Race Recap: The Charleston Sprint Triathlon

[Posting this belatedly; it originally appeared in the Charlotte Running Club newsletter and I wanted to wait until it showed up there before posting here. But I'm adding a few bonus pictures, so perhaps it was worth the wait!]

It’s the sort of thought that crops up in every runner’s mind at one point or another: Why not try a triathlon? After all, you can already do the hard part, right? For me it happened this winter as I was rehabbing from an injured glute. I was already swimming and biking as part of the rehab; why not see what I could do in a triathlon?

I decided to sign up for two: a “practice” sprint tri in May, and an olympic tri for my “real” one in July. A couple days ago I completed triathlon number 1, a race in the Charleston Sprint Triathlon series. Here’s how it went.

One thing that’s pretty intimidating about a triathlon from a runner’s perspective is the vast array of gear that is necessary — even if you’re going “bare bones” like I was. You’ve got to have a tri suit, one you can wear for the swim, bike, and run. You need a bike, of course, but also biking shoes (ideally “tri bike shoes,” designed to be put on and removed quickly), and some system for laying out your gear. You can even buy a “tri mat” specifically for this purpose. I chose to use an “old towel.” There are specialized tri racing flats (I used my regular flats, sacrificing 15 or 20 seconds because I had to manually tie them and arrange their floppy tongues as I slid them on).

When I showed up for the race, I didn’t know the most basic things, like where to put my bike and how to get from the swim finish to the bike start. I had only learned how to operate my GPS in “tri mode” a couple weeks before. But there were other newbies around, and I listened to them as they asked veterans the same questions I would have asked, and so I figured out basically what to do. I chatted with another veteran and told him I was mostly a runner and this was my first tri. He said he knew I’d do great.

Before I knew it, the elites were in the water. My group would be starting about 20 minutes later. That 20 minutes flew by, and soon I was in the water waiting for my group’s start announcement. One cool thing about tris is that everyone’s age gets written on their body in permanent ink; it’s easy to see who’s in your age group. My group (age 45-49) started together, all wearing white swim caps (that’s me in the blue top):

Note that I'm standing near the back; I'm not expecting much here!

This race was a 600-yard swim, a 12-mile ride, an a 5k run. Swimming was my weakest discipline, so I mainly wanted to not finish last in my age group. I was surprised to find that I was in the middle of the pack.

Bonus shot of me finishing the swim!

Since my training swims were 1000 to 1500 meters, this one went by quickly, and soon I was out of the water and on my way to the bike. After fumbling with my shoes and helmet, I ran to the bike start and clumsily hopped on. No flying mount for me; it took a few seconds to clip in, but soon, I was off, flying down the road, even passing a few cyclists along the way. I was cooking! Or so I thought, until a cyclist who wasn’t even in the race passed me like I was standing still!

I was still feeling the lingering effects of my glute injury so I didn’t want to push too hard on the ride. I could feel the strain on my legs every time I tried to pick up the pace, so I backed off but tried not to go embarrassingly slow. There were a few tight turns, but fortunately this race had plenty of volunteers to let you know when a dangerous corner was coming up, so they were no problem. Then a guy in my age group passed me. This meant war! But I sized him up and decided that he didn’t really have a runner’s build, so I eased off again and waited for my moment to pass him back during the run. The end of the ride came quickly; I slammed on the brakes and narrowly avoided crashing in to the woman ahead of me. I hopped of the bike and tried to shuffle to the bike rack as quickly as possible in my cycling shoes:

I'm amazed that some folks managed this transition in under 30 seconds

As I struggled to lace up my racing flats, the veteran I’d been chatting with before the race showed up and said “go get’em — this is your strength!” I was trying to figure out if he was already finished (he was in a group ahead of me) or I’d caught up with him. No time for that; I finished lacing up, grabbed my running hat and race belt, and headed out for the run:

Making sure to start the Garmin!

Soon I was passing runner after runner. Many were even walking. I was going slower than I was used to running in a 5k, but it was all I could do on my injured glute; it was motivating to seek-and-destroy the other runners, but depressing that I wasn’t hitting the kind of pace I was used to doing pre-injury.

Midway through the run

A familiar pose - checking the Garmin!

