Leon's World's Fastest Triathlon - TriathlonOlympic

Easy rectangle. Counted the buoys ahead of time. The path to the water was to head to the end of a dock and jump off, so they were letting us jump off the sides and swim around if we wanted, so I did that, in order to get a couple strokes of warm-up in and to seed myself near the front. Once it was nearly time to start, and I was surrounded by all these beefy guys, I had serious second thoughts about whether I wanted to get kicked around. It worked out all right though.

The first leg was a little grabby and kicky, not to mention swimming-into-people-y, but it did thin out by about the time to turn the first corner. I had swum wide enough out that I just swam the turn, no fancy corkscrew turn. I hugged the buoys well for the second leg, but once we rounded the second corner and were going into the sun, everyone started having trouble sighting the buoys. Folks were pausing and just hanging out trying to spot things. I switched to polo stroking for a few strokes until I realized I could just sight off the nicely backlit scaffold at the finish rather than looking for the small orange buoys.

When we hit the sandbar near the end, I swam until my fingers hit bottom, then I walked maybe 10 feet or so until it was hip deep and swam again. Strong finish.

Start closer to the left (buoy) side rather than far right, so I don't add so much extra distance.

Think I'm getting more coordinated with running in cleats.

Nothing

I had a blast on the bike! Loved it. The turns every 2-3 miles kept it from getting monotonous, at the cost of lots of deceleration/acceleration. Cline Ave, the highway that we did the out-back-out-back on, is deteriorating from disuse, so there were some ugly spots on that, mainly on the west end. Otherwise, it was straight and really just had some overpasses for hills, so it was easy to maintain pace.

Going out, we had an awesome tailwind that made it super fun to whoosh downhill...that meant that of course there was a headwind for coming back, but I spent the time trying to convince myself that I looooove headwinds, headwinds are awesome, and headwinds are my friend. (I don't think I ever convinced myself, but it beats sitting there thinking "this sucks" the whole time.) That headwind did make the exit ramp off Cline Ave. very welcome, though.

Nothing. I drank enough, maintained my effort well enough, and had fun.

I had ridden the bike without socks, and elected to skip them here too. Also, I forgot to remove my bike gloves and left for the run with them on -- shoved them down my bra just to have someplace to put them. That turned out to be a mistake because the scratchy velcro chafed in no time. Ouch!

Take off my bike gloves! Or at least remember that my tri top has pockets!!

Ran this one slightly slower than my race the day before, as expected. My goal for a PR for this was just to run the whole distance -- I've never done an Oly without stopping to walk part of the 10k. So I just wanted to run, however slowly I had to go to do it. And slowly I went -- all the teammates that I cheered on during the bike slowly caught up to me and cheered me as they passed. Which worked out great for me since that meant they were all there to cheer at the finish line. :-)

Nothing.

Stopped running. Probably should have stretched, but stretching is for people who do things properly...


Probably would have gone slightly faster if I hadn't been coming off a race the day before.


Couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day to race on, and a better group of people to race with. Beat my race time goals by 4 minutes -- did every single thing faster than I projected. Not too shabby for less than 24 hours since my last race, and about 6 hours of sleep!

The only thing about the day that was a negative was I saw several folks who flatted on the course, all of them on Cline Ave. It's awesome to have a closed highway to race on, but it's showing some wear and tear from NWI winters. The people who flatted that I noticed all looked to me like they had serious bikes, and I wonder if they were on ultralight tubes and tires, and paying a price for it. I started pointing down at the potholes as I came across them, to hopefully warn people behind me about the hazards, but I don't know that it would have helped anyone going very fast.