Monday, June 2, 2008

HHHunt Powersprint

Well, I've had quite the past couple of months. Since Shamrock, I've managed to get my knee back into good form, but while racing Duathlon Nationals, I crashed and severely sprained my right thumb. I was in a cast for 2 weeks, and a brace for another 3. Training has been subpar to say the least.

Well I had gotten a comp entry to race the Powersprint, so even though I felt like I would be in poor form, I decided to give it a whirl and see for real what kind of fitness I had.

The race is 300m swim, 20k bike, 5k run, and I hold the course record from last year, 50:36. It had been raining last year, but it had also been a superb race for me, so I was thinking that to touch anything close to that would be unrealistic. I was shooting for mid to high 52 minutes.

My best time for a timed 300m swim thus far had been 4:41. Yesterday I swam 4:23. Yeah 18 second PR. That was cool. It felt really pretty good too. Kept nice long strokes the entire time, tried to stay as smooth as I could, and worked on keeping good form. It really couldn't have gone too much better. All those hard swimming weeks throughout the winter paid off big time.

T1 was solid, actually my fastest t1 for this race by a couple seconds. I had a good position for my bike, and that's probably why.

The bike. Hmmmm. I still am shocked to think about how I pulled this one out of my arse. I avg 27.0 for 20k, going 27:31, and setting the bike record for this course by 45 seconds. I just crushed it, and felt great doing so. My legs just had so much to give, and I just kept in in the highest gear I could turnover, and went for it, full blast. I think the next fastest cyclist was 27:50ish, and there was one guy who actually went faster than me, but he didn't run afterwards, and was apparently completely tanked after the bike leg. Yeah, I'm not counting that cause the guy beat me by like 10 seconds, and had the race been over after the bike, I could have taken quite a bit off that time I think.

The run was ok...16:03 for 3 miles (apparently the course was .1 short). That's about 5:21 pace, which is not flying by any means, but it's still pretty solid after a fantastic swim and an even better bike. I was first by about 4 minutes, and even better I'm excited about getting going with my training and getting in even better shape. Bring it on!