Although local triathlete Josh Reilly couldn’t quite bring home his second national gold medal in three years July 31, in the end he was still second-highest on the awards podium at the USA Youth Triathlon in Cincinnati.
“I’m pretty happy with my performance,” he said. “My times were decent. It was a good race for me.”
Reilly, 15, a club swimmer with Verde Valley High Performance at the Hilton Sedona Resort pool and a member of the Sedona Red Rock High School mountain biking club, came in less than 44 seconds behind winner Lucas Bourgoyne, of Houston.
Although he was the fifth-fastest swimmer and second-fastest biker in the competition, tired legs from a mixed-team relay he ran earlier in the day kept Reilly from closing the gap any further by the finish line.
“My legs were pretty shot after that,” he said. “It was something else to do that day, so I figured, why not? It was another chance for me to podium, and I ended up doing that.”
His mostly 13- and 14-year-old team finished near the back of a 50-team field in a 250-meter swim, a three-mile bike race and a run seven-tenths of a mile long.
“It was a really short race in comparison to everything else,” he said. “We didn’t do amazing, but it was the first time anybody on my team had raced the mixed relay. My team was pretty young.”
Still, Reilly felt he had enough stamina to take the triathlon — even though it was double the distance.
“That was one of my big concerns going into the second race — the fatigue,” he said. “You have a certain threshold of pain where you can maintain, and I thought I could hold it at a high enough level through the second race.”
He finished his 375-meter swim in just over three minutes and was runner-up among bikers on the over-six-mile course in 17:13.
But the difference was noticeable toward the end of the triathlon’s 1.5-mile final stage, he added after finishing 28th out of all 11- to 15-year-old runners.
“I couldn’t tell you why, but a lot of times where the pain happens and the fatigue hits me is in the knees and the shins,” he said. “Running is a pretty high-impact discipline. It’s rough on the body — more than biking — and tougher physically.”
So Reilly is going to try to “dial in the running” this fall with a Cottonwood cross-country club team as his first step toward qualifying for the Junior Elite nationals.
“That’s my big priority this fall — five to six times a week,” he said. “I’ll be hopefully swimming three to four times and mountain biking two to three times a week.”
Reilly is shooting to finish among the top 30 triathletes in the U.S. ages 16 through 19.
