Back to Training
After a fun three weeks of racing in Europe I am now back in the states and back to training. I am lucky enough to be able to spend five weeks in Colorado Springs, Colorado at the Olympic Training Center at a development training camp put on by USA Triathlon. This means access to amazing training facilities, great food, and I get to hang out with all of my friends at the camp! It’s a pretty sweet deal.
I spend most of my day training, going to lectures, or watching the Tour de France in the cafeteria.
Counting down to the Olympics.
There are only 12 days left until the Beijing Olympics! It will be pretty exciting to watch the Olympics from here at the OTC. Unfortunately, with the Tour de France ending today 12 days also marks how long until more TV entertainment comes around to watch at breakfast, lunch and dinner! Some more pics:
A scenic view from the OTC campus.
Even the foxes on campus are fit!
Tisza in Pictures
Manny, me, and Steve before the swim start.
The top 20 athletes got called to the stage at the party on Sunday night. This is the women’s top 20.
The crowd.
Matt Chrabot and me on stage.
The men’s podium.
Hamburg Race Report
The Hamburg World Cup is an awesome race. Run with German precision, the race is usually quite a spectacle for the people of Hamburg (Hamburgers!). Last year an estimated 300,000 people came out to watch the World Champs and it wasn’t much different at this year’s race where I managed to finish 18th. With that I am now world ranked! 77th! However, I won’t say I had the best race of my life. In fact, a little bit more attention to detail could have gone a long way.
As for the course, the swim is usually a wetsuit-legal 2 lap swim, the bike follows a very technical eight lap course through the city, and the run is a flat and fast four lap course. This year, however, the Binnenalster (where we swam) was a balmy 20.6 degrees so no wetsuits!
The race went off at 3:07 PM (as I said, German precision!) and I got out to a quick start. There were only 39 guys on the starting line mainly due to the Olympics being next month, but also because a lot of guys were racing the French Grand Prix taking place the next day. I had decent starting position and got out to a surprisingly quick start. I hit the first buoy in good position and this was when I made my first mistake: Somebody a few meters ahead of me let a gap open up and I didn’t notice. The gap widened and I didn’t see it until they were 30 seconds up! I went to the front of what was now the second swim pack and tried to close the gap with little success. After the first 1000 meter lap I exited the water and struggled up the pontoon before diving in for the second 500 meter lap. I thought I was done for until I finished the second lap and noticed I was out of the water with some very good guys! Brad Kahlefeldt bounded up the stairs next to me and I knew he might be my ticket to the front pack.
Then came mistake #2: I completely botched my first transition. I struggled to get my helmet on. Finally I got out onto the bike and the four athletes I exited the water with were about 10 seconds up. I knew I had to get on and I chased hard for about 5 minutes. I held even with them until I completely blew up. I fell back and eventually found some company (including Steve Sexton and Ethan Brown, my travel buddies for this Euro racing tour). As it turns out we eventually brought back Kahlefeldt’s group of four and our second pack became 18 strong. Then here is mistake #3: I lost track of what lap of the bike we were on. I think everyone in my pack did except Ethan, who attacked on what everyone thought was lap seven (but was actually lap eight, the final lap). He got a decent gap into T2 while I was one of the last into T2.
I salvaged my 18th position on the run by posting somewhere around 33 minutes for the 10k, which combined with a small field helped put me in the top 20 and thus score 3 points in the World Cup rankings! I don’t know my exact splits because I had no chip (although the ITU did fabricate some splits for me on the results).
After the race we had the pleasure of meeting ITU president Les McDonald – he had one question for us: What is the capital of Canada? The answer is Ottawa. But ask yourself seriously – did you know that? Fortunately Steve answered correctly on only his second guess. Apparently Les asks this to a lot of American athletes and our track record for correct answers isn’t very good…
Me, Ethan, and Steve after the race. Les stupides Américains!
Hamburg World Cup
The Hamburg World Cup starts in just a few hours…you can watch this one live if you want!
