After Sables d’olonne we had another long day of travel and
I ended up not getting any training in. What this meant was that I had from
Tuesday-Saturday to get as “in shape” as I could for the Andora Sprint
Triathlon in Italy. I was very nervous about racing for a few reasons, but
mainly because I got hammered on the Tuesday training session. Leading up to
this week I had only gotten 23 hours of training in over the last 16 days –
normally that’s how much quality training I get in 6 days. So here I was with
no food, no car, no internet, no phone, and worst of all no fitness… Great.
Luckily on Wednesday a team mate took me shopping and I got caught
up on sleep, unpacked, and got to breathe a bit. Each day I could feel my
fitness coming back and I was getting more and more excited about racing. After
5 hard sessions and 18 hours of training I was feeling much stronger physically
and more confident mentally on our 2 hour drive from St Raphael, France to
Andora, Italy.
The Race: (There are so many details I wish I could share,
but that would make this post extremely long. So here are the basics of what
happened)
The start was a very chilly 11-12c degree ocean swim with strong
currents and hectic wind chop the entire way. I got to debut my new 2012 BlueSeventy
Helix which kept me warm and comfortable and helped me to exit the water first.
The rough conditions broke things up a bit and I was able to get out on the
bike with one other team mate and a random Italian guy who was just sitting in.
Around one of the corners I threw in a big effort and my team mate and I were
able to drop him. We put our heads down and drilled it for about 5k and I finally
looked back and there was another team mate bridging up. I slowed the pace a
bit and he caught on at around 7k and the three of us went to town and worked
together extremely well in the very windy conditions and after 20k ended up
putting 1:30 on the rest of the field. About 1k from T2 there is a very sharp
downhill 180 degree turn that goes through this extremely small bike tunnel
(about the size of a doorway that goes under a road) and I was in 3rd
position going into this turn and due to where I positioned myself I wasn’t
able to make it into the tunnel and ended up running straight into the wall. I
didn’t crash hard, but I did go down and ended up losing the other two guys and
about 15-20 seconds. Luckily I was only 1k from T2 so I just soloed it in and
transitioned as quickly as possible. The run was a 2 lap flat course where you
could see where the other runners were very easily, so when I started the run I
had both of the leaders in sight. I slowly built my effort until I had passed
the 2nd place guy, and was running right next to the leader at about
2.5k. We then ran together the rest of the race and once we got to the
finishing chute I knew position was very important so I surged just a bit to
make sure I had the lead heading around the 90 degree turn into the final 50m
sprint for the line. Luckily it worked and I was able to out sprint my team
mate Karl Shaw for the win. Our breakaway buddy held on for 3rd
place too which made it an awesome day for St. Raphael Triathlon Club.
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