Kristen Marchant’s K-Town Race Report
Newmarket’s Kristen Marchant, a Recharge With Milk Ambassador Team member, won the women’s title at Sunday’s K-Town Long Course Triathlon.
Here is her race report:
I was excited to do the Kingston long course triathlon this year as it slight increase in distance from Olympic but not quite a half ironman and I wanted to see how I would fare with the extra kilometers. It looked like it would be a relatively flat and fast course and although it turned out to be slightly hillier than I expected, it was still a great course and a fun race.
The swim to the first buoy was horrendous. My initial plan was to try and jump on Angela’s feet, however this plan was quickly thwarted when I got hit multiple times, people grabbed my arms, someone managed to grab both my legs (how is that even possible…?) and another guy swimming right in front of me was doing a zig-zag the whole way to the buoy with his feet right in my face, causing me to have to slow down. Fortunately I don’t have to start with you violent men again this year. 😀 Once around the first buoy it was like everyone disappeared and I was swimming on my own the rest of the way. Aside from swimming a less than straight line, the swim went well.
Onto the bike I knew Angela was ahead and I was unlikely to catch her so I just focused on pacing the bike leg so that I would have something left for the run. It was a great course, although as I mentioned, hillier than I was expecting.
Onto the run I was excited to see that my legs were feeling decently good. I had my bike fit looked at last Monday which resulted in moving the saddle back a couple of centimeters, and that seems to have solved some of the problems I was having earlier in the season J I didn’t know how much of a lead Angela had on me so I was looking for her. The course had lots of turns though so I couldn’t see too far ahead at any one time. At about 5km I saw her and probably unconsciously picked up the pace until I caught her at about the 6km mark. I found out later she was having cramping issues which is unfortunate for her as she had an excellent swim-bike combo to start the race. After that I just kept plugging away and felt surprisingly good for the majority of the run. I could feel the leg fatigue setting in just after the 10km mark and knew I was slowing down, but tried not to slow down too much. I crossed the finish line with a run split of 1:01:48 which is probably the best run I’ve had this year, although I wanted to break an hour. Next time. J The run course was really nice as a lot of it was down on a path by the water, so it was quite enjoyable.
Post-race I enjoyed some food, caught up with some athletes, took some pictures, and found out I get my name on a trophy which is pretty cool. 😛
I’d like to once again thank Multisport Canada for their support and for hosting a great race, C3, and my swim coach Jeff Slater.