My expectations were lowered. My biking hasn't been as fast as in the past. My running has been slow and peppered with injuries. My swimming has been not too far off from what I was doing at my best last year, but still not quite as good. My goal was to finish in under 3 hours. I was hoping for a sub-35 min swim, a 1:25 bike and a run under an hour. Which, if you add up - leaves little room for transitions or mistakes if I want to do that whole sub-3 hour thing, because those all equal 3 hours of racing time. :)
I got to the reservoir at 5:30 - 30 minutes before transition officially opened - to poach the best possible place to set up....I was one of the first three athletes there and the second person to walk into transition. Luckily, they were pretty lax about when it actually opened so I wandered in around 5:40 and no one seemed to mind.
The racks were sort of set up by bib # but luckily I was #233 and assigned to the last rack (nearest the bike out - YAY!) but unfortunately the side furthest away. I was literally the last racer assigned to this section, so I set up way out on the end so I just has a straight run to the "bike out" arch.
As other athletes started pouring in, I was pretty much all set up, and able to start my warm up around 6:10. I got in solid warm ups for all three events, which was pretty nice and barely had enough time after my swim warm up to run from the beach back to transition to hide my flip-flops and car keys under my towel for after the race. As I did so the announcer said "All olympic distance athletes need to be on the beach" and I promptly hustled over.
During my swim warm up, I quickly realized the water was ICY COLD. Not surprising really since the high for the day was only 67 degrees. As soon as the depth increased to about 5-feet I swear it was 60 degrees. BRRRR I think this was probably the coldest swim I ever did. It hurt my head a little, but after we started out, I got used to it.
For what I believe to be the first time EVER I actually hung with the women on the swim! I was even passing some of the men (who started maybe 4-5 minutes before we did). But as I made the left turn to come around the buoys and swim back into shore, I cut it too wide and was not diligent enough about my sighting and ended up swimming WAY far left of the guide buoys. I was disappointed and sure this would ruin my swim. I did end up losing the pack that I had been hanging with because of this mistake, though I was around an athlete or two from time to time.
As I came in I watched other athletes stand up as soon as they could but I remembered to keep swimming until my hands were scooping up sand. I did and immediately looked at my watch - 34:29. 2:06/100y or 2:17/100m. I was pretty darn happy with this. Especially given my nice WIDE path I'd made for myself.
Unfortunately the run up the beach, across the concrete into transition was a little tough and took me an extra 1:37 - making for a chip swim time of 36:06. All things considered - this is STILL better than many of the swims I've had in the past.
Transition itself kind of sucked because it was on very gravelly pavement that really cut up my feet. I knew it would be like this ahead of time, but it was pretty awful - especially on my icy cold and numb feet. I ran the bike to the mount line cursing under my breath the whole way because it was so painful. I hopped on though and was pretty successful in getting my feet in my shoes - granted I had been practicing since being fit to my tri bike a little over a month ago.
The bike started off with a mild set of rolling hills - which amounted to a lot of low grade hill climbing for the first 7 miles. For the first 30 min I averaged 15.9 and felt pretty discouraged, but as the course continued the climbing stopped and around mile 10 I came upon a pretty sweet 5-mile descent. It definitely helped even out all that climbing and because I was in one of my highest gears, I used this time to make sure I drank water, took all my nutrition, and refilled my aero bottle. The descents were never too aggressive - I think at MOST I hit 30 mph. By an hour, I'd made it 17.8 miles - so a significant increase in speed since the first half hour. At this point, I had roughly 7 miles to go, so I just wanted to focus on getting this done. The remainder of the course was pretty fair rolling hills and apparently brought me down to an average of 17.6 mph - finishing in a little over 1hr 22 min (bike course was slighting short). With a long enough bike course, this still would have been a 1hr 24 min finish and just barely under my goal.
I ran into transition, again like I was on hot coals because of how harsh the ground was to my bare feet. I struggled getting into my sneakers because my feet were so cold, which was incredibly frustrating. I think a combination of the painful run and this sneaker struggle accounted for my 1:37 T2, which was depressing given I'm looking to be around 45 secs here. Nevertheless, I took off on the run.
The run was an interesting 2-loop 5k course that I ended up really liking. We ran a little over .5 miles on pavement until we hit a dirt trail and ran out on that until the turn around point. This whole leg ended up being AWESOME. I ran my first mile in 8:58 which was both fast and a little too aggressive. Since I was hoping for 9:40s at the very least, this was surprising, but also concerning because I was afraid I would burn out. But I walked for water a couple times and pushed myself to keep running - feeling pretty good. I didn't take my garmin so I wasn't really sure of pacing other than knowing I did the first 5k in under 30 min and was on pace to do the second one in what seemed like about 28. As I came in, I saw I basically needed to haul or I would exceed the 3 hr mark, so I "hauled" to the best of my ability (which obviously isn't too fast :P) and made it in at 2:59:02 by my watch and 2:59:07 chip time, which earned me 3rd place in F20-24. Pretty psyched to see I just ran a 9:18 pace 10k which was significantly better than how I had been performing or expected myself to perform.
While this is not, by any means, my best race, given the full-time job, loss of personal coaching and move to hills/altitude - I'm pretty proud of myself. As a season opener I only have room to improve and I think this allows me to set a goal this season of completing either Boulder 5150 or Sunset Olympic tri in around 2:51 which is not ALL that much slower than I was doing in Chicago last year. Hoping for hard training and good results to come.
#rinse. repeat.
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