A Race of my Own

So yesterday was all about Cairns, both 70.3 and the Ironman, but on the side I actually had a little race of my own.

My race was a low key paddle race which I mainly did because it has been a great race in the past and it provided some motivation for training in Winter. A chance for a fun day out I guess you could call it.

The race itself was a local kayaking event, but for the last few seasons the kayakers have let Standup Paddle Boards compete too. Usually the SUP fields are very small (yesterday there was two of us) and we are usually the slowest people there (kayaks are way faster than SUPs), but the kayak crowd is friendly, and while they think we are a bit crazy they tolerate having us around. Plus, as I said the races are fun, and they are a good chance to get some mid-Winter race practice.

I did this race last year and had a lot of fun so I thought I would do it again this year. The event has 11km and 18km options, but last year the SUPs were limited to the 11km version. Doing the race last year I remember hitting the wall in a big way. I went out really hard and paid the price about 8km in. The last few kms were pretty painful.

This year SUPs were allowed to enter the full 18km event and I was keen not to repeat my pacing mistake from last year. Given the longer distance I thought hitting the wall might be pretty painful. Since we had such a small field I decided to use the race as more of a long training event rather than a full on race, which turned out to be the best approach.

The smarter pacing meant that while this year's event was much longer, it ended up feeling a lot better. While I got fatigued and tired I never once felt like I had hit my limit or that I was on the verge of bonking, rather the effort felt sustainable and consistent. I am choosing to take that as a sign of better form over this time last year, but really I think the lower intensity was the main reason for the improvement. It was a good lesson about how much impact appropriate pacing can have on a race. In the end I sat just below my threshold for a bit over two hours, which is probably about as hard as you want to go in a race like that. I suspect if I had gone much over my threshold early I would have faded hard in the second half.

The other interesting part of the day was the weather. We are in the middle of a major Winter storm in Perth. It has been going since Friday and will keep bombarding us tomorrow too before finally calming down on Wednesday. While we didn't get a lot of rain on Sunday it was certainly pretty windy during the race. I had a few people cite the wind as the main reason they didn't want to do the event, but I learnt long ago to not talk myself out of a race before it even starts because of the weather, you never quite know what will turn up. In the end 90% of the race was pretty darn nice, either tail wind, or not too much head wind. However, there was a 2km stretch where we paddled right into the teeth of the wind. In case you were wondering, SUPs do not like headwinds. To say it was tough going would be an understatement. The headwind section took you past the start/finish line and I gave serious thought to just heading in, but in a rather cliched moment I was thinking about how to eat an elephant, in this case how do you beat a headwind, 20 strokes at a time. Taking it stroke by stroke I got through the headwind section and into the final 3km of the race which were much easier. It was a great reminder about taking on tough conditions. In the end, in a race, everybody is out in the same conditions, it is those who handle it best who will prevail. I paddled smart, but persisted and that was enough to get me through. Sometimes not panicking and having the stubbornness to put your head down and keep going is the best weapon you have. A lesson as applicable to triathlon as paddling I think.

Anyway, all up a good race. It was another fun day, although the 2km of headwind were a bit less fun than the rest. I didn't go in as fit as I would have liked after a few weeks of stop/start training, but it was a great way to break up the routine of training. That was the last race on the calendar until August. Some time for a bit of quality training now.