Philadelphia Women's Triathlon - TriathlonSprint

Race was wetsuit legal (barely – water temp was 77). Not to many people wore wetsuits, but I opted to wear mine.

About a week before the race, the swim course was shortened, so that was kind of nice. Only bad thing about that is that I can’t quite compare my time to last year’s, but that’s okay.

I think I swam pretty well. The weird thing is, in a race I breathe to the right almost 100% of the time. However, in the pool, I much prefer breathing to the left. I tried switching to the left during the race, but for some reason I kept catching mouthfuls of river water and quickly switched back to breathing to the right.

I actually got kicked or bumped in the face and my goggles got knocked out of position. This was the first time that’s ever happened to me, even though I hear about it happening all the time. Had to stop briefly to fix them, and then I got back to swimming. That was pretty much the only break I took.


Besides improve my swim overall, nothing really.

Wetsuit came off pretty quickly. Put bike shoes on (no socks) without cleaning feet. So, this was an improvement over T1 in my last race in that regard.

Nothing really. Move faster, I guess.

I basically pushed as hard as I could on the bike. There was a spot along Kelly Drive that seemed to almost go uphill a little (even though it looked flat) and there was a pretty decent headwind over there. So, it was a little depressing to watch my speed drop 2-3mph in that section when I felt like I was working harder. After the first loop my average speed was 18.8, and my goal was 19.0 average.

I passed a lot of people on the bike, and wasn’t passed by too many. Saw several people riding side by side, cruising like they were just out for a pleasure ride. Even overheard one girl ask her friend if they were allowed to ride so close. The other girl sort of shrugged her shoulders and was like, “oh…I don’t know…I’m sure it’s no big deal”. Kind of a “who cares” type attitude. Nice.


Not much. Basically just rode as fast as I could. More time on the bike, obviously will help bump up my speed for next year.

So, I flubbed this one up. For some reason, I had a hell of a time getting my shoes on. I couldn’t seem to balance long enough to slip my shoes on. It took me several tries. Plus, I think my foot had gone numb or something, because it felt like I had something stuck between my toes…but when I checked, there was nothing there. So, that took a little bit of time. Ugh.

I don’t know. Have better balance?

So, this was interesting. The run starts in the grass and you run a pretty short distance through the grass. It sucks, of course. My legs felt like crap. I felt slow. I got to the first mile marker and hit the lap button. My split was 7:55. Yeah, so I’ve never run a mile that fast before. My 5k open PR was an 8:29 pace and that was only 5 weeks ago. So, my first thought when I saw that split was that the markers must have been placed wrong. I expected the distance to the 2nd mile marker to be a little long, so when I hit the lap button at mile 2 and it was 8:10, I was shocked. Okay, so I was actually running that fast. I ran as fast as I could. I swear. I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. I kept thinking to myself, I don’t want to look at the results later today and wish I had just pushed a little harder and gone just a little faster. I thought the finish line would never come, it was such a hard effort for me, that I’ve never been so happy to finish a race! I thought I was going to die when I crossed the finish line!

Nothing. Ran as hard and as fast as I could.

Walked around and stretched a little. Ate a choco chip cookie. Yum.


Training. Experience.


My goal time was 1:35, but honestly that was a bit of a reach. I knew I could come in under 1:40 easily so I wanted to make my goal under 1:40, and 1:35 was the next round number. My overall time was 1:36:40, so I didn’t make 1:35, but I couldn’t be happier with my time. And the fact that I PRed my run by 1:32 is just awesome!