Playing Catch Up Part 2: Gaining Perspective in Omaha

Racing in Omaha was not on my radar at the start of this year.  This is pretty much due to my lack of familiarity with the annual races associated with the sport.  Given my finish earlier in the year in the desert and then again in Hawaii, I secured a spot to race in the Age Group National Championships in Omaha, NE in August.  Since I have been putting off a visit to see my brother who lives in Lincoln, I thought this would be the perfect chance to see him and try and secure a spot to the World Championships.

Leading into the race, my sole focus was on IM Wisconsin that I would tackle about a month later. Since the Olympic distance only takes around 2 hours and I was training for a 10 hour race, I had to put my expectations in check.  Knowing I could still put together a strong race, the only goal going in was to secure a spot to the ITU Wold Championships in Rotterdam, Netherlands which will occur in September of 2017.  This would mean me taking 18th or better in my age-group.

Just a quick note, the Olympic distance consists of a 1500m swim, 40km bike, and 10km run.

Highlights
Swim 26:42
Bike 1:03
Run 40:26
Overall 2:13

Swim
Hands down, the worst triathlon swim of my very short career.  It was a non-wetsuit swim in a lake that was measured at 84 degrees F prior to the race.  Needless to say, I had a bad swim and was extremely hot while doing it.  This was another race where I was fortunate to be in the first wave, which ended up paying off later on.  I forgot to start my watch for the start of the race, so I came out of the water without really knowing what the damage was at this point.  Coming up the chute into T1, my brother yelled something to the effect of "a lot of people are in front of you".  All of these people were in my age group, I had some work to do.

Thanks for the pic ma

Bike
The bike course was a fairly flat course with two pronounced climbs.  I was planning on riding hard, but given my lackluster swim I really had to kick it into gear.  It was an out and back course, so at the turnaround I had somehow managed to bike myself into 20th place, meaning I passed a good 20 people on just the first 12ish miles.  I essentially held my position there, holding off a few attempts by people trying to pull away.  I hustled into T2 and was able to pass a few more people as I head out on the run.

Multitasking

Run
The run course was also an out and back, which included a turnaround in the TD Ameritrade Stadium (Home of the College World Series).  I had situated myself  nicely into 18th place on the run.  Given how the day had gone and Ironman being my focus, I was happy to sit in comfortably on the run.  At the turnaround, I found myself in no-man's land. I had a healthy lead on the few runners behind me, but I was a bit back from the runners in front of me.  I looked around coming down the red carpet and was pretty confident that I did what I needed to do.

Running the track at TD Ameritrade

Results and Roll-down
Well, my assumption was wrong...initially.  Due to the way the age-groups are broken out, USAT does some shuffling to account for people aging up over the next year.  This left me sitting in the uncomfortable 19th position on Sunday night.  I was outside of an automatic slot, but within the top 25 which would allow me to receive a roll-down.

It took until Tuesday of the following week to receive my invite from USAT to be a part of Team USA for the 2017 Grand Final.  Needless to say, I was and am pretty pumped.  I've represented the US in a different capacity before, but this will be the first opportunity to do so in sport.

Omaha was a great chance for me to be humbled by the sport again.  There were so many fast people out there and it was a nice reminder that I still have lots of work to do.