Chilly Creeks Duathlon Race 1

Over the weekend, I decided to do something that I had never done before, but was interested in trying: a Duathlon.
I had been excited about this race since I signed up a few months ago, and did my best to try to ride here and there which I failed to do. About all I was able to do was use the exercise bike we have in the house, which I guess was better than nothing. I figured that I put in about 30-40 miles last week, and 35-50 the week before on the bike. Again, not the right way to train, but with the weather doing its thing lately I would have not ridden outside anyways.
So, Andy Rinne and I arrived early Saturday morning at the Marina at Cherry Creek State Park and noticed that it was very cold outside, and not warming up. We still had 2 hours before race time, so we were hoping that things would change. As we were sitting in the car, we started to look at the different types of bikes people had, ranging from MTB bikes to full on race bikes that were worth well over 5000.00. This is the first lesson about Duathlons: In order to be in the mix, you have to have a light, fast bike, and you also need to have some time on the bike. I was already at a big disadvantage being that my Giant ATX-970 Mtb from 1999 was most likely 30 lbs or heavier. I guess I should have entered the Fat Tire division, but oh well.
We finally got out and ran a little bit and noticed that any trail areas were snow packed and icy and had heard that the bike course had a far amount of ice and snow on it as well. We then got the bikes out, set them up in the staging area and went and ran more. Race time was 10:00, and it still was somewhat cold out, so we decided that running pants, gloves, hat and all the fun stuff was going to be what we used. We really had no idea of what the run course was like, and didn’t go out on the bike course at all, so we were unsure of how the race was going to play out. I was in Wave A and Rinne was in Wave C so he would start at 10:02. It was finally race time, and they gave us directions, lined us up and did the normal countdown and off we went. From about 10 meters until the rest of the run portion of the race, I was gone. I would guess that I took the mile out in high 4:30’s to low 4:40’s and never looked back from there. The first mile was on the road, and I finally hit the turn for the dirt portion of the run. It was snow packed and hilly which made it interesting. By the time I hit the timing mat at 4 miles and got my bike and went on, I was up by about 5 minutes. The run time was nothing great, 21:27, but I found out that it was 4.15 miles, not 4. I think the snow also slowed things down a bit.
Once I got on the bike, I just tried to settle in and enjoy the race. I was cruising along and feeling good and lead until about I would guess 7 or 8 miles into the race. Interesting enough, the guys with the light, fast bikes caught up and blazed past me like I was standing still. First it was one, then another and finally two more that caught and passed me. I just tried to ride as well as I could at this point and finally finish in 59 something. When I looked at the results, I saw that they were averaging about 23 Mph to my 18.1 Mph. Doesn’t seem like much, but damn what a difference it was. I saw one guy was riding at 32.1 Mph for his average!! So fifth overall in my race, and I guess 7th overall for combined races.