Once again I did a race while suffering from a cold. I hope this scenario doesn't repeat itself too often!

This year my finish time was more than 10 minutes faster than my finishing time on the same course last year. My swim splits and my run splits were faster this year while my bike split was exactly one minute slower.

We had much stronger wind to contend with this year, and I think that explains both my faster swim splits (the wind and the waves pushed us in the right direction) and my slower bike split (strong head winds and cross winds were a factor in the second half of the bike loop).

As for my faster run splits, the only explanation I have is that my running continues to improve. I may have actually reached the point now where I'm better as a runner than I am as a cyclist.

Now, if I could just improve my terribly slow swimming in similar fashion ...

On Friday and Saturday I took part in the 4th running of the Reno-Tahoe Odyssey, a 178-mile running relay race, which was quite a blast!

I was on a 12-person team called the Road Raptors, which was organized by Dave Sargent, one of my running buddies in Chapel Hill. We finished #18 of about 100 teams and we finished about 45 minutes faster than our target time of 24 hours.

I highly recommend this race to anyone who enjoys this sort of thing. See http://www.renotahoeodyssey.com/.

One interesting moment in the relay for me was when I met a guy wearing an Ironman Florida finisher hat. I started talking to him, and learned that he had done IMFL the same year I did (2007) and he finished less than a minute ahead of me.

It's a small world, this community of endurance sports enthusiasts ...