Teamsiliconvalley - Sports Blog

SAAB City Duathlon 2008

June 13th, 2008

Well its funny, with Chunnie being so far away it seems as if all my posts are about the other activity in my life (at the moment) which is - triathlons. Last weekend was supposedly "longer" event that I had wanted to do instead of the sprint distance that Marisa did. It was the SAAB City Duathlon. It was supposed to be a 10K/40K/5K event (10km run, 40km bike, 5km run). However due to a mess-up in marshalling and probably poor planning/organization it ended up only being a 10K/22K/5K event. So i did feel cheated especially since i had forgone my long training ride for this week to rest for the event.

Luckily, I had the TEAM HALL support crew there to cheer me on. Along with her brand-spanking-new mother's day / birthday present from her children.

As I was wheeling Speedie into the transition area i was on the lookout for puddles since it had rained quite a bit the previous day and the transition area was in a field. But as i walked along the ground felt pretty solid, good stuff! I walked and walked and since my number was 0035, my bike rack was at the far end and just as i reached that end, my foot (in my new shoes with nice dry clean socks) sunk into a deep puddle, not so good stuff! Darn, my feet were wet and yucky even before starting the first 10K! Luckily I had brought a spare pair of socks that i would change in to before starting the race.

After some warm-up with guys from my usual cycling group (The Breakfast Club) and I went to the start line where I bumped into my old housemate from Cornell, Maoyu. We were both pretty surprised to see each other, not having met each other recently and definitely not expecting to see each other wearing full body spandex... AWKWARD!! He's a fast guy so he sped off at the start of the run and at the 2.5km mark (a U-turn point) i saw him something like 30m ahead of me but i never managed to catch up. Along the route there was a nice guy wearing the exact same outfit as me, he commented, "hey, we're teammates" as he went by and we laughed about it.

After the run, my legs were actually already aching, maybe from not having run at pace very much in training, or maybe just the slight ups and downs of the underpasses, not sure. But anyway as you can see i was still in a good mood and smiling. I got into the transition area, got Speedie and started the long run (almost 300m) out of transition. This was a long run that had HUGE puddles. That meant that everybody was carrying their precious bikes over the puddles:

It was then that the confusing bit started. I had studied the race briefing so I knew exactly what the route should have been so when we reached the first turn, i was shocked to see that the turn had been blocked. We ended up all just going straight, which cut off a huge portion of the route. After the first (of 5 laps) i looked at my odometer and it read only 4km so i knew something was up. All along the route you could hear people talking about why was it so short and how many laps to do. The marshals still said 5 laps which would make it well short... oh well... Also, by making the route shorter, it made it insanely crowded, it was like riding in a huge peloton the entire way, definitely not that safe and definitely not that fun. Still, i trudged on and also for some reason actually got cramps in my calves.

As I got back into transition I still felt pretty good and was able to run pretty fast, in the end it would end up being about the same pace as I had run the earlier 10K, for both of the runs i ran at roughly 5min/km. Also, along the route i noticed the same guy that had passed me in the first run my "teammate". I called out to him as I passed him and we laughed again, maybe my bike+run=brick trainings had helped since I was able to run faster than him this time around... who knows? Anyway I went on and eventually finished in 2:01:59... Good enough for 20th place in my age group out of 113 finishers. Although I would take that with a grain of salt since there were people who did more laps of the bike route due to the confusion. I think my main takeaway from the race is that my running off the bike is surprisingly strong, and that i was able to average above 30km/h on the bike albeit over only 22km.

The Breakfast Club (at least a tiny portion of it):

Also, thanks to Marisa for taking the photos of the race!

Entry Filed under: Multisport