We finally had a glorious weather day in Connecticut. What a July 4th! Bright sun, blue sky, and big white puffy clouds. Yeah, there was an occasional dark cloud, but I never saw any precipitation. Luck was with us after dodging thunderstorms all week, including yesterday. I did the Chester 4 on the 4th Road Race for the 7th time. I didn’t run in 2008, but came back strong this year. Debbie also ran the hilly four miler, though this year, she was hauling an extra load.
780 other runners joined us for this classic event in beautiful Chester. Today has been marked down in my calendar as a super-training-day for months. I planned to ride from Old Lyme to Chester, run the race, and then ride for another five hours. The plan worked perfectly. I met Deb in town after riding across the Connecticut River and then through Essex and Deep River. We registered, warmed up, and then ran the race. I achieved my personal best time on the course, 23:28. After we cooled down, I met teammate A. Zane Wenzel at Richard Sachs Cycles, which is 200 feet from the finish line. Zane rode over from Middletown. It was nice to see Richard. He is gearing up for another big cyclocross season with his team. He was actually working, getting some frames built for the team. Richard has been a fixture in Chester for more than 35 years, but I noticed a For Sale sign in front of his shop. I gather that he is headed to Massachusetts soon. I’ll have to get the scoop on that later.
Deb headed home and we headed out, joined briefly by Daria Vanderveer, a long time friend. She had ridden over to run the race and was returning to Middlefield. Daria is an Ironman veteran, so I chatted with her gathering as much information about long course triathlon as I could. Zane and I crossed the river into Lyme, then took Devil’s Hopyard Road through Devil’s Hopyard State Park. It is one of our favorite roads. We continued into East Haddam, Moodus, East Hampton, Cobalt, South Glastonbury, Portland, and then we crossed the river again into Middletown. We parted company on Main Street and I headed south on Saybrook Road (Rt. 154). I stopped for a couple breaks before crossing the river again in Old Saybrook on my way back to Old Lyme. My feet were a bit sore, as was my lower back, but my legs felt pretty good.
I’ll confirm when I download the info from my GPS, but I think it was a total of 107 miles on the bike plus 6 miles of running. That is exactly what I wanted. I toyed with the idea of running again when I returned to Old Lyme, but I had enough physical activity for one day. A stroll down to the beach began the recovery process.
As for the race, Chris Cross was the overall winner. He ran 20:49 and was followed by Adam Vess and Christopher Zablocki. The first woman was Jean Bohlke who ran 23:55 for 11th overall. She was followed by Becky Iselin and Carolyn Pastel. As always, it was nice to see so many people come out for the run. There were many spectators too, which makes the event all the more special. I saw lots of stars and stripes. The color guard, composed of United States military veterans, sang the National Anthem. This year, there was no classic pace car belching exhaust. We had to navigate the turns on our own. The results were posted within minutes, thanks to the chip timing system. It was the first time that the organizers tapped chip technology. I heard a rumour that the entry fee is going up next year to cover the extra cost. I’ll worry about that in 2010. It was a brilliant day.
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