As expected, I passed the guy in my age group who had passed me on the ride. I passed a couple other guys in my group, too. It was frustrating to not be able to run as fast as I had before my injury, but kind of neat to be doing so well compared to many others.

Soon I was headed for the finish line:

Yeehaw!

It wasn’t quite as fast as I’d hoped to go in my “dream scenario” but it wasn’t bad either; I ended up fifth out of fifteen in my age group, many of whom had much slicker gear and tri-gizmos than I did. The other participants were friendly and supportive, and the overall vibe was fun. Overall stats:

Swim: 13:29 over 600 yards (2:16/100)
T1: 1:22
Ride: 35:24 over 12 miles (20.3 mph)
T2: 1:29
Run: 22:10 over 5k (7:08/mi)
Total: 1:13:53

I’m still not sure I’m sold on tris; I definitely don’t think I like them as much as road racing, but I’ll probably throw one into my schedule every now and then, even after I’m fully recovered from my injury. Maybe you should, too!

The Garmin record of my race is below:

The things you'll do to settle a debate!

Two years ago, two friends and I set out on a crazy hike through Linville Gorge, NC. The terrain was difficult, but the scenery was gorgeous, and we had a fantastic time. But one issue was left unresolved: Should we have taken that climb out of the gorge two years ago?

Basically, the question was as follows. About 5 miles from the end of the route, there is a choice to be made. After a difficult riverside trail featuring much bushwhacking / getting lost, the trail splits. One path continues down the river, only to peter out about a mile from our goal. The other path is clearly marked, but heads 1500 vertical feet straight up the side of the gorge before descending back to the finish. Which path would you take? These maps illustrate the problem.

Here's the route of our run:

The area in question is highlighted at the lower left. Now take a look at this map of the area:

Notice that the trail along the river (Trail 7) ends before reaching the Mountains to Sea Trail (Trail 14) at the bottom of the map. The Linville Gorge Trail is the very trail that had been so difficult to follow, and now it looks like it ended completely. Tristan argued that it would be easier to follow this trail, then navigate along the river for the final mile. I said it made more sense to take the Pinch-off trail (Trail 21) up to the highway (actually a gravel road) which connected directly with Mountains to Sea (Trail 14). In the end, we went my way, but for two years Tristan insisted he was right.

So now, two years later, we were going to do the entire route again, but this time we'd take Tristan's route no matter what, then decide whose plan was better. This time, the plan was to hike in two miles to a camp on Shortoff Mountain Friday night, run the entire 22-mile loop without backpacks on Saturday, camp again Saturday night, then hike out Sunday morning.

As before, I picked up our permits Friday morning, but this year I took the opportunity to get in a shakeout run near Linville Falls. It was a perfect day for a run, and the falls were gorgeous:

Then I drove to the other end of the gorge and hiked up to save a campsite for the group. This year there would be five of us: Me, Tristan, Jeff, Sam, and Jon. We stayed in a beautiful spot with views of the gorge, and Jon even carried up cold beers for us to drink by the fire!

Jon and Jeff enjoy their beers Friday evening

The next day we arose with the sun and got ready for the epic run. Soon we were out on the trail on a gorgeous day. The first part of the trail was flat-to-rolling, and very runnable, with spectacular views of the gorge.

I get a selfie while Jeff takes a more traditional shot of the gorge

Yep, it's scenic up here!

After this the trail got a little tougher, but there were still some runnable sections. The group began to split up a bit but we reassembled for a photo in the middle of a big climb:

Sam is *not* standing on a rock. Nosiree, he's really that tall!

At Mile 10 we arrived at the river, where everyone had a different method for getting across. Jon hopped across a precarious gap. Sam attempted the same maneuver but had to jump in the water when he dropped his bottle. Jeff rock-hopped but then had to bushwack his way back to the trail. I tossed my gear to Jon and swam across. I'm not sure how Tristan made it; he was already hiking out the trail on the other side when I arrived.

The next 5 miles were the same challenging navigation experiment I remembered from last year. Jeff and I stuck together while Jon and Sam bounded ahead. The miles passed slowly as it the trail was rocky and barely runnable at all, when we could find it.

Finally we arrived at the point where the Pinch-in Trail split off from the Linville Gorge Trail. I told Jeff that I was planning on staying on the Gorge trail but it was possible that there would be bushwhacking. He said he didn't have a map so he had to stay with me. Off we went!

