Race Coverage

"The Race of My Life"....

Thursday, 20 September 2012 02:10

Hy-Vee 5150 US Champs Race Report - When I left my job at Target I dedicated everything I had to training and racing and spent the last two years relying on the help of friends and family to chase after the foolhardy dream of being a professional triathlete. Most of the time my life feels like a bi-polar disorder. Sometimes I'm training completely alone in the freezing cold pitch black of a Minnesota winter and sometimes I'm spending Monday afternoon riding my road bike on gorgeous rural roads with great friends. Sometimes I'm dropping huge chunks of time in training and doing workouts I couldn't have seriously considered just a....

few weeks earlier and sometimes I'm irrevocably stuck in the same place I've been in training for the last 6 months, no matter how many hours I spend staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool. The time has been everything from immensely rewarding to painfully frustrating. But this weekend made me appreciate every moment of it. After all of the hardship and focus I had a breakthrough race at the biggest race of my life, Hy-Vee. I won a car and a $6,000 gift certificate which is obviously huge from the financial side of my life. But the win also validated everything that I've done so far and given me confidence to keep plugging away even when it seems like winter will never end or I'll never swim fast enough or not feel an exhausted zombie. So right now I'm stuck with a huge smile on my face, but I'm not finished. It's really just getting started, and I'm looking forward to all the highs, but I'm also looking forward to all the lows.

The race this weekend was set-up starting two weeks ago at Age Group Nationals in Burlington VT. I had a pretty mediocre race there that I kicked off with a painfully slow swim. I had the 134th fastest swim, which brought me out of the water a full 4 minutes and 40 seconds behind Adam Webber... ouch. After that I pulled myself together and finished 3rd overall behind Brian Duffy and Drew Scott. I wanted to be in top form, but in reality the race was still a tune-up. Hy-Vee and Duathlon Worlds are the peak for my season, and because Du Worlds is 3 weeks after Hy-Vee I couldn't taper at all for Age Groups. If I had, I wouldn't be able to hold that top form for another 5 full weeks and would probably suffer for it at Du Worlds. So instead I used the race to