Richmond Duathlon

The purpose of this weekend's Duathlon was to see where my speed and fitness was, which would tell me how effective my training has been. The short answer is that I seem to have the speed, but my fitness is certainly lacking. Overall this is better than I expected. My race splits were:

• Run 5km - 19m21s (3m55s pace)
• T1 - 0m35s
• Bike 20km - 31m44s (38.0 kph)
• T2 - 0m28s
• Run 3km - 12m26s (4m08s pace)
• Overall - 1h04m36s

Elaine and I had party in Rosebud on Saturday night. This was always going to mean limited sleep before the race. It wasn't helped when I didn't notice that this race had a later than usual start at 9am (instead of 8am) - Elaine was not happy with me. However the upside was that I scored prime position in transition.
As we gathered on the start line I noticed that a lot of the big guns had come out to play (including several speedsters in my age group). I had hoped that the clash of dates with the Half Marathon in Sandringham would have thinned the field, but a lot of the athletes who are doing the Age Group World Championships in Auckland next month decided to use this race as a good hit out.
My nemesis from last year Aurel was present and he had a new bike. After beating him for the first time ever in the last Duathlon last season, I was now confident I had him covered (not sure if there was any logic to that confidence). A new club member Peter and his wife Tatjana were also racing - this is a different Peter to the one I mentioned last season. I had never raced Peter before and I was interested to see how I matched up. I suspected he had a slight edge on the run, but I was confident my biking ability would hold me in good stead.
The first run went well. I found a good rhythm and was able to sit 10 metres or so behind Peter and Aurel, who out of pure coincidence were running together. They slowly extended the gap as the race went on, but never moved out of sight. Looking at my average pace for each of the 1km run splits:

  3m41s, 3m49s, 3m54s, 3m57s, 4m12s

I suspect Peter and Aurel maintained a relatively steady pace, whilst I slowly fell away. But I'm happy with my run split of 19m21s.

Having fallen away significantly towards the end of the first run, I took a conservative approach on the bike leg. I've been averaging less than one ride a week for the last two months and most of those rides have been quite short (some only 30km). So I ditched my usual strategy of pushing really hard and decided to keep some energy in reserve for the last run. Even holding back, I still posted a good bike split compared to the other riders (20th fastest overall for the race). However as the 5km splits below show, my speed still dropped off.

  38.6kph, 38.8kph, 37.5kph, 37.0kph

As expected the 2nd run was a little ugly. In the beginning I struggled with sore calf muscles, but I slowly found a rhythm before struggling again towards the end. At the turn I saw a had a reasonable lead over both Peter and Aurel and that helped me maintain some sort of pace to the finish line. Below are the kilometre splits for the last 3km run:

  4m15s, 4m05s, 4m07s

The last time I raced on this course in October 2011, it was my best ever race. Today I was only 90 seconds slower, and I didn't dig anywhere near as deep. One year ago my Duathlon Run split was 20m16s (at Somers), so I am in much better condition than the same time last year. Elaine also had a great race. She won her age group as expected (I missed the podium), but was also very happy with her time and overall place.