Wind, waves fail to deter triathletes

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This article was published 21/08/2023 (806 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASAGAMING — Sometimes a little less means a whole lot more.

Large waves created by strong winds on Clear Lake on Saturday morning led organizers of the Riding Mountain Triathlon in Wasagaming to change the Sprint swim from 750 metres to 300, which played nicely into the hands of 15-year-old Winnipegger Addison Champagne, a 15-year-old provincial team member who won the women’s title by a sizeable 11 minutes.

“I thought it was really good because I’m not the best swimmer to begin with,” said Champagne, who finished the 300-metre swim, 20-km bike and five-km run in one hour four minutes 23.9 seconds. “Having a shorter swim would benefit me in the long run because I’m a fast biker and runner.”

The day saw a lot of clouds, temperatures between 15 and 17 C and wind gusts measured at up to 30 km/h from the west that felt a lot stronger.

Race director Dave Lipchen said swimmers who were in the water before the Sprint race estimated the waves were between 12 and 18 inches going out and up to 24 inches coming back.

“We had a very small window, and we also made that call based on the constantly changing conditions,” Lipchen said. “Basically it was our only window to actually have a triathlon and get through a swim before things were going to change.”

In 2002, the conditions were so bad the swim was entirely scrapped and replaced with an extra run, making it a duathlon.

The Sprint race was dominated by Manitoba provincial team racers, with Turk Dingwall winning the men’s and overall titles.

In the Olympic event (1.5-kilometre swim, 40-km bike, 10-km run), Andrew Martin of Winnipeg was the overall winner, while Dawn Neal took the women’s title in just her second year racing.

SPRINT

Despite her concerns about the swim, Champagne was out of the water eighth overall in the Sprint in 6:32.7. She covered the 20-km bike course in 35:38.3 and finished up with a blistering run of 19:57.6, second overall of the 144 Sprint athletes.

“Having no hills in Winnipeg, it’s kind of tough coming out here and having to struggle on the hills,” Champagne said. “But I felt like my power was pretty good on the bike. I just focused more on power and less on speed.”

With an eventual 11-minute margin of victory, she had a comfortable lead heading into the five-km run and instead tried to sustain her pace throughout the scenic course.

“I wanted to get a good run and push through to the finish line,” Champagne said.

As part of the provincial team that trains out of the Manitoba Triathlon Centre, she’s travelled to a lot of American races this season, including the 2023 USA Triathlon National Championships in Milwaukee. But it’s still nice to emerge victorious at the granddaddy of Manitoba events.

“It feels pretty good to win,” Champagne said. “There’s more competition than the usual races so it felt pretty good.”

In the boys Sprint race, Champagne’s provincial teammate Dingwall was second out of the water in 6:07, posted the second fastest bike split in 35:27 and then threw down the fastest run of the day, covering five kilometres in 19:54 to finish in 1:01:33.4.

The 15-year-old Winnipegger admitted the news the race was being shortened wasn’t ideal for him.

“The first thing I thought was that it was going to be different,” Dingwall said. “I’m much better at the longer distance because I can get more of a gap on my opponents because I have much faster endurance. I just had to try and push all the way and go super fast and hammer to win.”

His strength is on the bike, and it was tested by the wind gusts on the course as competitors ride north from the townsite on Highway 10 toward Dauphin. That put a premium on riding aerodynamically.

“I had to really try and get as aero as I could,” Dingwall said. “The hills weren’t every helpful, especially when it was windy.”

Two weeks ago, Dingwall finished third out of 142 athletes in the youth development men’s draft-legal podium at American nationals. But like Champage, a win closer to home was ideal.

“It was a really fun race,” Dingwall said of Riding Mountain. “People are really nice and the snacks at the end are always really good. The course is really good, I really like it, and being able to camp with your family and then just waking up and going to the race and having a beach day, that’s really nice.”

OLYMPIC

The 1,500-metre Olympic swim began at 8 a.m., and it was choppy. Still, Martin was ninth out of the water in 27:55.

“It was tough,” Martin said. “The first hundred metres wasn’t terrible but once you kind of got away from the shore, the waves got bigger and bigger and I’m not the best swimmer by any means. I was definitely out of my element once it got a little rough in the water. I tried to kind of relax and put my head down in the water and just finish it.

“It wasn’t going to be my best, but whatever, just get it done and try not to be spent, not too gassed.”

He moved closer to the front of the pack with a bike time of 1:04:34 — “I like hills, they’re a little more fun” — but wasn’t able to close the distance between himself and the leader, Patrick Labossiere.

Martin was finally able to make his move on the run when he posted the fastest time, finishing the 10 kilometres in 38:41. He took the lead at about 1.5 km and never looked back on the course, which sees runners finish up on the trail along the lake.

“I knew coming out of the bike that if I could be somewhat close to him, I could reel him in on the run,” Martin said. “It was good. I tried to settle into a rhythm for the rest of it, and once I got to the water, it was so windy. It was a bit of a battle but it was fun.”

Martin completed the course in 2:13.20, which put him two minutes and four seconds ahead of Labossiere.

Perhaps the most amazing part of his victory was that his primary race of the season was actually a much longer 70.3 race in Mont-Tremblant on June 25.

Unfortunately, the race was cancelled 30 minutes before it began due to smoke from forest fires, so he had to readjust his goals accordingly. That meant he set aside the longer training necessary for the half-Ironman distance for shorter, higher intensity workouts for the Olympic race.

“I trained hard for the next month and a bit and we’ll see what happens,” Martin said of his change in focus. “It’s nice. It’s fun.”

The third-place finisher in the Olympic race was the female winner, Neal. A mother of four children aged 10 or younger, the Winnipegger is in her second year in the sport, although she has a background as an elite swimmer. It showed.

“It was really rough,” Neal said of the water. “With all the waves it felt like a washing machine. It was fun to have the waves pushing you around a little, it’s a little more engaging.”

To make things worse, she was leading the pack and missed a buoy, so she had to circle back. Incredibly, Neal was still the first Olympic athlete out of the water, completing the course in a blistering 24:14, more than a minute ahead of Cameron Sweetman.

Neal did the race for the first time a year ago and was nervous about the hills then, but this year she enjoyed it a lot more and finished the bike in 1:15:33.

With a run of 40:50, she coasted to an almost 11-minute victory over second-place finisher Hailee Morisseau and the other 27 women in the race, finishing in 2:24:26.8 to earn the women’s title.

“It’s great,” Neal said. “I just love triathlon in Manitoba, everyone is so supportive and the fans and officials are great. It doesn’t matter what your abilities are, you see all ages, shapes and sizes out there and everyone is just having a blast. The community is so good and so welcoming.”

While it proved to be a challenging day for Lipchen and his large group of volunteers, he said it turned out to be a great experience for the athletes who took part.

“We couldn’t have asked for a better day, even with the constantly changing conditions,” Lipchen said after the race. “We had summer and we had a little bit of fall and then it was summer after we made a call on being prepared for fall. Right now, it’s fall again. The wind is blowing in off the lake pretty good and it’s cooled down.

“Regardless, everyone I spoke to had a really good time.”

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