I’ve not done too many races this year due to injuries and the Kona prep but as team captain I try to do each league race. The one last Saturday was race number three and late but hopefully not too late I seem to get back into shape.
Even though Westerwald Triathlon only had some 200 participants the field was stacked with potential and we were in the middle of it. It was the sprint tri state champs of Rhi-neland-Palatinate and they had EUR 500 for the winner so a few very fast guys showed up.
Regrettably two team members were out due to injury. So all we could hope for was a middle of the pack result with two of our backup crew racing. In the middle of my Kona prep I could not do much of any tapering. The day before the race saw me running 2:30h at IM pace and Saturday morning two hours of easy spinning on the bike so I did not ex-pect much. But the race was only a print (500m swim – 20k bike, 5k run) so I thought it might work out.
Once we were off, all mayhem broke lose as 150 guys tried to make the first 90 degree turn only 150m from the start line as fast as possible. My black left eye is testament to the brawl. I exited the water in just over 7:30min and was quite pleased. Once on my QR CD 0.1 I started to play catch up, as always. The bike course had some 1000 foot of ver-tical climbing on just 20k so it seemed fair where I was in the race. Behind me it seems to have been a different story though. Right before we hit T2 I caught rode past local pro Benjamin Rossmann. I thought: Hey that’s not too bad! I could hear the announcer say something about me being in 4th place overall. At 35:43min for the hilly course I had posted the third fastest bike split of the day and hit off onto the run. A quite hilly run though and even though it was only 5k I really suffered and had to surrender three spots to finish in 8th place overall. Even though I made the podium of my age group (2nd) we could not stay for the awards presentation as the race had only started at 5pm and we still had an invitation for dinner.
My teammates also did a good job and in the end we finished 7th of 12 teams and after three of four races of the season we are “Safe!” and can plan for another season in Ger-many’s third tier triathlon league.
Sunday then had another quite strenuous workout waiting: four hours of IM bike effort followed by 30min of running. Damn am I happy for my rest day today!
Cheers
Tim
