Devilman Sprint Race Report

Devilman Sprint Triathlon
2009 Race Report #4
May 9th, 2009


Background

I returned (with Sparty, my partner and fellow old-man AG denizen to Cedarville, NJ site of my first sub 5-hour H-IM. This time I was here to race the sprint version of Devilman. Also occurring on this day was something called a “half-lite” 50-mile triathlon. I considered racing the longer race despite my lack of fitness, especially Long Course fitness, but decided not to for a couple of reasons. First, I’m Alex’s algebra “study buddy” and with my trip to Australia on tap for the next day, I needed to spend as much math-time with him as possible to help him get ready for a test this week. Second, on Wednesday of this coming week I’m climbing Australia’s highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko, and I wanted to be reasonably fresh for what will no doubt be a long day.

So the Sprint was the right choice for me. This race was billed as a 0.45-mile swim/20.5-mile bike/4 mile run. The race director put tildes in front of the race distances and he was right about the approximate nature of these distances. This was to be another small local race with only 126 folks entered overall and just five in my AG. A quick look at the competition led me to believe I had a good chance of extending my AG win streak.

Race morning was quite clear and pleasant—about 65 degrees although somewhat humid. It warmed up quite a bit as the morning unfolded—it was 76 degrees at the end of our race and the LC guys had to deal with temps in the 80s. There was noticeable wind, I’d say gusting in the 10-20 mph range. This helped on the way out on the bike but was a noticeable retardant on the way back to T2. That said, it was a pretty nice day to race—so we did!

The Swim

All 112 of us who actually showed up to race this morning jumped in the muddy, murky “lake” shortly before 8 am. We were allowed no warm-up, just jump-in, line-up and go. The water temp was near perfect at 69 degrees. The swim course was laid out as a small rectangle with 3 counter-clockwise turns, and it looked visibly short to my eye.

At 8 the gun went off and the melee began. I like one-wave swims (like IM races) as you have a much better sense of where you stand than you do with wave races. However, even with the smallish turnout the tight course led to a lot of bumping and banging throughout the swim. I started to the far right, away from the buoy line as this position allowed me to keep an eye on things with my left sided breathing.

I did a reasonable job of negotiating the throng though invariably, in a race like this, you do have to pull up and change course from time-to-time to evade some slub who seems to be intent on slugging you every four seconds. I tried to hit the first 50+ yards hard to get into relatively free water. Soon I was red-lining it and felt a little short of breath. It occurred to me that I had not yet practiced my hot-start-recover-on-the-fly technique in the pool and so I think this approach backfired a bit. I’ll need to work on this in the weeks ahead.

After the first turn I had to back off to try to get back to an equilibrium (man I hate being out of shape). Sparty, who started on my feet, latter told me I had moved about 10-15 yards ahead of him by the first buoy but that he was able to catch back up to me by the second. Sparty has improved a lot in his swim over the last couple of years and he was having a solid swim today.

As we neared the 3rd and final swim buoy, I looked over and saw Sparty’s distinctive blue earplugs right next to me. This surprised me a bit as I usually swim about 10% faster than Dave. This got me going as I wanted to try and post the fastest swim time in our AG. I sped up and opened a slight lead as we hit the final turn. I took a tighter line around the buoy than Sparty, who was inside between the buoy and I. Dave swam up on my back a bit but I was able to plow ahead and open up a lead. I told Dave about this after the race and he remembered the incident, but had no idea it was I. This asymmetrical information advantage allowed me to narrowly beat Dave to the end of the swim.

At the end of the swim we encountered a line of 7-8 people waiting relatively patiently to exit up the one narrow ladder/dock. I probably was in this queue for about 10-15 seconds before I was able to pull myself out. I didn’t look behind me but Dave was right behind me and he had now realized he was right on my tail—literally! I stopped my clock when I stood up on the dock and saw an elapsed time of 8:20 and an average heart rate of 154bpm. Two conclusions can be drawn from this. First, the course was definitely short. As much as I would like to think so, I am not an 18:30 per mile pace swimmer. My guess is that the true distance of the swim course was around 0.3 miles. The second conclusion is I’m definitely a ways away from sprint swim shape, my average HR should be a lot closer to 160-162 for a sprint. I think I out to be able to get in decent swim sprint shape even with my limited swim volume and I intend to up the intensity of my swim sessions to help achieve this capability. Further, with my current fitness I probably should have swam this race 30+ seconds faster today.

Overall, I recorded the 44th fastest swim time, which is a decidedly uninspiring 61.6 %-tile effort. No question this was a below average swim. I’m normally around the 80 %-tile for an open water swim and this would have required me to swim some 56 seconds (about 9%) faster—this is the amount I need to improve my sprint swim—hopefully over the next 3-4 weeks. On the AG side, I was indeed first of the three of us dinos that actually showed this May morning. The “official” swim split was recorded after a lengthy run on a stony path so the record shows I was about 17 seconds faster than Sparty in the swim, but this is due to his leisurely approach to transition, he was in fact really 1 second behind me on the swim.

Our AG standings:

Christofferson -----
Spartin + 0:17
Meyer + 0:32

Transition One

As I intimated above, the transition here is very lengthy. I recorded a total transition time of 3:52 (168bpm avg HR). While this is almost an IM type transition time, I believe I was relatively a lot better than most in T1. I noted above the 17 seconds I had picked up on Sparty and I was also able to pass a lot of folks on the run into the transition area and then exit faster than many of them as well. My guess is that I passed maybe 10 folks during T1 and I was now in about 35th place. I made the long run out to the bike mount and was on my way. My SRM reported than I had run 0.125 miles from the rack to the bike mount—pretty ridiculous!

