Undefeated
My first race of the year, the Stanford Treeathlon, was this morning, and after 4 years of racing it, I finally won! That means I’m undefeated so far this year! haha The last time I won a race overall was Boulder Peak in 2005, and both races were close. I won those races by a combined 3 seconds!
Leading up to the race, I had two solid weeks of race-specific training. I did less reps than I will do in subsequent cycles since I wanted to make sure I eased into it without getting injured. I did a 22:30 2000y tempo swim (lifitng up to sight once per 50y) and did some 300y reps in around 3:12-13. The end of this past week was pretty tiring. Wednesday night I did a 7200y swim with 5000 straight in 1:00:50. Then I combined a tempo effort and long run on the treadmill - 2×10:00 at 5:27 pace with about 1:30 easy in between and then aerobic effort afterwards to bring the total to 10+ miles. Finally, I finished up the night at around 10pm after doing some strength training. Thursday afternoon I went for a 7-8 mile run and then did a 3 hour ride on the trainer at a pretty high aerobic effort. I was feeling really, really fatigued on Friday and just did a 2700m swim as I didn’t want to be completely tired for the race.
I didn’t have much “spring” in my legs and arms during the race because of all that training, but overall, it felt pretty good. I had a nice 500m swim in the San Francisco Bay (it was cold!) but my start wasn’t the greatest, and I ended up about 8-10s behind a few of the leaders. I started the bike in 3rd and gradually lost some ground. It was my first time riding outside in a few months and the first time riding with the aerobar setup since October, but I think the Thursday night long ride had much more of an effect than that. Luckily, I had a good T2 and felt decent on the run. Again, there wasn’t much spring in my legs, but I held a nice strong pace and gradually got faster. About 200m from the finish I full on body slammed someone running in the opposite direction but did a quick 360 in the air before going all out for the finish. I held on barely to win by just under 2 seconds. My transitions were actually around 40 seconds faster than the guy I beat, so I guess transitions can actually win or lose a race! Knowing the training I put in the past two weeks, the race was definitely a good sign for where I’m at and where I can get to before my next race in May.
After the race, I went and did a 6200y swim at Stanford and did some strength training. On my way to the gym I noticed a fencing match going on. It was the NCAA Western Regionals and it was the last match to determine who would go to Nationals. I only saw the last couple minutes, but it was pretty intense and full of emotion! It was tied 14-14 at the end of the time limit, then they took a quick break during which the Air Force coach got a red card for talking back to the ref or something (the lady I was standing next to said that was the first time she’d seen that in 10 years). Then the two athletes lined back up for the final point. I don’t know fencing terminology, but they went back and forth for a little bit faking each other out before finally the girl from Stanford scored the winning point! The whole thing was pretty dramatic and exciting - I’ll have to go watch more in the future!
Filed under: Race Recap, Training
