In my very recent last post, I gave sort of a play-by-play of the events at the ITU World Championships in Penticton, where I was crowned the overall World Champion for the AG Race. I gave a little detail on my inner thoughts throughout the race, but I thought it would be a good addition to speak a little bit about the strategy that lead to that result. If you look at the results I recorded from the race the first two legs of they race were solid but not earth shattering. My swim was pretty good and put me in contention out of the water, and my bike was pretty good again leaving me in contention for the win coming off the bike. However, when you look a little more detailed into the numbers I managed, neither the swim or the bike, really showcased what I believe I'm truly capable of but still lead to the overall win by a good margin against some of the best in the world. Here's what I mean:
The Swim:
I swam 42:57 for the 3km swim. That is around a 1:25/100m average, and around 3:45 slower than I swam about 5 weeks earlier in an open 3km swim race. That is about 7 seconds per 100 slower than that previous swim. Granted that 3km swim race didn't have a 120km bike, or 30km run afterwards, and it was largely impacted by the conditions on the day where for the middle 750m I was essentially unable to sight, and had no idea if I was actually going the right direction or not thanks to the blinding sunlight but still I could definitely swim faster.
The Bike:
I biked the 120km route with 3600ft in 3:07 which is 38.5km/hr. This is 7 minutes slower than my initial goal time of 3 hrs but I gave myself a 10 minute window of anywhere between 2:55 and 3:05. When I put that goal time together months ago I didn't take into account however the very technical descent after the big climb on McClean Creek where it would be hard to fully make up for the time lost on the climb, and I didn't account for the technical section coming into the finish of lap 1, 2, and 3 near the transition. In this section there were a number of hairpin turns and one full 180 degree turn which slowed the speed significantly. Still if you look at the power it was around 10-15 W less than I planned (10 W less than what my goal was, and 15 less that I figured I could push on a perfect day). Yes, the power was hampered by 2 long descents, done two times each, where my goal power would've been a stretch to sustain but less power is less power. The descents of course would've had a huge impact on the average power, but the normalized power would not have been so heavily impacted and it too was less than the goal. And that goal power wasn't one that I just pulled out of nowhere, it was based on my power in Racine (I took about 15 W off my Racine power since this is 30km longer), and 120km training rides where I've held similar if not higher numbers. In fact, I had a training ride on June 3rd where I rode 119km in 3 hours flat with 2000ft gain and my power was 23 W higher than it was in Penticton. If you extended that training ride out to 120km it would be a 3:01:32 time which is 5:30 faster than my time on Sunday - and that is in training ride, and on a Cervelo P2 not a P5 with Sram etap, a ceramic speed UFO chain, and a Zipp 454 NSW upfront to compliment the Revolver Aysmm disc in the rear.
So with those numbers in mind, how then did I manage a win in a World Championship race. Initially even though I won, when I looked at the numbers, I'm not going to lie, I felt a little disappointed that I could for sure have gone harder on the bike and harder in the swim. But here's the thing even though the training I did going into Penticton indicates that no doubt I could have gone faster on the swim and the bike, by no means does it take away from my performance on Sunday, and it doesn't mean that all that training was useless. The way I look at it is that because I pushed 23 watts less on the bike than I did on that 120km training ride and swam 7 seconds slower by 100 than I'm capable of it meant that going into the run I had that much more energy than all my competitors, and won the race by putting massive chunks of time into every one of them on the run. Basically I built the swim pace, and bike pace/power up to such a high point in training that on race day I was able to swim and ride at a lower percentage of what I could do but that lower pace/power was still high enough thanks to the incredibly hard training to get me off the bike in contention for the win, and then run my opponents legs off. Also their is the pretty obvious fact that on that 120km training ride, and multiple other long hard rides I never ran 30km immediately after them. So really who knows what would happen if on that great June 3rd ride I tried to run 30km right afterwards. Actually I could answer that question because in Wisconsin 70.3 only a week after, I tried to bike a similar effort and then on the 21.1km run off the bike, I was getting medical attention 8km into the race, had to walk through a the aid stations, and couldn't see straight thanks to extreme glycogen depletion/dehydration and it was difficult to see through all the tears of pain in my eyes.
Penticton was an incredible learning experience because it really showed me how critical the balance is between the 3 disciplines, and that you need to be so smart with how you use your energy. The fact is that at the end of the race you don't get any award for how fast your swim was (well in Ironman's you get a award from Roka but that's not my point), or how much power you were able to push on the bike. Really it doesn't matter. But what does matter is knowing how to divide your available energy so that you cross the line completely empty and in the fastest time possible. I figured on this day in Penticton, that my best chance of winning the World Championship was to ride a little more conservative and a time that left me in contention but most of all to make sure that I was able to run to my potential. If for example I biked that 5 minutes faster, than who knows I may have been walking during the latter stages of the run, instead of running close to a perfect even split race running a 59:46 opening 15km and following that up with a 1:01:09 final 15km. Having said all this I'm not by any means saying that this is the recipe to win every race, and I'm just going to replicate this strategy over and over throughout my upcoming pro career. No, instead I need to work hard to find that balance of how hard can I swim and bike, and then still run well. Now that after this race I have much more confidence in my running legs, perhaps I can go harder on the bike in upcoming races, since in Penticton there was a lot of uncertainty of whether or not my legs would hold up at all for 30km. I had done one single 30km training run leading into Penticton where I ran first thing in the morning not having biked before, and was in a world of pain even though I only ran 2:07 which is 6 minutes slower than Penticton. So that run despite making it the distance, having not biked before, and being in that much pain throughout the second half didn't exactly leave me feeling super confident in my run legs. All of this learning about the balance between the three disciplines especially the bike and run will come with experience. Remember most of my racing has been Aquabikes to this point and in my entire triathlon career stretching back a "whole 2 years" I've now ran off the bike in a race situation 7 times, and three of those are in sprint/olympic distances. So there is lots of time and experience to gain in the future for sure. And this will continue in Chattanooga for the 70.3 Ironman World Championships where my gameplan will look very different than Penticton. Essentially thanks to having the pressure off of getting my pro card, I'm just going to go for it and race very aggressively from the start. My focus will be the bike where I will try to push about 10 W more than I did in Racine, and if that's too much it's too much, chalk it up as a learning experience and in the future I'll know that is too aggressive of a power plan. But if it works, and now that I have much more confidence in my run legs, then I back the bike up with a solid run and achieve a smoking fast time.
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