Pleasant Prairie Triathlon - International Race - TriathlonOlympic

Lets start by saying I feel pretty good about my swim fitness and my confidence has grown while doing my HIM plan which has me in the water 3x a week. However, I do have this tendency to sight poorly and get myself out of position and on bad lines in open water.

So, true to form, after jumping in the water and heading out about 300 yards I noticed I was way off to the right of the group and all my myself. Oooops. Bad way for me to start which didn't really help the confidence.

However, as I continued on I made an effort to sight more often and actually did a pretty good job of staying on course. There were several times where I started passing people from waves ahead of me and it did get congested. One time someone was doing the breast stroke and I nearly swam right into her hard-kicking leg. I missed a swift kick to the head by about 12 inches and am thinking that could have been pretty nasty. I really believe the breast stroke should not be allowed in OWS simply for this reason.

When all was said and done I am very happy with this swim. I felt that after the initial navigational issues I did recover well and really got into a groove and was able to swim easily and effortlessly.

Sight better (more often) in the first couple hundred yards.

3:38...seriously? Horrible. I would love to see how I placed overall in T1 (and T2 for that matter) just for a laugh. I think the bulk of my time was wasted while I was looking for a Starbucks kiosk in the transition area.

Honestly, not sure why it took so long. Had a little difficulty getting out of the suit, but not a huge delay. Prolly more a volume issue in that I seem to do about 13,000 things when I should only be doing 2 or 3. Have to look at improving this.

Everything.

Conditions were ideal today. Very light winds and fairly cool. Heat was never an issue. Roads are in good shape and the course is flat and fast.

Right up until race day morning I was not sure how hard I wanted to push on both the bike and the run. I've been experiencing some IT Band/knee issues which I believe are related to overuse. I wanted to be a bit cautious today because I don't want to further aggrevate my knee with Racine HIM coming up in about 3 weeks.

That being said, I also find that in a race setting I frequently deviate from any type of "go easy" type of plan. So in a nutshell, I did end up going harder than I wanted, but not so hard that I was dying on the bike. Overall things felt comfortably hard and I was very pleased to see I averaged over 20 mph when all was said and done.

Not much. My first two miles were the slowest so perhaps I could have pushed a little harder right out of the gate.

See T1. Actually, this one was only semi-horrible. Everything seemed to go fairly smoothly, but I need to look in greater detail in how to speed things up a bit.

Not quite sure yet.

After my bike, I was deciding if I wanted to start the first couple miles at about 9 and then come down to 8:30's for the remainder. Once I started running, things felt pretty good and my breathing was pretty comfortable. I looked down at the Garmin a handful of times and I was running 8:20's which was surprising because it felt like I was running 10's. So at that point I decided to just stick with that pace and see how well I could stay there for the entire race.

I was able to maintain this pace for the entire run and was hoping to kick things up a little bit in the last mile or two. Unfortunately that never happened because I couldn't talk myself into it. Sometimes I am stubborn like a mule...or a donkey. Regardless, I am happy with this run because it was solid for me after a swim and a bike.

Nothing

Gatorade, water, & bagel.


My body.


It's evident that Pleasant Prairie hosts a lot of triathlons because things were clearly organized and well run. In addition, with having sprint & International courses overlapping, the routes were clearly marked making turns and intersections easy to navigate even while speeding through quickly on a bike. I will definitely do this race again.