So today I decided to do a little practice run for my upcoming triathlon. While I would have liked to do a full practice run (swim / bike / run) like I did last time, I also wanted to try a run on the actual course itself. My initial thought was to swim at the Y, then drive up to Morrow and do the bike and run, but since it’s fairly close to where I work, I instead decided to just skip the swim and drive up there after work one day. Errr today.

Drove up there and drove the course in my car first to make sure I knew what I was going to be doing. I ended up in downtown Morrow, where I parked the car. Met up with a carnie (missing several teeth and hauling a truck full of those portable fairgrounds rides) who was looking for “Center Street”. I tried to help out as best I could….

Because the triathlon bike course is a “point to point” course, it threw a bit of a wrinkle into my plans. Point to point means that it starts and ends in different places. It starts at point A (near Miami High School) and goes to point B (near the bike trail in downtown Morrow), and then back to A and finishes at B. This brought up some logistical problems for my training run, since if I did the whole course, I would not end up where my car was.

It was my original intention to park at the high school, do the course, ending at the bike trail, and then do the run course (an out and back on the bike trail) and then bike the 2 miles or so over to the high school. When I saw how busy the road was I’d have to ride on for the shortest path back to my car, I decided to not do that. I got the brilliant idea that I would just leave my car parked at the bike trail and then do the course in reverse. It was not until about a mile in that I realized that this would leave me the exact same problem except I’d have to somehow get myself (and bike) from the high school to Morrow, instead of reverse.

So I decided to just do an out and back on the course and then do the last 5 or so miles on the bike trail. Here’s the route I ended up doing, if you’d like to follow along. Even though I did the course in reverse, I’ll describe it as it will be run on race day (i.e. starting near the high school)

Starts out southbound on Morrow-Cozzadale road, and starts out with a killer hill. It’s pretty steep and then when you get to the top after a bit of flat, there’s another little mini-hill you have to go up. After that, you start the “rolling hills” which covers the majority of the course. There are some decent-sized hills, but most of them have a down first, so you can pedal down and use that momentum to get you up the up-section. Just when you start to get a downhill, you have to stop and turn left onto McIntire Road.

McIntire is all up and down – more of the rolling hills. There are 2 decent-sized hills, and in each case (both out and back) the one you get to first is the easier one to do. Left onto Ludlum Rd and it was fairly flat with (wait for it) more small rolling hills. Right onto Bennett Road (a strange intersection) and it’s more of the same with a largish hill at the end. Once you make it up there, you’re just about done. Right onto Morrow-Rossburg Road and it’s all downhill from there. Literally. Actually it’s kind of scary-downhill, because you can get going pretty good and there’s some tight bends where you have to worry about veering oncoming traffic. At the T-intersection, left onto Front Street and into downtown. For the supersprint folks then you start the run, while us sprinters have to turn around (somewhere around here) and head back.

The back part of the course (that I rode first today) was pretty much the same, just in reverse (of course). The initial hill was good-sized, but not as much as the first one (so which one do we “get” to do twice?!), and the downhill on Morrow-Cozzadale was also somewhat-scary. After you turn from McIntire, there’s a bit of an uphill at first but the majority of Morrow-Cozzadale is all downhill and fast. A bit of time to rest up before you get to tackle the hill of doom (again).

When I got back into Morrow, I turned east onto the bike trail. Plan was to go about 2.5 miles out which would put me a bit more than 5 miles out. The trail has markers pained on every 0.5 miles but ever since my cycle computer broke (stupid Meijer brand piece of crap) I don’t have a good way to measure exact distances while I’m out and about. Just as I had passed the 2.5 mile mark, and I was wondering how I was going to figure out where I had turned around, I came across a road crossing (Strout Road). So that made it easy to figure out.