WUC Race Report – Long Version
Here is the long version:
We arrived in Turkey after relatively uneventful travel from the States (I did get upgraded to business class for the Chicago – Frankfurt leg, though, which was awesome). We were greeted by some FISU staff and made preparations to leave for Erdek. We just missed the 12:30 ferry to Erdek and the next one wasn’t until 6:30 so the FISU guys got a bus for everyone who had arrived around the time we did (this included the British, Greek and Chinese teams). We soon learned two important facts about how things operate in Turkey that would become the theme for the week – there will never be enough space on the bus and everything will take at least twice as long as the Turkish race delegations tells you. We were told that the bus would be quicker than waiting for the next ferry since it is only a “five hour drive,” so after barely fitting everyone and their luggage on the bus (bike boxes took up several seats) we set off for Erdek. We arrived in the city nearly eight hours later to find that everyone who had taken the 6:30 ferry was already sitting down to eat dinner. We had basically gone half way around the Sea of Marmara via Izmit.
The days leading up to the race were characterized by odd food served at the hotel (not ideal for pre-race), run-ins with the hotel staff (mostly concerning keeping our bikes in the hotel rooms or acquiring water from the restaurant), and of course the shuttles that ran on Turkish time.
Our hotel – the Agrigento
Several changes were made to the race course and time line the day before the race. First, the bike course was changed from four laps (10k per lap) to eight laps (5k per lap). This eliminated the only flat portion of the course and made athletes climb a somewhat large hill (8% to 10% and around 1k in length) 16 times. The swim was changed to an in-water start due to the large number of athletes in the men’s race (81 starters). Also, the men’s and women’s race times were switched so that the women raced first at 1 pm and the men raced later at 4 pm.
Race day finally came and the weather was almost perfect – sunny and clear (but hot!). I rolled up to the race site about 1.5 hours early along with the rest of the American men’s team and heard the announcer going on about Justine Whipple – she was currently leading the women’s race with 2 laps to go on the run! This was certainly a good start to the day. Justine crossed the finish line to take the gold medal as we were setting up our transitions. I did some swim warm up with Ethan and waited for introductions to take place. I was the last American athlete to choose my start position (numbers were assigned randomly and I was 69). We hopped in the water and held onto the start rope. I braced myself for my least favorite type of triathlon swim start – the in-water start.
The horn went off and I got pummeled for about 100 meters before things started to settle down. I lost about 20 meters. I settled into a big pack and started to try to move up. After about 1200 meters I sighted to the lead swimmer going around a buoy and got a time gap of about 25 seconds to me. I exited the water 28 seconds back feeling good about my position especially since I was surrounded by a lot of people.
The start of the bike was where things started to go bad for me. Despite a large lead pack of swimmers, a gap had formed as some talented cyclists at the front were pushing the pace and other less talented cyclists were falling back. I made the first turn and was greeted by a 20 mph headwind and the first hill. I couldn’t close the gap by myself and the second pack formed around me. The good news was that Steve Sexton and Ethan Brown were in the front pack. The gap continued to grow each lap – 30 seconds after lap 1, 50 seconds at lap 2, 70 seconds at lap 3. Finally the bleeding stopped when a contingent of Swiss athletes joined us. The Swiss along with the four Czech athletes in the second pack closed the gap back to 50 seconds at lap 4. I was just along for the ride – I didn’t want to help close a gap to Steve and Ethan. Anyways, the gap was staying steady at around 60 seconds each lap. A few of the Czech athletes got a little heated since they were the only ones steadily doing any work – they yelled something I couldn’t understand but I got the point. They didn’t seem to understand that they were the only team with nobody in the front pack! The bike course was extremely hard anyways so nobody was “sitting in.” We came into T2 down by 70 seconds on the leaders.
The run is pretty easy to explain – I had the best run of my life splitting 32 minutes. I ran down the majority of the front pack and had the 3rd fastest run of the day. It was kind of bittersweet, though, since that run would have put me on the podium had I been in the front pack. However, with my sixth place finish, Steve Sexton in seventh, and Barrett Brandon in 15th, some quick calculations showed that we pulled off a silver medal in the team standings!
After a quick shower and a bit of recovery time we were off to the awards ceremony. We had to wait for a second bus to show up and pick us up (much to the surprise of the race delegation, 200 people still didn’t fit into one bus!). The team awards ceremony started as soon as we arrived and we were very surprised to find out that our men’s team had, in fact, won the gold medal! We got to stand on top of the podium and everything!
However, after checking the math we found that the race delegation had made a mistake and we had actually placed second (as we had originally calculated). The Swiss team had won without a doubt, so we went over to their table and had a slightly impromptu medal ceremony:
Fortunately the Swiss also had a 5 athlete team so everyone got the correct medal – silver for the USA and gold for Switzerland!
