Race Coverage
He's Back! We Think...
-
Wednesday, 26 August 2015 02:10
Photo - Conditions during the race were kinda yucky. But as so often happens, the weather got good after the last finisher crossed. Why is that? Enjoying the new sunshine here are Waseca 1/3 winners Rich Heilman and Suzie Fox.
In 1996 when Rich Heilman was 32, he was one of the most successful amateur long distance guys in the US. At Long Course Worlds in Muncie, Indiana, he finished 3rd overall in the amateur competition.
A few years later, Rich disappeared from the regional and national tri scene in order to do life stuff. Over the next decade and a half he popped up on the tri grid a time or two, usually at an out-of-state Ironman, but not often enough to suggest that he would return to regional prominence.
Then Heilman, now 50, showed up at this year’s Lake Marion Olympic Triathlon. He didn’t look much older than he did in the 90s and still had his infuriating 30-inch waist and 5% body fat.
He finished 2nd overall in that race.
Is he back? It was too soon to tell....
Then he showed up at Waseca last Sunday. The day was kinda yucky, windy as a banshee, grey, chilly and dank. Despite what appeared to be a long swim—splits resembled those you’d see in a half IM, not a mile—Rich did what he used to do. He worked his way to the front, and stayed there. Though Mitch Brekke, 26, who’s enjoying a breakout season, was able to match the cincogenarian’s bike and run splits, his two-plus minute deficit coming out of the water would be the margin by which he would be beaten. Still, the young man from bucolic Hartland, a 300-person hamlet not far from the Iowa border, had much to celebrate: a 2nd place finish in a sub-3 hour time, which don’t come easy when the weather is kinda yucky.
Heilman’s winning time was 2:56:33, which was more than ten minutes faster than any 50-plusser had gone in the seven-year history of this totally cool event.
Is he back? We think so and expect to see him often on the local and regional scene in 2016, where he'll duke it out, as he had done in the prior millennium, with Kevin and Tony and Brian et al for Master of the Year consideration. We're totally looking forward to that.
Placing third overall was Suzie Fox, Minnesota’s winningest woman this season. Her goal was to take down Cathy Yndestad’s ridiculously fast women’s CR (2:56:16). She knew early on that the weather and the long swim would nixed her original goal. And the fact that she had raced the Maple Grove Du, which she won, the day before, would make things even more difficult. Run-bike-runs require serious recovery time.
Was a sub-3-hour effort possible? Maybe. But a more reasonable goal would be to finish in the space between Yndestad’s CR and the event’s 2nd fastest time, Nicole “Heiney” Heininger’s 3:02:25.
Fox’s bike and run splits were circumstantially outstanding and delivered her to the finishing line in the impressive time of 3:01:08. It capped the second two-victory weekend of the season for Fox, and her 2015 win total is now nine, and 31 for her career, which began in 2009.
Fox’s podiummates were Rochester’s Alexandra Cohen (3:24:25), who placed 3rd at RochesterFest Olympic back on June 21 and prefers to be called "Alex," and Mankato’s Becca Lewis (3:31:21), who is a big fan of Ellie Goulding’s music and even sang along with two of the British pop star’s tunes that were broadcast on the event’s PA.
Unsurprisingly, only two divisional records were rewritten, one being Heilman’s in the 50-54M category, the other belonging to Denny Ellingson, whose 3:22:52 lowered the 60-64M mark by more than 19 minutes. RESULTS
