I was surprisingly not tired when I got up in the morning. After packing up the car, I woke up Kayla and off we went. The three hours from Pittsburgh to Vermilion were pretty uneventful. It's nice having no cars on the road to deal with, especially after missing out on so much sleep. We didn't find a place to get coffee until maybe fifteen minutes before we got to the race so it was a tough three hours.
As it turns out, Vermilion is a pretty cool little place, save for the fact that it is in northern Ohio and that it is indeed little. I think that after spending nearly a week in Rhode Island with a beach a stone's throw away in most directions, I'm just excited to see any beach.
I had plenty of time to set up transition stress-free and hang out with Kayla while watching earlier waves of the sprint race go off.
Our U-29/Elite wave was finally called to the start line on the beach for the two-lap swim in Lake Erie. After swimming in the ocean in Rhode Island, I felt pretty confident that I could take on pretty much anything in the water. It made what little waves or current there were in the Lake seem pretty insignificant.
The gun went off, we dove in and I promptly stopped. The water had apparently jarred the left side of my goggle loose and it immediately filled up with water. I took a second to fix it and was back on. The swim seemed to go incredibly fast, but I had no idea where I was within the wave because there were people from so many other waves around. Not that I knew it at the time, but I came out with a sub-19 minute swim!
My bike was waiting in transition at the end of one of the rows right on the edge of the transition area. Before the race, I pointed this out to Kayla, suggesting that it might be fun for her to wait for me there, just outside of the barrier, to cheer me on during T1. Standing right next to each other for the minute and change that it took for me to strip my wetsuit and grab my bike proved to be incredibly awkward. We smiled, said "hi", said "bye" and then I was off for the bike.
It was a bit hard to get going the first two miles or so because of the rough road surface, but luckily, that was the extent of the problems I had for this 40k portion of the race. The route was great. There was no traffic and everything was well organized and marked. It took a little bit longer than I had expected to get through the bike for a few reasons. First of all, the bike was about 3/4 of a mile long according to my bike computer. About a week before the race, I plotted out the bike course on mapmytri.com and found it to be long on there as well. Also, while there weren't really any significant hills to speak of, there were many long grinds up very small grades that definitely made it difficult to keep the speed up and proved to be tiring by the end of the leg. Being a loop course, one would expect the downhills to make up for it, but they were quick, steep and technical with a lot of sharp turns. This made it impossible to take advantage of the speed that downhills offer. I passed my fair share of people and ended the bike in 1:09. I would usually be appalled at this slow time, but it appeared as though everyone else's were a bit slower than average as well.
Coming into transition, I was about five seconds behind four people. Leaving transition, I managed to pass all of them straight away. Then a side stitch decided to knot my stomach almost instantly. Luckily, about a week before the race, I read an article about how to manage side stitches. It progressively started to fade, so I could pick up the speed gradually, however, it was not completely gone until about the half-way point. I started running my usual pace after that, but the damage had been done over the first three miles and I was relegated to a 45-minute 10k. Compared to the sub-40 run I should be able to cranks out barring any side stitches, I was a little disappointed. But it was still enough to keep me in 16th place overall (including all of the registered elites), also putting me in first for the 20-24 age group.
While not a horrendous day, it was still a little lackluster after being spoiled by Morgantown and a handful of other top-5 finishes this year.
To sum up the rest of the day after the race: Drive home and sleep.
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