Splits were:
5.71 miles out (Morrow to HS) – 22:22 – 15.32 mph
5.52 miles back (HS to Morrow) – 22:13 – 14.91 mph
5.82 miles on the trail – 21:54 – 15.95 mph
Total distance 17.05 miles – 1:06:29 – 15.39 mph

Then I started out on the run. I took a bit of a break here but probably not more then 2-3 minutes. I did have to lock up my bike and get some water and such, but I wanted to simulate actual racing conditions as much as possible. And after all, transitions are what I do best! :-). The run was very hard. I was figuring I would have to walk some of it (I haven’t yet been able to run a whole 5K without stopping to walk, much less after a 17 mile bike ride), but I was hoping to be able to do the out part without stopping (1.5 miles or so). Nope – I had to stop about the 1.2 mile mark. I had done the first mile in about 8:20. From the run course map it’s not quite clear where the starting point or the turnaround point is, but it looked like it started a bit east of where I was parked and that the turnaround was a bit east of what I was thinking was Stubbs Mills road (the road I drove in on). So I figured instead I’d just run to the road and then turnaround and it would be pretty close. I got to the turnaround and the road did not look familiar (I had crossed over the trail as I had driven in so I expected it to look familiar). The distance was right though. I hadn’t reached the 3rd every 1/2 mile painted trail marker, but it had been awhile since the 2nd one and since I had started a little before the first one I figured it was just on the other side of the intersection. Frankly, I was definitely NOT looking for excuses to NOT turn around! So I did. Further inspection indicates that the road I turned around on was not Stubbs Mills, but (a possibly un-named extension of) Morrow-Cozzadale. But even further inspection indicates that that is the correct road I was looking for.

The run back was hard – I stopped to walk a bit shortly after the turnaround and then a 3rd time with about 0.8 miles to go. I ran about the last 0.7 miles or so. One note of warning – on the way out just after you leave Morrow (maybe 0.2 miles in?) there’s a orange diamond construction sign on the trail indicating “Uneven Pavement”. When you see that same sign on the way back, don’t get too excited – you’re not almost there – it’s a different sign :-/. But when you see the “light at the end of the tunnel” you CAN get excited. Most of the run on the trail is heavily wooded and shaded, so you can definitely see a bright light off in the horizon as you’re getting close to the end. And even though you are on an abandoned railbed that light is NOT a train, but it’s the clearing that indicates you are back in Morrow. I started my final kick when I got into the clearing but if the start/finish is a little east of where I started / ended today I may have to hold off on that a bit longer.

Final time was 27:04 and measuring the course I ran says it’s about 3.04 miles, so that’s a 27:36 pace. My last 5K at the end of a triathlon was 27:22 so that seems pretty close, though I was (and am) hoping to do a little better.

Which brings me to pontificating about my goal. I have set my goal for the race at 2 hours. I figured rough estimates of 1 hour for the bike, 30 minutes for the swim and 30 minutes for the bike. As I was finishing up my bike (and realizing I was going to come in at something like 1:06) I began to wonder if 2 hours was doable. The bike is probably my strongest event, and if I go 6 minutes over there, I have to make up those 6 minutes somewhere (and this doesn’t include transition times either). After I got back and realized that the course I did today was a bit longer than the race course (17 miles vs. 25K or 15.5 miles), I did some figuring and saw that my “adjusted” race course time was something closer to 1:01 or 1:02. So if I can hit 1:01, with similar transition times from last race (2:08 and 0:39), and a 27 minute run, that leaves me 28-29 minutes for the swim. Last time I did 800 meters (albeit in a pool instead of a lake) I finished in 25:33. So maybe 2 hours is doable. Still I’m leaving it as the goal.

I am somewhat worried about being the last person in the race. I think it’s highly likely that at the very least I will be last out of the lake and certainly at least in the running for last on the course. My reasoning is that this does not seem like a triathlon that “beginners” would choose. At the Miami triathlon, when they asked for a show of hands for people that were in their first tri, a sizable amount of people raised their hands (myself included). This is a bit longer, especially the swim. If there were any beginners I think they’d be more likely to do the “supersprint” version. And while this doesn’t REALLY bother me, since I’m mostly just competing for / against myself, I don’t really WANT to be last (who would?). Of course, one advantage of being last is that nobody passes you :-D. The timeline for the race says 4:30 p.m. start and 6:30 p.m. “Awards”. I hope that they will wait for me! 🙂