Lake Lenape Triathlon - TriathlonSprint

Well, another slow swim, but I managed to keep my wits and breathing about me this time, staying focused on the stroke and kick instead of getting out of control and going into hyperventilation mode. So OK, I might still be near BOP out of the water but it's a lot better coming out breathing more or less normally than coming out of the drink gasping. I actually passed some people this time (not many), all on the way out and near the turn buoys going back in. Could not catch the guy who was sculling on his back, at least not until he took a kayak breather.

Keep practicing those drills and grabbing an OWS when I can to maintain the calm.

Felt like this T1 took forever, so surprised at the actual time. Wetsuit came off easily except on heels which I had to peel off one at a time. I don't know, I just felt really slow here. Wasn't trying to beat any records, but wanted to be efficient.

Not much. I was just moving slow, but ended up better than I'd have thought.

Since I'd only ridden a couple of times since Parvin I didn't want to try to blow this ride out. Decided to treat it as a sort of power test, so I went out in the small gear for the first five minutes, then did two ten minute hard efforts with a five minute small ring spin in between. Or at least that's what I thought I did; apparently didn't get a good finger on the Interval button because the ride results showed a 25-minute interval you can't make much sense of except there were a couple of higher-level lines on the graph. Appears I ran in the 180-220 range for those periods. Wanted to get a good number to train off of going forward but I'll have to figure that out again. No traffic on the ride was pretty cool but there were some teeth-jarring sections of road. Most importantly, I located the farm stand/pie shop TSW wanted to stop at after the race.

Well, would've been nice to have better interval graphs, but I rode this as planned.

I came out of my shoes at the perfect time, maybe a minute or so before dismount. But the run from the dismount to transition was across a shell and gravel parking lot that was pretty darn rough on my tender feet. Probably should've just left my shoes on; I gave up even trying to jog over that paw-shredding surface and just kind of tip-toed in. Took a little while to get the Zoots on and comfortable.

Not much. Leaving bike shoes on might've made a difference. Figure out a way to deal with the Zoot running shoes. They're comfortable as heck but I currently have no way to just slide them on.

I had zero expectations for this owing to the fact I'd only run eight miles or so over the last three weeks, with three of those in the Parvin triathlon. Started real easy, ran slow for the first 10 minutes, with a plan to hit it hard for the next 20 as a time trial. Humidity had kicked up by then, though, and I was still feeling it from the bike (why were my butt cheeks sore?), so that didn't quite work out as planned...pace during the "test" interval came out to about 10:10/mile, and I know I'm capable of better than that.

Nothing in this case...I didn't come in to "race the run".

I was hurting when I crossed the line...had to just hang with my hands on my knees for a while and hope I didn't puke on the young lady taking our timing chips. I wasn't exactly pushing it out there - treating this as practice since I'd not done much over the last three weeks - so I was surprised at how blown I was at the end. But it was a good time and decent treats afterwards (Oreos!). I also walked into the water and just stood up to my neck for a few minutes to cool down. Point of this race was to kick off the second half of the season, get re-charged after a break, and have a good time. By that measure it was a great race. Lot of cool tri-dogs too, especially Henry, a little Norfolk Terrier who can roll over faster than you can blink, and his Marmaduke-sized housemate Darwin, already 140 pounds and not even two years old.


Probably the lack of training over the last three weeks. This was intentional, though, giving myself some time off after training up for the last one.


Great little race, second time doing it in last three years. TSW really likes it too because everybody's so friendly and it's easy to watch and get around; seems like she was everywhere, moving around faster than I was. Will probably try to make this an annual thing because it's so pleasant.