Wasaga Beach Olympic Triathlon - TriathlonOlympic

Shallow start for 75 metres required dolphin diving. A few power strokes to get ahead of the second start wave and then settled into a steady pace with bilateral breathing.

Try and find someone to draft off

34 sec. run up from the beach to the transition area. Pretty disoriented but had a great racking location, so no trouble finding my spot. Wetsuit off easily and helmet and glasses ready to go, shoes clipped on the pedals. Barefoot run to the mount line and off we go. A little slow getting feet in shoes, but didn't lose much time.

A couple of short but steep-ish hills. My chain started slipping on the hills and then about 30 kms into the bike, my chain ring snagged something. I got off the bike to find that the plastic fixture holding my front gear cable in place had broken and the cable had slipped across and caught in the chain ring. Luckily I managed to slip it back into place and get going again after a 2 minute stop, but it made me nervous to do any gear shifting after that. It was a relief to get to the dismount line.

Pretty smooth transition. Slid on running shoes (body glide on the heels and baby powder inside), grabbed hat, gel and Garmin wrist strap and went.

I was working to keep my pace at 4:45 because I had bonked badly at Gravenhurst, and my plan was to negative split if I had anything left in the tank. I picked up the pace to 4:30 for the last 3 kms, but probably could have done it sooner. Had a great finish and passed a guy who had passed me at KM7.

I did my first tri, the give-it-a-tri, at Wasaga last year and fell in love with the sport. It was a pleasure to see the improvement over one year: I finished 4 times the distance in 3.3 times the time. It has been a great year of racing and training and I'm looking forward to getting better next year.