ST ANTHONY'S RACE REPORT

I haven't done this race in 6-7 years as far as I can recall but since I qualified for the elite amatuer division this year, I thought I would give it a shot. I knew there were going to be some blazing fast women in this group but didn't want that to detract from my goal of racing my own race. This was, afterall, a training race in my build up for Florida 70.3 in 3 weeks so didn't have any delusions of a high placing or anything. I wanted to get a good idea where my fitness was right now and compete as well as I could. Did a couple days pretty easy last week to allow my wrecked body chance to rest a bit for this race since I felt so bad at the last race two weeks ago. We spent a bit of time in Outspokin booth at the expo on Sat and this tired the legs out a bit but we wanted to help out since they sponsor us. Since I was in an early wave, we wanted to get down there pretty early to get set up and walk over to swim start. I ended up jogging to the swim start because I miscalculated how long it would take to walk over there! No worries. Wet suit on, lubed up, couple minutes in the water to situate the wet suit better and we were off. The weather was absolutely perfect for a race, we were really lucky with that! There were about 40 women in the wave so the start was super clean, no clobberfest like normal! I concentrated on my stroke mechanics and really never breathed hard during the swim, felt really good. I sighted well, swam straight but never got on any feet to draft so was pretty much on my own which would prove to be the theme of the day! I thought I could swim around 22 minutes if I was having a good day. If I hadn't had so much trouble getting up the steps, I would have broken 22! Very happy with the swim. Unfortunately, half the girls in my wave were already on the bike course. I basically did most of the bike all by my lonesome, worried about being on the right course at some points! This was nice but I would have liked to have a few people to pace off of! Oh well. Legs felt pretty tired on the bike but I really wanted to get under 1:10 and managed to accomplish that on my solo time trial (I was happy I did my speed bike workouts all by my lonesome at Fort Desoto)! When I got off the bike, my quads were cooked! I went into auto pilot for the first part of the run, even though I wanted to try and run with Cosgrove who was in front of me. I managed to keep the pace under 7:00/mile which wasn't fast but ok for how I felt. I finished in 2:16 for 15th in the elite category (placing went higher due to a couple DQ's). I am happy because this is a huge PR for me and I kept competing and pushing even though I had nobody to really key off of which can be difficult mentally. Today I feel really sore so I know I raced hard. I don't have the best swim, bike or run but I feel I'm getting to be pretty even in all three which is what I have been working on. I have a relatively hard training week this week then will start into 2-week taper for the half ironman on 5/20. We are planning to do a 2.4 mile open water swim race on Sat which should be fun, if that's possible! Congrats to everyone who raced on Sunday, it was a great day!