Winston Guo: August 2021

Racing is back!

After 16 months of virtual racing and no IRL racing, I'll take anything I can get...even if there are endless steps to meeting all the health enforced covid protocols.

Whelp, I spoke too soon! These lovely stairs were a third of the battle of a very challenging T1. A snaking ramp to exit the water and along with another 400m ramp greeted us on the other end to get back onto the street level after transitioning inside on the parkade. Super cool concept, the race can be lost here alone!

I took Celebration off the zwift setup and had to polish off the dust from the race wheels, installed the carbon brake pads and swapped over power meters. One of my virtual racing friends Edmund mentioned he was doing the race too and we compared notes. First thing he mentioned was previous top 7 finishers all had road bikes. Certainly, it was a strong business case to opt for the road bike.

Sorry Celebration, you'll have to wait a little longer for the next one!

My good friends Brendan and Lawrence were very kind to drive me to Montreal from Ottawa for this weekend's race. Lucky for me the humidity was going away and surprisingly perfect temperatures for race day. ~21 degrees C air temp and 24 degrees C water temp. It started to sprinkle a little bit to saturate the roads in the morning. I rode in and spotted a quick recon of the run route.

No biggie, as flat and paved and straight as one can make it.

Check-in was super efficient. We showed up only an hour in advance of our designated start time. iTT format. I met Edmund and we walked past security together to enter zee process. We learned later the times were only meant to separate the crowds as the race permit had to follow stricter protocols during the time of its application.

Swim - running dive start off a pontoon, we had to sight for first right buoy and then four left ones.

T1: Oh M Gee whiz stairs and ramps to enter the third floor of parkade to reach transitions racks.

Bike: F1 style 11-turn circuit x 6 laps + 2 turns for enter/exit = 68 turns! Turn 1 was a dead turn 180 degrees. Along McGill between Turn 2 and 3 was elevated concrete sidewalks and potholes. 8-90 degrees turns allows you to undercut those pesky TT bikers who just blasted along the straightaways.

T2: ramp up and then a little swing around to make the transitions fair for distance travelled. Thinking back, I should had just racked my bike in rack Z to have more space! Instead I chose rack C.

Run: we do 2 laps out and back (CCW). After the killer bike and two technical transitions, a tame run course was welcomed.

This was sprint #22, triathlon #72 for me.

I started mid-front pack and entered the waters 8:53am. They sent an athlete every 15s starting at 8:40am. Rookie mistake, my goggles straps were loose so when I dove in, the goggles filled with water. No argie-bargie swim, we had a lot of space and maybe a handful of swimmers passed me.

T1 was a little rusty, I crossed the mount line and remember pausing for a second until another person passed me.

The bike course definitely favoured the locals. After the race I spoke with a couple locals and they were thrilled to take advantage of local knowledge of the road network. They probably could had wrote a manual of where all the man holes and elevated concrete sidewalks (you need to bunny hop these) and pot holes and alligator cracking and more. It took me a couple laps to realize I wasn't being aggressive enough to cut the turns. Every so often a biker would pass me and I would copy their speed and approach to each turn. Brendan and Lawrence was at turns 7, 8 and 9. Brendan yelled "BOP BOP BOP BOP" swiss-german (reminds me of IM Zurich). He yelled it with such confidence, I made sure to push 500watts as I rode by!

I thought I was cutting the turns aggressively, but watching the olympians the next day I realized there were still a lot more angle required for the turns! A lot of trust to keep the shiny side up and the rubber down.

I trusted I counted 6 laps of the course, but second-guessed myself at the finish turn because my garmin only had 17.8km. Did I miss count a lap? I processed this info and decided to take an extra 200m and then when making turn 1 on lap 7 I took a gamble and turned into the finish. Either I get DQ for missing a lap or I save myself 5 minutes for another lap. It paid off in the end! Bike was short (Transitions were long).

T2 was eventful. I can remember missing taking my shoes off due to the 30s blunder of the extra turn on the bike. As I approached my rack, my neighbour happened to be there as well. I cleaned my bike stem when I rebuild my bike and the front handle bars dangled into his area. After the race, he was kind enough to ask me English or French and then decided to give me a lecture on how my bike dangling into his area caused him to forget his run belt and he had lost 40 seconds. I didn't think much of it as it was pretty much a mad scramble of events. I didn't confront him and apologized. Next time I'm moving my bike to rack Z!

Run. I think this was a bike heavy course. I moved from swimming 86th to 50 after T2 and then finished 40th. Deep field! I was only 5 minutes from my AG winner but finished 5th. The run felt more like a hobby jog. A few runners passed me. One flew by me but then he took a second lap as I took the finish. iTT are tough to know who is in front and behind.