World Aquathlon Championships Wednesday August 27, 2014
Aug 28, 2014
Really cool experience. Hawrelak Park is set up so professionally. The event was very well organized. Top notch. It was also nice to share the experience with my wife, Celine, and Mike Gerencser who both also raced today.
Check in was slick, BUT, holy smokes, it was an iron curtain to get into transition. They wanted to see that numbers were tattooed on you and your wetsuit, they checked your uniform for logos, ensured you had your race number and wrist band. Many races have done this and they check for numbers, but every athlete was checked from head to toe. It still went quick though as they had 6 gates.
Marshalling was 30 minutes before the race and they wanted chips outside the wetsuits, wetsuits and swim caps on as they divided the heats by swim cap colour.
Not so bad, but with the sun beating down, everyone in our heat was dripping within minutes. I took my suit off my top and cap off once in the holding pen and seemed to be okay doing that.
We stood on the blue platform, “On your Mark’s”. We were allowed to step onto the sand but our foot or calf had to still be touching the platform.
“GO!!!” I dove into the crystal clear water. The water was 19.1 degrees C and very clear. I looked on either side of me and couldn’t see a single racer. I was in the lead!?!? For three seconds. It was a full out sprint for the yellow buoy, a bit of a fight. You could not cut the corner this year. You had to keep the yellow buoy on your left, then all the orange buoys on your right. 1 lap, 750m. I swam hard for the first 250m, moving side to side onto different feet to see where I could get the best draft. I was able to settle in at the turn to head back and able to draft the whole race. The top swimmer in my age group (35-39) was out in 9:05. I was out in 11th in 10:32.
The run to and through transition was long. I opted to take my wetsuit off 1/3 of the way. My transition time was 2:46, good enough for 12th.
Then onto the run. The run was two laps around Hawrelak Park. Flat and fast with new asphalt all around. A little bit of a wind from the west. I felt fast for the first km, then the guys started to blow by me. This is a World Championships. I was abruptly humbled. I thought I was cookin’. I was actually flying (for me), but still it seemed like I was going backwards as some of these guys left me in their dust. It was quite a humbling experience. Probably one of my fastest swims and what ended up being my fastest 5km that I know of to date in 17:34 (9th overall) for a total time of 30:53 (2:51 behind the gold medalist), good enough for the 3rd Canadian and 12th overall. A special mention out to Andre Ratte, who was our second Canadian and another local (one of those who blew by me) just rounded out the top 10 – nice work! And, also of course to the top three athletes from Belgium, Brazil and USA (so cool to see so many countries out there racing).
I felt like a ran a marathon afterwards, so now to my couch to recover and get ready to add 20km of cycling to that same race for the sprint on Friday at 10:10am. Then onto the Standard distance on Monday at 8:10am.
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