I raced the Peterborough half yesterday and I recall a while back a post about dumbest things you’ve ever done in a tri… well here is mine.
This year I don’t really have an “A” race and was thinking of passing over this half since I’m not really in shape to race. Last weekend I cranked out a 220k ride on Saturday and an 18 mile run with tempo on Sunday to increase my mileage in a big way. I think that this weekend was still showing some signs in my readiness for the race. From the beginning I felt sluggish in the swim and came out of the water close to 2 minutes off my normal swim for this course, which is not a disaster but a little discouraging. This is where the stupidity started … I run to my bike, strip off the wetsuit and grab my helmet, sunglasses and gel flask up. I put on the glasses and while I’m sticking the flask in my jersey the helmet drops out of my hand onto the ground. In my haste to get moving after my slow swim some *****ed up part of my brain must figure “helmet is not in hands so it is on your head”. I put on my shoes grab my bike and head out for the road. An official starts yelling at me “Helmet, helmet!” and I’m thinking “what idiot is trying to start the bike without his helmet?” then I realize that it’s me! I do a u-turn and run back to get my helmet. This is when race announcer, our good friend Stephen Fleck of many slowtwitch posts start announcing that Faulds has forgotten his helmet. Needless to say, I’m glad they didn’t dq me for this but I got quite a few jabs from other competitors when I finally got out on the bike! I was telling this story to a lady after the race who was in the campsite next to us and she had done the sprint race. She asked me if it would be ok to tell others since she was a newbie that thought that it was quite amazing that someone who is in their 16th season of racing, done Kona and broken 9:30 could make such a rookie mistake 
I really knew it was going to be a bad day overall when about 11k into the bike I passed another slowtwitcher, Dev Paul, and then both of us passed a youngster just before a hard 90 degree turn left onto a 400m gradual climb. The young guy jumps onto Dev’s wheel, slingshots by Dev and catches up to me as I’m cornering. He blasts the first 50m of the hill and then slows right down. I sat up so I wouldn’t go into his draft zone and figured I’d go by after the top of the hill (I’m carry an extra 9 or 10lbs so attacking hills early was not part of my game plan). As I slow up, Dev (who picked an interesting way to taper for IMLP in 2 weeks by hammering an awesome race on a really hot, windy day … tapering is for sissies!) uses his compact crankset and flyweight body to fly by me. As he passess me and pulls in a motorcycle comes up and withing about 2 seconds the official tells me to pull over and dismount. I slowed right down and asked if he meant me since I just got passed and have at least a few seconds to drop back and he asks “are you sure you just got passed?” I assure him that this is what happened and ask if he still wants me to dismount. He says no, keep riding. So I’ve now lost all momentum on the hill and see 2 dots on the horizon that I was accused of drafting off of. I caught back up to the youngster and finished way ahead of him.
Once out onto the run, I was in shuffle mode and has my slowest ever half-marathon in a tri by about 6 or 7 minutes for my slowest half-im time since I was a newbie. I still managed a top 20 overall and 4th in my AG but most importantly, it was a good training day that hopefully used up my quota of bad stuff happending for the rest of the season. This morning I got up from the overnight camping and did the 93k ride home faster than last year so my body must be coming around.
Congrats to Dev on a super race and good luck at Lake Placid.