After spending last whole week in the US, on the West coast in Portland Oregon (9hr time difference), and only doing some limited training due to meeting schedule I woke up this morning at 2.25am, and managed to fall asleep again only around 4am again....so needless to say, the first night back was very short and waking up this morning was hard.
In any case, the adrenaline started to kick in, and after breakfast (that was prepared by my 8 year old son Matteo) and packing the car I was off to Almere for the mid distance duathlon. I chose the mid distance due to the fact I traveled last week, otherwise I would have gone for the Dutch National Championships duathlon race at the same location but double the distance. It was great race weather, 5C, sunny with some scattered clouds.
My race distance was:
4km run over soft ground, 2 laps of 2km
12km MTB, 2 laps of 6km
2km run , 1 lap
Having arrived there I kind of set my target time to 1:15, but then realized that I never calculated in the transition times....
Today my start number was 296....few minutes before the actual race some 50ish athletes got briefed on the race rules, and at 11.30am local time we were off.
I started off at the end of the pack knowing I would not be able to follow the tempo if I started in front.
Start was quite fast....at moments my km pace was well below 5:00/km, which is fast for me resulting in my heart rate averaging 170 over the 4km distance. Average pace over the km for the 4km was at 5:11...not bad. 19:45 was my time after the first run split.
Transition went smooth, and and I was on my MTB in 1:15. MTB started well, and the ground was soft in the beginning, while towards the end it was very soggy and my back wheels was dancing left and right as I was trying to get as high cadence as possible through the wet mud.
The 6km loop had a few nice "hills". The first one was with some 30ish stairs, while the second one was so muddy that I would never get up the hill....so on both instances it was off the bike and up the hill on foot.
I was pleased with my first lap that I finished in 21min. I thought my second lap would be better and it certainly felt that I was riding faster as I was anticipating gear changing better (thanks Tim!) but the official timing though different. My second lap was 58 seconds slower at 22:36 for the total MTB time of 44:13.
Second transition went faster that T1, not sure why....but now that I think of it...could it be that I forgot to take my helmet off? I started running my final 2km run and as I was just out of the transition zone I noticed my helmet was still on....crazy me....the aerodynamics were now completely off!! hahaha....so I got it off and threw it just meters past the drink post.
Last 2km felt hard. My knees were OK, but I felt tired and I felt heavy...not sure if this is the jet lag effect or just all those "healthy and small" burgers in the US. Looking at the result of the final 2km I realized that it was actually faster than the 2nd 2km's that I ran before....must have been due to the last few hundred meters sprint I did to finish in style.
Final result, even though I missed my target, was a total of 1:16:28 which gave me a fantastic 34th place out of the 53 starters on this distance. In my age group 20+ I ranked 16th out of 26 starters.
I am very happy with the result. Very encouraging especially the run went better than expected. All the training time investment is starting to show.
Those interested in GPS tracks and additional data....here we go:
Run1
MTB
Run2
Many thanks to the organization and all volunteers.
Photos credit goes to Jasmijn Gangel. Thanks.
Your welcome!
ReplyDeleteJasmijn