This was the race that was supposed to be my first ever triathlon in August 2013. But I pulled my hamstrings three weeks before the race, so missed the race and then took a few rest years before diabetes mandated that I get my butt off the couch for good in May 2015. Ironically, instead of being my first tri, Lake Norman Y Sprint in 2016 was instead just a training race for IRONMAN 70.3 North Carolina.
This race came in the middle of my last training block for my half-Ironman and I felt pretty sore and tired. Kelly didn't have a whole lot of rest in this training block as her goal was to progressively overload me until taper in October. I didn't even do a race report for this one contemporaneously with the race. I just went, did the race, ate all the food at The Egg in Davidson and then went home to nap.
This race had a super-early start at 6:30 as the increasing traffic on Main Street in Davidson almost killed this even. Traditionally run by SetUp Events, the Lake Norman Y switched the race to Jones Racing Company for 2016. Due to the early start, I stayed over at my fried Amy's house, as she lived only a 5 minute drive from the Lake Norman Y. Although the air mattress accommodations were quire comfortable, the two roaming, nocturnal cats were a little disruptive so I didn't get the best night's sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, one of the cats knocked over my bike, which also caused some sleep disruption. I mention all this because every triathlete needs to have reliable stock for excuses as to why they didn't perform as well as they thought they should so, for those keeping count, have two excuses: (1) coach overloaded me, and (2) cats.
The 6:30 start was somewhat poorly conceived. With such an early start, I arrived around 5:45 a.m. and set up in the dark. While pre-dawn setups are par for the course in an IRONMAN, they are not always quite as appreciated for a sprint. Promptly at 6:30 a.m., everyone was ushered to the water to..... wait. They couldn't dispatch the swim waves until sunrise and sunrise was not until 6:45-ish so me all waited until around 6:50 or so before it was light enough to start the swim in Lake Norman. It was a wade-out-into-the-water start, and there was a lot of waiting around for a small sprint race. I had practiced open-water swim in that lake a lot throughout the summer as the Lake Norman Y hosts many supervised open-water swim events from May to August in preparation for this race. But the light was way different at the break of sunrise than it is at 8 a.m. when the practice OWS starts so everyone's strategy of following the trail of sunlight back into the dock didn't quite work as well as usual. All the same, it was a good, although warm, non-wetsuit legal 750m swim.
The bike course is a well-known course and I had biked it many times over the past year. It was a pretty long course for a sprint, at 17.5 miles, with lots of rollers and some pretty steep hills on Faith Road before the turn back to the Y. Regardless of the early start time, by the time we were heading back on Hwy 115/Main Street into Davidson, the traffic was getting pretty heavy. I saw Amy at one of the turns into the last mile or so before transition and it was good to see her out on the course.
The run was hot, through the unshaded neighborhood streets behind the Y and I was feeling a weird combination of aerobically fit, hot and really sore from my lower back down to calves. But the pace I held was pretty good for at that stage of my training, all things considered, and I was happy to have another race done and in the books before my final tune-up race in September at White Lake Fall International.
Not too bad for a slow triathlete 16 months off the couch whose coach was torturing him :)
That sprint tri at the Lake Norman Y was a nice race with a substantial bike course. It is sad to see it go, but with no ability to mitigate the traffic situation around the Y, there was no choice but to move it a couple of miles north to the Ingersoll Rand business park for 2017.