Dumaguete City, a haven for fitness enthusiasts, offered a challenge within its Sandurot fiesta activities that would bring mountain bikers and runners together to face off and settle a disputed claim to the throne of who’s the fitter athlete.
Mountainbikers and runners abound in this City, and both groups have spoken the belief that their respective discipline makes them the stronger athlete. The Dumaguete Fiesta Duathlon, combining an initial 5-kilometer run, followed by an 18 km. bike ride, and ending with a 2-km. run, would appear to finally settle the dispute.
The runners would have the five-kilometer at the start to use their developed stamina to transition to the bike with a lead. The mountainbikers would then have to make up the lost time with their stamina on their bikes built up over many years of riding inclines and rough terrain. Then it would all come down to the final two-kilometer of who still had any stamina left to close it out.
I was among those who wanted to know, and began preparing to use my mountainbike strength to assure me of proving to the running world that mountainbikers are a cut above in terms of fitness strength.
With race day only a week away, I decided to work on a strategy for the transitions.
Transitions are the critical few seconds when you must, as fast as possible, shift out of your running shoes into your biking shoes/cleats, put on a helmet, lift your bike off the rack, run it out of the transition area, and jump on it to start your race pedalling cadence for 18 kilometers.
My initial (foolish) strategy was to beat the transition time by using a soft biking shoe for the run legs to avoid the need to change shoes. Exploring this strategy led to an early setback. While running a practice five kilometers in my biking shoes, I suddenly felt a sharp pain pierce the back of my right calf. I hobbled home with a pulled calf muscle.
Resting a couple of days — and realizing that by wrapping my calf and wearing running shoes, I could bear the pain — I tried to explore running one kilometer in four minutes.
This was in response to the information shared to me by Irma Pal, who has run marathons and ultramarathons, that the fast runners in Dumaguete could run a 5K in 20 to 29 minutes.
I was excited to realize I could run one kilometer in a little over four minutes.
So I spent several sessions each day running up to my bike, changing shoes, donning the helmet, jumping on the bike, getting off the bike, taking off the helmet, running with the bike — to bring down my transition time.
On race day, as we all gathered at the boulevard to receive our race numbers, I was disturbed by the idea that there was no categorization except for men and women. All male racers were in one single category racing as one group.
In mountain biking, this would be unheard of, as bikers are inspired by racing for the podium in their respective age categories.
The mountain bike world is sensitive and cognizant of age handicap, that age will factor into performance. Any mountain biker will acknowledge that a 20-year-old and 40-year-old who train the same amount of hours will not perform at the same level. The 20-something will always outperform ancient guys like me.
Looking at the field of racers — most of them below 40, many in their 20s, only a handful of us were over 40 — I already felt defeated even before we could start.
For a mountain biker, our motivation is to reach the podium, that is, to be among the Top 3 finishers in our respective category. This was clearly not a possibility now, I was thinking to myself.
I later asked a runner: What motivates you in a race like this? Her answer was interesting: I strive to make my Personal Best time (PB) or to beat a Personal Record (PR).
In running, it seems that it doesn’t quite matter as much if one makes it to the podium unless she had actually beaten her fastest race time. It’s about besting previous times so really, it’s about racing against self.
For a mountain biker, PBs and PRs don’t make sense, as every race course is different in distance and terrain.
Compounded to this disappointment was the announcement that transition times in this particular race would not be counted. In other words, all the training I put in preparing to change shoes and move in and out of the transition area as fast as I could would not at all affect the outcome of the race.
Instead, they would simply add the time of the first run leg, and the time of the bike leg, and the time of the final run leg.
At the bang of the start gun, we all sprinted down the boulevard from the I Love Dumaguete signage, running towards the Tinago bridge. Heading back, I began to realize how one kilometer is poles apart from five kilometers.
I was simply humbled by the power and stamina of the local runners. Their many nights and days and weekends and months of training before every race was indeed showing results, and with every ounce of biking power that I thought I had in me, funny but I could not maintain their running pace.
And so the young duathletes breezed through the race course like in the Olympics, blasting through the transitions.
As we transitioned to the bike leg, I could feel redemption. My many early morning hours and several days and weeks and months and years of climbing mountains and rocky roads took me past several of my run competitors early in the course, then a few more midway through the course, and a few last batch at the end of the course.
But to my surprise, as we transitioned back into the last 2K run leg, those last few who were behind me after the bike, started to slowly catch up with me again, and passed me, as I tried to hold them back. Alas, their running strength and endurance through the entire course was plainly far superior.
So has the dispute over fitness between mountain bikers and runners been settled? Not by this race.
But for all those who finished the Dumaguete Sandurot Duathlon, what we do know now is that to survive and do well in a duathlon, it takes balance, neither mountain biker nor runner alone can blow his own horn and claim the throne of the fitter athlete.
What we all learned is that both mountain bikers and runners are strong, but not strong enough without having trained in the discipline of the other.
A duathlon is not about half the race, it is about the entire race course. It is about the balance of strength in the run and on the bike together, and nothing less. (Cobbie Palm)
