Where did y’all pass Dave Scott? At 53 he still had the fastest swim split!
I was middle of the pack in the elite wave. I’m a much stronger biker than swimmer so I was passing a lot on the bike. I chased down a lot of riders only to have them suck on my wheel as I went by. At one point, a friend of mine who saw me at the turnaround said I had 10-15 riders tightly on my wheel. I took a really bad turn at the second turnaround and there were 5 guys who immediately went past me. The poor guys had to break their own wind for at least 30 seconds–that was how long they could hold me off on their own. I’m sure there are people reading this who were a part of that. All I can say is “Good for you. You’re willing to cheat to finish 25th in the elive wave instead of 30th.”
I was also surprised there weren’t more penalties. It wasn’t that the race wasn’t marshalled. I saw a lot of marshalls on the course. At one point, after a couple of my freeloaders passed me at the bottom of a descent only to box me in on the way up the next hill (this happened constantly) I actually looked at a Marshall riding parallel to me and said, “can you please help me here?” He started writing on his pad, so I assume he penalized at least one of them, but I wish he told them they were being flagged so that they might have stopped sucking on my wheel.
Marshalls? What marshalls? Oh… maybe they don’t care about us common peasant age groupers. Never saw any.
They didn’t just have one - they had THREE.
But I think this was really about three NYC psych operations trolling for clients. They probably paid the race officials to have a setup there.
For those of us who had to wait an hour or two to start, it was nice to see the unlimited food/starbucks/etc at the swim start.
Overall, that was the best organized race I’ve done. I did it last year and it seemed more together this year -except for all the fencing blocking the route between the transition area and the swim start.
My mom and cousin wanted to walk along the shore to watch me swim but weren’t able too because of this. It also made for a rediculous walk from T to the swim start.
I was in the old farts wave (4th) and so I got to see all the pro’s and elite’s as they were biking back from the first turn around I did’t see any blatant trains, but I also didn’t see any course marashals either. Tim
If you don’t like drafters, just ride hard so they can’t hold back there 
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On a brighter non drafting note, did anyone catch some of the CAF athletes out there? I saw the guy with a torso on a skate board finishing the run portion. I remember walking toward the swim start and seeing him in the water wondering, why isn’t he swimming freestyle?? I couldn’t see that he didn’t have any legs at that point.
Yes, there were some amazing PC athletes out there. One guy had no legs, and only one finger on each hand?!?!?!? Makes me feel silly for complaining.
John Korff, the race organizer:
"It’s New York and everybody has a shrink. So why don’t we get some shrinks at the start?”
i’m speechless.
that gave me a good laugh, you have to know John and if you do you can totally see him saying this and also realize not to take it seriously at all. John is a good guy and organizes races from the perspective of “what can I do for the athlete,” definitely on the good guy side
Dave Scott raced?..awesome…I see he did a 2:01 or so…8th elite am…I wonder if there is any 50-55 AG in the world that could beat him…
…and others say he was sucking wheel?..
He wasn’t really joking. It seemed like a good idea. The article discusses the very real reasons why they set this up. Apparently they actually SURVEYED people who DID NOT DO THE RACE but were REGISTERED. It turns out they wigged out about the swim at the start line and bailed. So this was a way to address the problem.
Brilliant thinking. Maybe it worked for some people.
It turns out they wigged out about the swim at the start line and bailed.
$200 race fee, $350 airline ticket, $610 hotel stay…
Even if I see sharks in that water I will start!!! I have bailed out on couple of local 5K races though… Sometimes sleep seems sweeter than running in the crack of dawn
They have them in Hawaii at the World Championships.