2 Weekends, 2 great races
My gawd was it humid out there! This past Memorial Day Weekend was my 6th time running the Soldier Field 10 Miler and it was a rough morning. The race started with a yellow flag and by the time I hit the turnaround, they raised it to red. What was kind of amazing was looking back at 2011 when I did the race for the first time. Here’s what I looked like at the end of that race:
Now here’s a shot of my son and I after this last race.
Yeah, he’s gotten older but what’s amazing to me are some of the changes I’ve gone through. In 2011, I finished in 2:08:43. This time, 1:51:56. Given that I ran the 2nd half much slower than I intended due to the heat, that’s still a really cool difference in finish times.
A week later, I was in Hammond, IN for Leon’s World’s Fastest Triathlon. This is one of the few races that are nearby enough that I don’t need a special trip for, but because of my school schedule I haven’t been able to do it in recent years. This year, I finally made it.
When I made my race plans this year, I decided to simply focus on Sprint distance Tris and this was in fact a pretty fast course. It would have been faster, had it not been for the winds. No matter where we rode, it seemed like we had a quartering wind. The first leg of the swim was tough too since we were swimming into the wind as we went out. Very choppy and murky conditions but I flew back the 2nd leg. For some reason though, it ended up only being a little over 500 yards (about 468 meters) instead of the advertised 750. Several other athletes on Strava showed similar distances.
Either way, I ended up with a PR for Sprint Tri of 1:35:50 and the especially cool part was that I came in 4th in my age group. (and no, I wasn’t last). I finished pretty strong and probably could have come in under 90 minutes if I hadn’t taken so long in T1 and pushed a little harder on the bike. I don’t know if I’ll be doing Leon’s again. It was small and fairly well organized but man Hammond, IN smells bad. Worse that rural Illinois when I did Galena a few years ago.
My next race is Toughman Wisconsin, which despite the name I’ll be doing the sprint distance again. After that, I’ll be focusing solely on training for the Chicago Marathon.
Running Big 
Thanks for sharing. Inspiration!