Competitors weather Philadelphia triathlon

Local radio stations were already broadcasting excessive heat warnings when, like some human version of the windstorm that tore through there last week, 2,500 Philadelphia Insurance Triathlon competitors and 7,500 fans began to blow into Fairmount Park just past dawn on a steamy Sunday.

Soon, a leafy, riverside stretch of Martin Luther King Drive was bursting with type-A's in spandex, many of them there to complete, with widely varying degrees of competence, a 5-kilometer run, a 40K bike race, and a concluding 10K run in superheated air laden with both humidity and grief.

A pair of rail-thin New Zealand professionals - two-time Olympic medalist Bevan Docherty and Nicky Samuels - won the men's and women's Olympic-distance races, respectively, in their debuts at this sixth annual Philadelphia event. On this day, they would have welcomed the swimming that typically makes up one of the triathlon's three legs.

Tragically, the swimming portion had to be replaced with the 5K run after Derek Valentino, a competitor in Saturday's sprint-distance triathlon, went missing in the Schuylkill. Police boats dragged the river before and after Sunday's race - officially a duathlon - before finding the body of the 40-year-old Prospect Park man late in the afternoon.

The cancellation of swimming "was unfortunate, but it was definitely the call they had to make out of respect for the guy who was missing," said Docherty, his body and outfit soaked from both perspiration and the bottled water he had doused himself with at race's end.

Without the Schuylkill swim of just over a half mile, which would have come first in this taxing trifecta, the athletes got little relief from the sweltering heat, which neared 90 degrees when the first of the pros finished at about 8:45 a.m.

"It was really humid, really hard work," said Samuels. "The humidity really gets to me. I've been training in Boulder, Colo., the last six weeks. It's hot there, but it's a dry heat. Here, as soon as we stepped off the plane, we could feel the difference."

As the first wave of runners - the 90 professionals, for whom this race is now part of the Race to the Toyota Cup points standings - took off eastward on Martin Luther King Drive near Black Road, the hordes of later-starting amateurs readied themselves for what literally was their day in the sun.