Milton Triathlon - Try-a-Tri - Triathlon

I did a practice swim in Lake Kelso the day before to get used to the water conditions which definitely helped me today. Tried to control starting out too hard and felt like I was able to hold a good easy pace. Overall a very good swim leg for me.

Not much. I had one swimmer on my right that paced with me until the first turn and he kept pushing me a little off course, but not something that I can control.

Transition time was included in the bike leg

Other than work on getting the wetsuit off quicker, overall a decent T1

There were pretty strong winds before the race and the forecast was calling for gusts up to 45 km/h. I was debating whether to leave the FLO 60 on the front or switch out to the stock wheel. I decided to stick with the FLO and it wasn't an issue. The wind was basically head on for the main stretch of the bike leg with some rolling hills.

There were two fairly decent sized hills that were a bit of struggle to climb into the wind, but after the turnaround with the tailwind and downhill I was pushing close to 55 km/hr at one point.

Since it was only 10 kms, I pushed quite hard and definitely above LTHR.

Both T1 and T2 are included in the bike leg and so time is a little better than shown. My Garmin had the bike leg at 34.6 km/hr average.

I felt really good on the bike, but for a Sprint distance I would hold back a little as my pace today would have been too much. Otherwise a good bike leg.

Overall smooth T2. Struggled a little bit with getting my shoes on, but not more than a few seconds

For my first tri of the season, I was quite happy with both my transitions.

Between the fairly large hill right at the beginning of the run and going too hard on the bike, it took awhile to settle into my run. Also developed a side stich about halfway through, but it was only 2.5 kms and so I just pushed through it. I passed someone in my age group early on and it turns out he was in the lead for M40-44. Ended up 1st in my age group and 2nd overall.

Similar to my bike leg, I would not push as hard for a Sprint distance, but as it was only 2.5 kms I went a little harder than I normally would.

Since this was my first tri of the season, I decided to just do the "mini sprint" distance. I have several Sprints and an Olympic later in August, and so I treated this as my tune-up race. Overall it went quite well and I was happy with my performance. The swim settled my nerves and I feel confident about my Sprint race next weekend.