Well, its time to settle in to the off-season training but by no means settle down. I have a lot of distance training planned for the next few months. Its time to rebuild my base so that I have more endurance and its also time to hit the weights. I usually bulk up about 10 pounds or so in the off-season and then lose about five right before my first race. I am also going to try something different this year. I will be racing a winter trail running series in Greensboro NC, and some of the 6 & 12 hour MTB races to keep my edge. If I don't race at all it seems that I lose that internal gauge.
As for Nationals (September 30th) it turned out to be a beautiful day, the water was calm and about 58 degrees and the ambient air temperature in the 30's it couldn't have been better. I improved my swim compared to last year and reduced my swim/transition time by 4 minutes. In fact I think my transition took a little longer this year due to the extra clothing I put on to avoid an uncomfortably cold ride. When I reached the summit of mountain bike leg I finally felt one of my feet. The right one was nice and toasty while the left one was numb. The bike climbing was just as brutal as last year and of course like I always do all I could think of was the downhill. It never fails that the few people that pass me on the climb I blister past them on the downhill. I was keeping an eye on my average speed trying to keep it up to around 10mph knowing if I fell below I would have over a two hour ride ahead. With all of the climbing it is hard even to maintain 4 mph at times. So once the trail flattened out I was sprinting every chance I had. I actually averaged around 9.5mph and cut my bike time by about 9 minutes. Once into T2 it was on for the run...or so I thought. About two weeks before the race I did a 5k race and clocked a 16:10 time so I knew my running was dramatically faster this year but after pushing harder on the bike my hamstrings disagreed. I cramped pretty bad and believe it was definitely the altitude. I actually added 5 minutes to my run from last year. All in all it was a great race and the fact that I beat last years time is all I needed. I am ready for more and can't wait until next year.
