Final 'Fall Classic Duathlon' Thoughts

I posted my race report on Monday from a fun race this past weekend. I did NOT expect that race to go down the way it did. I had a lot of race plans in my head going into it, but never the option that ACTUALLY happened. From "worst finish" to "best finish," the main 3 ways I thought this race would go looked like this:

• Let a few lead runners pull away, try to hold off as many as possible on the bike, then catch some of those cyclists on the run for a top-10 finish.

• Lead the runners out, try to hold off as many as possible on the bike, then catch some of those cyclists on the run for a top-3 finish.

• Lead the runners out, try to hold off as many as possible on the bike, then catch ALL of those cyclists on the run to take the win.

But I NEVER thought I'd lead wire-to-wire! If you told me I'd do that, I'd wonder how much time some better cyclists made up on me on the bike (wondering how close they'd be behind me coming into T2), but then I'd have NEVER thought that I'd have the fastest bike split like I did! It was a fun day of racing on Sunday!!

I also felt a little bad for taking the win by 7 minutes. I wondered how many would have beat me at the spring version of this race. I looked at this spring's results, and only Sean Cooley would have beat me (and he won by a lot, so I feel less bad now). He had substantially faster first run and bike splits, but then I had a faster final run split by 0:13 (he could have been letting up because he had it in the bag). Sean and 2 other athletes would have had faster bike splits than me, but I would have caught everyone but Sean by the finish:

Spring results. My 1:09 last weekend would have been killed by Sean's 1:04 this spring!

And in looking at the 2015 spring results (the last "big" year I did this in the heyday of MN multisports), I would have moved up from 11th overall to maybe 9th. (My time puts me just behind 9th, but if I had someone to shoot for, I 10000% know that my final run would have been faster.) And my 3rd time racing this was 2.5 years ago, and those results show that I would have moved up from 2nd to 1st with my performance last weekend. Happy to be racing well at the moment!

I'm waiting for some race photos to be uploaded because some of those should be epic! I hope to share those on Monday. Back with some "Friday Funnies" tomorrow!