Hillary Biscay

14 March 10: Abu Dhabi Triathlon

Posted on 14. Mar, 2010 by hillarybiscay in Blog | 4 Comments

Yesterday I had the privilege of being part of the inaugural Abu Dhabi International Triathlon, or what I like to call, Kona 2010, Part One. The women’s field was completely stacked, so for me, this race was less about aiming for a piece of the huge prize purse than testing my fitness against the best in the world. I certainly got what I came for!

I finished in 16th place overall, which is neither here nor there, really.

I gave up just over a minute to the top girls in the swim, which was not good. This is swim time and, more importantly, an opportunity to follow a hard early pace on the bike that I am giving away. So my swim performance card reads, “Room for improvement.”

The biggest portion of the race, however–the bike–was the highlight of my day. This was where I really wanted to test myself. I wanted to see if my cycling legs were ready to ride with some of the “big girls” all day, and if I could keep my head in the game and my pace on for 200 kilometers. I was able to do this better than I ever have before, finding strong girls to try to keep up with and being able to match their pace for much longer than in the past. I ended up coming off the bike with the likes of Bek Keat, Sam McGlone, and Lisbeth Kristensen, none of whom I’ve ever been able to share this position with before. This was the bike progress I was hoping to see in Ahu Dhabi, so I was really pleased with this.

It was a fast bike ride! 200 kilometers took me 5:25. We thought it would be dead flat, so we had a whole lot of surprise bridges to cross, one of which we had to climb over six times. I never had to get out of my big ring, but it did sting a bit into the headwind on the last lap.

Despite being in the aeroposition for essentially the entire 200k, I was comfortable and my back didn’t suffer at all–which I think is a testament to my awesome new Wilier Tri-Crono. Love it. And my legs felt strong the whole way through–maybe even their best during the final twenty kilometers of the ride.

The run legs were alright too–not speedy by comparison to the women by whom I had managed to surround myself, but functioning alright. I must admit that might have been the longest 20-kilometer run of my life, though. I kept telling myself that after a 200-kilometer ride, I just had a short run and the race was nearly over–since I am accustomed to having 42 kilometers in my future at this point. That little story was a cute one that got me through the ride well but made the run a bit of a rude shock. After a 7 hour and 41 minute workday, however, I finally reached the finish line, satisfied. Still much work to do but it was progress.

I also came away with some valuable knowledge from one of the other tests Coach and I had set out for this race, which was the two-weeks experiment. That is, it seems that the strategy we used for my training in the two weeks between Ironman Malaysia and Abu Dhabi seemed to work pretty well; hence we have some idea of how to plan my month of Challenge Copenhagen-Ironman Louisville-Ironman Wisconsin come August.

Lots more racing adventures to come in 2010 and it looks like good things are in store! Now I’m back home to Tucson to put in another serious training block to prepare for the Ironman Lanzarote-Brasil double in May. Thanks once again to all of my amazing sponsors for their support in this project: K-Swiss, PowerBar, ISM, Wilier, Zipp, FSA and CycleOps.

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