Mid-race Crises

One of the things that I do better as a Masters athlete than I did when I was racing Men's Elite is handle things going wrong. Part of this is that I no longer have any expectation of winning a race overall and I'm generally happy to be on the podium in my age-group. So I don't really get nervous before races any more and, when stuff happens, I'm more willing to accept that it just wasn't my day and look forward to the next race.

A good example this season was the Battle of Waterloo: a new event, by a new organizer EST events. As I mentioned before, I really like events that are a bit different and this certainly fits the bill. It's a ten stage run-bike-swim-run-swim-run-swim-run-bike-run. Most of the running is cross- country and the only things that I'd have liked more is to have had a few thousand feet of vertical climbing on both the bike and the run ..... although, I do accept that finding big hills in Michigan is kinda hard.

One of the challenges in this race is the fact that you have to take your running shoes with you on the swim so you basically have two choices. You can leave your shoes on or push them down the back of your trisuit in which case you get wet shoes ..... or, you can use a dry bag and come up with some means of attaching it to yourself.

I chose the latter. I have two pairs of racing shoes so my plan was to put one pair in a dry bag and attach it to my bike. I'd then run the first leg of the race in my other pair and that way I wouldn't be fooling around in T1 trying to get my shoes in a bag and so on.

Great plan ... and it worked perfectly. I was in 15th place after the first run and I had the fifth-fastest T1 so I could look forward to my strongest discipline: the bike. The first ten miles were great, I overtook six or seven people and nobody came past me so I was comfortably in the top ten overall.

However ....

Un-noticed by me, the strap that was holding my shoes to my saddle had loosened and, the next thing I knew, my shoe bag slipped and went into my rear wheel. Fortunately, I didn't fall off but I had to stop and sort it out .... wasting about four minutes. Two miles further down the road, it started to happen again so I stopped again and ended up with the shoe bag strapped round my waist. By this time, I'd lost 20 places.

I arrived at T2 and ran down to the beach to start the first swim. Unfortunately, I failed to notice that my dry-bag now had a hole in it which meant that with ten seconds, it was a very, very wet bag. I don't know if any of you have ever done the "bucket" drill in swimming where you tie a empty bucket to you and it acts like a sea-anchor or the mother of all drag suits so you have to work much, much harder such that 100 yards seems a really, really long way. My wet bag had the same effect, turning a 14 minute swim into a 23 minute swim!

Not only did it make me swim slower, it also made me work much harder and I really struggled on the next run leg too.

While I eventually started to get my act together and ended up winning my age group and finishing 26th overall, I probably lost 20-25 minutes one way or another which would have moved me up into the top 10.

If this race had been an "A" race, I'd have been pretty annoyed with myself. As it was, I just had to treat it as a learning experience and as the last hard workout before the State Championships ....which were also disappointing but for an entirely different reason. More next time.....