What Doesn’t Kill You…

Yesterday I had a bit of a race at the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruses, NM that they like to call a Duathlon. It is actually only a run then a bike followed by a shower and some sandwiches, about the way all duathlon’s should be in my opinion.

The WSMR races are small, inconceivably small by most of your standards but even small for my remote corner of the globe. I think there were 61 registered and 52 actually showed and raced. The run is an out and back on a sand road, which is mostly well packed but it does have some soft parts and the bike is also an out and back on a pretty rough road with some nice cracks in it. The run is pretty decent but that bike kind of sucks because there is about a 4 mile drop (fun) onto some very bumpy rollers (not so fun) back to about a 4 mile climb to the finish line (SUCKS!).

This was my second race in my age group and at 206 pounds I was still able to nail down second place out of the 5 that ran in the M 40 - 44. The first place guy beat me by two minutes; he crushed me on the bike but only had me by 10 seconds on the run. He was pretty small, I probably had a good 50 pounds on him if an ounce but he had powerfully built legs and was no slouch. I was happy with my race and don’t think I could have done any harder. I came ever so close to breaking an average sub-7 min pace on the run and was pleased with my bike split considering I have only ridden maybe a total of 400 miles in the past 3 months.

Today I headed out for my last long run before next weekend’s 50K and I crashed hard. I was going to do an easy 20 or so and the day was fantastic, the best weather we have had in 3 or 4 months. The temp was a nice 55 degrees and the sun was out in a clear blue sky. I must have underestimated how much yesterdays race took out of me and how much more fluid and fuel I need in the warmer weather because not only did I crash hard but I ran out of gel and water and Accelerade.

All I can say is that I am glad I have become used to having bad final long runs before an event otherwise I would be worried. Now it’s time to slack off and let recovery work its magic!