I hadn’t planned on doing Zell, as it is a team sprint and as I may have mentioned before, my swimming isn’t that good. It turned out though that the 2nd team didn’t have enough people to make a team without me, and due to high water levels in the Mosel, it was changed into being a Duathlon, absolutely perfect for me.
I had done a little online stalking of my team mates, I know Stephan already, he is a great runner and biker, Volker seems like he must be very good, he was in Hawaii and still runs fast, then there was Marco, who ran a 4h+ marathon in Mainz, it seemed like he might be out limiting factor. We met up in Mombach at 8am and headed to Zell, which is about an hours drive away. Heiko was with us and was racing in the 1st team, that race started much earlier, hence the early start. We were there at 9am and it was pretty clear why we wouldn’t be swimming, the current was crazy! I reckon you could float 750m in about 12 minutes in that stream!
We had a little chat about our tactics when we were all there, I suggested that we run our first 2.6km at 10km race pace, then ride like crazy and run the 2nd 5,2km run as fast as we can, whilst staying together. Marco said that he thought 4:30/km would be ok for him, so that was out plan. We watched the Regionalliga and saw that Konrad was doing great and the others were giving their all too, our race started at 11:55 with a mass start. We started at a good pace, but not over doing it, we were just over 4:00/km and Marco seemed ok, so we held about 4:05/km for the 2,6km. We weren’t first place, but we were far from last too, so it was ok.
