Race Coverage

Metalhead Testudine Boy Rocks...

Wednesday, 29 June 2011 03:00

(ED. - Matt Payne is not only a great athlete / musician / human being, he's also a very interesting writer. This race report is too good and too cool not to rip off and post here. Check out Matt's righteous blog for more words, insight and off-center perspectival stuff. LINK)

By Matthew Payne

Waconia Race Report - So there I am cruising down Highway 5 on the way to the race, music cranking, enjoying my traditional in-car pre-race breakfast of champions (a banana and a can of Ensure chased with a 20oz of Coke), when I see what looked like a little painted turtle on the opposite shoulder. Sadly, roadkill turtles are a somewhat familiar sight in Minnesota this time of year, but this one didn't look like it had been hit. So I slammed on the brakes and pulled a really sketchy, most likely illegal U-turn and circled back to check on the little guy (more likely girl actually, as most of the turtles killed crossing roads are females traveling to/from nesting sites) with the intention of helping it cross the road safely.

Many of you who stumble upon this blog may not know of the depths of my turtle and tortoise nerdery. Well... turtles and tortoises are my favorite animals ever. I have a pet tortoise, I've planned vacations around ...

turtle-related activities, and I regularly donate money to turtle related charities (the Sea Turtle Conservancy and the Turtle Hospital if you happen to have some money burning a hole in your pocket). So it's my personal policy to always stop and make sure any live turtle I see on the road makes it to the other side. Not doing so condemns the turtle in question to death for all intents and purposes. The chances of a turtle making it safely across a road as busy as Hwy. 5 unassisted are pretty much zero.

Sadly, this particular turtle had indeed been hit and was already dead, so this story doesn't really go anywhere other than serving as platform for me to tell you to watch where the hell you're going when you're driving. There's really no excuse for running over a turtle. They're kinda slow... it's not like they'll jump out and surprise you.

With that out of the way...

Waconia is always a highlight of the season. It serves as Minnesota's qualifier for the Best of the US Championship, so the field is always very competitive at the front and this year was no exception. I finished 4th here last year and luckboxed my way into the BOUS race via rolldown when the 3 guys in front of me were unable to go. I ended up finishing 3rd at the championship race, earning myself the somewhat dubious distinction of being the only guy in the history of the competition to place better in the national race than in his state's qualifier. The crazy part about that is that I didn't race poorly at Waconia or out of my head well at BOUS. In both races I did pretty much what I expected out of myself time-wise. Dudes are just that fast around here.

This year my primary goal was to finish in the top 3 so I could qualify legit and not have to worry about the rolldown. That would by no means be an easy mission, as you can pretty much set your clocks by Dan Hedgecock and Patrick Parish going 1-2 at this point. The race for 3rd looked like it could be pretty epic though between me, Alex Hooke and Kevin O'Connor. We've raced each other a ton over the last couple seasons and have proven to be fairly evenly matched.

The Pre-Race Jams

Even without the attempted turtle rescue detour, Waconia is a long damn way from Columbia Heights. Good thing I pulled some solid tunes out of the vault for the journey. Obsolete by Fear Factory is one of my favorite records of all time. It's an industrial metal concept album that tells a story about a Teminator-esque future where the machines have taken over the world. If you're saying, "Wow... that's the nerdiest thing I can imagine and sounds like concentrated female repellant," you'd be absolutely right. But I'm old and married with a kid on the way so I can now say that I love this shit with no shame whatsoever.

The Race

Another race, another ridiculous problem. This time, as I was zipping up the top half of my suit in transition getting ready to head down to the swim start, the stupid zipper popped open and jammed exactly like it did during the swim at Trinona a couple weeks ago. I stood there and wrestled with it for a solid 15 minutes, but I couldn't get it put back together and the start time was rapidly approaching, so eventually I just gave up and resigned myself to doing another race looking like an absolute goofball. Not a super great start to the day.

