Finally my summer classes and internship are down. Now I have nothing to do but prepare for France and focus on tri. Get prepared for an influx of updates! It's about time.
I just raced the Sylvania olympic-distance triathlon in, you guessed it, Sylvania, OH.
Brad, Kendyl and I drove out to Ohio on Saturday, stuffing our faces with entirely too many Matt's fig bars. Matt's, excitingly enough, is one of the newest sponsors of NU Tri, thanks to yours truly. We (slash I) really could not be more excited. We all use fig bars as pre-race nutrition especially for our carbo-loading and now we get them at a delicious discount. om nom nom nom
I had set myself up for a pretty disappointing race. My running and biking had been very slow in the past few weeks since I'd finished Evergreen back in July. After being hit by a car a week before the race (oh yeah, I was hit by a car. It was at a stop sign and I'm totally fine, but FYI it happened), I wasn't even sure if I would race, but my coach told me to stay signed up and only quit if I absolutely felt awful. So I listened and was feeling fine so I raced.
A few weeks back, Kendyl (who is a fantastic swimmer) helped me out with my swimming technique. Since then, I had really been focusing a lot on practicing my swim stroke. The water in Olander lake was very warm. Honestly, in comparison to the air temperature, it felt like taking a bath. I was lucky enough this time, to stay with my wave for a good portion of the swim and then as soon as they dropped me, the next one caught me and I hung on to them. In the end, I was out of the water in 35 min! That's a full 6 minutes off my time from Evergreen. We had a looonnnggg run to transition so in the end it was a 37 min swim time which is still 4 min off my swim time. When I got out of the water to see my watch said 35 min, I was newly inspired to actually give this race a shot. I had a pretty average 1:34 transition and then headed out to the bike.
The bike course was flat and WINDY... oh and rainy. My new burst of adrenaline was quickly depleted when I struggled to push 17 mph on the bike. This is MY leg. If I can't perform on the bike, my race is kind of a disaster. So for the first 10 miles, I alternated between being depressed that I couldn't keep pace and yelling at myself to keep pace. It didn't go all that well. Then on a nice right turn on to a bumpy road I lost my pack of shot bloks, my only race nutrition, only having eaten 2 of them thus far. I panicked a little that I would get side cramps from lack of electrolytes, but decided there was nothing I could do about it. I chugged my water and continued on my depressing bike leg in the wind and rain. But soon enough we came to the turn around and with 14 miles to go, the wind was at my back so I cranked it up to 20 mph and told myself I could hold it and make up for the bad first half. Thankfully, I did hold about 19.5-20.5 for those last 14 miles. I didn't quite make up for the bad first 10 miles, but I yanked my average speed up to 18.6 and was off the bike in 80 min. It wasn't as good as my 76 min finish last time or as fast as my 20 mph average goal pace, but it wasn't the worst either.
The run was the one thing I wanted to push in this race. It was a flat course. It was gently raining. It was mild if not cold weather and my goal was to break 9 min/mile pace. I took the first mile easy which ended up being about a 9:30. I had found a running buddy who was chatting me up and I realized I couldn't let him drag me down. I pushed a little harder on the second mile and he stayed with me. Still, I finished that mile a little too far over the 18 min mark. On mile 3 I finally started kicking it into a higher gear. I saw a guy loping along from Ohio State and thought "time to snag another place for NU" so I barely pulled past him and then dropped him (unfortunately, along with my running buddy). Soon enough, my running buddy caught up to me and managed to keep pace. Another guy joined us and I was happy he started to talk to him and not me, but also happy to hear this conversation taking place to get my mind off the pain. Soon enough, I began to feel a pain in my chest - something I'd been experiencing lately on runs if I took it out a little too hard. I tried to push through it, but the pain began to escalate so I knew that the best thing to do would be just walk my heart rate back down to zone 1. My chatting runner friends dropped me while I waited a few seconds for recovery. Soon enough I was back to normal trying to bridge the gap I'd created. In a few minutes I found my running buddy walking a bit. I asked if he was okay and he assured me he was fine and quickly attempted to meet my pace. We cruised over the mile 4 marker and I thought "2 to go, let's pick it up." I knew I was hitting pace there and it hurt. My thighs were dying but 2.2 miles was nothing - 20 min max. as we rounded the corner to find the 5 mile mark, I continued to speed up a bit. At a half mile to go, my running buddy completely dropped me. I was disappointed to see how much energy reserve he had as I cruised along, probably now holding a very painful 8:30 pace. Finally seeing the finish line, I picked it up to probably around an 8 min pace, crossing at 2:56:56. Again, breaking 3 hours and a little bit better than last time. In the end, I only kept 9:05 pace and was a bit disappointed, but it was still 19 sec/mile better than my pace at Evergreen.
It was an interesting race and next I'll be met with rolling hills on the bike course of Muncie, IN for conference championships. I took 17th in the collegiate women's group. Kendyl took 14th. Brad took 7th and had the best bike leg in the collegiate men's group by 7 secs!
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