The Nautica NYC marked the beginning of my 2008 triathlon race season. The event, an Olympic distance triathlon (1500m swim, 40km bike, 10km run), was a pretty lightweight challenge given my Ironman training and was a good chance to just go all out and see how I could do. From the moment I got out of the water, I had planned to go as hard as possible and, in the end, this seemed like a pretty successful strategy.
My only beef these days with Olympic triathlons is that they're pretty short for the amount of preparation involved. Having not raced anything but road races since my Half Ironman last October, I had completely forgotten what goes into a race weekend. On Saturday, I spent an hour checking in at the official race hotel and then took it easy for the afternoon. Later that evening, I hauled over to the west end of Manhattan to get my bike checked in and prep my transition area.
By the time I arrived home from all of this, it was 9PM and I still hadn't started getting my nutrition and swim and run equipment ready. It took about two hours to get everything ready (since I hadn't done real race prep in so long) and by 11 I was finally ready for bed.
I managed to squeeze in 5 hours of sleep and then got up so I could eat a little and get down to the race site. Although my wave didn't leave until 7am, the race started quite early and the transition area was closing at 5:45.
Unfortunately, when I went downstairs, I found that a massive party had gone down and a bunch of drunk people had moved all my nicely prepared gear in every direction. After 30 minutes of scrambling to find my heartrate monitor, shoes, wetsuit, etc. I was finally out the door. I greeted the local corner drug dealer and hopped in a cab headed down to the west side.
The transition area buzzed even though it was only 5am. I took my time doing final preparations on my bike and running gear and laying things out nicely. At 5:30, I met up with other guys on my team; we all Body-Glided up, grabbed our wetsuits and made the 1 mile trek uptown to the swim start.
The race consisted of swimming about a mile down the Hudson River, hitting transition, biking north on an out-and-back 40 km bike course, transitioning again and then making the final haul--a 10km run--into and around Central Park.
The swim went quite well, although currents weren't nearly as favourable as expected. I tried to do some drafting but the group broke up a fair amount and this was tough. Adding to the difficulty was avoiding the many jellyfish--only got stung 4 times-- and navigating around the physically challenged wave. (As an aside, hats off to these champions. Everything from the legally blind to people with various amputations, these guys really made you realize what can be accomplished with hard work and dedication.)
I finished the swim in about 22 minutes, jump up on the make-shift pier and gunned it to transition. I wasn't really sure how far back I was but I suspected that my swim had been pretty weak (I've neglected this leg far too much this year). As I ran towards transition (which was more than 500m away), I passed a bunch of guys. This was all in keeping with my plan to go as hard as possible and not worry about blowing up.
Out on the bike, I blew past a bunch of people in my age category in the first 20 minutes. Then, I just started picking off people from the swim waves that had left 30 minutes before me. My legs were screaming, especially on the hills, but I settled into a decent pace and felt reasonably good out on the bike. The aero helmet and Zipp 404s really added to my confidence and, in the end, I think I took down about 400 people on the ride.
Getting back into transition, I was worried about my legs. I hadn't done much short course preparation this year and was pretty sure that a hard ride was going to kill me on the run. But, in the end, the legs were pretty good. I made it out of transition, worked my way up the first hill and then picked up my pace as I headed for the Park.
Things didn't start to really hurt until about mile 4 of the run and, at this point, I was so close to the end that I just sucked it up. There was a brief moment of in-the-mouth-vomitting but other than that, things went pretty well. Passed a good number of people on the run and gunned it at the end. Crossing the finish line, I had no feeling for how I'd done in my age category, but given that I nearly fell over a few steps after finishing, I knew that I had given it my best. I was also quite happy with my 2:25:29 as it was a personal record.
A day later, I checked online and found out that I had come 3rd for U25 men and had qualified for the age group national championships out in Dallas. Now, I'm just debating if I can race those post-Ironman. More to come on that front.
And now for a few pictures from the race...
On the way out on the bike, drinking from my aero bottle.
Downhill coming back around kilometre 21.
Drinking from the aero bottle.
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