Lake Sammamish Triathlon - TriathlonSprint

Wasn't sure where to start so I just went right to the middle front. Turned out to be fine, didn't get run over or hit at all. HUGE newbie mistake of not double checking my goggle tightness and ended up with very leaky goggles I had to stop and clear 3 times. Overall, I think I had a strong swim, 12th in my AG for first time out? I'll take it.

Choose goggles more wisely and tighten strap and make sure they don't leak. I went with the open water swim mask instead of my tinted goggles and that was a mistake.

Planned ahead and had a bottle of water to rinse off my feet and socks rolled up. Socks went on feet fine but I was still a bit wobbly and had trouble standing on one foot to get them on. Shoes and helmet on fine. Sunglasses had gotten all foggy from the dew so had to think fast and jam them in my suit and deal with that on the bike.

Take a bit more time to balance before trying to roll on my socks.

Great ride for me. My biggest issue was not being able to see well through my foggy and then fingerprinted sunglasses. I know this route extremely well and trained on it so I knew what to expect. I feel like my turns and cornering are strong but I just need more time in the saddle to go faster. Considering I only started biking in May and had a grand total of 200 miles on my bike before the race, I feel like I did well. Handled the hills all right, gearing was good, and even managed to get in aero for about 30% of the ride.

Work on smooth pedaling instead of mashing, train hills, log more bike time.

Difficulty seeing made me almost run down the wrong chute off the bike, luckily got back on track and into transition quickly but it cost me a few seconds. I had allotted 2 mins for T2 in my estimate so I was under that and happy.

Drink and grab some sports beans.

....and everything had been going so well.

Felt normal going out of transition. Knew it would take me 1/2 to a mile to get into pace. However, when I went to pick up the pace, I couldn't. I kept thinking my legs would adjust and I could go faster. My HR was between 158 and even as low as 148 during mile 2. But every time I asked for more speed, my legs would not join the party. My goal going in was to run the whole thing and I met that goal, but I'm still disappointed in my run. I had done that run at 36 mins 3 times in teh weeks leading up to the race. 36 minutes was my "worst case" scenario because I expected adrenaline to kick in and maybe take me a bit faster. To the contrary, I ended up a full 10 minutes over my training times. I also had the return of the back cramping. This is mysterious and really impedes my running. The only thing that helps is to stop and stretch it. That was the only time I stopped, so I'm still happy with meeting my initial goal but determined to improve my running. I tried to take all this in stride, enjoy the beautiful trail and encourage the legions of people passing me.

Run 3x a week minimum in training. 2x a week won't cut it. I thought having been a runner most of my life that this piece would simply fall into place. It didn't.

Caught my breath after my face-saving sprint to the finish for photo purposes and then found my cheering section. Perused the food table but nothing really appealed and there was a line, so skipped it and headed back to my house for a lovely, soothing HOT TUB soak!!!


Lack of enough run training in the months leading up to the race, lack of experience as a cyclist. Not checking my goggles before the swim.


Perfect first race close to my house on familiar course. I'll be back to beat this initial time and break 1:30.