ITP -- the Monday after...

Although I am quite a bit away from home this weekend, I got a call at 8:30 AM from a TARGETRAINING enthusiast. And I am on Pacific time, so that means it was 5:30 AM. Now I did get up and go riding for 3 hours up to Red Rock from the Las Vegas strip, but needless to say, I hoped that the caller had something interesting to speak about.

"Dom won the ITP sprint triathlon, Eneas got 2nd, David Yockleson crossed the line in third place, and the relay team of Mitch West, Greg Stewart and David Mosse, despite starting back a couple of waves, crossed the line in 4th." Valentin Lopes crossed the line 5th (sixth overall). So that was a 1-5 finish -- that's pretty darn amazing by our coaches and team.

It turns out that Dom Gillen won and did so by breaking the event/course record set by our own Jordan Rapp. And Eneas set the fastest bike split in ITP history (and despite finishing way back on the swim -- which he frankly can't really do -- got a solid second place to Dom; Eneas also did the second fastest run split, less than 50 seconds behind Dom). The relay won the relay and apparently actually finished faster than Eneas (who gave them a 6.5 minute lead in the swim...) . Yock got passed by another athlete (Cliff Sherb, who is a friend of TT and a fast young man from NYC with roots in CT) later on in the event, but 4th overall is not too shabby (and winning his age group of course). Valentin Lopes ended up getting 6th overall and won his 25-29 age group (great stuff!). David Booth got ~19th overall and 4th in the tough 30-34 age group. Robert Labanca got 3rd in his age group (45-49) and got 23rd overall! Amazingly enough, only two non TARGETRAINING athletes had less than a 41 minute bikesplit. However, 6 TARGETRAINING athletes did this: Eneas 33+, Dom 37+, Greg S. 39+, Yock 40+, Valentin 40+, and Labanca 40+.

I think our women's team took the morning off -- well they've had a great season so they deserved the morning off. And the guys represented pretty well. Mimi and Megan were going to do a relay but I don't think they found a third.

The weather held off. Apparently Max V. was very busy at the TARGETRAINING tent, fixing flat tires, helping all the triathletes who somehow managed to have bikes that needed emergency tuning on race day (he was glad to help). Tyler J., our running guru and other pro triathlete sidelined with a calf injury, who now will be wearing Newton's to help reduce such injury likelihood, and helping a young lady from Pennsylvania who forgot her running shoes. Both of them of course just being generally helpful to athletes. And U-25 team member Craig Luekin, who also is the collegiate national champion this year in criterium (and got 5th on the road I recall in the championships), driving the TT car in support of the race and pitching in to act as an extension of the ITP support crew. Chris Bartlett got 11th in the 40-44 age group.

As of this time, we haven't seen the official results online. But, the 5:30 AM caller's results have been independently confirmed by a number of other observers...