Month: July 2019

ET Lake Zurich – 7/14/19

“What do you do when you fall off the horse? You get back on.” – Multiple sources

After Pleasant Prairie, I wanted back on the horse; badly. I had to wait 3 weeks for the opportunity though. Going into Lake Zurich, I also intended to test out a few things and see if they worked. They included ‘racing empty’ (1/2 Powerade for breakfast instead of solid food) and racing without a wet suit.

Lake Zurich is the earliest race that I have during my season. When you’re not fully awake at 3:30AM, you can sometimes forget things. HUGE, HUGE, HUGE thanks to Steve from Village Cyclery for his help. We would not have been able to race without it.

While I had planned to race without a wet suit, I couldn’t have raced for points with it. The water temp was a balmy 83.5 and the air temp was about 68 pre-race and mid-70s when we got out. So it was the perfect water/air temp mix IMO. With the issues in the water the previous race, I gave myself a little bit of a cushion when self-seeding. Even though there was traffic, it was definitely the smoothest OWS I’ve ever had during a race. To the point that I believed we still had one more buoy turn when Lee signaled me we were at the swim exit.

Transition went as planned, and we were out on the bike relatively quickly. The bike went really well even though there were a couple of unexpected obstacles. There are a lot of hills (both rollers and a couple of huge ones) on the bike course, so there weren’t any good places for bottle passes. However, draining half a water bottle of Skratch from dismount into T2 seemed to work out well.

A reasonably smooth T2 led to us headed out onto the run at just over 1 hour. At this point, the heat and humidity had increased from the nicer mid-70s that it was on the bike. While my goal was to run the entire 5K, it just didn’t happen. I knew it would go well because of WI hill hell and hoped I could make it happen. But the huge hills at about 1mi and 2mi, along with the heat and some other minor ones killed that.

Even though the run wasn’t what I wanted, it was still 2+ minutes better than last year. And overall, I PRed the race by almost exactly 12 minutes (1:39:51.66 vs. 1:51:51.59).

As I head into the back-half of my season, I would greatly appreciate your support. You can support me by donating through my Dare2Tri fundraising page. Thank you in advance for any support you can provide!

4th of July Fun (Run for a Vet 5K) – 7/4/19

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!” – Christopher Lloyd

Prior to this past week, every race that I had done was on a paved surface. Even if we were going through the forest or along a lake, it was still on some sort of paved surface. The Run for a Vet 5K was my first trail race, and it was an entirely different animal to say the least.

During the past two years, I’ve found an event prior to our week in WI. That way I don’t feel as bad about a week of R&R filled with beer. But since I couldn’t find anything before we left, I found this 5K on July 4th. So R&R turned into ‘active R&R’ that included AM hill runs and afternoon swims.

While those AM hill runs were not fun, I’m glad that I did them. If I hadn’t, Thursday’s race would have been even more of a challenge. The course was a combination of a snowmobile path and a cross-country ski path, so LOTS of hills. I mean, LOTS and LOTS of hills. (Followed by hills…)

Prior to the race, I met up with my guide Paul and his family. After we had a few minutes to talk, Mazie Vincent from the local NBC affiliate interviewed us. You can watch Mazie’s piece here.

As we started off, things seemed really good. The first mile on the path wasn’t that bad. There were some hills, but they were minor or gradual ones. And then we made the turn onto the second half of the trail…

The second half was full of ‘fun’, steep hills. Some of these came in rapid succession; some were long, hard climbs. I did have to walk a couple of these because of length or after doing them because of the difficulty. Regardless, Paul was there to help steer me around the obstacles and help talk me through the hills. I was able to catch my breath during the rare flats and aid station as well.

At about 2.8, someone from the race was giving you your time. They also mentioned ‘only 525 steps to the finish’. Oh, but they didn’t mention that about 490 were in hills. LOL We crossed the finish line to a cheering crowd, and Carrie captured our finish. You can view the video of it here.

Even though it was an extreme challenge, it was a tremendous amount of fun. I am extremely grateful to Paul for being my eyes for the race. THere’s absolutely, positively no way I could have run this race without his help. Also, huge thanks to Rebecca and Dave for all their help and Mazie for interviewing us! I hope to do the race again in the future!