St. Croix Race Report

I am glad I came and did this race again. I was originally going to try to qualify and since I already have my spot do not need to.  So We made a decision to be in shape for the race and go as fast as I can, btu not to full prepare for it as I had early season previously and it kind of showed up today.

 Weather was raining in the am and it turned out it just kept raining all day long.  For me personally this took a little impetus off my motivation because, well it just did. J That combined with the last time I was here three years ago I got SCHOOLED on the course I decided to play it a bit conservative today.

The swim was pretty uneventful. My speed suit must have been pulled on because I did notice it was open after about 1000K so I rolled over and wrestled that back closed but other than that it was pretty straight forward. Some dude took off at the beginning and was GONE! He outswam Potts by 8 min! I can tell you it was true too because I saw him go and couldn’t believe it.

My transition was slow as I never changed “auto on/off” on my new garmin and I had to mess with that and I didn’t really feel like just running through the mud because I really didn’t think that would matter too much to my overall placing at the end of the day.

I took off somewhat easy and really tried to ease into the bike. Again, I wanted to not have any cramping today and the hills are so far out of what I have been training lately I just needed to feel it out for a bit. Also, there was standing water up to 6 inches deep in several places. I kept thinking how bad crashing would such and with as hard as the course is normally I didn’t see the point in taking risk on descents and corners.

I passed most of the women pro (I was in the 4^th wave I think) and by mile 40 was in 19^th overall place on the road. The feedback I kept getting was that I was doing all the passing, watts were up whenever I felt like pushing and I thought “hey I must be ridding well, lets just play it cool”. I also was afraid the rain would stop, the sun would come out and would just steam cook us all. So was hedging for that.

With 5 miles or so to go I kept looking back and saw literally nobody.  I relaxed all the way into T2 again, thinking the run is hard enough, pushing the last 5-8 miles would probably take more from that then time gained.  

T2 was again slow. I had put all my running stuff in plastic bags and had to unwrap it all, and wanted to put on socks and not with muddy feet, etc. blah blah blah, my transitions were WAY slow! My fault, but I honestly didn’t mind so much because again, I didn’t think it would matter. – It did, as it always does.

2 guys passed me in T2 -I never saw them again.

 I ran steady for the first 7 miles, then just felt a little “out of shape” and had to slow down a touch the last 5. Not a catastrophic reduction, but I was fading.

In the end, I felt like I biked too conservative but that is usually not an issue, and I feel my base is a little light, but that is by design. So it wasn’t a great race, but it wasn’t a bad one either.  I speant WAY TOO MUCH time in transitions, as they were abotu 6 min added to my bike and run combined, but hey, it was raining! :)

I am happy to get in a solid effort today and get the season started.