Since I wasted so much time with my suit, I didn't really get any sort of warmup. I've never been a big believer in the power of the warmup anyway so I wasn't too concerned. I lined up right next to Alex with the intention of trying to stay on his feet the whole way. I stayed with him for maybe 1/3 of the swim, but then I lost him and was stuck swimming alone again. Right after the first turn I got in with 5 or 6 others and we swam as a pack the rest of the way. All in all a reasonably decent swim by my standards, but I'm starting to see a pattern where I swim like a champ for 300-400m then fall off the pace. I'll have to add more race pace swim workouts so I can get more comfortable at that effort and hopefully hold it together a little longer. If I could have stayed on Alex's feet I'd have gained ~30 seconds, which is a serious chunk of time in a race like this.

T1 was pretty meh. I fumbled with my helmet strap for a few seconds and almost ran some girl over at the mount line, but didn't have any major F-ups.

One of the coolest things about Waconia is the banana yellow trike with the giant American flag on the back that serves as a lead vehicle on the bike course. You can spot that thing from a couple miles away, so you always know exactly where you are relative to the race leader. Once we got out of town and onto the open road I was pleasantly surprised to see the trike not more than 30 seconds or so up the road with only 5 bikes in front of me. That meant that with a decent ride I could get to the front of the race by T2, and if I'm on the front at T2 I'm in pretty good shape for a podium spot.

Of course seeing the lead vehicle off in the distance and actually bridging the gap up there are two different things entirely. I caught the first two guys within 3-4 miles and found myself in 4th behind Dan, Alex and Kevin. At around mile 6 I caught Kevin and was sitting in 3rd about 20 seconds back from Dan, with Alex maybe 3-4 seconds up on him. At around mile 10 we turned into the wind and it felt like someone filled my tires with cement. Luckily I was still closing on the guys in front, so they must've been struggling with the wind a bit too.

I finally caught Dan around mile 16 or so. There were a few rounds of back and forth passing as we bridged the gap up to Alex, and I came around and assumed the race lead at about mile 18. I got to revel in the excitement of leading the race for all of about 15 seconds before Alex re-passed me, but hey, for that brief moment in time, I was winning. Some days you've gotta celebrate the small victories.

Maybe 1/2 mile out from T2 Patrick came blasting by seemingly out of nowhere and Dan, not willing to give up an inch to Patrick, bombed down the hill into the park with him. All 4 of us hit T2 together. Patrick and Dan leading the way, then me, then Alex, all spaced less than a second apart.

I got through T2 without incident and hit the run course a couple strides behind Dan and Patrick. I couldn't hear Alex's footsteps behind me, but I knew he should be close. I drilled it out of T2 and managed to stick with Dan and Patrick for the first half mile or so. I was fully aware that given their NCAA D-I run pedigrees I wasn't beating either of them to the line, but I can't be that close to those guys that late in the race and not even try. This also had the nice side effect of putting a decent gap on Alex behind me, with the obvious not-so-nice side effect of me feeling like a cramping, puking pile of dog crap only 1/2 mile into the run.

Once the track stars had broken me off and started disappearing toward the horizon I settled into a more appropriate pace. The run course at Waconia features near constant rolling hills. Nothing super steep, thankfully, but just enough so that you never really feel like you can get into any sort of rhythm. At the turnaround I saw that I had a solid 30 seconds on Alex, so I was still in pretty good shape to grab the final BOUS slot, but I really felt like I was on the verge of falling apart. I must've looked back a dozen times on the return portion of the run, but thankfully nobody was ever there so I was able to cross the line in 3rd.

There's no prize money on offer at Waconia, but they have the next best thing... beer mugs! Crashing out on the couch with a frosty cold one the afternoon after a race is one of life's greatest pleasures. And it's even better when you can drink it right out of your trophy.

So in review... pretty much par for the course: swim was OK, not real good, but not embarrassingly bad, bike was decent, run was poorly paced (although that was a conscious decision on my part) but otherwise serviceable. The end result... the ticket to BOUS is punched and my cupboard has one more beer mug in it. I'll take it!

* Turtles are cool cartilaginous reptilians of the order "Testudine."