Collegiate Nationals Race Report

In the days following the Boston Marathon I experienced the usual post-marathon stiffness and noticed that my quads and calves really did hurt that much more from all the downhill, but there was something else too. Two days after the race, on Wednesday afternoon, I received an email from a Clemson teammate exclaiming how it was just 2 days until Collegiate Nationals!

I knew it was a crazy plan to begin with, but crazy is right up my alley. I sacrificed my scoring spot on the Clemson roster because of Boston so my Nationals performance didn’t really mean much, but I had no plans of just going through the motions either. My plan was to go as fast as possible, just 5 days removed from a marathon.

The day after the marathon, I hopped on my bike for an easy hour ride. According to Strava.com I averaged just 92 watts… it was a recovery ride, after all. School work and travel mixed up my Wednesday and Thursday but I managed to successfully complete a short pre-race brick on Friday with the team and felt reasonably good on the bike. The run felt like it was going to hurt at race pace, though.

The morning of the race the ladies had the luxury of starting first at 7:30. The men’s first wave would go at 10:30 so I got to passionately cheer on my teammates. Fellow Sport Factory athlete Lee Gedney, chopped a whopping 35 minutes off her Olympic PR en route to a stellar 2:24:33. I had been expecting Lee to race well and hoped she’d go under 2:30, a time I thought I’d be able to beat in my post-marathon state. When she crossed in 2:24:33 I knew I was going to have to hurt to beat that time.

My open wave began at 10:50 and I was quickly on my way. I knew my race depended mostly on my swim, and also on how my run held up after Monday’s 26.2 miles. The swim seemed to go by reasonably well and I managed to keep swimming hard to the end to hit the mat in 32:41. Not stellar, but alright considering I had done about as many swim workouts since October as I have done since Nationals 9 days ago. The run up to transition wasn’t short so it greatly inflated times in T1 but my 2:58 transition seemed to fare reasonably to others, especially given that I overran my transition spot by 20 places!

Out on the bike I got my first sense of how my swim time was. 2 minutes into the ride, after a much improved mount from a year ago, I saw that the time of day was 11:28 am, 38 minutes after my supposed start time of 10:50. Consequently, I figured I had been around 34 minutes for the swim and I calculated my time left to break 2:24 with a minute less than I really had. I figured if I could bike a 1:06, transition under a minute and run sub-43 I would be just under 2:24.

About 4 miles into the bike leg, the President of the Wisconsin team caught up to me and we soon began to trade off turns taking the pace (within non-drafting rules). At the first turnaround I noticed my first 10k had been SLOW. I was on pace for a 1:10, not the 1:06 I needed. Little did I know, the wind was at my back almost the entire way back and on both return trips I blasted 14:45 10k splits. I dismounted with an “on-the-bike” split of 1:05:56 for 25.48 miles (both years I recorded the course as almost a kilometer too long). My official split was 1:06:41, however, due to the run around transition after the dismount. Interestingly, my mount and dismount saved me 51 seconds over last year, so while my ride was 1:18 slower, my official splits differed by just 27 seconds.

A 1:13 T2 got me out onto the run course with me thinking I had to run sub-40 to surely beat 2:24. In retrospect I had 40:28 to do so and 41:01 to beat Lee’s time but I knew I had to run fast! My first mile up the long hill came by in 6:30 and I quickly calculated the pace necessary for 40 minutes; 6:26/mile! I needed to pick up the pace slightly but with the early hill I was probably doing great so long as I stayed steady. After all, 10k is no short task. I fortuitously kept going, still passing other athletes left and right as I had been ever since exiting the water. I came through mile 2 and saw 6:19 flash on my watch, perfect. Mile 3 down the hill and past the cheering sections near transition had me within 3 miles of home. My third mile of 6:13 gave me some life and I finally realized that my legs may hold up for a sub-40 run. Miles 4 and 5 of 6:27 and 6:34, respectively, were painful but didn’t give too much back to the necessary pace for sub-40. Finally I could feel the finish line within reach. I tried to give it my all and kept thinking how I only had a mile to go, only three quarters to go, just 1k left, 4 minutes of running! I pushed my way to a 6:23 6^th mile and cruised over the final .2 in just 58 seconds to clock a 39:26 10k split, and a 2:22:58 total time. My run was just 32 seconds shy of my Olympic run PR, excluding my accident-rest-aided 38:01 at Tugaloo last fall.

Overall, I was also just 5:24 off my PR from last year, 4:06 of that was from the swim, 27 seconds from the bike, 32 seconds from the run, and the remaining 17 seconds from T2. Not too bad 5 days after a marathon.

Congrats to Katie June for beating me by 59 seconds with a superb run.