Last Du of the Year this Saturday

So I am now back in Ontario after spending the week on a work related trip to beautiful Sonoma Valley in California. Lots of work during the day and social events at night. Even though the boss kept us busy, I still managed to slide in a bunch of great runs along the vineyards and Russian River and several laps in the pool.

I do not think I kept all the pounds off from the amazing food and great wines but I tried my hardest to stay in form with our last Subaru Duathlon coming up this weekend (Sept 5th). The hardest thing to stay away from was the awesome after meal treats.

Watching the stats sites this weekend makes me wonder if Mark's prediction of a total Subaru Series field duathlon is in the works this coming weekend. I noticed that the Cobourg event, today and yesterday, was forced to run all events as duathlons. I am not sure why they could not swim but I can imagine the frustration of several athletes as this was suppose to be the Ontario triathlon championships.

Well, they kept the du and tri seperate from each other on the results page although everyone was forced to race a duathlon. A big shout out to Bruce Bird for finishing second overall in the Olympic distance championships! My former du competitor added this amazing feat to his top spot at this years Ontario Duathlon Championships. Amazing!

I just hope the triathletes can swim in Guelph as the duathlon field is usually big enough at this race and the points are pretty important to finish the season. Mark is only around 70 points back so I need a strong showing to hold on to my age group position.

Getting into Toronto at 7 am on Saturday, I was pretty wiped yesterday from the flight and could not muster anything in the way of training. Today was much better and I was happy to see I did not lose too much on the bike after a week of running and swimming. I headed towards Milton in the absolute horid weather (cold, raining and super windy) and completed several climbs, ending up with 73km on my computer. I followed that up with a great 10k later at night with a solid 6 x 1k session to get the speed back up.

Tomorrow will have an easy run with a bike TT in the evening as the FMCT crew hold their final scheduled solo TT of the season. We have a team TT in a few weeks but this is the last of the single rider races. This should let me know if I have any rust or not. Weather looks to be a factor so it may be hard to tell.

Anyway, just a few notes to let everyone know that I am still out there and also reading up on everyone! I have seen a bunch of really solid results from several friends in the past two weekends so I know I have to be on my game to compete as the year winds down. Keep up the great work everyone!