Blue Lake Triathlon

Tri-Northwest Club Championships

June 14th is Jessi and my wedding anniversary.  Wow, what a great anniversary weekend spending it with some of our friends and racing a triathlon. Pretty good if you like that kind of stuff I guess.

This weekend would find us on the outskirts of Portland at the very popular Blue Lake Triathlon on Sunday along with 1000 other people racing the Oly and sprint tris. We headed over on Friday after school. It should have been the last day of school, but thanks to those wonderful 5 snow days, we would be returning to school on Monday.

I have raced this event for the past 3 years and have come to really enjoy the event. It is early enough to establish a baseline. I am not one for flat bike courses because it normally means that there will be a lot of drafting. But I have never really seen that to be a problem at Blue Lake. It does create a great opportunity to test some thresholds and compare from year to year. It has normally been a pretty fast course for me and I have had some good splits there on the bike. The run is flat too. But if you do too much work on the bike, it’s very easy to get run down, and I know I can get run down :)

The race started at 8:00am in water that was about 71 degrees and air temp that was 60 with an overcast sky.  In the elite wave, there were about 15 I think.  I got passed by a couple guys.  I made the turn for the finish and swam straight and was 2nd out of the water. I knew the guy 1st out of the water was ahead, but I did not think by more than a minute. I saw him in T1 and caught up to him. He left transition about 4 seconds ahead, so I closed almost all of my deficit I had from the swim in T1.

Then it was pretty much open road for 24 miles. Well, and a motorcycle. I locked into a steady effort that I felt I could maintain. At the last turnaround I took a split to 2nd (still the same guy) and realized I had a pretty good gap, but I thought I would need more time. With about 9 miles to go, I picked it up a bit and pressed on to the finish. I ended up with one of my fastest 40k bike splits (54:00), and highest power output for me as well. I was pretty excited about that.  The Trek TTX did not disappoint, again.

I rolled into T2 and was greeted by many spectators cheering me on. I was really impressed. There must have been 100 people right ON the dismount line. I cruised in and threw on my KSwiss K’onas and was off. I normally feel slow in the first mile and know that I just need to get settled in.  I could see the 5 that were behind me coming in and realized I have about 3:30 on 2nd, so that gave me a little breathing room. I ran to the turn and was feeling good. I felt like I got going from mile 3 to 4 when I saw my mile split I realized that the mile markers may be off because it was a little faster than I was running. But it really did not matter. At this point I had about 4 minutes on 2nd, and knew that I just needed to keep doing what I’m doing…nothing stupid. Just run my race. I came into the final quarter mile and was pretty excited knowing that I would defend the number 1 I was wearing this time.

It was a fast race. I was happy with all my splits. None of them were earth shattering…well, maybe the bike a little, but they were consistent and efforts that I “should” be able to replicate in future races. There was never a time I felt like I was racing out of my control. So that felt promising.

Another amazing trip with great people. Races are a lot of fun, but they are even better when you share them with friends, on your anniversary, and end up setting a PR. That’s a good weekend.

Hope your weekends are great.