Take on the Heat Triathlon - TriathlonSprint

The swim portion was shorter than advertised. However, I felt good on the swim and was able to stay around the middle of the pack but I think I got lulled into thinking I was doing good when others got over 2 min on me on that short swim. I felt like I swam pretty straight and sighted well. I still need to get my stroke rate around 60 spm but I think that stroking faster and using less effort works better. I lost too much time here and I'll have to try harder on my next sprint.

Swim harder. I need to treat sprint swims like a sprint and not a half-iron distance.
Need more swim practice and still need to work on bilateral breathing

That surface hurt! This was worse than Joe pool lake which is an indication of how bad it was. They need to provide a little more carpeting not just for first rack. Looking at results, I lost a podium on my transitions. Gave up over 30 seconds to a lot of people so I need to focus and get moving. 38th/286

Might have been worth putting a spare pair of shoes near the swim exit so I could run faster

My race plan included turning down the effort on the bike in the hopes of running a bit better. I went as hard as I can at Cooper and I felt horrible in the run so instead of keeping my HR at around 164bpm, I went for 158-160 bpm, constantly reminding myself to back off. I also had a rider go down about 15 ft in front of me. It looked like he was still braking when he tried to turn in a gravel section and the front just slipped away. Raised my heart rate!

Go harder and since I didn't really gain in the run, I should've kept the throttle pinned. I feel like I lost the podium holding back too much on the bike. I also pulled off the strap on my shoe costing me time trying to thread it through. I am going to rubber band the edge. Cadence was also on the low side.

gave 10-15 sec here so need to clean this up also. 45th/286 overall

Run faster and get shoes on quicker

I was 2nd in my age group so it wasn't too bad. Faded a bit midway but definitely put in the effort .

Train more. My run volume has been pretty low and I think I need to get it back to at least 25 miles a week.

not much - just caught my breath and walked to massage area


Swim training needs to be more emphasized over next 6 weeks. Lost 2 1/2 minutes to the fastest swimmers. My transition times were also pretty slow compared to overall.

This was my last sprint race for the year and 2nd to last tri that I have scheduled. I'm going to be doing my 2nd Oly distance (Toyota US Open) and looking forward to seeing how I've improved on that same course (hopefully, it will also be wetsuit-legal so I can compare apple-to-apple). As for Sprints, I did 5 this year - 2 podiums, 2 Top 20's, a near-miss of another podium and improvement in all of the 3 sports. Most notable improvement has been my running and I'm happy with also continuing to have an improvement on the bike. My swimming has also come a long way - from bottom 15% to right around 40th percentile now. Still a lot of room to go though and Ineed to really focus this off-season and get myself closer to 60th percentile next year. I think that if I can do that, I'll be in podium contention for every sprint race. I will be focusing on continuing to improve the run. I broke the 21 minute mark for the first time on a tri 5k on this event, so next goal is to break 20 minutes next year...and all this while keeping my cycling at the same level.

For the next 6 weeks, I have to focus on the Oly distances - 1500m swim, 40k bike and 10k run. I know I can handle the bike portion so I'll have to focus on optimizing my running for that distance and improving as much as I can on the swim between now and then. I'm just hoping to beat last year's Oly time by at least 10 minutes.


Kayak people didn't show - they allowed refunds for people that don't want to swim without kayaks (there was a rescue boat). Bike course was bad with lots of cracks and gravel. Worst part though has to be the parking lot - it is chip seal and full of gravel. Very hard and painful to run on. Finally, I don't think the course was measured correctly. Swim/Bike/Run courses were all short.