inauspicio.us

I cruised down to Falmouth on Saturday morning, having spent Friday unpacking and trying to re-route the rubber bands on my powermeter.  Good times.    Three days in a row with less than five hours of sleep left me feeling pretty ordinary, but I stopped on the road somewhere in southern massachusetts for two cans of red bull and some advil and pretty soon I felt halfway human again.

I got to the race early and had a mellow warmup.  I was feeling the pressure of having won this race in each of my last three attempts and really wanted to make it four.  So I had a bit of a reconnoiter, with a lap of the bike course and a lap of the run course.  The latter had changed since ‘05, when I ran something like 8:42 for the opening “2 miles”.  Then some water, since it was hot as hell, and a nice chat with Paul Miller who was racked next to me.  A very nice guy, he noted that he’d spent Friday moving and I figured we were more or less even on that score since I’d spent Thursday doing the same.  Then they delayed the start for half an hour, and we were off!

As I’ve mentioned before, the pacing strategies on display among age-group men are interesting and almost certainly suboptimal.  But we all race for fun, and it is for sure important to do what feels right pacingwise.  For optimum performance, it might be a good idea to try to make an even pace feel right, but I know that optimum performance doesn’t correlate perfectly with optimum fun, so “correct” pacing will be a little different for everyone.  Paul and I mopped up the early leaders a bit before the mile mark and then I took a small gap into T1.

I got a bit flummoxed leaving transition but otherwise had a decent time of it and even got my shoes velcroed pretty quickly.  Then – and this was a real weird experience for me – I built a huge lead on the bike.  Awesome!  I got into T2 with about a minute and a half lead and more or less held that to the finish.  The official results have me about 35 seconds slower than my actual time, for some reason, which I mention only because it would become something of a theme during my weekend.

After the awards ceremony my mom drove me up to Truro to meet the church youth group.  I got one of them to wear my pointy superhero helmet, but no pictures yet, sniff.  Colleen had me dog the lead group of boys on my fixed gear, which was a nice challenge, especially going downhill.  A great day, great race, and a great ride.  I stayed up with the yoots and their campfire until about 2am, and then crashed.  You know, because I had to get my beauty sleep for a race the next day.