Yesterday and today were the 14th Annual Draper Lake Duathlons. The two day event includes an off-road duathlon on Saturday and an on-road duathlon on Sunday with special awards for those who du both.
Mav is the Race Director for both events and spent the days leading up to it preparing packets and such, then basically lived at Lake Stanley Draper from Friday until the end of the race today.
This was the debut for Sweet Tee in an adult multisport event. He helped Mav all day Friday and the better part of Saturday, then got up this morning and raced the on-road duathlon. The morning dawned to steady heavy rain, but by race time the rain had ceased and cool temps and cloud cover helped to offset the high humidity. Sweet Tee was a tad nervous on this his first adult du! He got his stuff set-up in transition and warmed up a little and then towed the line with about 150 other eager beavers.
When Don Garrett of DG Road Racing fired the gun, the athletes began the first of three times they would climb the hill to get up to the lake road from the Marina. Sweet Tee look relaxed and confident, and he never did throw up!
Sweet Tee finished the first 5K run in 23:22.6, just 9.8 secs behind the leader in his age group (Zack Lavergne):
who happens to be from Little Rock, AR. That is Zack’s dad beside him. Sweet Tee lost about 9 seconds to Zack and Jake Hooper in T1 (0:38.1) and they all went back up the hill on the bike for 14.5 miles around Lake Stanley Draper. Unfortunately, Sweet Tee lost time to both Zack and Jake on the bike and came in third in 51:56.6, almost 4 minutes behind. He lost another 5 seconds in T2 (0:27.7).
Out on the second 5K run:
Sweet Tee ran hard. At the turn he spotted Jake and told him he was going to catch him. He did. In fact, he almost ran Zack down too (25:12.6). During the second run Sweet Tee made up 5:30 on Jake and almost 2 minutes on Zack to finish second in his age group (1:41:37) behind Zack (1:39:49) and in front of Jake (1:43:29):
Congrats to P.I.T. Sweet Tee and Brother Mav. You both did great things this weekend!
