St. Anthony's Preview

I've got a pretty big score to settle with St. Anthony's Olympic this year. It's my first of 2 "A" races - and my goal is to finish in the top 10. Last year I did horribly; I got sick 2 weeks before hand, and was run down for the race - midway through the bike I fell into cruise mode and limped the rest of the way. This year's going to be a different story!

There are 131 Clydesdales in the 40-49AG this year - up from 67 last year! The Clydesdale competition is huge in 2007, with 56 guys returning from last year's race. Of last year's top 10, 7 are returning, of the top 20, 17 are returning. It will be a hard group to break into. Of the returning Clydes, 2:36:41 gets you 10th place.

It will be interesting to see how USAT scores will reflect on predicting the results for SA. The scores seem to be pretty consistent at the Olympic level - although I'm only looking at a few scores. Using our Clyde champ Roman's 2:39:26 Chicago Oly time - that time earned him a score of 71.7359. The corresponding SA guy with the same time (2:39:20) scored 72.1494 points. On the other hand, our RaceAthlete buddy Myles out in NM ran the Grady Williams Memorial Freedom Days Olympic in 2:56:10 and scored 73.7115 - must have been a tuff race!

I bring up USAT scores because I looked up guys' scores that did not do the SA tri last year in an effort to see what their Olymic-distance times at other events looked like. Since the USAT score seems to reflect the difficulty of the race, the #10 spot of last year's SA finishers has a USAT rating of 72.48 - one fellow actually raced better with a lower score for the year of 69.88. So it would be reasonable to assume that to break into the top ten, a guy would have to have a rating of at least 72 - racing other distances - and of course, not counting for improvement over the year or off season.

Only one guy who did not race SA last year and who had a score on the USAT web site had a USAT rating that did - 73.77 - and he did the Montauk Oly in 2:28:22 - a top 5 SA time for sure. So we should definitely look for Peter Helling from Brooklyn, NY to finish strong. Another group to look out for are the 70+ scorers that did 1/2 and full IM's last year - there were 3; Rudd, Hale and Snodgrass - all guys to look for.

What does this mean for the Bigun? 2:34 is probably going to be worth about 6th place, and I'm guessing that most of 6 through 10 will be coming in in that minute. To go that fast, I'm going to have to be reasonable - my weakness is my run, and I'll be lucky to do a 9:00/mile pace. My swim is coming along nicely, and with a wetsuit I'd have to swim a 1:42/100yd pace to swim in 27 min - something to shoot for. The bike is probably a strength - I'm going for a 22.2 mph average to get it done in 67 min. With a total of 4 mins for transitions, I could come in under 2:35 - each leg is possible, but putting them all together.....hell yea!


The trick will be to get down to 230lbs - that will be huge! Keeping my run volume high, and doing these intervals to get faster is key #2. Swim 3x per week minimum is key #3. And finally, well, it's all about the bike, right? This is all pretty OCD, but I've got phone duty here at work - fielding sales calls that are coming in at about 1 per hour...so I've got time on my hands. I wish I was out on the bike right now!