A weekend at the races

A final cap to a long three weeks of training, where I was doing around 17 hours per week.  Friday was the Harvard 4th of July 5 mile road race.  It is a hilly mother of a course, with a massive hill (West Bare Hill Rd) at mile 3.  It was raining as usual, as it seems it rains almost every weekend so far this summer.  Given the high volume of training, I was just looking for a solid Zone 4 LT workout.  I was able to keep things together enough to run just over 30 minutes (30:05).  Not great for a flat 5 miler, but not bad for this course.  Looking back two years ago, my time was almost 40 seconds faster this year, which is huge.  Only finished 14th overall, and 6th in my age group, which shows there are lots of fast people around here.

The next day was the Patriot 1/2 Ironman race.  This takes place towards the South Shore, and is a mostly flat/rolling course on pretty rural roads.  It is actually a very nice race, especially for its second year.  It is too bad that the 70.3 series is butting up against it.  Kind of like Starbucks versus your local cafe.  The guys who run Patriot do a great job, with nice stuff in your registration bag, so support your local race directors!

I only did the aquabike, which was supposed to be 1.2 mile swim and 56 mile bike.   My goal was to be beat up during the swim, and hammer the bike.  Mission accomplished.  I got Maytag’ed during the swim.  Since I was doing the aquabike, I started in the last wave with the relay people, Clysdales, Athenas, and other aquabikers.  This turns out to be a pretty stiff swim group, as swimmer do the relay and aquabike (since no run is involved) and Clysdales take up a lot of space!  I was getting rocked and rolled.  One guy who I see at all the races kept swimming into me as he was going off course.  This was a losing battle, so I stopped, breat stroked, went left and continued on my way as he went off to sea.

The best move of the day was when I had to split two guys who started in earlier waves.  They were both pinching in on me, and I needed to cut between them.  It ended up that I came across one with my left arm, grabbed his shoulder, and pulled myself past the one on my right.  Very smooth.  Sorry about that, guys.  But, I had a relatively decent swim, keeping my cool, swimming relatively straight, and keeping the pace up.  Considering it was my fourth swim of the week, I was happy with my 34:40 (on what had to be a long course).

Next was the bike.  Last year I did 2:36 (or so). This year, I wanted to break 2:30.  I started at a pretty good clip, passing a ton of people (since I was in the last wave). My teammate John Steiger was doing the aquabike as well.  We came out of the water at the same time, with him drafting off of me for part of the swim.  That was a big boost since he has been a faster swimmer than me. I was happy to see myself making progress in the water.  The bike was going very well, as I went through the first lap in 1:14.  Legs were starting to feel the uphills on the second loop, but wanted to keep the pace up.  Except for some really rough patches, the roads were in good shape, with some wetness from the rain the previous day and night.  In the end I was able to roll through the course in 2:28, which is a 23.2 mph average.  Very happy with that time considering the workload I have been under with no taper.  I finished second right behind John, which was kind of a bummer but since we don’t win anything for aquabike really okay.  I got my workout in.

The weekend was capped by a 15 mile run the next day on the Boston Marathon hills.  Now for a little taper, fine tuning, finally some sleep, and getting the head together for Lake Placid.