Beach to Battleship HIM - Triathlon1/2 Ironman

Overall the swim went much better that I expected. Strong favorable current + salt water + wetsuit = very quick time but I'm not going to complain. My main goal for the swim was to keep my composture and get out of the water in a decent time. Since I did most of my training for this race while deployed to Iraq my training was less than optimal but my plan to start in the back of my wave and follow the crowd to the finish of the swim leg worked as expected.

Not much really other than more swim training.

The run to T1 was rather long but I think most participants will agree with me that the fast swim course more than made for the length of the run.

Because of the weather forecast I used the changing tent and put on cycling shorts, cycling jersey,and arm warmers. By the time I started running with my bike to the mount line I realized that the arm warmers were a bit much so I stopped an took them off. I think that a tri suit under the wetsuit would have worked fine for the conditions on race day and would have save me about a minute but better safe than sorry.

The posted official results are grouping T1 + the bike split together so I'm using the data out of my Garmin to figure my splits so they might be off by +/- 30 secs. Overall the bike went pretty well though I had two little mishaps the first one was a drop bottle when I hit a bump in the road less than 1 mile from T1 so I decided to unclip and pick it up which ended up being the right thing to do since the first aid station wasn't until approx. 30 miles in and the bottle I dropped had my HEED supply, which was mixed much stronger than what they wer serving at the aid stations. Then approx. 1 mile before hitting the interstate some lady decided to jump in the lane in front of me and I almost ran into her car, so again I have to unclip walk the bike around her car (she kind of froze and just stood there parked in the middle of the bike lane and couldn't make her mind about what she was going to do). Other than that the bike went pretty well and again the plan was to make sure I didn't go out too hard in the bike. Work my way to about 20MPH average by the time we hit the long stretch of HWY into Willmington but then the headwind made me slow down some but I decided not to fight it and just save my legs for the run.

Again not much really. I think all I need to do is continue to train and learn about cycling since this is only my first season in the sport. As a matter of fact before last year I have never rode a bike with gears.

I let the excitment of finishing the bike kind of getting the best out of me a bit and forgot to take my Garmin out of the aero bars so I have to chase the volunteer that took my bike for about 15 secs in my bike shoes to retrieve the watch, pretty comical really but didn't cost me much timewise. Saw my wife on the other side of the bike corral and that was great for morale. Changed from a bike jersey/shorts combo to regular tri shorts/singlet.

Again a slightly different clothing choice could have save about a minute or so but not really a big deal.

Final leg of the race went pretty well and like in all my previous Tri's this is the part when I made the most progress throgh the field. I'm a pretty experienced 10K road racer but I knew that trying to negative split this race after the bike and the run probably wasn't the smartest course of action so I shoot for hitting the turn around at about 8:00 min per mile pace and then hang on for dear life for the last 6.5 miles. Here is where my restraint during the swim, the bike and the transitions paid off since I was able to execute my plan and I passed numerous athletes during the run and was only passed by one or two athletes on the last mile.

Nothing just continue to train and keep learning about the sport.

Inexperience, still learning the intrincacies of open water and bycicle racing.


My overall goal for this race was breaking 6 hours although based on my workouts that was a rather conservative goal but I decided to err on the side of caution. I'm satisfied with this result as validation for the training I conducted during my first season as a triathlete. Now is back to the drawing board to look for ways to train better and continue to become a smarter and faster competitor. For next year I'm looking into attempting to break 5:20 at White Lake and then based on the results from that race either sign for the full Ironman at B2B or race the half again.