I got back out onto the racing scene yesterday with a short sprint race at the Cheery Creek Reservoir. I did this race last year so I thought it might be fun to come back and give it another go. I took a couple weeks pretty easy (one nearly off) after Louisville and this week has been the first actual week of structured training. I haven't been feeling tip top (pretty normal) so I wasn't really sure how I might feel yesterday. All I really wanted to do was try and ride as hard as possible since I've felt as though my last few races had fairly passive bike rides. The race itself went pretty well. I swam alright, but I fumbled with my wetsuit in T1 and really lost some valuable seconds there. I came out onto the bike course about 40 seconds down from the lead and that is quite a lot to make up in 19K. I tried as hard as I could to move up, but I only made ground on second place and lost time to first (Dave Scott's 21-yr old son)

I started the run and I could see second place just up the road. I took a split about 1/4 mile into the run and I was about 24 seconds down. I kept taking splits and I brought it down to about 11 seconds with 1 mile to go, but I think he got a second wind at that point because my progress stagnated and I ran the last 2K with about the same distance between us. I finished in 59:44; my bike was about a minute faster than last year (though I missed a turn last year) and my run was 17:14 this year instead of 17:42. That gave me an overall finishing time that was about two minutes faster than 2010. It actually went much better than I thought it would and I had a lot of fun racing. It also keeps me on track of my goal to race at least 1x/month from Feb-Nov. this year.