Duathlon Worlds in Edinburgh, Scotland

I spent a total of a week in Edinburgh and stayed with Jon Kent, Josh Merrick, Dereck Treadwell and Tim (from Hartwick College) in a cozy little apartment. Edinburgh is a beauitful city and have a lot of attractions for tourist. During my time there I went to the Edinburgh Castle, went the Royal Botanic Garden, walked on Calton Hill where there were a bunch of monuments and YES, went to multiple pubs. Don't worry, I went to the pubs on the last day I was there :)

This was my third year on the Elite team and this was certainly the toughest field and toughest course there has been within the last three years. The set of the course was a 10k run, 40k draft legal bike followed by a 5k run.

The first run went out hard as usual. I always hang in the back for the first 1/3rd of the race and run even splits as I catch all of the guys who go out to hard. The 10k run consisted of loops, each loop being 2.5k. It was a gradual up hill and then a pin point turn around down hill. Now I can run up hill pretty well but I can't run downhill and on each downhill it seems like the lead guys were getting a bigger lead on me. I finished the run about 45 seconds back from where I thought i would be.

I knew I had my work cut out on the bike. The bike consisted of a 7 loop course of about 39k. There was a decent climb and decent in the loop. I quickly worked hard on the bike and caught up to Josh Merrick and another guy from the UK. We worked together as we flew past guys that couldn't hang with us. Josh and I were doing the majority of the work. We caught up to a group of about 12 other rides and Dereck Treadwell was in this group. I went right to the front to keep a honest pace as everyone drafted on me. On the last loop I took the lead and pulled hard the whole time into T2. I got off the bike and tried to roll as quickly as I could on my beat up legs. A few people out of the pack of 15 got away from me but I held my own in the last 5k and finished 23rd out of 50 some elite men. I finished up the 4th out of 7 Elite men. A tough race and day but I did the best of what I could to represent USA for Worlds.