After the
Cozumel/Tongyeong double, I found out I had gotten bit by a spider back in
Korea. When I got home my foot was twice the size and I could barely walk. I
ended up having to take 4 full days off doing anything until the swelling went
down. This wasn’t the ideal preparation for my final race of the season, but it
fell right in line with how the rest of my season had been going. Luckily I’ve
been dealing with stuff like this throughout the year and so I just carried on with
business as usual without too big of a fuss.
I got a chance
to drive down to the Olympic training center in Chula Vista, CA the week before
the race and do some tests and have a few high performance meetings with the
USAT crew. It was a fun week leading up to the race and I was stoked to finally
be finishing off the season even though the preparation hadn’t been ideal.
The double
super sprint race format was killer, 300m swim, 8k bike, and 2.5k run - all
twice through with no break. Lars Finanger is doing an amazing job of bringing
the supersprint format into the USA triathlon limelight. The whole race was
filmed by Universal Sports which made for an awesome race environment. Most of
the athletes did interviews beforehand that would later be used in the
broadcast, and one of the questions I was asked before the race was “what is
your ideal race?” Surprisingly my “best case scenario” answer ended up playing out
exactly how I had hoped!
I lead the
first swim out and drilled the first lap on the bike. Starting the second of 8
laps Ben Kanute and Eric Lagerstrom had joined me and from there we worked
flawlessly together and put a solid buffer of time on the rest of the field.
The three of us stayed together from the second lap of the bike all the way
until the final run when Ben put the hammer down and was able to sprint away
for the win, beating me by just .6 of a second! It was a fantastic race for the
end of the season!
Right after
the Men’s race, Lars set up a two person “team relay” where each team member did 300m
swim, 4k bike, and 1.5k run. There were men/men teams, and men/women teams with
$500 in prize money for the fastest team overall, and the fastest co-ed team. I
got picked by Sara Mclarty and the two of us ended up winning not only the
co-ed prize, but we beat all the guy/guy teams too and won the overall! That was
probably the highlight of the day.
After this
race I started my 3 week offseason and was able to go on an awesome road trip
with Katie Hursey.
For all the
sheisty things that went down this season, I’m definitely on the upswing mentally
and physically and am looking forward to next season and Olympic points
qualification starting!
No comments:
Post a Comment