Canoe – Cycle - Run

Yesterday was a great day!  My first triathlon and I didn’t even have to swim.  I slept over at my parent’s house in preparation for the event since we had to leave from their house at 6am in order to get to the race location in Sydenham on time.  We arrived at 8am and got our Canoe in the water and the bikes set up in their place.  It turns out that we were the only canoe entered and there was about 14 kayaks or so.

So automatically we were going to be 1st and 2nd place in our event.  While cool, it’s also a bit of a let down to be winners by default.  It was then that I decided that we were actually racing the kayakers.  This is something that put us at an immediate and severe disadvantage.  We had a white water tandem canoe, and some of these guys had actual racing kayaks.  But we were in a race and there must be competition!

We set out and within seconds on guy was way ahead of the pack, we settled in to the 6th and 7th spots (since there was the two of us).  We actually held this the entire length of the boating portion of the event!  It was a 4k paddle, which the lead guy finished in 26:09.  We finished this portion of the race in about 32 minutes, so at a 6 minute disadvantage off the lead. I say about 32 minutes since they take that time from when you cross over the line with your bike and I stopped to change my shoes and socks since they were wet from the boat, dad didn’t and so he gained 30 seconds on me here.

We headed off on the bike part and that 30 seconds was enough for dad to pull away from me.  The first portion was a pretty big hill up and away from the water but since it was the start of the bike part I gunned it right up and passed quite a few people.  On the flat parts of the course I was pushing about 34km/h and over the 20k I was just barely over 30km/h!  Fast!  At about the half way mark dad was going back the other way by the time I was almost half a kilometre away from the turnaround point.  He had stretched  his 30 second lead to about 2 minutes.  By the time we made it back to the transition point it turns out he was about 3:30 ahead of me.  He finished the cycle portion in 36:18 and I did it in 39:41.  So thanks to my sock change going into the 5k run portion he had about a 3:53 lead on me.

Here though is where my strength would come out and his weakness.  Dad is not much of a runner even though he has the cardio for it, he doesn’t do it very much and so his calves were cramping up pretty bad.  I wasn’t having my fastest 5k but I was going along at a decent pace.  It was really humid, but thankfully the sun was not out.  Dad was still ahead of me when we first crossed paths just before the 2.5k turnaround point and I caught up to him at about the 3k point.  It started to rain in the final parts of the race and I knew I wasn’t in danger of anyone passing me when I came up on the final stretch.  I motored a bit at the end, but didn’t have my usual sprint as there was no one to catch and no one catching up on me either.  I finished and dad was only about 50 seconds behind me!

I finished in 1:39:10 and he was 1:40:09!  His quickness biking was just not quite enough to hold me off in the end.  I think that if I had to I could have pressed a bit harder to win if I had needed to but, that won’t be an issue until next year!

So I was Gold, he was Silver.  If we included the kayak racers, who had about an 8 minute lead off thanks to the superior water vessels, that lead guy finished in 1:31:21, 1:37:25 and then us at third and fourth and then next would have been 1:42:29.  Which says to me, all things being equal, we would have been challenging for first and second!

A pretty awesome day indeed.  Pictures soon to follow!!

I got the breakdown in times in pictures from the stats van, online all they have are finish times as a whole.  But there was just a 5k run as well.  If I had entered that, even with this slower time after biking 20k I would have been 18th overall and 2nd in my age group, dad would have been 28th overall (including me) and 2nd in his age group!  Very decent runs especially you you consider that these folks has not just done a 20k cycle!