3 Races for the price of 1

First race as a 30 year old
I had a great experience racing in NY for the Geneva Continental Cup. My parents were able to make the trek up to watch another race this year. I spent my 30th birthday on the plane traveling to the race and looked forward to racing after a long break. The race course is great with a no wetsuit swim, a challenging bike course, and flat run. I was looking forward to the bike since each loop includes some tight crit-like turns and a decent climb and decent. This was the first triathlon I have done that starts after noon; the race starts at 3pm. I am not sure how to plan my nutrition for racing at that time since I normally only eat breakfast before my races. The race started okay but the swim didn’t go quite as planned; I lost contact with the lead gals and was chasing them for the last 500 meters. Exiting the swim I was 20 seconds down and had to work hard on the bike to bridge to the front pack. The bike went well our group worked well and put time in the other packs. Exiting the bike, we had a sizable gap on the other racers. The run started off poorly but improved steadily until the last two laps when I started to feel normal. I was able to finish in 3rd moving out of 4th place in the last lap. Overall I was disappointed with my run but happy overall with the effort and excited for my world cup races in the next two weekends.

Sickpuppy in Austria
I traveled to Kitzbuhel Austria for a world cup race and caught a bug that turned into bronchitis. By the time I arrived at the race, I was sick as a dog. Luckily, my mom accompanied me to the race and was able to help me cope. The bronchitis had me wheezing and hacking up with any minor aerobic effort. On race morning, my mom did some respiratory therapy on my back to loosen up my lungs. But even as I was riding to the start I was hacking and coughing in a tiring effort. By the start, I just wanted to finish the race and go back to bed. I finished the race and actually held together pretty well until the run when my exhaustion from battling the illness caught up with me. I finished the race and wanted to immediately collapse into any bed. As soon as I finished, I started a course of antibiotics in the hope that I could kick the illness before next weekend’s world cup race in Salford.

What a difference a week makes
By the race weekend in Salford, I was feeling much better; still not 100% but night and day from where I was only a week earlier in Kitzbuhel. By the race day, I felt confident that at least my body was doing double duty battling an illness along with having to race. The swim went well and I exited in the front of a large pack. One the bike, I did a lot of work pulling to try to keep the pace honest so that we weren’t caught by the other packs strung out along the course. Sadly, I think I wasted some energy that I really didn’t have to expend and suffered more on the run as a result of biking so hard. On the run, I felt steady but not fast. When I finished the race I was frustrated by my performance but not upset considering the events of the last three weeks.