Duluth Triathlon Half Ironman - Triathlon1/2 Ironman

If it was long, then I think I did fine. I felt good, swam strong and except for the difficultly sighting, felt I did well.

Nothing.

Not great but typical

Bike was riding weird. Dropped my chair when I went to small ring. Didn't do that again which meant I worked harder on the bike than I intended. And odd sounding on most of my other gears. (Later realized I must have knocked the barrel adjuster because I had to turn it quite a bit to get it to go smoothly again.) Still I had a good bike time. Hard to eat on the bike because of road conditions but I managed mostly shot bolks and water then gatorade. TWo packs of shot blocks=400, +2 gu= 600 calories. Whatever the gatorade had. Since you can't process more than 250 calories per hour on the bike, I was a little shy of what I might have done. Maybe that led to cramping or maybe the harder work on the bike.

Lube. When I bring the bike in for a tune-up, put the race wheels on it??

Took a little longer than usual. Had to porta-potty. Also saw friend who was bloody from crash and wanted to make sure he was OK.Talked a little with him.

First ten miles, I was on course to finish in just over 2 hours. I tried to keep it in check at about 10 min miles for at least the first half so I didn't blow up, and I was fairly successful--some early 9s. Cramping started pretty soon into it--vastus medialis, left and then right too. Kept it in check and sucked it up. Mistake to stop and stretch quad because it brought hamstring into worse cramp. Stretched that out and it was fine. VM kept up but manageable--worse going up hill. Gave myself permission to walk a bit and it helped for a while. At about mile 10 it was getting worse, moving into left calf. I was walking quite a lot. Then run a little but it would start up again and I could sense it moving to foot. Basically needed to flat foot it. Well, it seized anyway and involved the foot. I tipped over and my calf was in full screaming spasm. Friend was behind me and said she saw it coming and she massaged it out so I could stand and start walking again. I was hobbling but made it to the finish--ran the last 100 yards across the finish, figuring the medic would pick me up if I keeled over.

Hmmm. Good question. Cramps are not new to me, but thought I had them under control. I think I need to experiment with salt tabs. Only drank on run and expected to get my electrolytes from it, and hadn't counted on Gatorade being watered down. Sometimes barely a flavor. Don't count on others for your nutrition? Work on eating Gus on run without getting ill? I think salt tabs are a good place to start. I sweat a lot.

I walked around to work out cramps and drank a couple of bottles of gatorade. I walked around, talked to folks. Ross took down my transition.


Run= cramps; swim=long and not enough buoys; bike-don't know if I could have done much better.

I have never had a better mental race than this one. Proud of that.


First time for this race but picked this Duluth triathlon bc the organizers have experience with it (Superior man the following week didn't have that.) So it was a little disheartening to see that they didn't have enough buoys, that the volunteers on the swim weren't so helpfully placed. No finisher medals, t-shirts were tiny, and the post race food was lack luster. Worse was the age groups--1-39 and 40-120?? I wondered if that was legal with USAT. Pretty lame. The 7 awards they gave out for AG were really nice. But come on. You can't put 40 year olds with 50 year olds. Not to mention one friend who is 70. Race cost $150 so it wasn't cheap. I am pretty tired of for-profit company races. The community sponsored ones tend to be so much nicer--like Annandale, Buffalo, etc. Now, HIMs tend not to be run by communities bc they are a bigger affair. Nothing the race director could do about the roads, the decision of the contractors to work that day. But there were other things in their control that I thought experienced folks would be better at.