Amazingly, as soon as we started down this route, the trail improved, and was once again quite runnable. At some point, according to my map, the trail was going to peter out, but for now it looked great. After a mile or so we caught up with Tristan, who was grinning from ear to ear.

"So what do you think about this trail, Dave?" He asked.

"So far, it looks like you're right," I said.

"You see!"

"But we haven't gotten to the part where the trail disappears yet, remember?"

We pressed on, but Tristan grew more confident with every step that his route was the best. But then, suddenly we were off trail again. Tristan had an advanced GPS with maps, and said we needed to ford the river to pick up a different trail that wasn't on my paper map. My plan was to stick with Tristan, so I said "sure," and we waded across. We wandered around the woods for a few minutes, and I began to wonder if this was the part where we would start to regret this decision. But then we found the trail again, and all was well for another couple miles, until we had to ford the river again.

This was a pretty difficult crossing, and Jeff caught a great photo of me stumbling across:

Once we were across, however, the trail was easy to find, and it was flat double-track. There was no doubting that Tristan's route was easier, even with the two extra fords.

Soon we hooked back up with the Mountains to Sea Trail and climbed back up to our campsite, where Jon had another beer for each of us and I was able to create a burrito feast for the group.

As we sat enjoying our beers, the burritos, and the view, Tristan asked "So Dave, when are you going to apologize?"

"Apologize?" I said. "I agree that you were right, but now you want an apology?"

"Yes, Yes I do."

I certainly wasn't going to accommodate this request. What was he going to ask for next? But Tristan persisted in demanding an apology.

Now I think I know what we're going to debate for the next two years!

Below is the GPS of our epic run!

Can I use 5k time to predict Beer Mile time?

Next week I will be timing a variation on a Beer Mile: a Beer relay. In this event, the rules are pretty simple. Each team has two members, who proceed as follows:

1. Teammate #1 drinks a beer and runs a half-mile
2. Teammate #2 drinks a beer and runs a half mile
3. Repeat 1 and 2 above.

As a timer, this presents an interesting difficulty: How many people can do this event at once without chaos ensuing?

My initial hunch is that we can time 50 teams at once. But if 50 runners are passing through the finish line area in roughly the same amount of time, this could be problematic. Then we'd have the craziness of those runners finishing and their teammates trying to chug beers, and it might not be possible to keep track of everyone to identify the winners (we're tracking the top male, female, and mixed teams).

What I'm hoping is that beer-chugging ability and running ability will naturally sort everyone out, and the runners will be nicely spread out by the time they reach the finish, even after just a half mile. This is certainly what happens in the 5Ks we time. In fact, I have lots of data about real-world 5K times from all the races I have timed to back this up. But just because runners spread out over 5K doesn't mean they'll spread out as much over a half mile.

So I decided to take a little survey in a couple different running groups I participate in. I asked three questions:

1. What is your 5K PR?
2. How fast can you run a half-mile (805 meters)?
3. How fast can you chug a 12-ounce (355 ml) beer?

What I wanted to know is how well peoples' 5k times correlate to their half-mile and beer-chugging times. Thirty-one people responded, and after removing three folks who are either freakishly slow in the half-mile or accidentally entered their half-marathon time instead of half-mile time, I created this chart of the results:

Click for a larger version

The chart correlates half-mile time (blue) and beer-chug time (red) to 5K PRs. As you can see, half-mile time correlates pretty well with 5K PR. The R-squared value for that data suggests that 5K time explains about 48 percent of the variance in half-mile times. By contrast, 5K time explains only 8 percent of the variance in beer-chugging times. The beer-chug times are all over the map!

So how would that correspond to an actual race? Well, if everyone who answered the survey completed the first lap of the race in the times indicated in the survey, the finish would look like this:

There might be a little bunching among the first 5 or 6 finishers (four runners are each predicted to arrive after a total of 180 seconds), but after that things spread out quite nicely. And let's not forget, these survey respondents, members of running clubs, are faster than your typical 5K runner; the slowest among my respondents reported a sub-30-minute 5K, whereas in the last 5K I timed, 73 percent of the participants were slower than 30 minutes! Also, I think it's reasonable to expect that running times will be unequally affected by the consumption of beer, with some runners able to shrug off those effects more easily than others.

