Despite it being the State Championships, neither Elaine nor I were particularly excited about this race. We both wanted to do well, but having already finished our target races for the season, it was a lot harder to find that inner drive.
Sunday morning did not get off to a great start, as I incorrectly set the alarm for Saturday instead of Sunday. Fortunately Elaine had wisely set a backup alarm which saved us from missing the race (and also gave us an extra 20 mins of sleeping). Of course we then left home later than intended, resulting in a bad parking spot - long walk to the race (that wasted even more time). We stole back some time by doing much shorter warmup rides than usual (about 4km instead of 10).
Racking my bike in transition, I set my Garmin 310xt watch/bike computer to multisport mode so that it would automatically switch from bike to T1 to run (I don't wear it in the swim). It was all ready to go when I realised I hadn't checked if I'd disabled AutoPause (which can result in inaccurate split times). In my haste I hit too many buttons at once and upset the Garmin. When Garmin watches get upset they just lock up and sometimes stay that way until the rechargeable battery runs out (in 20 hours). Luckily, after 2 minutes of minor panic, I coaxed the watch into shutting down. Once powered up again, it had forgotten the previous incident and was back in a good mood allowing me to set everything up again (ironically AutoPause had already been disabled).
Once at the swim start I was feeling good. I'd survived all my blunders and there was nothing to stop me from having a good race (or so I thought). The first 500m of the 750m went fantastic (best swim ever to that point). I found a good swimmer to draft off and we had pulled away from the main pack with only 4 or 5 swimmers from my wave ahead in the distance. Despite the fast pace, sitting in the draft was ridicously easy and with around 250m to go I was feeling so good I decided to charge off by myself - stupid decision. The last section back to the beach was directly into the sun making it extremely difficult to see the finish arch (even with my new tinted goggles). Now swimming by myself, direction was all up to me. I saw a faint outline of the finish arch and charged towards it. Unfortunately as I reached the beach I discovered I'd swam back to the starting arch (over 100m off direction), much to the amusement of the assembled crowd who were watching the later waves about to start. Comparing my swim split to the other athlete I had been drafting off, my little detour added over 40 seconds to my time.
After a running mount onto the bike I had trouble placing my feet on the shoes (already attached to the pedals), which is usually the easiest aspect of the flying mount. Then the early going felt tough. My legs felt very heavy, no doubt still fatigued from the Geelong race 2 weeks ago, and it was very difficult to get my power wattage up - usually it is an effort to keep my watts down early in the ride. Things slowly fell into place and I got into a reasonable rhythm that allowed me to average over 40kph for the bike leg. But this was slower than my effort at the Elwood race and I think conditions were better this time (wind was almost non-existent).
I exited T2 thinking the run might be better - I was very wrong. In previous races, the first kilometre has been spent trying to hold back and not run too fast. Today I was struggling right from the start and then continued to get slower. My average run pace was 4m12s per kilometre and the run split was a full 2 minutes slower than my Elwood time. The temperature on the run was only 22 degrees Celsius but after the race everybody reported it feeling a hellava lot warmer. And nearly everybody I spoke to had a poor run (most of these people did Geelong as well).
Most of the club raced at Geelong 2 weeks ago and most of them suffered in today's race in a very similar way to me, but minus all my stupid mistakes (although Leah did swim to the wrong turnaround buoy and was directed back to the first one by the lifeguards). The exceptions were Young Matt who had a great race, Hayley who won her age group yet again (even though she rolled her ankle at the run turnaround) and Nolwenn and new girl Kate also appeared to have very good races. While far from his best race, Martin still won his age group and Elaine, Clint, Aurel and Dale all picked up podiums (and Adam and Sarah just missed out with 4th places).
Usually I only average one good race a season. This season I've had 2 great races (Elwood and Geelong) and one very good race (Mordialloc). So I can't complain about one bad race, especially with it being so close after Geelong. The good news is I won a very nice Soleus sports watch as a spot prize and our detox regime (from red wine) is on hold tonight - in fact I'm drinking a glass now as I type (Cheers !).
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