Calling nashville triathletes

Triathlon Forum
1

Hey,
I will be moving to the Nashville area at the end of June this year and am looking for some advice from triathletes in the area. Please bear with me, thanks.

  1. Where are the main road riding and/or tri groups riding from?
  2. Is there a specific park area within town that has trails to run?
  3. If you were to choose your home location based on access to good (i.e low traffic density) training roads where would you choose?
  4. Which pools/gyms have Master’s and are there any 50m pools around? I would ideally like to find a gym wth a pool facility so I could lift and do winter spin classes with my wife all for the one membership fee.
    I am going to be working at Vanderbilt medical center so all things being equal I would like to be located close to work. Ideally within an easy bike commute (i.e. 10 miles or less).
    Thanks in advance for any information,
    Nathan
3

Welcome to the area Nathan. Mike pretty much covered everything and I live a little south of Nashville away. I just wanted to say that Mike is right about Natchez Trace. Me and my wife go out there every chance we get. It’s worth the drive.

Also another place that I like to run at is behind the the Brentwood YMCA. I guess you would call it a river walk/path.

I heard through our Tri club (Columbia Tn) that Franklin is trying to get a Tri club started.Franklin maybe to far south of Nash. for you I don’t know. But it is a nice area. Here is the adress for the Franklin/Nashville area bike club. www.harpethbikeclub.com

I don’t know if you mountain bike but we have some nice areas to ride here in Columbia. I’ll include the address for our bike club, it also has our tri club in there also.Maybe there is some useful information there you can use. www.columbiacyclingclub.com

Just to let you know a lot of the roads here in Tenessee don’t have shoulders and some of the “good old boys” like to see how close they can get their side mirror to your ear.But don’t get me wrong most people here are really good people.

Later Dave

PS One more www.nashvillestriders.com

4

Nathan,

Welcome to the area. Nashville is great place to live for triathletes—decent weather, nice terrain, and plenty of races to choose from. We have an active tri-club, the Greater Nashville Athletic Club. Here is the link to the website:

http://www.gnac.org/

Here is the current newsletter:

http://www.gnac.org/Newsletter/GNAC_February_2004_News.pdf

The club is mostly about fun, but its membership includes its share of celebrities and over-achievers such as Gordon Haller (winner of the first Hawaii Ironman) and Bruce Gennari (2001 overall national amateur champion and USAT triathlete of the year.)

Mr. Mike is right. For going long, the Natchez Trace Parkway can’t be beat. It’s smooth, rolling, and winding. The scenery is beautiful, there are hardly any cars, and you’ll get to use most of your gears. The “airplane fields” Mike mentioned are on the south side of Old Hickory at the intersection with Vaughn Road.

On a typical Saturday morning 50+ runners will congregate at the Belle Meade Blvd entrance to Percy Warner Park. Those wanting the challenge of relentless hills, run inside the park. Others run through the streets of Belle Meade.

Jim Spivey is the Coach of the Vanderbilt women’s cross-country team. He is also the second fastest American ever for 1500 meters (3:31.01,) the last American to run the mile in under 3:50, and still holder of the American record in the 2000 (4:52.44.) Anyway, he coaches a track workout on Vanderbilt’s fantastic outdoor track facility on Wednesday evenings.

If the quality of the public school system is a major factor for you, you should consider living in Brentwood, which is south of Nashville. It would lengthen your commute, but depending upon where you live, you can run and ride from your house without too much traffic. In fact, I’ve never had a near miss experience like baddog describes. Once I get a couple of miles from my house I might only see a car every five minutes or so. Spivey lives down here and makes the daily commute to Vandy. It’s the only place my wife and I even looked when moving here 2 ½ years ago.

Brentwood has two YMCAs each having both an indoor and an outdoor pool, but the best pool in the area is at the two-year-old Williamson County Parks and Rec facility (in the heart of Brentwood) featuring a state of the art indoor 50-meter pool. The facility also has a nice weight/cardio room and indoor tennis courts. I swim with the master’s team there. They have up to three scheduled practices a day so something should work into your schedule. The coach is Ashley Whitney who was an Olympic gold medallist as a 16-year-old at the 1996 Olympics.

Bob Fink

5

LOL wasn’t it Powerman TN last year where the the leader of the race was hit by a little old lady in a white Jeep?

:wink: Dave