Big Wheel Racing

By Nate

Fool Hollow Lake in the town of Show Low Az hosted the Deuces Wild Triathlon Festival on May 31 / June 1. The even consists of a “long course” (aka half ironman distance) and an Olympic distance on Saturday, as well as an XTERRA off-road triathlon on Sunday. I elected to do the Long Course race on Saturday, and headed to the lake to bag a camping spot after work on Thursday.

The long course went off at 0630 Saturday morning in an extremely brisk lake (~61F?), and thanks to the combination of altitude and cold water I had a bit of a slow swim at 37:10 for the 1.2mi (2000m). After that long cold soak on the legs it took some time to get up to speed on the bike, but once finally loosened up the bike went smoothly, hammering out the 57.5mi in 2:42:04, which turned out to be 13th fastest bike split of the day. Heat and wind started to become a challenge on the in the last 14mi (which also contains the majority of the sustained climbing on the course). The combination of Perpetuem and nuun worked flawlessly on the bike as usual. An early mistake in T1 though I think set things in motion for a problem filled run, I took a couple ibuprofen after the swim to ward off the not uncommon post swim headache, having forgotten to bring tylenol. Unfortunately, what I failed to remember is ibuprofen will tear up my stomach in a hot run like we had. The result was an inability to absorb nutrition during the run, so after the initial 6 miles pace was decreasing continuously despite trying to keep up the fuel/hydration strategy that has worked well in the past. Consequently the run was a somewhat disappointing 2:04:12. A testament to the Hammer Nutrition and nuun combination on the bike that I had enough gas in the tank to complete the 13.1 mi run with effectively no nutrition and still salvage a 5:29:38 total time. Good enough for 30th overall and 4th in the 30-34 age group.

nuun is “gettin’ it done”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:15 am and is filed under Our Gnarly Good Sponsors, Race Results. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.