Race Updates

I've participated in a few races the last couple of months. The first was the Mattoon Beach Multisport sprint triathlon. I had only been in the water once and on my bike once this year after coming off of marathon training, but I went ahead and raced anyway. I finished the race in 9th place overall (results here), and as is fairly common, I had the fastest run split in the race. It was the first time that I had worn my new Fighting Illini Triathlon gear, which you can see in the picture at left with two other FIT members, Kevin and Jimmy. My PhD advisor, Martin Gruebele, beat me in the race after completely destroying me on the race and the swim. Notice his larger trophy in the second picture.

The second race was the Buffalo Trace trail race in Mahomet. I took second overall in a somewhat disappointing 29:12 for the 5-mile race (results here). It was a fun race, though, and it was pretty sloppy on the trails after a decent amount of rain. I wore my cross country spikes and my calves paid the price for the next week.

Recently, I raced the Wolf Creek sprint triathlon dualthon. The weather was really nasty as Martin and I drove down for the race and with the rain storms, the Army Corps of Engineers wouldn't let us swim in the lake. As a consequence, they changed the 400 m swim into a 1-mile run, which played heavily in my favor. Instead of falling way behind on the swim as I usually do since I'm a slow fish, I got to get in the bike with a decent lead. As expected, Martin blew by me on the bike (as did two other guys), but the 10-mile ride wasn't enough for anybody to put me out of striking distance. I was able to ease up after I retook the lead about halfway through the 3-mile run to take my second victory at Wolf Creek (results here).