The North Shore Triathlon is a Sprint event (740/20/5) held by the North Shore Tri Club, amazingly enough, in North Vancouver. 
It’s the first official race on the TriBC calendar, so there is a separate elite race for cash prizes as well as points and a potential shot to get noticed for the provincial team. A lot of FAST people show up to this event, including our National champ who handily won this year’s event in 53 odd minutes (including a sub 16min run).
I was on the road last week, and arrived back in Vancouver yesterday @ 09:30 after catching the 07:30 flight out of Toronto. I had a tune up swim planned, as well as a short ride and a run on the agenda – nothing hard, just enough to get the body tuned up and back in motion. I also had to get my bike checked, as there was no race-day bike check. I hate that, as it forces an extra trip and is a pain in the ass to schedule, but those were the rules. On Sunday, the bike check was held at one of the sponsoring stores – but this particular shop is a running only store. Figuring that they’d have some dude there from a bike shop to do the safety check, I loaded up three bikes (mine and two friends) and rolled on out to North Van. That proved to be somewhat interesting, as I pulled up in front of the store and parked right in front of the tent. As I got out to take the first of the two bikes on the roof down, the guy walked over to me and said “Hey man, don’t worry about it. I know the pain of taking them down just to load them up again”. He then proceeded to give me “passed” stickers for all three bikes, and just asked that I make sure the headsets were tight, that the brakes worked, etc. Now I’m certain that he was just being nice and saving me the hassle of unloading and loading three bikes, and it probably helped that I look like I know what I’m doing – but that was the weirdest bike check I’ve ever seen!
I went into the store to pick up my package, which included my race number as well as timing chip. Sweet! All I have to do on race morning is set up my transition area and get body marked. No lining up seven different times for this and that. J
My ½ hour ride turned out to be more like an hour, and I shorted the run by a couple of minutes because my right ankle was feeling “weird” – not painful, just “off”. I figured I’d let it get a little extra rest and then beat on it tomorrow.
Race day dawned cold and wet. The roads were slippery, there was a good degree of cloud cover, and it was lightly misting. Not perfect weather, but good enough for racing. The swim was in a pool, 15 swimmers per 37m double wide lane. 10 laps (20 lengths). It was going to be a rough affair. I lined up with the 14min swimmers, and took it out a touch hot. I quickly smashed my way through the pack that had bunched up in front of me, and found some open water. I stayed alone for the better part of the first half until fresh swimmers jumped in the lane. Then things got messy. I had to bail on two flip turns when instead of wall I felt something soft and lycra covered on the soles of my feet, had at least three head-on collisions coming off the wall, and swam both over as well as under a few packs. Still, I was out in decent time and headed off to the transition zone. Total swim time, 14:28.
Had a pretty quick transition and hit the bike course. Immediately out of the transition zone there’s a bit of a hill (“bit” by North Vancouver standards, that is), and then the course was rolling with a healthy elevation gain for the 2.5k out to the turn-around. 4 laps (7x 180 degree turns – thanks for the pre race tips, ST!). It took me the better part of the first leg out to find my rhythm, but by the first turn around I was feeling good. I was passing a lot of people, and didn’t even notice the cold. I didn’t actually notice it until I went to take my feet out of my shoes, and was having a hard time because I couldn’t feel or move my toes. I bombed back down the hill, did a nice flying dismount right at the line, and ran into transition pretty hot. Too hot, in fact. I had to pick up my bike and redirect it as I missed my rack lane. Total bike time, 35:45
This is where my frozen feet really burned me – it took forever to get my shoes on! I probably “only” wasted 20-25 odd seconds, but it felt like an eternity. My calf cramped up on me as I was fighting with my shoes as well, which I managed to massage out and hoped wouldn’t come back to haunt me on the run. Out onto the run course, which started with a short uphill, followed by a pretty good downhill on dirt/gravel, and then into the woods. Nearly the entire run course is either uphill or down. There were a few flattish spots, but even those are false flats. I wasn’t feeling bad, but I wasn’t having the best run ever, either. I just focused on breathing well, keeping a good turnover, and picking a good line. I got passed by a bunch of people as is the norm for me, as well as a couple of 13yr old girls. Damn those kids made it look easy. Maybe if I weighed 85lbs it would be. I had enough left for a decent kick to the line, and made it across in 26:49. Not the sub 25 time Paulo was looking for, but this was a far tougher run course than I had been expecting.
Overall I put down a 1:17:01 – good enough for 17/27 in my AG, and 142/372 total. I just barely edged out PowerGyoza to take the 2nd chapter of the Fat Bastard Challenge (that boy put 3min into me on the run!), and had one of my better races overall in all three events. The only area I really ran into trouble was that 2nd transition. I’m going to have to work on my lacing system.
This was a really fun even that I’ll definitely have on my calendar for next year. It was tougher than I had anticipated, but that just adds to the enjoyment factor for me. With a decent amount of work in the pool on the horizon, as well as a “nowhere to go but up” run, I’ll be looking to break 1:10 next time around.
Just outside of T2
Coming back down the hill - 3.7k mark or so
He’s ALMOST smiling here!