But to answer the initial question in this post, how does 5K time correlate to Beer-Mile time? We can't know for sure since we don't know how the beer consumption will affect running pace, but assuming its effects are negligible, this chart correlates 5K PR to total time for chugging a beer and running a half-mile:

The R-squared value suggests that this correlation may be significant; 5K time explains 50 percent of the variance in first-lap Beer Relay time. But of course, we won't know for sure until we run the actual race!

Race Recap: The Bloomsday Run

Ever since my in-laws moved to Spokane a couple years ago, they have been pressing me to run in the Bloomsday Run, one of the biggest road races in the world. It's just a 12K (7.46 miles), but for decades, tens of thousands of Northwesterners have been converging on this event in early May.

This year I finally had the chance to do it. Unfortunately, the corrals for the race are seeded a little oddly. Instead of going by straight pace, behind the elite runners, Corporate Cup runners get the next placement. Thousands of runners, from Alex the department assistant who's only run 7.5 miles once in his life, to some guy in accounting who is three years out of college when he could run a 30-minute 10k, all line up together in what can only be described as pandemonium.

Next to the Corporate Cup runners are about 500 folks like me, who aren't fast enough to be elite but are faster than most of the Corporate Cuppers. Here I am lined up at the start of the race:

This is about 15 minutes before the start. It was totally packed when the gun went off!

When the gun sounded, it was pandemonium as the crowd struggled to sort itself into proper pacing groups. I've heard horror stories about this race being clogged up for the first two miles. I managed to fall in with folks running my pace after about a half-mile, but it still wasn't ideal. I don't see why Bloomsday can't sort people better according to pace. They do it at Peachtree (an even bigger race), breaking runners into much smaller groups of like-paced runners, and the start is much more organized, allowing folks to start running at their target pace right away.

My goal for this race was a 7-minute pace, which would mean finishing in just over 52 minutes. This is considerably slower than I would be running if I hadn't gotten injured in February, but it would represent my fastest run since the injury over this distance. Since it was a hilly course, the plan was to run the flat Mile 1 at about a 7:00 pace, then bank some time in Mile 2 which included a huge downhill.

After starting the first mile at about a 7:30 pace I ended up running it in 6:55. This means I probably ran the second half of the mile too fast. Mile 2, however, went as planned, and I finished it in 6:38. During Mile 3 I knew I'd probably see my friend Barb, who is a sports-med doc and was working the medical tent. Sure enough, she saw me and got a photo as I climbed some of this mile's 85 feet of gain:

So far, so good!

Mile 3 went by in 7:08, about right since it was mostly uphill. Mile 4 rolled by in 7:06. Next was a dramatic downhill followed by the first half of "Doomsday Hill," the legendary 140-foot climb under the pounding sun. I tried to bank some pace on the downhill, then crossed the Spokane River and headed up Doomsday. As I climbed, I motivated myself by the fact that I could see the top of the hill, and maintained a steady pace all the way up. Pace for Mile 5 was a respectable 7:33. Now all I'd have to do was pick the pace back up to 7:00 for the final 2.5 miles.

Checking my watch. I'm surprised all my race photos don't look like this!

The problem with Doomsday Hill isn't so much the hill, it's the fact that you don't get any relief after the hill. At the "top," the road actually continues gradually uphill for another half-mile. It was excruciating trying to pick up the pace. I could only muster a 7:31 for Mile 6. Mile 7 wasn't any better despite finally flattening out: 7:34.

I knew Greta, Jim, and Marion (my mother in law) would be waiting for me around Mile 7, so I kept watch for them. I finally spotted them at around 7.2, and Greta got a picture:

I'm trying to smile through the pain

Now it was just a matter of the sprint to the finish. I picked up the pace as best as I could, but others around me did much better; I was probably passed by 10 guys in the final quarter-mile, and I only mustered a 7:07 pace for that last half-mile. Overall my official time was 53:53, a little slower than planned, with an average 7:14 pace. This was good for 40th in my age group (out of 1,241), so still fairly respectable given my injury. If I had been injury free I think I might have been able to finish about 7 minutes faster, which would have put me in the top 10. Maybe next time!

