Like everything we love, my relationship with the sport of triathlon has become more casual as familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a kind of indifference?  I remember (oh, well), the sleepless nights, the hilarious anxiety-naked-missing-start-drowning-dreams and, yes, weeping over the swim starts of my first couple of triathlons.  Move on a couple of years, and while I’m still good on the race day preparation front (Gels.  CHECK!), I’ve become more casual about the Big Day Out.  This is typified by the fact that in preparing for Sunday’s Olympic Liberty triathlon, on Saturday I frown at my wetsuit (which has had exactly eleven unmended months in mothballs since I ripped a fine hole under the armpit at the Salmon Run in Ballina last July).  Yup, I haven’t even taken it for a dip in a lake (despite there being allegedly 10,000 in Minnesota). 

The last year or two I’ve taken on spring running, a kind of late-spring triathlon cramming involving some bike catch-up to peak at Kilkee, then a summer of marathon-prep running.  This year is no different, with the added chaos of packing up my life and moving west to Minneapolis for six months in April.  I’ve been doing a run training plan with triathlon cross training (read one bike and one swim a week); when I get to Minneapolis, thrown out by the new routine and new area, I tag onto whatever training I can get.  My race plan for the season is mainly to try lots of trail running with the goal of doing a trail marathon at the end of the summer, but I’m planning to throw in a triathlon or two (to keep the hand in).

Swimming:  I suck.  I’ve levelled off nicely in the effort-to-reward chart for swim training over the last year or two.  Oh sure, the first couple of years worked and I slowly got to a kind of efficiency over my original help-I’m-drowning doggy paddle.  Now?  Train 5 to 6km a week (as I did in 2008) – I swim 1.5km in 30min.  Train 1.5 to 2km a week?  Well....let’s see.  I don’t want to join a gym here as Minneapolis is a playground for outdoor sports in the summer and my apartment building has a great mini gym downstairs.  So I join the Masters swim classes at the YWCA uptown, just ten minutes walk away.  There’s a good ‘Total Immersion’ teacher there.  I join the lane with ‘most potential for improvement’.  I find this both hilarious and depressing.  I’m not sure that being a slow swimmer has much correlation with potential for improvement in my case but the sentiment is most American in its positivity against all evidence to the contrary.  There is occasionally an Italian woman in my lane who bellows things like ‘This-a metronome is-a TORTURE!  Is-a like Guantanamo! ‘ at the coach when we try swimming to a beat.  I love this, but the coach is most alarmed by this European excitability.  I go once a week and get beaten up royally by the other slow-laners, including two quite-significantly-pregnant women (who apparently have less potential for improvement than me) in such epic main sets as “4x400 IM”.  Another MPFI and I just front crawl most of it (and we’re still only just keeping up with the glowing bump-ees).  Disheartened, I abandon Masters swimming after a couple of weeks, and do just one token dip in Cedar lake for 10 minutes (wetsuit free, it’s lovely and warm in the water) a week before the race.

Minneapolis is a cyclist’s paradise.  I’m living beside the Mid-town Greenway, which connects to the Grand Rounds – miles and miles of trails, if you know where you’re going.  There is an entertaining mix of commuters, leisure and sports cyclists, reclined cyclists, kiddie-tow tandems and ridiculous novelty bikes.  For the first couple of weeks I borrow my friend Helen’s backup road bike.  Then, throwing money at the problem, I invest in a fabulous new Quintana Roo Dulce women’s triathlon bike.  Rumour has it that my marathon training partner, Miriam Wall (AKA the Pocket Rocket) is burning up the tarmac on her new Giant back in Galway, and I see no other way to keep up.   I bike sometimes with a work colleague who lives in my apartment block and his friends.  I have, if not ten years, certainly more than one age-group over them, so it’s satisfying when I can keep up with them easily when they start chase-downs, without breaking too much of a sweat.  I’m a great cyclist!  I bike with my friend Helen and her Kona-bound friend Pam, who won an age-group place at this year’s world IM championships through a couple of podium placings (read 10-hour-ish Ironman times).   They take me out on the Liberty cycle course on a soupy 95F, 70% humidity day for a 40km recovery cycle (them) and, well, training (me).  It’s like cycling in treacle.  I’m just keeping up, despite Pam having won an off-road duathlon that morning, and Helen is recovering from a 15 mile run.  I’m a mediocre cyclist.  It’s good to see the course though – it’s best described as ‘rolling’ – no major climbs but lots and lots of small hills.  One or two Thursdays, I bike with the local-to-work Maple Grove bike shop women’s cycle (hey!  This’ll be a breeze! Ladies only!) which turns out to have a cruising pace of 30kph, and I have to do chase after the pack after each red light as I can’t get to grips with my new clip pedals.  I’m a terrible cyclist! (And apparently pretty uncoordinated).

