2005 was good and bad for me. Bad was the weird lower-leg injury that stopped me from running from March through July, but good in that it got me back into racing bikes which has been great. I did a bunch of racing on the bike this year, with okay results given it was my first year and I missed a lot of key early season training.
In late July I was able to start running a little bit, and slowly worked up to 3 or 4 miles twice a week or so. So I signed up for the Beaver Lake Triathlon, which is a sprint distance race that I really enjoyed last year. It's a little different in that the swim is shorter but the run is longer than usual, which isn't exactly what I needed given the leg but oh well. Just like last year, the organization for the race was as great as the weather.
The swim is in smallish Beaver Lake where the water tends to be very warm. Since it was only 400m, I opted not to wear a wetsuit. My swimming has improved so I went out hard. Fortunately it was as short as it was because I was miserable for the whole swim. Drowning seemed like a reasonable alternative to finishing. I was happy to get out of the water.
Given how much time I'd spent on the bike, that was my focus. BLT has a bike course with a fairly major climb in the middle of it. You go out for a bit then decend for a while, right out 202 and then come back up the back side of the plateau. So my plan was to hit the bike as hard as I could, both because it was my strength and two because I wanted to be tired so I didn't overdo it on the run. My goal was top-20 on the bike. I used my road bike since I thought I could climb better on it than on the TT bike, and added some clip-on aero bars. So the bike went pretty well. No one passed me, and I caught a lot of people. What sucks about the 12 mile courses is that by the time you start to really feel warmed up, you're almost done.
So I wrapped that up and came to the moment of truth: the run. I always get some calf cramping off the bike, so I've finally learned not to panic but to just run easy until it subsides. I think it helped that BLT has a fairly long downhill section at the beginning of the run. I went out and set a pace I was comfy with and settled in. A few people passed me but I didn't worry much about it (in fact I ended up catching some of them). Towards the end of the run, I passed a guy who was out on the neighboorhood jog at about the 3.5 mile point. I was feeling comfortable and hadn't really struggled at all and he says to me "I think you're 16th -- some guys are way up there but you're the 16th person to go by me". I started in the first wave, so there were clearly going to be faster people in the waves behind me that would finish later but it was a good motivator. I decided no one else would pass me and picked up the pace and ended up running 7:19 miles which seemed amazing given how "easy" I was trying to take it. It was cool being one of the first across the line though - lots of crowd noise and what not.
| Division Rank: |
8 / 49 |
| Gender Rank: |
57 / 346 |
| Overall Rank: |
61 / 567 |
BIKE RUN OVERALL
OVERALL DIV SWIM TRAN BIKE TRAN PL AFTER RUN
NAME AGE SEX TIME PLACE TIME PLACE TIME TIME PLACE TIME BIKE TIME PLACE CITY & STATE
61. Shawn Burke 31 M 1:20:27 8 0:06:23 196 1:27 0:40:09 42 0:55 42 0:31:32 100 Kirkland, WA
Major improvement over last year:
196. Shawn Burke(2004) 30 M 1:30:37 35 0:10:12 277 1:51 0:42:43 173 1:00 171 0:34:50 279 Kirkland, WA