After the games I was surprisingly very motivated to get back into training as I had some big races coming up. Unfortunately the body had other ideas, coming down with a bit of a head cold and a fever! You lie in bed thinking your season is over but surprisingly enough after a week your back into it feeling a million dollars. Sometimes it’s just what the body needed!
The race here in Des Moines Iowa has the largest prize purse in triathlon of 1 million dollars, 25 athletes qualify for the event through the 5150 series otherwise they offer 5 wild card slots to “special” athletes and I was lucky enough to get one of those wild card slots.
The course was set to be hot and hard, with our race starting at 4:30pm and a non‐drafting format! With so much money on the line it was a stacked field, and with 5k bonuses throughout the course in every discipline was going to be tough!
The swim offered 2 x 5K bonuses, so I just let the swim specialists battle it out and sat in to save energy. A good sized group of about 15 exited the water together, we all jumped on our TT bikes with aero helmets and started the 40km bike.
Now in a non‐drafting event there are few different rules which are very complicated, but basically you can be any closer than 10m to guy athlete in front of you. With so many guys so closely matched to each other it’s an art to just stay out of trouble. Throughout the bike there were a few guys that were “busted” for drafting and a few with mechanicals, so by the time we got to the end of the bike the group had gone from 15 to about 10!
Onto the run and it took me about 1km for me to get into a good rhythm, then slowly I started to pick up the guys that went out too fast. After the first lap of 4 I was sitting in about 7th, by the 2nd I had moved into 6th and finally by the 3rd lap I had moved into 4th which is where I finished up.
It was a solid result and a very good payday. With my next event being the world 70.3 champs in Vegas
only a week away I hope this race has set me up well.