Austin Pan Am Cup…Second Place!
I’m excited to report I placed second in yesterday’s Austin Pan American Cup! Despite a poor swim, I was able to stay in contention on the bike and battled it out for the win with New Zealand’s Callum Millward on the run. It came down to a drag race style sprint in the last 100 meters and he got me. Here are a few pics from the race (courtesy of Ashish Patel):
I got beat up quite a bit at the start of the swim and found myself pretty far back in this long, strung out men’s field.
Cameron Dye and Mark Van Akkeren set a blistering pace in the swim.
Onto the bike I found myself in the fourth pack on the road. We had a lot of good cyclists and we caught the two packs in front of us. A group of three stayed away (Brian Fleischmann, Cameron Dye, and Mark Van Akkeren) and had a gap of a little over one minute heading out onto the run.
The men’s podium: Me (second), Callum Millward of New Zealand (first), and Martin Van Barneveld also of New Zealand (third)
The women’s podium: Hayley Peirsol (USA – second), Kate McIlroy (NZL – first), Jenna Shoemaker (USA – third).
Champagne!
The water was 1000 times cleaner than last weekend in Oklahoma City. This was a turtle swimming around in the swim venue.
Pics From Pan Am Champs
Swim start.
Exiting the swim about 20 seconds off the lead.
Just crossed the finish line for ninth.
Photos courtesy Rocky Chen.
Mexico – Next Right… and Pan Am Champs
It was about a week ago today that I finally piled all of my earthly belongings into my car and departed the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center. It was definitely a bittersweet departure – I will miss training in Chula for sure. On the other hand it was starting to get ridiculously hot there (I think it capped out at 103 one day before I left, causing some serious bonking to occur on a training run). Also, I was headed out to two weekends of racing in the midwest so I was pretty excited about that. I left Chula at 8:45 AM last Monday and arrived in my final destination of Ft. Worth, TX at 7:00 PM on Tuesday. That’s 22 hours of driving with a one night rest stop in Las Cruces, NM. In sharp contrast to my two days of travel, Ethan left Chula Vista three hours after me and arrived in Ft. Worth that same night (flying). I definitely don’t suggest driving long distances to races if you don’t have to – it’s just too much sitting.
Anyways, after 1200 miles of driving along I-8, I-10, and I-20 and countless signs saying “Mexico – next right” (and one confused sign that said “Mexico – next left”), I finally arrived in Ft. Worth at my friend Barrett’s house and it wasn’t long before we departed for the Pan American Championship in Oklahoma City. The entire Chula crew was racing here and we were excited to see how we would fare in what would be the biggest race of the season thus far for most of us. For me the race didn’t pan out exactly as I hoped but I did manage a top ten finish. I haven’t done a real race report in a long time so I figure I will do one now. Read on!
The swim was a one lap swim in the Oklahoma River and I’m just going to spare the niceties right now: that was the dirtiest place I have ever swam in a triathlon. I can’t even think of anywhere that comes close. In the end it didn’t matter because it is a race and I race where I’m told to race and that’s that. Maybe it was the rain from the night before that made the river exceptionally dirty on race day, but dang! Dirty. Anyways, the swim started and I got out relatively clean for the first 300 meters only to see a ten meter gap open up around the first two turn buoys. I spent the next 1000 meters death flogging myself to close this gap and I eventually succeeded. Knowing my track record of making front packs after exiting the water on the very back of a swim pack, I made a serious attempt to move up a bit which I was also successful in doing. In the end I exited the water near the tail end of the front swim pack but with five or six guys behind me.
Onto the bike a series of unfortunate events happened right in front of me. First, Brian Fleischmann had a bit of trouble mounting his bike and lost control, crashing into Steve Sexton. Steve didn’t go down, but he did lose his shoe in the middle of the road, and as I passed he was going back to fetch it. I roomed with Steve for the past four months in Chula Vista so I have seen Steve get stressed out on almost a daily basis. However, the look on Steve’s face as I passed was a completely different level of panic and stress that I have never seen before, and rightfully so! He didn’t finish the race. Back to my race, though. After I passed Steve I looked up and saw a pretty big gap had opened up between myself and the next guy – about 20 seconds.
So a second pack formed that included myself, Ethan, Barrett, Brian Fleischmann, Matt Seymour, two Brasilians, an Argentinian rider, Andrew Russell from Canada, and Javier Cuevas from the Dominican Republic. Dispensing with the niceties again, this pack was completely useless. In retrospect it was probably Ethan and my responsibility to organize this pack in to a pace line, but honestly we were both looking to Brian Fleischmann to take some initiative. Brian wasn’t doing anything, though – he was either demoralized because he should have been in the front pack or he was saving his legs for the run. Either way, our pack held a 20 to 30 second gap for 15 kilometers and then started to hemorrhage massive amounts time to the front pack. The gap ballooned up to three minutes by the end of the bike and we were caught by a HUGE third pack of 30+ guys 3 kilometers from the bike finish. So that made T2 a huge mess.
Out onto the run our pack was effectively running for at best a seventh place finish (the front pack that was three minutes up had six guys in it). I never really found a rhythm on the run and at one point I faded as far back as 13th place. I had a strong second half and managed to finish up in ninth. It was definitely not the breakout performance that I know I’m capable of at this point, but I did manage to pick up some ITU points and a little bit of money.
Anyways, I’m racing again this weekend at the CapTexTri so maybe I can redeem myself there! If I happen to find any pictures from this past weekend I’ll post those later.
Florida Fun
After St. Anthony’s I decided to spend a little bit of time in my home state visiting friends and family and generally having a ton of fun in Florida! Here is a little bit of what I did:
I stayed with my coach Jen Hutchison in St. Pete for a few days. She made me a pancake breakfast the day after the race – apparently I was on a diet.
I borrowed Jen’s sweet Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove to Orlando to visit my Mom and Dad. This is my Mom’s dog Cosmo – ferocious!
After a short stop in Gainesville to visit friends (and get some of my favorite pizza at Satchel’s) I made my way up to Jacksonville to help out at the YMCA First Coast Kid’s Triathlon. This is me hanging out with some future triathlon stars the day before the race.
Here are some of the “celebrity big kids” as we were known for the weekend. There were about 10 of us big kids and we were celebrities for various reasons. From left to right: Sophia Every from the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, Jacksonville area fireman Raleigh Zike, Don Redman (completed 650+ triathlons in his lifetime), me (token professional triathlete!), Ty Dickenson (Jacksonville area policeman), Don Davey (ex-NFL football player), and Dustin Crawford, a Navy ensign.
I got to be the big kid for the 8 and under age group.
Here they are parading on over to the start.
We big kid’s had our own race and guess what, I won! Unofficially I completed the 100 yd swim, 3 mile bike and 1/2 mile run in 12 minutes and 45 seconds. Here I am with another of the big kids – Mark Woods, a journalist from the Florida Times-Union. He got third. Don Davey (the ex-NFL football player) got second. Pretty fast for the biggest guy in the field! He’s training for Ironman Austria.
