Tjalling Ypma - 5/25/10

This is my annual ‘ice-breaker’ event, the one that forces me to get into racing mode and shake the dust off the race equipment that has been stored away for the last 6 months. It’s a low key, low cost, low stakes event, which usually only takes me about two-and-a-half hours to complete, so there’s not much to stress about. They also offer a shorter race option, which provided an opportunity for my youngest son Menko to enter his first ever duathlon. He took a leaf from his dad’s rigorous training regime: his total training for the race was to run one lap of Padden in each of the two weeks before the race. He doesn’t own a road bike, so he rode the course on his full-suspension mountain bike instead.

The race starts at 8, so I usually leave B’ham at 4am in order to get to the fairgrounds in Enumclaw by around 6:30. It’s an easy peaceful drive at that time of day. The race setting is quiet and rural; the course is largely on quiet and fairly smooth country roads that skirt green grassy meadows spotted with bright yellow dandelions and buttercups, backed by low dark-green forested hills. It was a dry but chilly morning, thanks to the clear skies overnight; it was hard to decide quite what to wear but I went with the minimalist approach as usual – I generate a lot of heat when I race. There were a couple of familiar B’ham faces at transition, including Eric, Sean, and Steve Wade. I had vague aspirations of winning my age-group, but those disappeared when I heard they were doing 10-year divisions and that Steve was thus in my category. I did enjoy meeting the only other competitor in my 5-year range, Scott Hale. He is coached by Daryl and he’s a very good runner but not as strong on the bike as I am, so I knew that in order to beat him I would have to crush him on the ride.

The start was the usual sorry spectacle that occurs whenever I am part of a race that starts with a run: the mob storms off into the distance while I languish in their wake, coughing and choking on their dust. However, I’m an old dog and I’ve been around the block more than a few times, so I was pretty sure that the race would come back to me eventually. So it proved once we got past the first mile or so, when I latched onto the heels of a small Asian girl who began cutting her way up through the trailing ranks. We made very satisfactory progress, picking off other runners with gratifying regularity. I knew we weren’t going fast but we weren’t dawdling about either; I might have remained a bit too comfortable but I was nevertheless quite happy to average something just under 8 minutes per mile for that opening modestly hilly 5 mile run. I was a bit slower than last year, and the race data shows I was only in 71st place overall after the run, so I was still way back in the field by the time I hopped onto the bike.

The ride is always the fun bit for me. My 10-year-old aluminum Cannondale, which probably has about 30,000 miles on the clock, cuts a sad figure beside the shiny new carbon Cervelos and Felts and Kuotas that decorate transition these days, but it’s still the engine that counts. I put my head down and began pushing the big gears on the initial moderately flat stretch of the course, and by the time I hit the bottom of Mud Mountain with about 6 miles done I had put 15 competitors behind me. Things got a bit confused on the climb, since there were remnants of the short course race still struggling their way up amidst the bulk of the long course racers, so I wasn’t sure who I was passing as I made my way up the hill; it seems that somewhere along the way I passed Scott. I have done this race so many times that I know the climb very well, which makes it a lot easier to know how hard and when to push and how much pain is still in store at any given point. I passed another bunch of riders on the false flat before embarking on the fast descent back towards transition. I was glad to see that the rumble strips that had been installed on the shoulder of the highway last year had largely been worn down, so there was more leeway to avoid the passing traffic. I’m not comfortable in the aerobars at the high speeds reached on such long steep descents, but my crouch worked well enough to keep anybody from passing me on the drop and I was able to get by a few others on the short intervening flats before we hit the bottom and turned the sharp left-hander onto the straight back to transition.

As we completed the first lap I was on the tail of a guy wearing a pointy helmet and riding a disk wheel; it gave me (the oldest guy in the race) considerable pleasure to blow past him on my old school gear. And so it went, though one recently-passed fellow gave it a last hurrah by briefly flying past me at extremely high cadence on the steep lower slopes of Mud Mountain before blowing up spectacularly. Somewhere on that second climb I apparently passed a cramping Sean Hackney. By the time I got back into transition, after 28 miles on the bike, I had passed about 40 other riders and was now around 30th overall. I’m reasonably pleased with an average speed of just over 20mph for the ride, given that this includes two ascents of Mud Mountain, even though there were 16 guys who rode it faster than I did.

The second run tends to be a grim affair for me, partly because I always overdo it on the bike. Since everybody I had passed on the bike had clearly beaten me on the first run, it is also standard that I get engulfed by a horde of runners intent on putting me back in my place. On this occasion I also had to cope with a dull pain in my lower left calf that felt like it could easily become something more significant like a muscle or tendon tear. I had had this pain for a week or two, and had nursed that leg a bit in my first run of the day; I now had to be careful to manage it through the second run without incurring any major damage. In some ways this was a blessing, since it forced me to take shorter strides with a faster cadence, which felt pretty comfortable. I trotted along as best I could, with just one or two guys flying past me in the first two miles. As I neared the three mile mark I heard fast footsteps behind me, and shortly I was passed by both Sean and Scott. I didn’t know that I was ahead of Scott, and if I had I might have gone a bit faster at the outset, but he is a far faster runner and there was no way I could go with him now. I was content to maintain about 8:15 miles, which seemed to be good enough to hold off the bulk of the anticipated hordes. As I re-entered the fairgrounds with about ½ mile remaining I noted a few runners not far behind, so I gave it a good go and managed to make it to the line without any of them passing me. I finished about 36th overall, not too bad for an old geezer who can’t really run.

Menko’s short course race went rather well. He was part of the pack for the first 2k run, and then held his own on the bike despite the handicap of his heavy bike and fat tires and not knowing how long and hard the Mud Mountain climb would be. He’s a good climber, so he passed a lot of people on the way up, but then got frustrated on the way down when he maxed out his gear ratios and was wind-milling as others flew past him. His lack of any training for the run cost him on the closing 6k, but he somehow managed to run it all and was well-satisfied with his overall placing of 36th, essentially bang in the middle of all finishers. I think he may be hooked on this silly multisport business; he plans on doing Xterra Solstice next. He might even train for it; 4 weeks should be plenty of time to learn to swim, right?

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