Hy-Vee Triathlon: Race Report

I just got home from my little road trip up and back to Des Moines for the Hy-Vee Triathlon. This was suppose to be the biggest race of the year for me up to this point and the first race that I peaked for. Unfortunately for me mother nature had other ideas. It rained torrentially all morning on saturday causing the staff to cancel the kids race. Then things cleared up in the afternoon and when I got into Des Moines at about 4 pm to attend the race briefing and pick up my race packet there were only scattered clouds and things appeared to be looking up. It didn't rain over night and in the morning it was overcast but dry (as far as I could tell, it was still quite dark when I got to the race site at 5 am). Then just after I had finished setting up all my stuff and was getting ready to start warming up the race director made an announcement that they were expecting a huge storm to roll in by the mid-morning so they were changing the race to a sprint. That meant cutting the whole thing in half: 400m swim instead of 1500m, 20km bike instead of 40km, and a 5km run instead of the standard 10km. To say I was frustrated and disappointed would be the world's biggest understatement. I had this race highlighted on my training calendar for the past few months and had already driven 3.5 hours to get there, not to mention a very expensive entry fee. And I wasn't the only one, just about everyone that I talked to felt the same way. So I ran the race basically as a training day and did fine. I struggled through the swim a little due to a total lack of warm-up but found my legs on the bike and run and maintained the kind of pace I would want for 40km and 10km. The overall results and age group results weren't great, but that's okay because the race was more valuable as a benchmark for my pacing. I must give the organizers credit, though, because just as they predicted the skies opened up at about 7:30 and it rained like crazy and was still raining when I left town a few hours later.

I have just signed up for the Topeka Tinman Triathlon next weekend. It is a race that I wasn't going to do originally but because I don't want to waste my peak I figure this could be a good opportunity to have a solid overall result at a race where I have been successful in the past: 7th overall in 2008 and 6th overall in 2009. Maybe I'll even sneak onto the podium.... I'll talk more about this race as we get later into the week and closer to the event...