Island Lake Triathlon - TriathlonOlympic

This was one of better swim performances for an olympic. It felt great. The only thing that got in my way were people who were doing the sprint triathlon. I did get a small rip in my wetsuit that I will need to repair but other than that it was fine.

Make sure I warm up with a short swim before I start my race.

This was an awesome transition. My wetsuit did get a little stuck on my timing chip and around my heels but I still managed to get it off quickly. I think this is where I got the tear.

Practice wetsuit removal more.

Well I knew I needed to push it on this bike to have an awesome race, so I did. I thought I had adjusted my re-derailleur correctly but it was giving me a few problems but nothing I couldn't deal with. There was a couple people that were riding really far to the left of the lane and when I would pass them, they would still be shifting over and I would cut it pretty close to them. They did say sorry though.

I need more hill training!!!

This was by far my best ever T2. I moved through this transition like it was nothing. I even had to put on my race belt and nathan fuel belt which I did as I was running which even impressed me!!!

Keep practicing it.

Well there was a pretty good size hill right out of transistion. That was the worst part of the run. There weren't that many aid stations. 3/4 mile, 2 3/4 mile, 3.85 mile, and 5.5 mile. So that was why i decided to use the nathan fuel belt because of the uneven spacing of the aid stations.

I need to get some more hill training in.

I drank some water and got a quick stretch from the local free person there. I had about an hour before the awards ceremony so I got my stuff from transistion, changed and put everything in my car. I actually had a flat tire when I went to get my bike. I told my self how lucky I was with that because it didn't happen on the course. When I changed the tube and inspected the tire, I noticed a nice size thorn that was sticking in to the tire.


Hill training.


I think this race has the potential to improve but some things need to be done. 2 volunteers at an aid station are not enough. When your volunteers are suppose to be making sure traffic isn't coming from a different rode, make sure you don't choose two high school age kids who like to throw pine cones at each other. There were not enough volunteers helping with the packet distribution the morning of the race. I think there was like one or two people also doing body marking. I understand it is hard to get volunteers sometimes, but advertise it more to get some more in there. If they would of had more volunteers checking people in then the race would of probably started on time too.

The food was pretty much non-existent. By the time I finished, there was a empty cooler and a cooler half filled with water bottles with no ice on it. The selection consisted of what looked like warm meat sandwich wraps, a container of twizzlers, a box of fruit snacks, two medium size boxes of bananas, about 10 peanut butter crackers left, and a whole bunch of empty boxes already eaten that did not amount to much. The athlete guide said and I quote this directly from there:

"Welcome to the Island Lake Triathlon We want to offer the best from the Zorrel Tees to the quality finish line food."

There was no quality finish line food. But the t-shirts were nice. Instead of the normal 100% polyester mix, it was a 70/30 split with cotton. So it was nice having a different material shirt.

The nicest part was the awards for the age groups. 1-3 got a bottle of wine for all age groups except for the under 21 crowd.My wine was a white zinfendal and the label on it said 1st place too. So that was better than the normal plaque or small metal. The raffle was actually decent too. Instead of calling numbers, they just threw things out in to the crowd or said the first person to run up here gets it. There was containers of heed, water bottles, and a few gift certificates.