Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Triathlon - Olympic Distance - TriathlonOlympic

Decent OLY swim for me. Didn't time the break perfectly this year, so getting out was a little less smooth than the previous two years for this race.

T1 certainly isn't my forte and my time reflects it. Had a little trouble getting my suit over one of my ankles which cost me a little time.

Decent OLY bike for me. I didn't go "all in" on the bike as I had planned...I wanted to be able to do something better than a death shuffle on the run. In retrospect, given my dismal run, I probably made the wrong choice.

Faster, harder...

Though I felt pretty good on the run, my Garmin was telling me different. I can normally hold around 7:00:00/mile pace on an OLY, but it was not to be on this day. Probably more related to lack of focus than physical limitations.

FOCUS!

Checked my finish time after the race and all was expected. Got home and took a nap, then after I awoke, checked the online results and lo-and-behold, I see "penalty: 2:00" beside my time. WTF??? On the bike course, after the turn around at Staples to do the 2.5 mile out and back, I had a marshal beside me for about 2 miles, and ironically, those were some of my fastest miles of the race - speed was 27mph+ for much of the time. I was picking people off one after another and had no one in pursuit. On a couple of occasions, the idiot driving the motorcycle was interfering by blocking me and putting me perilously close to the other riders that were not following convention and were hanging out in the left of the course for no good reason (and technically, should be tagged for a blocking violation). Anyways, I saw the assistant hurriedly scribbling and figured "cool, they're gonna hit these folks with blocking penalties for staying left..."...I passed at least twice between the marshal and said blocking riders. Apparently, they decided to include me in the festivities. The kicker is that LA Triathlon does not post the USAT Referee's Report, so I have no idea what I'm accused of doing...which also begs the question, why is the marshal not signaling an infraction on the spot? I'm not impressed with this aspect of the race in general, and more specifically, how I came to incur a penalty. I've emailed Pacific Sports for a copy of the referee's report, so we shall see.