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Wednesday, 04 July 2012 02:30

Trinona and Minneman Recaps

By Dan Hedgecock (danhedgecock.blogspot.com)

Three weeks ago I raced at Trinona for the first time. It was a great time. Their race slogan is some strength re-structuring and I was pleased with the second place to Thompson. Matt Payne, Alex Hook and I pushed each other on the bike which is always fun.

It was an actually hot day, with the heat index in the upper 90's and coming off the bike 3+ minutes behind David I knew I wasn't going to do better than second. That may have been a good thing though. I took the run easy and instead of feeling zapped for the next week like I sometimes do I was able to keep right on training.

Best part of Trinona: the classic drive-in just off the lake with homemade rootbeer and $1.50 hamburgers. I don't think I've ever tasted anything as delicious as that float after such a hot race.

Results: http://www.mtecresults.com/race/show/799

This weekend I did the inaugural olympic distance Minneman race. Like Trinona, the bike was longer than standard, about 26 miles, and the swim was a little short, but it's a very fast course with no hills in it. It seemed hotter than it was, only in the 80's. I felt better on the swim than I have before which is always a nice way to start a race. Devon Palmer went way off course on the swim and I almost followed his pack but realized the mistake quickly enough to only tack on 20 or 30ish seconds to my swim. I think if the swim was a full 1500, and I hadn't gone off course my time would have been somewhere in the low 20 minute range. One of my big goals this season is to swim in the 19 minute range for the olympic distance and I'm making progress. Sometimes it's frustrating and seems like I'll never get there. But I always remember that when I started running, it took everything I had just to break 5 minutes in the mile, and after a few years of training I would run 5k's at 4:35 pace. Rome wasn't built in a day and I'll keep at it in the pool.

I wanted to bike fast, especially on this flat course, and decided to really push the pace on the second of the two bike loops. Looking at my power data afterwards I'm happy to see that I averaged 276 watts (3.9/kg) for the course. It's hard to tell because the course is long, but this was strong enough to average 26.6mph. If it had been the standard 24.8 miles my bike split would have been somewhere just under 56mins. It's good to see my bike times continue to drop. Getting in good interval workouts now and again is really helping with the strength I've lacked on the bike until this year. Now I can get back to doing some run workouts to get my legs back under me. I didn't feel very quick on the run, but after putting in solid miles and bike workouts the past couple weeks it's not a big concern. There's still plenty of time until Du World's this September.

Results: http://www.pigmantri.com/jmsracing/results12/mnman12b.html