Festival of Flowers Triathlon - TriathlonOlympic

Time out of the water was 30:33. Sorry Setup Events, but this swim was not 1500m. It was almost exactly the same course as the SC HIM for goodness sake! I had what was for me a pretty good swim -- I sighted well, took a decent line (drifted right a bit after the first buoy, but nothing major), drafted at times (though not as much as I would have liked), and swam pretty hard. I was easily holding 1:45/100m or below. There is basically no way I was doing 2:00+/100m. So, as I felt this went well, I'm going to call it a decent swim. I placed about where I usually do, and given my lack of swim training recently, that's not too bad.

Train more.

Flying mount went well. I dodged the guys trying to put their shoes on going UP the hill and waited for the fast flat to put mine on. I could have been a bit quicker getting the bike gear on, but not bad.

This bike was actually a bit demoralizing for me. I assumed (wrongly) that I had something like 20 people in my AG ahead of me, and I passed very few of them on the bike. Almost every time I passed someone it was 30-34 or 35-39. So I came to the conclusion that the fast swimmers today were doing well on the bike and resigned myself to a mediocre AG placing, as I figured I wouldn't be running well.

I wanted to do this leg faster, and maybe I could have, but 23+mph on rollers isn't bad. I had to slow down once because the cable on my front derailleur somehow got mixed up up with the wheel and was rubbing it, but I was able to reach down and fix it on the fly.


Maybe go harder? I don't know.

A fast T2. No fooling around.

Not much.

I started off feeling great. After a slightly slow start, I was running 6:30 miles absolutely pain free. I slowed down a little because of the heat, but was still doing very well until I stopped for just a second (literally) at the last aid station to dump water over my head. I don't know whether I stopped too quickly, or it was just 'time', but when I started back I felt pain in my hip. Now, as it happens, I was leading my AG at that time by quite a bit. Fortunately, I didn't know that, and this ignorance made it much easier to live up to my promise to run pain-free or bail. I'm happy to report that I WAS mentally prepared to bail, but first I tried a sort of shuffle that minimized the impact and that worked well -- no pain. So I shuffled to the end. The last mile took me over 10 minutes, which was hard to think about, but I figured that finishing with a 10 minute mile was better than not finishing.

I had no idea at the time, but 2nd place in our AG was bearing down hard! He actually ran the best time in our AG and had the course been only a few hundred meters longer, he would have overtaken me -- I ended up beating him by just 28 seconds...

Nothing. Under the circumstances, I did what I had to do.

I sat down in the 'sprinkler tent' for a good long while, then got some food. My right calf threatened to cramp a few times, so I stretched it out.


Swim training, injured hip.


A good race. I'm glad I did it. Since I won AG, I hung around for the awards, which took a while, but I had nowhere to go. I'm really pleased overall with how I did, especially because Olympic is my worst distance, and this swim was long to boot, and not wetsuit legal!

(NOTE: Overall rankings include the OPEN competitors, which is why they look kind of low compared to AG.)