The Bike

I was eager to put a big gap on my Triathlon partner. I was confident I could do so because Sparty has yet to demonstrate that he has made as much progress on the bike as he has in the pool. I started passing folks left and right and steadily worked my way up the standings. While I wasn’t passed, two folks whom I out swam actually out-biked me, but my lead was sufficient to keep them behind me entering T2.

I felt pretty decent on the bike. I was seeing pretty good cadence and power numbers and with the wind generally at my back in the early goings, the speedo was frequently reporting in the 23-27 mph range.

As I got out towards the triangular shaped turnaround, the pack thinned out and I was only able to pass one more biker on the way back home. The back half was noticeably slower as a fresh wind made in hard to get out of the 20-23 mph range. I also began to fatigue as my lack of bike training and fitness became readily apparent—thank God I wasn’t doing the longer race!

I finally hit the dismount time with an elapsed time of 55:19. My SRM recorded 57:38 from rack to rack which means I spent 2:19 running the 0.25 miles between bike mount/dismount and the transition rack. This is a 9:16/mile pace—lol!. Making the adjustments for the above. My average power for the ride was 244 watts, which is not bad. I mean it should be 265-270 (8-9% higher) but not that bad at the end of the day. My average cadence was 82 rpm which is quite a bit better than the other 2009 races but still a little off my optimal spin rate of 85 rpm. I’ve been doing some high spin work on my Computrainer lately and it seems like it might be working. My HR averaged 162 bpm—also below a desired number of 167-169 bpm. So, and there is no surprise here, I’m missing the high-end punch on the bike that I have historically benefited from.

Competitively I posted the 14th fastest bike time, which is only at the 88.4 %-tile level. This is decidedly below par as I have always been in the 95-97th % range. To do so, I would have had to ride close to 2 minutes (or about 3.5%) faster—this seems like a pretty good measure of how much I should try to improve my sprint bike speed in the coming month. This seems in line with the 8-9% power short fall noted above (remember speed increases with the square root of power increase and an 8% power increase translates into a little less than a 4% speed increase).

I clocked the course at 21.241 miles but if I back out the 0.250 miles I pushed my bike, the actual distance was essentially 21 miles. My actual average speed was thus 22.8 mph. I calculate that last year I would have averaged 23.6 mph.

In any event, I did put 6:54 and 9:31 on my AG pursuers and at the end of the bike the AG race looked like this:


Christofferson --------
Spartin + 7:11
Meyer + 10:59

Transition Two

I quickly got through transition in a time of 1:56 (avg. HR of 164bpm). My guess is that about 1:10 of that was the time I spent pushing my bike from dismount to the rack.
I could see more bikes in transition than I had hoped (I could tell I was around 15th place or so) and set out to get through the run as best as I could.

The Run

Even before I was able to leave the school grounds (about a quarter of a mile), three folks ran me down. I felt drained and I noticed the heat. I wasn’t in any sort of trouble but I could tell I wasn’t that fast (even for me). As I went past the entrance to the end of the bike leg I saw Sparty and yelled to him. I looked at my clock and figured he was 7 minutes or so behind me. I knew the AG race was over. The little voice inside me said: “Just take it easy, don’t kill yourself. You’re not in shape anyways and you have to fly to Australia tomorrow.” The little voice seemed pretty smart.

I cruised along and hit what I thought was the first mile in 8:58. I knew I was slow but I thought the mile mark had to be long. I train faster than this and I recorded 7:30s at Smithfield earlier this year. I saw my average HR was 164bpm and given the heat, I knew I was not working that hard. It didn’t seem to bother me so I just kept plugging along reflecting on how utterly boring the scenery was.

I hit the turnaround (and supposedly the second mile mark) with an 8:35 split (163 HR). I figured I was around 20th place or so at this time. I missed Rob Holmes running me down or else I would have been motivated to speed up (he outran me handily, for the first time in quite a while, but couldn’t quite catch me). I pushed a little bit harder the 3rd mile and recorded a 7:54 (167 bpm).

Over the last mile I focused on and did catch a pretty overweight (although a bit younger) Clydesdale guy who had been beating me and I pushed through to the end 8:16 later (163 bpm). I think the course was longer than 4 miles but I didn’t measure it so who knows, maybe I really am this slow! My total time for the run was 33:43 (8:26/mile). If I had to guess I’d say the real distance was about 4.3 miles—but that is a total guess.

In any event I posted the 47th best run (59.0 %-tile) and my run was actually comparatively worse than my swim. I’m almost certainly 2-4 minutes slower in this race than I would have run last year. I did run 1-4 minutes faster than the guys in my AG so I ended up winning the AG title by almost 11 minutes.

Overall I finished in 21st place (82.1 %-tile). My guess is I’m about 4-7 minutes (also about 4-7%) slower than last year on this day. With last year’s fitness, I suspect I would have finished 8th or 9th. Be that as it may, I did manage to win my 4th race this year and my 8th sprint in a row going back to last year. While, I won’t match last year’s fitness I expect to narrow the gap over the next month. Also, as I write this I’m on a plane to Australia and I’m excited about my first summit attempt. And Rainier is just 3 weeks down the road!