Four States Triathlon - Tiger Phil - TriathlonSprint

Not a whole lot to say about the swim. The only thing was that there was one guy who continually climbed on my back for the first half of the swim. Dude, move over!

I basically did not sight at all. I just tucked in by some female swimmers and kept the same distance from them. I always figure that the female swimmers that can swim my speed are better-than-average swimmers.

This swim time was a minute better than the first time I did this race, in 2004.

Nothing except swim more in training.

Easy. I had to walk about five feet to get to the bike mount line.

Nothing. This went about as good as possible.

Here is where I started to feel my legs a little... See, I had a tough week, but you make your choices and you move on in life. I had played Ultimate Frisbee on Wednesday night from 8:30 until about 10:30. I am a youth minister (for Young Life) and there are a couple of kids that I want to connect with that play Ultimate on those nights, so I go where the kids are. Then, on Thursday, I ran 5 miles in the morning, and rode about 18 in the afternoon. Guess it was too much... I would hold about 19.5 or so into the wind, with occasional step-ups to 20 or so as I passed someone and got a wee bit of a draft. On the way back, I was cruising at 24 or so. This is only slightly less of a wind than we experienced here two years ago. I rode as hard as I could the entire time, and I only shaved one minute off my bike time from two years ago. That was humbling.

If I wanted to race better, I would not have played Ultimate on Wednesday. But I am happy with my choices. The bottom line is that I am, in fact, a minute faster even with deadish legs than two years ago.

I took my time a little bit in T2, even walking a few steps through transition.

Given that I missed second place by 7 seconds and the guy in front of me beat me by 6 seconds in T2, maybe I should have hurried things along a bit. Drat.

The run is where I lost time. This time was 18 seconds *slower* than two years ago. That's absurd. I am faster today than I was then. I know this qualitatively, but I guess it's yet to prove out quantitatively. I was hurting the entire run, so I know that this is all I had on this day. My BIL, who I run with occasionally, was a minute faster than me, and I know he is not that much faster than me.

Interesting note from the run: About a half mile into it, I hear a guy coming behind me. He stays behind me. I ask him if he is drafting off me... He says he is just using me for pace. He stays there the entire run. We actually struck up a friendship - his name was Paul. The only positive from the run was that I picked up the pace. My splits were 7:24, 7:00 and 6:30.

Again, my legs were screaming at me from the week's exercise and play. I can run faster, but not after the week I had.

Just walked around, talked with my Young Life kids and my family. Had a few cookies and a banana, etc.


Ultimate Frisbee and lack of swim training.


Here's the kicker. I am a Clydesdale, and when I registered, the guys told me that all the Clydesdales had numbers in the 20's. The guy that got second passed me at the very end of the bike. He left T2 28 seconds ahead of me, and reached T2 22 seconds ahead of me. The thing is that he was the last guy to register, so they gave him number 150. When he passed me at the end of the bike, I saw him and noted his number was not in the 20's so I let him go - made no effort to keep up. As far as I knew, I was the first place Clydesdale at that point, because I had seen no others. Well, at the finish of the run, I was coming hard and he was looking back repeatedly. I thought he was looking past me, but he was making sure I wasn't catching him. Now, I ran as hard as I could, but I just know if I'd known the guy ahead of me was in my class, I would have chased him down a little more. Stupid race numbers. Oh yeah, the guy who got first place Clydesdales was second place overall. That is just plain flat unfair no matter what you say.