I first heard about this race several years ago. Our local multi-sport club, the Louisville Landsharks always sends a large group of people up to Maysville, Kentucky for this race. My interest in making the 2-1/2 hour trip northeast grew even more when my brother and his family moved to Maysville two years ago. When I was working on my 2013 race schedule, I wanted to make sure I included this race.
So tomorrow afternoon, my daughter and I will make the trip up to Maysville. We will crash at my brother's place Friday night and then I'll race on Saturday morning. I'm really excited about this trip for several reasons. I get to see my brother and his family, I get to spend some quality time with just my daughter, lots of fun times with my Landshark buddies, and I get to participate in a race that I've wanted to do for a long time.
The race is kind of a Sprint/Olympic hybrid. It starts with a 1/2 mile swim in the Ohio River (typical sprint distance). This is a unique swim because it starts on a barge and is all down-stream. After the swim, there is a 26.1 mile bike (which is a little longer than an Olympic distance bike leg). The bike course features a huge climb at the 9 mile mark. A hill known as "Big Hiney". I've heard people talk about this legendary hill, but I've never laid eyes on it. So I decided to do a little research. It's a little over a mile and a half long with a total elevation change of around 300 feet from start to finish. The average grade is 3.5%. There's a big hill very close to my house that I ride all the time (1.4 miles and 222 feet of elevation change - 3.0% grade), so while I'm not excited about the hill, I'm not intimidated either. The best part is going to be the descend - which looks to be pretty long and without many technical curves...SPEED!!!! The race finishes up with a sprint distance 3.1 mile (5K) run that apparently includes some stairs?!?
My only concern at this point is the condition of my legs. It's been four days since the Half-Ironman race at Taylorsville Lake and my quads are STILL sore. I did some real damage to them on that run. The first few days after the race, I couldn't even walk right and stairs were very painful. After lots of compression, foam rolling and cold therapy...I'm at least walking and using stairs without pain. Will I be able to climb a massive hill and run a fast 5K - in less than 48 hours? I guess we'll see!
Another cool thing about this race is that it is covered by the local press. Including a LIVE broadcast of the race by a Maysville radio station! If you want to tune in at 8am Saturday morning, here's the link to the radio feed - http://www.soft96.com/
The local paper also does a nice writeup on the race each year. Here is last year's article: The Ledger Independent
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