Giant Eagle Triathlon - Sprint Course - TriathlonSprint

Swim went as well as I could expect given the fact that I had focused my training on the bike over the last two months. Was able to site much better than my previous event. First time using my Aqua Sphere Kayanne goggles in open water and thought they worked well.

Could have pushed the pace more on the first half of the swim.

T1 time was baked into the bike time. Wetsuit came off easy.

Not sure I could have gone any faster.

The course was a net downhill with an aiding wind. Road conditions were acceptable and a huge improvement from last year. My only complaint was the heavy traffic experienced when the Olympic distance merged together with the sprint distance. The bike lane simply wasn't big enough which caused clumps of riders.

I had my actual bike time at 50 minutes on my Garmin. As mentioned earlier, the T1 time was baked into the bike time. I also had the distance as 19.25 miles instead of the published 18.5.

The only issue on the bike came from my left shoe. The velcro strap continually came loose and rubbed on the crank arm.

As mentioned earlier, the heavy congestion carried over into the entrance to T2. You had to walk your bike up a small sidewalk that had a raised stone border. When I arrived in T2, there were close to a dozen people moving very slowly through this bottleneck.

I did get to see my wife and kids before going into T2, so that put a smile on my face.

Ran 10 yards away from my bike before realizing that I forgot to take off my helmet. That cost me 5 seconds. Other than that, it was a smooth transition once i was able to get to my rack spot.

As always, it took my legs a half mile to wake up on the run. The run went as well as expected. I was passed with a half mile to go in the race by someone in my age group. I attempted to match his pace, but came up 7 seconds shy of what I would later find out was a podium spot.

Simply, I need to run more. I have run a sub 22 minute stand-alone 5K on this course. I need to be able to duplicate that off the bike.

Water and pictures with the kids.


My performance was a direct reflection of the effort I had put into training. I've been obsessed with getting better on the bike, and I showed tremendous improvement in that area. I've neglected the swim a bit and it showed with a very mediocre time.


HFP racing did a hell of a job with this large and complex event. There were some issues with the results that cancelled the AG awards afterwards. The results were finally posted at 3:00 AM this morning. Sure that part sucked, but that was literally the only glitch I noticed the entire day. Everything else was top notch and I will be sure to do this event as well as other HFP events in the future.