Porter's Lake Triathlon, er Duathlon 2015

So here was my final triathlon of the season, the all new Porter's Lake Tri. Nice and close to home, great little course that I was able to test out last year. But the fates, I mean the weather was against us this year and things didn't go exactly as planned.

I woke up dark and early on Sunday morning. Well even though it was 4:30am it was brighter than I hoped for. The sky was full of lightning. I got myself ready and took off regardless. The closer I got the more lightning was blazing through the sky. By 7am the officials had to make the call and decided to eliminate the swim portion of the triathlon and call it a duathlon. So instead of a swim we would do an extra run of 2.5km.

The weather was humid, with a light rain, though warm. We lined up for the first run and were soon underway.

Classy looking #28

The run course is very hilly so I decided to take it easy at the start and work my way up to the front. All was going well but there was some miscommunication and the first couple of runners took a wrong turn. We all followed which ended up making the first run 1.7 ish km instead of 2.5. Not a huge deal, but I would have pushed a bit harder probably if I'd known that was the case to give myself as big a cushion as possible to the faster cyclists. I finished the run in 6:15 for a 3:41min/km avg and 5th fastest overall.

I zipped through transition, though almost forgot to remove my sneakers, yikes!

I got to the mount line and arrived with a few other riders and we all seemed to have a little trouble getting started. Then off we went.

The bike ride was great. Rolling hills and fresh asphalt. I was zipping along and a couple of faster riders passed me. I was then passed by one rider but felt like he slowed down too much. I dropped back and then mounted an attack and repassed him. This happened 2 more times during the ride as we were very evenly matched. I did feel good though as I didn't see him with the lead group on the first run, so if I was able to stay with him on the bike I would likely pass him on the run.

I came screaming fast into Transition 2 and did  a perfect dismount to save as much time as I could. My average speed was 35.4 km/hr. It was only the 9th fastest time, but there were some speedy bikes out there. I blazed through transition in 47 seconds for the second fastest T2 of the day.

I took off and quickly passed another runner. Then Clint caught up with me and we ran together for a bit. Somehow I had managed to screw up my Garmin, so while I had current pace showing, I had no idea about distance. Luckily the course when properly run is 2 loops of 2.5km, so I didn't really need to know.

As Clint and I kept going we were not very far behind the lead group. Turns out we were running fairly quickly as we started to catch them. Eventually the lead three turned into 2 and we were catching third place. To the final downhill and Clint had pulled away from me, but Kevin C was falling into my grasp. I picked up the pace as best as I could downhill and seemed to make up decent ground. I pushed even harder on the flat and managed to just pop by Kevin before the finish line to take 4th overall and 3rd Age Group. The top five of us were separated by less than 40 seconds. I managed to finish with a time of 1;05:52 with a final run of 19:39. That was a great 5km final run on that hilly course. It was the 3rd fastest second run of the day behind 2 super fast runners.

Not the triathlon I was hoping for, but it was a fun race and a great course. I hope that next year teh weather will cooperate and we'll see how my swim is.