Against all rules – 4th place at Griesheim State League Race



Hide & seek on the podium: Spot the Stutzer.

Sometimes everything works against you. First a severe cold prevents you from competing in your first Olympic distance Triathlon on May 12^th, then when you have to help out the second team of the club for their first league race the organizers turn the race into a format that just does not suit you. At all! That makes for some very frustrating racing even though the result was alright in the end. Last Saturday I had help out our second team at their first league race of the season. Even though it had rained hard the previous days the forecast for race day was alright. Temperatures of around 15-18C seemed doable as did the chilly but not too chilly water temperature of 15°C. Nonetheless the day before the race I was notified that the race had been changed from an Olympic triathlon to a sprint duathlon of 5k-20k-3,5k. The reason being… no one knew exactly. Late that evening an email from the league coordinator caused even more confusion. We were told that a meeting of the league council at 10am on race morning would decide on the race format. By that time the outcry/shitstorm had already broken out on facebook and the confusion was perfect. When we arrived at the race venue we were told that it was indeed going to be a sprint duathlon. As expected though, no one was able to point at the specific rule that allowed them to cancel the swim. The reason being: There simply is none such rule. Nonetheless we decided not to cause any further confusion and picked up our race numbers and racked our bikes. With two other athletes of our first team also helping out we stood a good chance of winning the race even if they changed the format.


When the gun went off it was the usual duathlon craze: Everyone was running the first kilometer like a madman. Everyone? No, not me! With the two weeks off training due to the cold I decided to take the first run rather easy. I headed out at a pace of about 4min/km and after the first two kilometers started to slowly reel in one guy after the other. I reached T1 in around 10^th place and was quite looking forward to the pancake flat two lap bike course. I caught one guy after the other and after lap one had moved into 6^th position.

 

The only fun part of the day: Putting the padel to the metal ehh... carbon.

T2 saw me arriving in third position with a small margin of only 30sec on 4^th. My teammates were cheering for me to keep pushing hard in order to secure the second podium for our team. The first podium spot had already been secured: Or race horse Florian Brosch was having a lonely day out in front winning the race by some two minutes over second place. I on the other hand started to feel the toll of the lack of run training after only 200 meters of the second run already: My left calf started to cramp up! Damn! I had to stop and stretch it for a few seconds. Perhaps I should not have done that three hour bike ride in the morning of race day after all? There was nothing I could do about this now though and so I kept on going. With about 1.000m to go I still thought that I would be able to finish third. With 500m to go though I heard the characteristic sound of hard breathing behind and with 400m to go had been passed by a guy who seemed to be flying past. No chance to keep up.

 

 

I kept on trotting to the finish line (see below) that I reached about three minutes after Florian th finish a good fourth on the day.

 

50 meter to go.

 

The rest of the team also did quite well: With two other guys finishing inside of the top ten we took out the team win with a convincing lead of more than six minutes in the combined time of the four fastest athletes.