October 2023 Newsletter
Online Updates
This semester, we have been working hard to bring more day-to-day content to our social media. If you’re looking for those more frequent updates, visit our Instagram page @vt_triathlon. It’s also a great place to find extra photos and fun videos featuring our triathletes at practice and races!
If there’s any content you want to see, or athletes you want featured, send us a message! We’re always open to new ideas!
Fall Recruiting, Training, and Fundraising
This fall, we welcomed 19 new members to VT Triathlon! This was one of our biggest recruiting classes ever! We’ve been very impressed by the effort and commitment of our new athletes. We offer practices seven days per week, year-round, which can be daunting to new members. Our entire team has brought the energy at practices to prepare for our races this fall. If you would like to know more about our training, check out our practice schedule or our content on Instagram!
Triathlon is an expensive sport, but we’ve been putting in the work to support the team financially. On Labor Day weekend, our athletes sold thousands of dollars’ worth of hotdogs, pretzels, and drinks while working concessions at the home football game vs. ODU! Just last night, we ran two different stands at the Pitt game! We also worked as lead bikes and course marshals for the Hokie Half Marathon and hosted a Panda Express restaurant fundraiser. Thank you to everyone who went out and ate some Panda Express last month!
Racing
Virginia Tech Triathlon competes in both the fall and spring semesters as part of the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Triathlon Conference (MACTC). We travel all over Virginia and North Carolina to race against schools like UVA and the Naval Academy. Our races are scored similar to cross country. Our top 4 athletes in the men’s and women’s races are scored, and your place is your score. The lowest score wins, and you earn points towards a season ranking based on the team’s overall finish place. We’ve raced at two triathlons so far this semester: Patriots and Giant Acorn.
Patriots
The Patriots Triathlon Festival in Williamsburg on September 9th and 10th was our first race of the season. This two-day event featured Half-Ironman and Olympic distance races on Saturday, and a Sprint distance race on Sunday. Congratulations to Will and Cason on completing their first half-Ironman triathlons! Our boys powered through 1.2 miles of swimming, 56 miles of biking, and a half-marathon to finish first and second respectively in the 20-24 age group! In the Olympic race, Anna and Jonathan placed 2nd and 3rd overall, and Adaline won her age group! On Sunday, we had seven people race the sprint, including four first-time Virginia Tech triathletes! Congrats to Kelly, Antoni, Zak, and Chase on finishing their first races with the team! We placed 4th overall out of 7 schools.
Giant Acorn
Last weekend, we raced at the Giant Acorn Olympic Triathlon at Lake Anna. It was an action-packed weekend, with the threat of a tropical storm looming overhead. Luckily, we were able to avoid most of the heavy rain and have a great race! Again, we had a ton of new VT triathletes. Andrew, Ann-Sidney, and Cooper each finished their first triathlons, and Jack, Zak, and Sam put together a great men’s relay! We also had some records broken… Congratulations to Andrew Bickford on a new team record in the men’s run of 37:49! Led by Kelly’s 9th place in the women’s race and Spencer McGehee’s 26th place in the men’s race, we again placed 4thoverall.
Upcoming
We’ve got a busy October, with our two conference championship races coming up over the next two weeks. The Pleasant’s Landing Triathlon on October 7th is our Olympic distance championship. We’re super excited to see our hard work from the past seven weeks pay off! We’ve started to taper, which means our athletes are lowering their training volume and getting extra rest to best prepare for Saturday’s race. Our sixteen racers are looking for some big time drops!
The Blue Ridge Draft-Legal Sprint is the second part of MACTC Championships this year and will be held on October 14th at Smith Mountain Lake. At a traditional race, bikers are required to keep ten meters between themselves and the next bike, except to pass. This prevents any advantage due to drafting, where the rider in front “punches a hole” through the air and makes it easier for the rider behind. In draft-legal racing, this rule is thrown out the window, creating very fast, very close, and very exciting racing. Our sprint athletes are looking forward to showing off their speed at Blue Ridge and securing some extra points to close out our fall conference season!
That's all for now. Thank you for reading!