But I wasn't the only person who struggled over those last 2.5 miles. A guy came up to me at the finish and told me that he had been just a few steps behind me the entire race. So it wasn't just me who found those final "flat" miles to be the toughest.

Here are a couple of shots of me after the finish:

Walking across the bridge after we've finished

That's the start line behind me. I had finished but thousands were still just getting started!

Me and the Bloomsday sculpture; the runners are sporting previous years' finisher shirts!

All in all it was a fun experience! It was awesome being a part of such an epic event! Details of my race are below.

Race Recap: The Leatherwood 10-miler

Last year I tried to run the Leatherwood 50-miler but was stymied by terrible conditions. Due to the crazy amounts of mud and rain I decided to drop out after just 50k. But I loved the venue, especially the opportunity to stay in a beautiful cabin with spectacular views of the Appalachians.

So it didn't take long for my running buddies Sam and Tristan to convince me to head back to Leatherwood, this time to run the 10-mile event. Surely that wouldn't be too difficult, right?

That was before I had injured myself badly in another race known for tough trails, the Uwharrie 8-miler. Now, just two months later, I was getting ready to run another tough trail race, still only partially recovered from my injury. At least our cabin had a good view:

The best thing about this view: It's not raining! It had been raining in Davidson all week long, and I had been checking the weather in Ferguson where the race would be held, and the weather was similar. On Thursday night before the Saturday race I had gotten absolutely drenched on a trail run at home. But fortunately the rain tapered off on Friday and there was no rain to speak of for a solid 24 hours before the race.

On Saturday morning Tristan, Hope, Sam's wife Stephanie, and I were ready for the 10-miler. Sam and Phyllis had already started the 50k. Here we are heading out the door of our cabin:

From left: Me, Tristan, Stephanie, and Hope

We drove down to the starting area, and before we knew it we were off. The 10-mile race started with a mile of a gradual climb up a paved road. I settled in behind Tristan, who had 4 runners ahead of him. My plan was to go hard on the uphills and easy on the downhills, since I needed to do some hill training anyways and there was less chance of a bad fall on the climbs.

After about a mile we turned onto the trail and immediately headed straight up a steep ascent. Soon Tristan and I were both walking. But after a while I decided I wanted to alternate walk-running, so I passed Tristan. Then I passed the guy ahead of Tristan. Suddenly I was in fourth place, third male in a race that I had been thinking of as a hard workout, not really a race.

I made it up to the top of the first major climb well ahead of Tristan and the guy ahead of him, who was wearing a Miller Beer shirt. As soon as we started the descent, I could hear Miller Man's footsteps behind me. We got to another climb before he caught me, and I pulled away again. The next runner ahead of me was a woman, who despite the 15 percent grades and 700-foot climb, never once stopped to walk. With my walk-run strategy I was gaining ground, but as soon as the trail leveled off, she pulled away. Soon after that, Miller Man passed me as well. My strategy was to not push too hard during the flats and downhills, mainly to avoid another bad fall, but also because I felt like I wasn't fit enough aerobically to run the whole race hard. The longest run I had done since my previous injury was only 12 miles, on much mellower terrain than I'd be seeing today.

When we arrived at the first aid station, 3 miles in, Miller Man was still in sight. But I wasn't carrying anything and definitely needed some water, so I stopped long enough to gulp down two cups. Then we headed down an extended hill on a gravel road. I decided that since this wasn't a trail I could afford to open it up a little here, so I did, keeping Miller Man in sight until we started the next climb. Miller Man was definitely walk-running the hills, so I made up a lot of ground as we climbed about a 400-foot ascent in Mile 4. But when we reached the top, he was still ahead of me, and pulled away quickly on the downhill. It looked like I was a solid 5th place for now, but I knew the second half of the race was mostly downhill, so I figured Tristan at least would catch up to me there.

In Mile 6 we hit another doozy of a climb. It just kept going up and up, and I had to take longer and longer walk-breaks. This graph shows you both the elevation profile and my cadence over the course of the race:

Yep, that's hilly!

The spots where the cadence drops below 150 are my walk-breaks. I think the four dots above 200 are just anomalies. As you can see, there's a big climb in Mile 6, and at the top it just keeps climbing some more. Finally I started descending again, and once again, this was a fairly smooth gravel road, so I allowed myself to run fairly hard in this section. Every once in a while I looked over my shoulder to see if Tristan was there, but I never saw him. Finally at Mile 8 I arrived at the aid station again.

