TMS Sprint Duathlon

Did my first duathlon this morning at Texas Motor Speedway. Here were my stats (thanks, Matt, for showing me how to use MultiSport mode on the Garmin Forerunner 305 - one of these days I'll actually sit down and read the manual for the uberwatch :-) - click image to enlarge:

Everything looks pretty good - except for the (hopefully erroneous) max heart rate during the second run – 240 BPM (gulp!) Officially, TMS Sprint Duathlon was supposed to consist of a 2-mile run, 15-mile bike, and another 2-mile run. However, as you can see from the numbers above, the runs weren’t quite 2 miles longer, but the bike was 1.5 miles longer than 15 so I guess that more than made up for it.

The weather for the race wasn't bad - temperatures were mild and the rain from Friday and Saturday completely stopped - but the wind, now that was something else. The forecast said 15-17 MPH winds from the WNW and we definitely felt it coming around the south and west sides of the track. With the wind at my back, I was cruising at 25-30 MPH in many occasions but then came the wind (and a hill!) and my speed dropped to as slow as 10 or 11 MPH. Ouch! And we had to do the 5-mile loop 3 times. Double (or triple) Ouch!


(Note: I think that spike at the 16-mile mark is from when I rode under the tunnel to get back into the speedway from the outer bike loop and my Garmin momentarily lost its GPS signal. I definitely don't remember flying in at nearly 40 MPH.)

So in the end, I completed the TMS Sprint Du in 1:24:52. This got me 7th place out of 19 in my age group (M 35-39), 49th out of 127 men and, overall, 59th out of 188 competitors total. And it was a lot of fun racing inside (for the run and transition area - the bike was outside) the NASCAR stadium.

I'm pretty happy with my performance. There wasn't any particularly weak area today. Just have to run a little faster and bike a little faster. No recipe for that except more hard work and training. There were a lot of hard core runners and cyclists (with some REALLY nice bikes) in the race, so I'm glad was still able to hang in the top third of the competitor field.

Official results at http://www.mychiptime.com/searchevent.php?id=292