This is a quick report on the Squiggy Classic Inline marathon I did this past weekend.

When I've heard about the Squiggy Classic Inline marathon I thought that it might have been a good opportunity to test my legs early in the season. However, making travel plans to get to Tampa proved to be difficult. I was not able to find any affordable flights so I have decided to drive instead. A shout to the Triangle Skating Club in attempt to find anybody to share the cost of gas with yielded no results so I was to drive alone. Generally, I would say that the 10 hour trek from Raleigh to Tampa is not bad... :-) It just that I wish they had more variety to radio stations on the way :-)

I got to the park where the marathon was supposed to be held around 6PM on Saturday only to find that it was closed. There goes my plan to roll around a bit to loosen my muscles... But wait, I can always put my skates on and roll under that gate! Which I did. The trail where we were supposed to race the next day was only about 10 feet wide... I could already picture that passing would be a problem... However, the pavement was SMOOTH. It was brand new, smooth pavement all around the park. Also, the course was flat. And I mean really flat. There were no false flats, no rollers, nothing... Just seven miles of flat as a pancake, smooth pavement.

The next morning I got to the park around 7AM and spent some time chatting with Herb Gayle and other fellow skaters. Shortly after we received our numbers and a Squiggy t-shirt. The t-shirt looks pretty cool - it's made of some kind of moisture wicking synthetic material... much better than your regular cotton t-shirt :-)Anyway, I pinned my number, put my headphones on and went on for a warm up. I warmed up really well and lined up at the start line around 8:50AM (as told in the race information booklet). However, we had only 5 people there... That was bizarre... I about 20 minutes a truck came and pulled behind the rest of the skaters. We lined up and I could just see how it was going to be disastrous :-) We had 5-6 people in every line on a 10 feet wide trail... And we had maybe 8-10 lines back to back... Oh, it was going to get ugly :-)

Now, one of my main goals for this marathon was to have a good start. Last season I felt that I was pretty sluggish at the start so I had to do better this time. I definitely did. I felt like I came smoking off the start getting right in the middle of the elite pack and holding on there... for about quarter of a lap :-) It just that flying down the trail at 26mph proved to be a tad too taxing on me so I had to take it down a notch... Soo... I'm 2 miles into the race and I am alone... Nice going :-) Obviously, I went into my "one small goal at a time" mode and found a lonely figure in front of me. When I chased it down, it happened to be an indoor girl who was skating pretty strong but also could not hang with the elite pack. We started trading pulls and chased down a couple more guys in the front. At the same time we were joined by a big pack from behind... Our pack swelled to about 8 people and overall we were working well. This pack contained a couple of people that I recognized. One of them was Brian Oswald who also became my marked man. You see, Brian is a very strong skater who was smoking his races last season... He put a big gap on me at last years Texas Road Rash... However, I was able to beat him at the NSIM. I knew that he was in my division and a strong skater, so I've decided to watch him.

The race itself was fairly uneventful. I had a pleasant conversation with the indoor girl who kept talking about chasing down her team mate who was in front. Which we did (and then she skated away from us). People were rotating fairly nicely in the front. However, the pace was incredibly inconsistent. In the pack the level of skills was so different that we would go from 16mph to 23mph back to 16mph in like 40 seconds... I started noticing that this kind of jerking was taxing me much more than consistently fast pace... In the last lap of the race we almost started crawling. It looked like nobody wanted to put a lot of work in until about 1.5 miles to go. Then, suddenly, people from the back sprinted by me, bringing the whole train of people with them... I've got boxed in and lost so much momentum that by the time I could take another stroke, I was spat out of the back. I sprinted as hard as I can but I could not close the gap... It was only myself and the indoor girl left and another lonely guy from our pack in the front... The pack was dangling 150 feet in the front but it was too far to close... I have gave it all to pass the person in front of me and the girl and I sprinted to the finish.

My result - 6th overall in open marathon. 4th in division (Brian took 1st overall - he was definitely strong that day).Average speed - 19mph. Max. Speed - 25.9mph. Time - 1:22:50 (the indoor girl beat me by 0.02 of a second :-) ).

Edit: Looking at the results online, it seems that I am 5th overall and 3rd in division... Hm... I wonder what happened...

Location