Challenge St. Andrews

After the race in Philadelphia last weekend I headed straight to New Brunswick and stayed with my teammate Reid Burrows parents, who live just north of Saint John. Awesome people (also triathletes and had awesome races on Sunday) and it helped me to get used to the time change (although only one hour, my body did not like getting up an hour earlier in the mornings).

Benny

Sadie

On Thursday I headed to Saint Andrews, a lovely little town surrounded by water, and stayed with my awesome homestay family, the Scouten’s. I don’t have pictures of them, but they had two dogs, so I have pictures of them of course J

This allowed for a relaxing, unstressful week leading into the race. It would literally have been impossible for me to get lost in town, and I was only 150m from the transition area and the Algonquin Resort, so I could walk to any of the pre-race functions. I was feeling great leading into the race, and it was fantastic to have a large group of people from C3 there as well.

Although I never expect to sleep well the night before a race, this is probably the worst sleep I have ever had. I doubt I even got three hours of sleep, due to many little things (like the fact that it doesn’t get dark until well after 10pm, 4^th of July fireworks, and a drunk person in the middle of the night yelling for half an hour about who knows what). Regardless, I got up at 4am and got ready to race.

**if you have read the race report on Slowtwitch or triathlete.com they are wildly inaccurate. This is a better report of what actually happened

Swim

The swim is situated in a cove that is protected from the ocean, so the water was very calm, but still chilly enough to require wetsuits. This was awesome, because the buoyancy offered by the salt water and wetsuits makes for good times, in both sense of the term. The men were off at 7am, and the women at 7:03. The initial plan was to get onto Jillian Petersen’s feet, as she is a great swimmer. Since I have an absence of ability to sprint, I went out as hard as I could, and found myself right beside her (I was shocked to say the least). She made the quick decision to jump onto my feet so I found myself leading the swim. Since I hate being behind people, regardless of what I am doing, I quite enjoyed this, even though I knew she was saving a lot more energy by drafting off me. I had no idea where the other women were, so I put in a couple of little surges in the first half of the swim in case they were drafting off Jillian. (and having read Melanie’s race report it would appear that it worked. #fistpump) Coming around the last turn buoy Jillian pulled out around me and got out of the water 2 seconds ahead of me. The other women were well back. We got our hiking gear on and climbed the mountain up to T1.

up up up we go to T1

Bike

I had felt a little flat in my warmup and was hoping that would go away in the race. Unfortunately that was not the case, and just didn’t have that extra ‘pop’ in the legs that I would want on race day. Not that I felt bad, but I don’t show up to races to have an average day. Alas, there is nothing that can be done in these situations, so I just kept riding the best I could. Melanie was chasing hard, and caught me just after the half way point. At some point I pulled away from Jillian and got to T2 a couple minutes ahead of her and a couple minutes behind Melanie.  The bike course was very beautiful, and decently challenging as there were no flat sections (literally), just rolling hills the whole way.

Run

Heading out onto the run I wasn’t feeling too bad and put my mind towards catching Melanie. Angela had told me that the run course was ‘deceptively challenging’ which would be a very accurate description. A two lap course, it starts out with a long gradual downhill, some flatter sections with a few small ups and downs, and then you come back, and get to climb up the long hill (which seems never ending when you’re doing it). Over the first lap Melanie put about 10-20 seconds into me, so the plan of catching her wasn’t working, and I was very aware that Jillian could be running faster than I was. The splits I got during the second lap indicated that I was starting to gain time on Melanie, but not enough to catch her, and I could see at the turn-around that Jillian was gaining on me. Barrie told me how far back she was, but it didn’t matter as I couldn’t go any faster, if she caught me there would be nothing I could do about it. Very aware of my terrible hill climbing abilities I was pushing any slight downhill and trying to not slow on the up hills as I headed back to the finish line. I had that 2km hill to climb to the finish line, so needed as much time as I could get before I hit that. One of the Challenge guys was riding up the hill to the finish line as I was heading into the last kilometer. “She’s catching you, you’d better not let up on the gas,” he said. ‘oh shit,’ I thought.

Coming to the top of the hill Melanie was in the penalty tent, fuming like a caged lion. This meant I was now in first place, but I just had a gut feeling that this was not going to stick. Although I crossed the finish line in first (Jillian was only 20ish seconds behind), I quickly learned that Melanie had a 5 minute penalty for racking her bike about 30cm to the side of where it should have been. I can’t believe that anyone would think that should deserve a 5 minute penalty, and indeed, the decision was made to make it a 30 second penalty, meaning Melanie won, I was second, and Jillian was third. (the results sheet made the adjustment on her swim time, which is why the race report constructed by someone who wasn’t there is inaccurate).

suffered some serious battle wounds on the run.
largest blister i have ever seen

It felt awesome to get on the podium for the first time as a pro, but certainly could not have done it without the support of others. Thanks again to Nineteen, Louis Garneau, Blade Carbon Wheels, Skechers, C3, MultisportCanada, and Kristen Pawlick from Wishbone Athletics.