Running?  Well, I’m doing all the running I need for triathlon, and possibly then some.  You can check out some of my trail running adventures at:

http://www.athenryac.com/most-superior-day-out-further-adventures-dee-hassett 

I’m enjoying the running (to the detriment of my long-suffering calves); it’s not as structured as at home – I’m not being as diligent about the magical speedwork + tempo + long run combo but I am getting speedwork or hills in, in various ways, and a long run every week.  Instead I take up as many invitations for interesting runs as I’m offered, including a beautiful night run at Afton State Park, eyed up by some mystified deer.  If I was to pick my main strength in triathlon, I’d say it was chewing dirt on the run leg.  Nailing the Kilkee run is my speciality (including the years of puncture and swim crisis). 10km under duress?  It’ll be just fine.

I’m spectacularly underwhelmed on race day.  It’s cloudy and most of the attention is going to the long course race going off thirty minutes before the Olympic.  It’s cold (for Minneapolis in June) and we end up climbing into the water to stay warm for race start (not a usual tactic in Mullaghmore or Kilkee).   I miss the edge of racing in Ireland, where I always know at least a few competitors and am usually battling royal with some of the Galway team.  Where’s Didi Baxter to put fire in my pants when I need her?!

I’m not going to bore you with the race details.  An unhappy first ten minutes – lack of open water training and a fast start brought back the Fear - settles into the usual plod, with some half hearted drafting and wibbly navigation.   Water temperature is very pleasant.  I stand up at....drum roll....29:45.  This is starting to look like the John Cunniffe School of Aquatics. 

The bike goes better than expected – I don’t suffer too much at all and pick up a nice cruising speed and settle into covering ground.  There are lots of hills so I’m constantly pushing up and rolling down.  I entertain myself by converting MPH to KPH (tricky when all the oxygen is going to your legs) as I’m not sure if I’m going faster or slower than usual with my new speedometer.  I half-heartedly chase down a woman who is around the same pace as me – we exchange places on the road a few times.  But mainly I’m busy getting around, thinking about lunch and whether it’s going to rain. 

The run starts badly – my legs feel really tired – maybe from the (conservative) aero position on the new bike (on which I have studiously avoided any brick runs).   The first mile I clock 8 minutes. Disastrous pace.  (Only on the way back I notice properly the steep uphill and dirt surface on the first mile).  As my legs loosen out I try to pick up the pace.  I’m thinking about the super Lisa Horgan’s advice – tiny steps, fast turnover.  She should know.  I’m trying to hang onto my bike competitor but she creeps slowly ahead.  As I near the turnaround I start counting the lead women.  I settle for getting back to base holding my place; I pick off lots of the men but can’t catch my new friend.  Although I’m tired, I manage the trademark sprint over the last couple of hundred metres, feeling really light.

I‘d hoped to clock 2:30 but predicted 2:33 before the race.  I was pretty pleased (with some sloppy transitions) to clock slightly under 2:32 in the end, with a better run than I thought.  It’s starting to rain – I change, grab some food, pack up my sticky gear (glad I’m not out on the now-miserable long course race), and by twelve I’m in the CostCo hypermarket in St. Louis Park, shopping for dinner for ninety.  But that’s another story. 

 I feel curiously dissatisfied with my day out (despite it being certainly all I can expect or deserve on minimal bike training and almost no swim training).  It’s mostly due to the poor weather and the lack of racing company to celebrate; the company and the sunshine are what make Kilkee so much fun.   It’s a kinda-PB: this is as well as I’ve done on an Olympic course if you exclude TriAthy in 2008 with the dubious ‘gravity assisted’ swim.  I’m one place off an age-group prize.  But you can’t control what your competitors do, only how you do.  Choose small races or suck it up with the big guns.  And be happy that cross training – of any kind – will sometimes work, to some degree. 

I guess that I’m always marginally unhappy with my race results.  Being dissatisfied is what pushes to make us stronger.  So what’s next?  A year off real triathlon training (with a trail marathon and NYC to keep me out of mischief) and I’ll be ready to hit the swim and bike again properly and get back into competition next season.  I’ve already picked a goal race for next year.  So I’ll see you in Frankfurt – for Ironman – in 2011.

CopyRight Galway Triathlon Club 2006