Slowtwitch race recap and top 10: (I got 9th, not 8th-Jarrod Shoemaker was 5th)
I felt strong on the swim, but like my stroke was getting me nowhere. I've been working on upping my stroke rate to handle choppy ocean conditions and it just hasn't fully come around yet. A longer, slower "pool" stroke like mine becomes inefficient in bad conditions because it is constantly disrupted by small waves. Joe Maloy (my Triathlon Squad training partner) has the perfect stroke for this type of swim, having been an ocean life guard for years. He lead the front group, gapping me when I swung a little wide to avoid traffic at the first buoy. I swam behind Olympian Richard Murray for the rest of the swim, and tried to keep the gap to the leaders as small as possible.
In order to get back into the race for the top 5 I would have needed to put in a stellar bike ride. I ran through the very long transition as quickly as I could, with the hopes of riding with Murray, but his awesome run speed and very hard start on the bike put me riding about 200 meters behind right from the gun. I tried to ride within myself from that point on, and only lost a little over a minute to Joe and Hunter Kemper despite riding alone. Murray managed to bridge to Hunter and Joe, and ended up second place overall. If I would have gone super hard the first half of the bike and done the same, things might have gone differently. "Coulda/shoulda" as coach Sousa said. Lesson learned, and a tactical misstep I won't make again.
I started well on the run, focusing on my turnover. Around mile 1.5 I started to feel my legs come around and I I caught two guys, including James Seear. The two of us ran together until mile 4, when I started to fade just slightly. It wasn't what I was hoping for on the run, but compared to last year, when I would get to the run and be sort of in damage control, it was pretty awesome to have confidence in my run and to catch people. My time of 34:26 was still faster than all but one of my draft-legal 10k's last year, and I trained straight through this race with no taper. Being able to see this type of improvement in a year is a good sign for the future!
This top 10 marks my best non-draft performance by far, but it still leaves me with a slight sense of discontent. A couple of things contributed to this. A) The sense that I have more to give. I've been having great swim workouts recently and when I was unable to put that together (regardless of water condition) on raceday, it's pretty frustrating. B) Seeing my teammate, Joe finish on the podium both makes me incredibly excited for Joe, but it also lets me know that I can do better. I'm excited to do another non-draft race and use the experience from this race to climb through the results a bit further.
I got straight back to training on the day after the race, and my arms have never been so tired on "easy Monday"
because of how hard I was working to increase my stroke rate. Visualization has always been helpful to me, so I was visualizing Joe swim (he has the fastest turnover of anyone I know). Luckily yesterday he was back from Miami and I could just match his stroke rate as we swam side by side. I feel like I'm flailing around in the water like a fool, but any time you change something in your stroke, that's pretty typical.
Next race: Bridgetown Pan American cup- April 21 Link
