Not satisfied with just a single victory for the day, Vince was headed off to Whistler to beat a bunch of twelve year olds in an “intro to biathlon” race. In the un-timed event Vince discovered that 12km of skiing can be more difficult than a 20 minute swim and run. He also discovered that twelve year olds who have put in more than two days on skis this winter can blow by you on the uphills.
Finishing not too far behind him were Barry (17:28) and Brendan (17:30) who did not stop at the finish line, but rather held his pace and sprinted the 200m across University Boulevard to his favourite coffee shop. Barry was third out of the water but managed to catch Brendan on the run, likely because Brendan was saving energy to elbow his way to the front of the line to get an Americano. Brendan knows the usual Sunday morning clientele can be aggressive senior citizens headed off to church and frat boys coming home from the previous Saturday night, so he needed to conserve his last strength if he wanted any chance of getting caffeine without a lengthy wait.
Stephanie Flynn had the fastest swim of the day and allowed her to win the women’s event by nearly a minute. Vince blames his uneven pacing in the swim on trying to keep up with her. The 1000 points she earned here puts her in third overall. Jen Bhatla took advantage of a quick transition and some speedy laps of the SUB to pass two competitors who were ahead of her out of the water. Her 19:13 puts her in second, inches ahead of Victoria who finished in 19:14.
All but two Aquathon competitors also did the 500m swim this semester, so some comparisons can be made. Seven athletes covered the 500m in the pool faster than they did in February and still had enough energy in reserve to run three laps of the SUB. The improvements ranged from 2 seconds (Drew) to 36 seconds (Johnson) and even a whole 45 (Max). Swim times can be found below, with improvements in brackets. There was a magic window of time between 8:37 and 9:15 where everyone finishing had bettered their previous 500m times. I can guarantee you Steph Urness would have taken more than 22 seconds off of her 500m time had I not been holding her up and refusing to let her pass for the first 200m. I knew I was in trouble when I was pushing off the wall with 100m to go and I saw Steph Flynn on the pool deck with her shoes on already. My shoes were on already too, but that certainly did not help with the swimming.
Steph F 7:13:00
Vince 7:40:00
Rachel 7:26:00
Karin 7:42:00
Eddy 7:45:00
Jen B 7:51:00
Brendan 8:06:00 (4 seconds)
Dylan 8:10:00
Barry 8:12:00
Kywon 8:28:00
Victoria 8:37:00 (3 seconds)
Winston 8:37:00 (8 seconds)
Johnson 9:03:00 (36 seconds)
Steph U 9:07:00 (22 seconds)
Max 9:15:00 (45 seconds)
Kaley 9:24:00
Jon 9:30:00
Ben 9:43:00
Drew 9:52:00 (2 seconds)
Jesse 10:00:00
Winston, the club patriarch, did everything in his power not to beaten by Victoria in the water. He succeeded, just barely.
We don’t want to make the statistics for the run feel left out:
Vince 9:30
Steph Flynn 11:15
Barry 9:16
Brendan 8 9:24
Jen B 11:22
Victoria 10:37
Rachel 11:58
Karin 11:47
Winston 9:33
Dylan 10:02
Jon 8:44
Max 9:10
Kaley 10:52
Eddy 11:15
Steph U 11:26
Kywon 12:57
Ben 10:15
Johnson 11:46
Drew 11:04
Jesse 11:49
No major upsets in the overall points were seen after the race, the top 4 or 5 men’s and women’s positions remained unchanged. Barry will be the first to have his name on the Trophy other than Matt Reeve. Vince’s name is also on the trophy, but for an entirely different reason. Vince would have had to put several minutes on Barry in the Aquathon to claim the overall lead. Three attempts to unplug Barry’s alarm clock and two tries at pushing him in front of a bus proved unsuccessful. Kaley retains the overall title that she has held since the 5k (briefly allowing Ms. Flynn to hold the position after the 500m swim). Victoria takes second place while Stephanie Flynn easily held on to third, gaining 110 points on her nearest competitor in the last event of the series.
For those who may be interested, if the entire Spring Fling was a single event, you can see below what your time would have been. Assuming fatigue plays no role and you were able to hold your pace over all distances. The course would end up being approximately a 12k run (with 300 feet of elevation gain), 21k on the bike and a kilometer in the pool. If we take the Ironman distance to be the reference standard, the 2.4 mile (3.8k) swim accounts for 1.70% of the total distance for the 226k course.
Since the 1 kilometer worth of swimming in the Point Series ends up accounting for 2.94% of the total distance covered, some adjustments need to be made. To keep the swim distance in line with the 1.7% rule, we really need to cut the swimming down to 578m, 289m for the time trial and 289m to begin the Aquathon. A spot on the ballots for the Wednesday Executives election will be added to confirm support for the decision to change the swim distances. To avoid a biased vote, anyone who has ever completed a 500m swim in under 8 minutes will not be given a ballot. Also, Kory; your suggestion of making the 500m swim event into a 1500m now seems quite ridiculous. Please do not bother to point out that the 12k of running is proportionally too long, I assure you things are better this way. The unfair, heavily swimming biased results for everyone who completed all 8 events are:
Barry 91:47
Vince 93:18
Brendan 94:34
Jon 96:04
Stallkamp 98:17
Ben 106:15
Johnson 110:57
Victoria 107:50
Kaley 108:05
Flynn 109:04
Urness 111:05
Looking at these results, an hour and a half for men and 1:45 for women seem to be good targets for the next Fall Series. The three time returning champion will surely have a shot at the 1:30 barrier. Interestingly, Matt’s 2010 fall series results calculated using the new 1000 point system would earn him 8109.6 points, very close to Barry’s total of 8114.2. The next Fall Series might be a very close competition.
Max and I were walking by Ivan on the pool deck after collecting our shoes and heading inside to the hot tub. “You guys are really fast” he said. “At running” , he added. We are both looking forward to the next point series where hopefully the swimmers will no longer have an unfair advantage. Just to be on the safe side, Max and I have signed up for a two week summer training camp with this man:
Here are the running and the swimming times added together including any mishaps with socks, tight laces, Garmins, tripping on the stairs, fence jumping, Speedo adjustments, smiling at cameras, avoiding pigeons, general whining and all calibrated for the chilly temperature and sun in your eyes:
Vince 17:10
Barry 17:28
Brendan 17:30
Winston 18:10
Dylan 18:12
Jon 18:14
Max 18:25
Steph F 18:28
Eddy 19:00
Jen B 19:13
Victoria 19:14
Rachel 19:24
Karin 19:29
Ben 19:58
Kaley 20:16
Steph U 20:33
Johnson 20:49
Drew 20:56
Kywon 21:25
Jesse 21:49
Sherry 22:56
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