For about :02. Then another dude goes by and I get another :02 of draft. Round the first bouy and a group goes by. I jump on their feet. I can’t make it stick. No get up and definately no go. Get dropped, I’m sitting in 8th place and 3 more guys go by. F*cking great, I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this far back in the swim. Round the far buoy and finally feel ok. Move back up a few slots and swim a straight line to the dock pulling a few people.
I’ve got nothing coming out of the water, getting up the boat ramp that someone made steeper since the start of the swim was a struggle. Get rolled in transition by a few people. Finally get onto the bike, roll a few people back. Move into 4th or 5th place, not really making up anytime on the guys I know I typically outride. Hit 5 miles in low 59min pace, hit 10miles in mid 59 minute place. I’m rolling fairly well, but it just not there. Over the next 5 miles it becomes apparent to me, I had 20k in me, nothing more. I’ve rolled into the top 3-4 and now have started the roll out of the top 3-4. By 15 miles I was on high 61 min pace and by 20 miles I was sitting up realizing today isn’t my day. I was getting rolled by people who I typically outride by 1:30…over 20k. Enter transition in 8th place according to a spectator and about 1:08 on my PT. 9,10 and 11th place are entering transition as I’m leaving for the run. Pick up one spot quickly, it’s pretty evident to me that I’m doing nothing. Any get up and go I had has gotten up and gone. I’d already made the decision on the bike to dnf or just jog the run. But within the first :45 of the run, I realized I’d be doing more damage to myself completing then DNF’ing. Took a right hand turn off the course, walked back to the RV where the trisports race crew was staging out of, grabbed a few cokes and went to get my stuff out of transition.
After clearing everything out, I worked the mile 7 run station in the half for a few hours handing out Gu. To make the day worse, hardly anyone wanted a Gu. Even lost $1 betting on who would and wouldn’t take a Gu. After a few hours of this, my hunger got the best of me, the bulk of the half was past my adopted aid station. Grabbed a bit to eat, then went and helped break down the Dueceman Half transition area in the rain. Got yelled at by a lady for moving her bike to a different rack. Seriously, it’s 8+ hr after the start, and the Xterra race the next day still has to be set up. We are down 7-8 people and have a pretty tight timeline to get everything staged for tomorrow’s race. You’re bike is fine, I dropped the other bike I moved…psych.
We drove back Saturday night. There was no way Sarah could work the Sunday Xterra and since I was awake why not drive home? Got back to Tucson about 11pm. Turned around Monday night and went to Phoenix for a 3 day meeting. F*ck me, I’m tired.
Now for the triathletes are slobs rant. This is the second weekend in a row I’ve broken down a transition area. We recycled over 30 plastic water and G-ade bottles that people just tossed on the ground. People left gel wrappers, snicker wrappers, towels, a winter coat, fruit, orange peels, banana peels (insert joke) and just about anything else you can bring to a race. Both weekends it looked like people didn’t know what a trash can was. There were trash cans and recycling bins all around. You’re mom doesn’t pick up after you in transition, you pick up after you. It was disgusting how much crap people just littered on the ground. If I owned the parking lot or area where transtion was I’d tell the RD hell no never again, you guys are f*cking pigs when he asked if I could use it again. Really it’s not that hard to throw something in the trash, you do it everyday. Why is race day different?