The Nation's Triathlon - Triathlon

The water temps were comfortable and the river was calm. The sighting was pretty easy due to the markers. My intent was to go out relatively calm and restrained to save more for the bike/run. I may have overdone it a bit due to my low comparative placement.

Definitely need to work on my swim time. I dropped several minutes off of my Naylor's Beach swim time and that was in much more challenging conditions. The swim is definitely an area that I need to work on. There is probably 5-7 minutes of potential time savings with a moderate amount of work.

Ranked 1226 overall for transition time. No wet suit to deal with this time and had a tri top for the first time and that seemed to make things a lot easier. Everything went pretty smoothly except the getting the gloves on which seemed to take an excessive amount of time.

In the future I think I will try putting my race belt/number on during T-1. It caused problems latter and at the speeds that I bike I don't think there is much of a negative drag effect.

Very happy with the ride. The course is relatively flat with mostly minor rolling sections. I tried to keep a reasonable pace with only pushing my HR to the low 150s or high 140s in some sections. I was also much more disciplined about Gatorade intake and my two Gu's and Shot Blocks package.

I am not sure I would change that much, I was pretty happy with my time considering I was not trying to drop the hammer on the ride. This seemed to work out ok since the run went much better than on my last two Olympic distance Tri's.

Took it fairly easy coming into T2 in an effort to bring down my HR. Everything went pretty smooth except for forgetting my race belt until I was out on the run. Going back for the belt added about 1/4 to 1/3 of a mile and definitely added what I would guess was about 3 minutes to my total run time. It also used up a fair amount of energy since I was running faster than I should have been at that point.

Put the race belt on during T1

A much stronger effort than any previous attempt. The whole Race Belt issue really sabotaged what would have been a much better effort. Still not able to run the whole thing without walking but the discipline of the fueling on the bike seemed to pay off.

Pay better attention to what I was doing in T1 and not forget my Fuel Belt.

Minimal.


The race belt issue in T2 cost me at least 3 minutes and about 20 places in my division. While the swim was done at a comfortable pace I clearly have lost some swim fitness since Naylors Beach Tri. I should have been able to go about 5 minutes faster. Overall though I can't complain too much since I did drop 10 minutes off of previous fully Olympic Distance Tri. With a good off season, a sub 3: 00 hour Oly Tri should be well within reach.


The race is pretty well organized for an event of its size. The big issue on this course was the new bike course which I did not mind at all but a lot of people did not like it at all. The one thing that I heard of that is just inexcusable was that they ran out of finishers medals., I don't even know how that is even remotely possible. It is not like the number of entries is a mystery.

Overall though I liked the race and would do it again.