After BLT went pretty well, I signed up for Kirkland, another sprint-distance race that's not only very popular, but very close to home. It's a late-season race that still starts at the regular 7am time so it makes for a dark, early morning. It's pitch-dark until about 6:30.
Lake Washington is still relatively warm through September, but the air really isn't. It was very low 50s at start time. You know it's cold when you put your foot into lake water and say "wow, that's warm". So I warm up on the bike-trainer for a while, then get my wetsuit on around 6:45 and head down into the water. Swim around a bit. Come back to the start area. Wait. Swim around a bit more. Wait. It's not bad when I'm actually swimming but standing there wet isn't so good. It's after 7 and I take one more swim out and can hear them say "due to fog, we're pushing back the start to 7:30". Great. What's interesting is that I can hear it because I'm out about 100y, but the people at the start area can't. So I come back in, tell some people, and we start trudging back up to the transition area. I'm starting to shiver pretty badly now. You know you're cold when you start to get butt-shivers.
Finally, we see the swim-angels starting to head out and the fog is rolling back so we get back in the water and before long the race starts. I didn't really pick a good spot to start the swim. My swimming has improved a lot but I didn't think about it, and right from the start I was getting stuck behind people. At one point I was boxed in and had to slow down and kind of breast-stroke around some guys and then get rolling again. I was amazed that even going out easy, I was passing a lot of people, but the swim felt long. About 2/3 of the way through I started to struggle and lose focus, which turned out to be due to some air in my stomach. I breast stroked a bit more to let that, you know, work its way out, and then I was good to go and felt good the last 200m or so into the shore. Unfortunately I hit a button on my stopwatch somehow so I had no idea what my time was when I got out of the water.
Last year I got on the bike and shivered horribly until I dried off and warmed up. Not so this year - the air must have been warmer as I was totally comfortable the whole time. For this race, I chose the Cervelo TT bike with Zipp wheels and all since I decided that even with the hills the road bike didn't do much for me at BLT. The Kirkland bike portion is very hilly with lots of short, steep climbs. I went out steady on the bike, trying to warm up the legs and not over do it early. I was catching a lot of people right from the start. On the first little climb of the day, I saw a guy run into the curb and do an endo. I'm not sure what happened to him but it didn't look like it was going to be too painful, physically at least. Hope he did alright. Not long after that, one of the guys that I had passed, came back and passed me again. We jockeyed for most of the rest of the uphill parts of the race, but having it be in my 'hood kind of paid off. I let him pass me on the last big climb, figuring he'd over do it. Sure enough, I caught and dropped him shortly after it flattened out. The downhill part back to the transition was a blast. Doing 40 or 45 on the aero bars down a curvy road probably isn't the world's safest activity but it sure was fun.
Again, I was in the first wave so there were a lot of spectators at the transition area making a bunch of noise. Love it. So I got my running shoes on and headed out. It's only a 5K run but the first K or so is uphill which is rough on the legs. I never felt good on the run - not sure if it was due to the cold or what but it hurt like hell the whole way. I felt like I was slapping the ground with my feet and my shins were killing me. I gritted through it and wasn't really enjoying it -- not sure if I need more brick workouts or what. I never got into that smooth floating run that happens on fast training runs. Anyway, the finish is downhill with several hundered people in the chute so it's always fun to come through there.
When I came through, the finish clock read 1:16:35, which was baffling since I thought that was my time from last year. I chalked it up to a really bad run. From the results below you'll see my mistake - I actually did much better. I'm not so bright sometimes.
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Division Rank: |
9 / 78 |
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Gender Rank: |
47 / 475 |
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Overall Rank: |
51 / 791 |
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
51. Shawn Burke 31 M 1:16:46 9 0:15:06 228 1:50 0:35:43 22 1:17 47 0:22:50 166 Kirkland, WA
116. Shawn Burke (2004) 30 M 1:22:35 22 0:16:16 309 1:40 0:40:26 120 1:36 136 0:22:36 145 Kirkland, WA
Swim was disappointing given how much work I've put in and how much better I feel about it but I'm happy about the bike. Run turned out OK too, all things considered.