The morning had warmed up and I was drenched with sweat, so I stopped and drank four cups of water and ate a cookie. Then I headed down the only really technical section of the course. I kept repeating the mantra, "Take it easy; you're not racing," while secretly hoping to myself that I'd somehow catch up to Miller Man and snag third-place male. The trail was muddy, but nothing like what it had been last year, and I was wearing much grippier shoes. I really didn't even have anything approaching a close call, let alone a fall. Finally I emerged on to the pavement and just started running as fast as I could. There was no one ahead of me and no one behind that I could see. I had fourth place locked up. I ran the last mile in a 7:14 pace and cruised across the finish line, where Sam was as surprised to see me as I was to see him.

He knew I was running the race conservatively, so didn't think I'd finish as quickly as I did — my overall time was 1:45:37 unofficially, 4th male and 5th overall. I knew he had a long way to go in the 50k so I was wondering why he was there. He had decided to drop out, since he had another 50k next week and wasn't feeling well after battling a cold the week before.

Tristan came in about 10 minutes behind me, with Stephanie a couple minutes later, finishing 4th female to match my 4th male finish. Hope, who had been thinking she might have to hike the entire race due to a knee injury, ended up running much more than she thought, and had a good race.

Phyllis, on the other hand, absolutely killed the 50k, running a negative split and getting the first overall female trophy:

Well done!

After the race, I headed back up to the cabin for a shower and enjoyed the best part of the weekend: Hanging out with my friends on the balcony of our beautiful temporary home!

It doesn't get any better than this!

I was relieved to have survived the race, and boy did those post-race beverages taste great!

The Garmin details of my race are below:

Guesstimating my lifetime miles

As the bio suggests, I got serious about running relatively recently, but I've been running almost my whole life. A friend of mine posted his lifetime total miles, and it got me wondering how many miles I've run, and whether I've run more miles before or since I started training more seriously.

Naturally I decided to see if I could come up with a reasonable estimate of the total number of miles I have run in my life.

I got my first Garmin in September of 2010, about 4.5 years ago. I had started building up my mileage in anticipation of my first marathon about 6 months before that. Up to that point, with the exception of a couple years when I tried my hand at half-marathons, I never ran much more than three or four miles at a time. But I was a consistent runner, logging 3 or 4 miles a day for 5 days out the the week.

So I figured I averaged 15 miles a week for the years before I got my Garmin, starting my sophomore year in high school when I joined the cross country team.

But there were some years when I didn't run much, toward the end of high school, and again when we had babies. My best recollection is that I had 7 non-running years. So since I'm now 48, that means I ran about 15 miles a week for about 21.5 years before I started keeping track of my mileage.

Here's the calculation I made:

So based on this estimate, I still have a ways to go before my logged runs surpass my unlogged runs. Assuming I continue at the rate I've been running for the past 4.5 years, it could happen as soon as a year and a half from now!

Recap: CMS Bike Time Trial (or, I really have no clue what I'm doing)

As a part of my recovery from injury, since I was already cross-training with cycling and swimming, I figured might as well do a triathlon. I've done much of my riding with other riders, though, and in a tri you are not allowed to draft behind others. So when I heard of the opportunity to do a time trial on my bike at the Charlotte Motor Speedway(!), I thought it might be a good way to learn what I'm capable of doing when I'm riding alone.

Fast forward to 5 pm last night. I'm in the infield at Charlotte Motor Speedway looking woefully underprepared. Nearly all of 200 or so cyclists here have carbon fiber time trial bikes worth thousands of dollars. They have aero helmets, aero shoes, and aero handlebars. My bike is a 1998-ish aluminum Cannondale with old-school road-biking handlebars. I certainly don't have an aero helmet and I forgot my gloves. Let's do this!

Lining up in Pit Row for the start

The riders are released one at a time, and each rider has a volunteer to hold them while they clip in and then push them off. When I arrived at the start line, I wasn't able to clip my left foot in. They actually held up the start for 15 seconds or so while I tried to get my foot in the pedal but eventually I just told them to start me and I'd figure it out when I was on the road. (Un)fortunately, Lori Ackerman was there to capture the moment on camera:

Wha? Which way does this go?

