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Posts Tagged ‘core speed’

Greg Bennett racing for the USA

ST: In 2012, you will hit 40 and as far as I can remember only Rob Barel, who competed at Sydney at age 42, has competed in Olympic triathlon past the age of 40. do you have a chance?

Greg: Im no spring chicken. Im 38 now.

ST: you look 28.

Greg: thanks Tim. I still love the sport Im healthy and training hard and one of those things I love about triathlon is the challenge. the challenge of making the Olympic Games as a 40 year will be incredibly difficult. I know that the road I am on will be full of challenges because I set the bar for myself very high. And this sport is full of them.

ST: you dont seem to be losing your core speed. Even though you were fighting some injuries last year and did not dominate the Toyota Challenge/Life Time Fitness series, you whipped the field decisively at new York when you were on top of your game. what about now?

Greg: I had a 7th at Sydney this year in the World Championship Series opener and I was pleased with it. that said, I was not over the moon. I like to win but I was 7th after a long time away from ITU racing. so it was a nice place to start for me. My task now is balancing two styles of racing ITU draft legal along with my non-drafting racing in the USA. My plan is to keep in touch with ITU racing from now on. It has the hardest competition. No offense to other forms like Ironman and 70.3. But the longer the race, the challenge changes. In long course, the actual event is tough. whereas the shorter you go, the event itself may be easier in distance but it is made tough because of the speed and intensity and standard of competition.

ST: which is tougher?

Greg: In brief, there is no easy way or direction to go — long or short. When there are 90 guys on the start line of a World Cup or World Championship Series event, the standard is now extremely high. When I look at Ironman, you probably realize there are 15 guys who might win. so it is a different sort of math. In an Ironman, to do that distance alone is incredibly tough. we were talking about it the other night at dinner. When you go to an Ironman you have a different parameter for success than you do with ITU draft legal races.

ST: Speaking of higher standards of competition, ITU racers like Alistair Brownlee and Javier Gomez have been timed in the low 29 minutes running the final 10k of Olympic distance events. Even if those runs are at times short of the advertised distances, the standards of the ITU runs are higher than ever. recently Tim Don finished a road race 10k under 29 minutes and within one minute of the legendary Haile Gebrselassie, which makes the 29-minute mark in triathlon at least plausible.

Greg: Tim Dons was an impressive run. In all fairness to the ITU, while I get a little disappointed when they are not 100 percent accurate, I think the top runners really are approaching that standard. While international road races have accurately measured courses, ITU triathlons most often have four lap runs. A fair run race should have no dead stop U-turns as we do many times in ITU races. Those kinds of turns slows the overall time by 3-5 seconds each, so as much as distances are off in ITU, sometimes by as much as a quarter mile, when you add up the dead stop U-turns, they almost balance out to a pretty accurate time for the 10k.

Greg Bennett racing for the USA


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