Race Coverage

Bike Crashes & Hotel Fires...

Sunday, 28 June 2015 00:10

By Heather Lendway (heatherlendway.com)

COPPER CREEK TRI RACE REPORT - I was excited to race another “local” sprint triathlon as they are usually the most fun and I love racing with people I know.  Fellow local pro Patrick Parish joined my dad and me for the ride down to Iowa.  We were able to cram two bikes, all our racing gear and an extra body (Patrick) in the back of the car.  Having a guest in the car was great for conversation and as always having a chauffeur was great for napping the second half of the ride, thanks Greg!

After arriving in Iowa we picked up our packets, dropped Patrick at his hotel, checked into ours, had some dinner and got to bed nice and early.  Thank goodness for earplugs because our hotel was filled with young softball and baseball teams that were quite rowdy, that is until the fire...

alarm went off just after 11pm.  Luckily they had an intercom system in each room to say it was a false alarm and we could stay in our rooms.  That’s the second hotel fire alarm for Greg and I in less than a year!  The rest of the night I was pretty restless and was just waiting for my alarm to sound.

I got to the race site bright and early so I’d have plenty of time to wake up, stretch out, warm up and of course enjoy my coffee!  Gear West teammate Suzie Fox was also racing and joined me in transition pretty early on.  Just over two weeks getting back into workouts after being very sick, I didn’t have high expectations for the race.  I had my first run speed workout a few days before and a couple solid bike workouts which were sub-par, so I knew it was going to be tough.  The course was fairly straight forward: out and back with rolling hills for the bike and a mostly out and back run with a couple miles of hills. READ MORE