Two Wheel Blogs

Nothing like starting out the year with a win. That's just what went down yesterday with the first race of the year for Dish and I. It was the Devil's Revenge Duathlon Race at Clinton Lake in Lawrence, KS. I'm not a big runner, and Dishman isn't the best mountain biker so we opted to do the team relay. We helped with registration and set up/tear down so we got the pleasure of racing for free. That's always good. We had no expectations. We had this down as training for some upcoming Xterra Offroad Tri's we'll be doing.

We knew the day was going to be good when we jumped in the car at 6am and 311 All Mixed Up started on the radio. An hour and a half later and we arrived.

Dish did the 3.75 mile run and smoked it. He came in 5th overall on the run, just a few minutes later than the leaders. He put down strong 6:50 miles. Gotta love that. The only other team that gave us a challenge had an awesome runner who had Dish by about a minute and half. I had no idea how great their biker was but I knew I had to catch up.

We wrestler style slapped hands in the transition and off I was on the 11.5 mile bike leg. It was almost all sweet bad ass rocky technical DRY singletrack. I was off on my grove for the first 10 minutes or so. It's been awhile since I've been on trails. It's been even longer since I've thown down hard work. Probably 5 months or so. I had no expectations other than to have fun.

Halfway through the first lap I caught first and passed. I knew I had it on the technical sections, and climbs so I felt good. I was sick all last week and felt about 80% on the ride. I could have done much better.

I finished both laps, and instead of being smart and letting Dishman finish the last 200 meter sprint, I decided to do it myself. The intensity kick my butt, and cramps set in at the end. I locked up bad, and ended up walking the last 200 meters. I've got to get that under control.

So we won, with a time of 1 hour and 30 minutes. I was plesently surprised with my bike time though. *Edit * Checked results and was longer than I thought. I guess the 56 was for the run and first lap total. They didn't break it out by lap on the results page at the race. Oh well, still did decent, but it was more like and hour and minute or two. I think I was still in the top 5-7 so it was okay. I knew I didn't have a stellar ride, so the 9 minutes difference wasn't so much to swallow. Chalk it up as a win, and learned experiences. I STILL think it's gonna be a good year! Here's some pics!