After about 5 seconds of riding I figured out that I had the pedal upside-down. Huge rookie mistake which wouldn't be my last. I looked down and saw my giant non-aero water bottle was still in its cage. So much for decreasing the wind resistance of my already clunky bike!

Oh well, all I could do now was ride. At least I had remembered to start my Garmin! I was getting good feedback on my pace, which easily climbed to 22 mph as I rounded the first corner.

Charlotte Motor Speedway is 1.5 miles per lap, which would mean 7 laps equal 10.5 miles, but somehow according to all the literature about this event, the time trial of 7 laps is exactly 10 miles. Maybe each lap is just a touch short? The other advice riders get is not to start out too fast. I had taken a couple of practice laps where 20 mph seemed easy, so I decided to shoot for 22 mph on my first lap.

That wasn't a problem for the first half-lap, but after I rounded the final turn suddenly it got much more difficult. The wind didn't seem any stronger but I had to downshift and slow down. I passed through the start/finish and kept on going around the first turn. As I came onto the back straight it suddenly got easier so I shifted up and went with it. Now I was up over 25 mph.

The next lap proved this wasn't a fluke: The front straightaway was much tougher than the back straight. A look at the elevation profile for the event shows why:

Holy oscillation, Batman!

It's fairly subtle, but there is a consistent downhill on the back stretch and a consistent uphill on the front stretch -- about 20 feet of climbing and 20 feet of descending on each lap. The difference between the two is about 4 miles per hour!

A rider with a loudly flapping bib passed me at about this point, but I kept him in my sights. For the most part Flappy Guy and I were passing people. These were mainly kids, women, and folks on handcycles, but it still does wonders for your confidence to be constantly passing people (it also helped that I started with the "slow group" — most of the fast riders started later). Here's a shot Lori got of me passing someone near the start / finish.

Cmon, dude, at least put your hands on the drops! It doesn't look like you're trying!

BTW I just noticed that Flappy Guy is in this photo as well (far right). That means it must have been taken around lap 4 or 5, which is when I remember passing Flappy Guy again.

With a few laps to go I started trying to increase my effort a bit. My average speed was now around 22.6 and I was hoping to increase it. I tried to upshift early for the downhill section and downshift later for the front straight. Looking back at my official splits, this worked to a certain extent: Lap 5 was my fastest. But I slowed a bit for laps 6 and 7, so perhaps I picked up the pace too soon. Overall my first half took 13:20 and my second half was 13:05, so I was a little faster on the second half. I may have hit things just about perfectly. Here I am making my final push to the finish:

Sweet!

Notice that Flappy Guy is nowhere to be seen. He must have faded quite a bit in the final lap. I took a look at the results to see if I could find him and I think he is Jonas Cherry, whose time was just 0.4 slower than mine. Remember, it's a staggered start, so he must have started a fair bit behind me.

After the finish, I made one last idiot newbie move. The roadway seemed to be blocked off, so I made my way back towards the start. Soon race officials were shouting at me to get off the road. It turned out, we were supposed to go to the point where the road was blocked, slow down, and ride around the barrier. Who knew? Fortunately this dumb move on my part was not caught on film.

A couple of friends also rode this event: DARTer Jack Haddock, who was a newbie like me, AB Lerner, another newbie but an experienced triathlete, and Ashley Ackerman, who is an awesome triathlete and a veteran of these time trials. Jack and I were far slower than the veterans, who came equipped both with better engines and nicer bikes.

Overall I was 143rd out of 204 participants, finishing in 26:22, an average speed of 22.8 mph. That includes the handbike riders as well, so you can see that I am a long way from being seriously competitive among cyclists. If newer, more aero gear gave me, say, an additional 2 mph, that would still have left me in 83rd place. So mainly I'm just not as strong as these other cyclists — which makes sense, since it's not my main sport. I feel like I've logged a lot of cycling since I was injured, but all of my rides in March totaled 261 miles, which is probably less than a lot of my competitors ride in a good week!

One thing I noticed during the race is that I was never especially winded. The difficulty in going faster seemed to be mainly due to leg strength and cycling efficiency. Hopefully as I continue to ride more I will improve my strength and efficiency and become at least a bit more competitive as my triathlon approaches. Below is my Garmin record of the race.