The Pigman Cometh

Ok, we actually went to the Pigman. It's a long drive down to the Pigman in Palo, IA, but its worth it. They have this race down with regards to check-in, transition set up, checking out your transponder chip, post race food, swag in the bag, etc. It's a very well run race.

TriRochester had 6 members going to the race (4 men, 2 women). There is a competition within the race for clubs-- they take the top 3 male and top 2 female finishes from your club, add the times together and rank your club accordingly. However, 2 members were not present from our club, one male, 1 female, so we would have been short one of the female finishes. As an honorary member thru club member Peter Maves, we added Peters sister, J.R. Grawe, as a club member--her result was used as the second female finish so we had 5 TriRochester results to use (Peter Maves, Patti & Jeremy Ekman, J.R. Grawe, and myself). TriRochester ranked 6th of 9 clubs who had enough results to be ranked. There were some seriously competitive and/or large clubs there. Gear West was made up of their Elite team so that is hard to compete with. Iowa Trihawks had 21 members and Midwest Xtreme Tri Club had 109 club members in the race. Yes, 109 of the 700 or so in the race belonged to one club! The 3 just mentioned finished 1,2,3 respectively. So with only 5 TriRochester results to use, I think we did pretty well coming in 6th.Go here to view the Pigman results:http://www.pigmantri.com/pig1rst09.html

Personally, I had a great race. My swim can always improve and it should have been better than it was. It kept me from winning my AG, but oh well. The swim felt better than last years Pigman (which was my first tri ever), but I only seemed to shave about 20 seconds off of it. In 08 I was 337th of 608 in the swim. This year, 281st of 666. My bike improved by almost a minute, and the run improved by 37 seconds. T1 & 2 were relatively the same. In total, I improved my time on the course by almost 2 minutes. Overall, I was 29th of 666, and 2nd in AG 35-39. I was #1 in my AG on the bike and on foot, but the 1st place guy in 35-39, Jeff Mortensen, took more than 3 minutes out of my swim and that's nearly impossible to make up.

Props go to TriRochester member Jeremy Ekman who I think turned a major corner on his racing abilities placing 5th in our AG. He averaged over 22 mph on the bike and had the 40th fastest swim of the day--just to highlight a couple bright spots.