The first local race of the season is over and done with. All in all, it was a decent day. I didn’t feel as fresh as I thought I would considering that this race was at the end of a recovery week for me. But I guess all my training up to this point has been LSD stuff for IM Moo so I didn’t really expect to have much speed in me.

The tri itself was a 1/2 mile swim, a 13.5 mile bike, and a 3.1 mile run. These distances were almost exactly what they were at my very first triathlon that I did late last fall. I had only been training a month to that point, and it was sort of to be the benchmark of where I had come since the beginning of my training. The weather was forcasted earlier in the week to include scattered thunderstorms, but thankfully they were wrong. It was a gorgeous race day – sunny, warm, and not really windy. From what I understand, that was a very pleasant change from the previous couple of years.

My plan for the swim was to take it out reasonably hard as that’s my strongest leg of the three. I pretty much knew my performance would be all downhill from there, so I wanted to build up somewhat of a lead with a strong swim. I did swim pretty hard on the way out, perhaps a little too hard? I guess I didn’t ever feel like my arms were hitting muscle failure or anything, but I was definitely “working” and found myself wanting to breathe more often than my stroke rate was dictating. There was a small group of folks in our heat who would turn out to be the faster swimmers of the pack, and I just tried to remain with this pack of folks the whole way through. The swim felt a tad longer than 1/2 a mile. The fastest swim split of the day was barely under 11 minutes which confirms my suspisions, but no matter. These things are bound to be a little off. My overall swim time was 13:06 which put me 5th in my age group. I had a little trouble getting out of my DeSoto T1 top so I just ran with it on into T1. Once there, I finally managed to get the top off but was feeling a little light-headed and dizzy. I changed into biking gear as quickly as possible and was off again. T1 time: 1:48.

As I’m riding away from T1, I get maybe 30 feet away from the mount line and drop my chain. Grrrrr. I shift up into my big ring, get it back on, and proceed on my way. I’m now in new territory. I’ve never really ridden my bike at a hard effort before for any prolonged period of time so I didn’t really know what to expect. My heart rate was in the mid-160s which seemed to me to indicate that I was working fairly hard. My HRM is also my bike computer, so I couldn’t really see what my speed or cadence was during my ride. I could glance down every once in a while to see what my HR was, but it was at such an angle that I didn’t do it too often. It would have been nice to have that data in front of me at all times just for reference. I’m going to have to figure out a better method for that for these shorter races. The course itself had a few rolling hills, but nothing too terrible. I think I lacked concentration on my ride though. Often times, I’d sit behind someone for too long making sure I wasn’t drafting when in fact, I should have actually be looking to pass and ride on. Note to self for future races. I took in maybe 3-4 oz of sports drink for the entire ride. I didn’t want to slow down to have to reach for my water bottle, but in hindsight I probably should have. I didn’t have as good of a ride as I was hoping to have. During GCT, I pushed 20.7 for 56 miles (I think?). Today, I only managed 21.9 MPH for about 1/4 of that distance. I was a little disappointed with that number, but then again I don’t really train for speed so I guess I’ll have to take what I can get. Bike split: 37:05.

T2 went by pretty quickly. My friends were cheering for me right by me in T2, but I was pretty winded at this point and starting to cramp a little in my side so I didn’t say too much. My goal was to get in and out of T2 as quickly as possible since I’ve been known to lollygag through my transitions. I was happy with my T2 result of 56 seconds. Right out of the T2 gate though, my cramps grew worse. So, and I’m embarassed to say, I sort of gave up on “racing” at this point and slowed way down. I didn’t feel like running hard while cramping and just sort of mentally called it quits. I thought training for an IM would have given me more stamina than I had, but maybe speed stamina and long distance stamina aren’t the same thing? So I just kept putting one foot in front of the other and did what I felt like was a jog. My cramps stayed with me through the whole run and in the final stretch home, I didn’t even sprint it in because I felt like I didn’t deserve to. I thought to myself, “I didn’t run hard through that whole run why should I run hard now?” So I just let people go and pass me left and right all the way down the chute. My only peace with my run is my actual run split. It wasn’t blazing, but it turns out I was running 8:11 pace. That’s not a totally wimpy effort for me as I usually train somewhere between 9s and 10s, so I’m pretty happy with that. Had I not been cramping or been willing to suck it up and deal with the pain, I could have pushed a lot harder. Run split: 25:22.

My overall time was 1:18:14. Compared to my sprint tri last fall of 1:36:XX, I cut off about 18 minutes between the then and now. So while I didn’t have the best of races and efforts today, I’ve most definitely made progress.

So much for recovery week. Back to training for Moo…