I'll be out of town (at Louis's law school graduation) on my birthday, so I swapped out the usual year X 100s swim and bagels at the Village for a bike-swim weekend. Saturday, Tri Scottsdale and the Village (great cookies, Abby!) organized a ride up Mount Lemmon in Tucson, then Sunday was Arizona Open Water 4000m at Bartlett Lake. I was a tad slower in the swim than 2 years ago, but nobody who finished ahead of me had ridden their bicycle up and down Mt. Lemmon the day before. A very nice weekend. Saturday, about 3.5 hours up, 1.5 hours down, 59 4 miles, 7,871' vertical gain. Sunday, 1:20:33 for 4000m, with full swim results here. And now I get a rest week - with NYC bagels, too.
I was hoping for better, but I started feeling poorly Friday afternoon, and had a sore throat Saturday night, so once I started the run I threw out my sub-3-hour goal time. I hoped to finish only without getting really sick, and my stretch goal was in under 3:15, and my really optimistic take was 3:10. But I must have been doing better than I thought, because my final time was 3:05. Solid swim, OK bike, and while I had to walk through each water stop and twice on the second loop, I still had about the same time on the run as I did in September for an Olympic tri: Swim 27:57; T1 3:21; Bike 1:22:43.4; T2 2:33; Run 1:08:36.1; Total 3:05:10.7, 9/18 ag, 145/214 men, 177/322 overall. Not a bad day, all considering. But what's with these fractional seconds on a 4Peaks Racing event?
A sweet little event at Tempe Town Lake, with 2 swim options, then a set run, which can be dropped for people who only want to do the swim, plus relays. So, 6 different race categories, then all the age groups. The weather was nearly perfect; the water temperature was 74 degrees, so it was wetsuit legal and pretty much everybody wore one, as did I, for the open water practice. Results here; 1:04:33 for the 1500m swim-transition-run, which was 30/58 overall, 23/40 men, 3/4 a.g. in that category. That's nearly 5 minutes faster than last year (over a minute faster on the swim and over 3 minutes faster on the run), probably because of the weather but also a stronger run than last year. On to Cactus Man on Sunday.
Photo credit: Pedro Gomes (the triathlon coach who gave us the only advice I remember: "With 17 hours, you can do pretty much anything.")
