Mountain Lakes Triathlon - TriathlonSprint

Beautiful morning. 65 at start - incredibly odd for Alabama in August. Did 550yds in the pool there as a warmup and felt pretty crappy - been having issues with shortness of breath. The lake for the swim was awful - murky, dirty, and weeds all over. Regardless I wanted to take the swim at a reasonable tempo pace. The swim ended up way long - ~750yds instead of 600. This is to my advantage, obviously. I put in the only time in my AG under 10 minutes and was in the top 2% of all swimmers. This is a time trial start, so things are usually pretty sedate out there - except today. Never had so much contact. People were running into me constantly and I had to fight to get around just about every buoy. Inadvertently groped a couple people (sorry about that). Despite all that I fell into a very good rhythm and felt pretty good the whole way. Never did get passed. Despite being long the swim seemed to go by very quickly. All in all an excellent swim.

Decently good transition. 15/50 here.

Run faster up the hill.

I had good a transition - headed out on the bike. Held good power for the first ten miles and then just pooped out. Not sure why - very disappointing. That said, I think I was in the 3rd percentile of bikers. My time was :20 slower than last year, though there was more of a headwind on the long backstretch and times were somewhat slower overall here. Held 237w, 24.2mph, and was 1/50 in AG. Really wanted 25mph - maybe next year.

Put more time into the new TT bike.

21/50, but most people were within just a few seconds of me.

Not much.

Another good transition and headed out feeling pretty good on the run. Had to stop for :10 to stretch out a crampy calf. Other than that the weather made this this nicest 5k I have run. Finished :15 seconds faster than last year - all due to weather. Right on 7:30 miles. Considering I haven't been breaking 8:30 in any of the hot runs I have been doing this summer this was a pretty nice result. As always my relative placement here among other results sucks, but evidently good enough to hold on to the decent swim and bike results.

Run more. Say that every year, and every year the heat tends to kill my running plans for summer.

Running.


As far as placement, I was a bit fortunate in that two guys in my AG got promoted to the overall Master's category. Got some good swag for winning - a gift certificate a beach towel. Most importantly I beat all my training partners (one of them by :03 :boxing: ). Need to work on running (obviously) and on putting out good power on the bike while in aero for long distances (which I don't do except in races). Other than that it was a beautiful morning and a great race.