Clear Lake International Triathlon - Olympic Course - Triathlon

This was the nastiest water I have ever been in. It tasted like a combination of salt, fish and a turd with burnt hair. I tried as hard as I could to keep water out of my mouth but it didn't work so well. Luckily I managed to minimize the amount of water I drank. I imagine drinking that much sewer water would really set you up for a crappy race.

Swim faster and let less poop water in my mouth.

Pretty solid T1 for me. This was the first time I tried the rubber band thing to keep my shoes level. Running out of T1 I got on the bike pretty quick (no flying mount). When I pushed down on the left shoe the rubber band on the right shoe snapped so that was no longer level. It didn't take any effort to get my foot on the top of the shoe and start pedaling though.

Not break the rubber band before the race. When I was setting my bike up I broke one of the rubber bands and had no spares so I had to tie to together.

I was planning on holding 250-260W normalized power. I went a little above that due to some skirmishes on the bike. There were three guys in a straight up pace line that I blew by. About 5 minutes later they came by me, the guy in the back then proceeded to come over into the side of me (if I hadn't moved we would have exchanged paint). I told him to give me some room to which he promptly replied you should drop back 3 bike lengths. Which I retorted "I will when you make your pass within 15 seconds." The three of them passed me and then slowed down immediately. I was holding a constant power +/- 5W this whole time, so I knew they were drafting to pass me and then were not able to hold that power. It was super fucking annoying because then, so I wasn't cheating, was forced to drop back and wait to pass again. I went to pass the entire group of them again (at 255W, so it's not like they were even close to my speed). I passed all three of them within 15 seconds. At this point I was really watching my computer to make sure I wasn't being the one in the wrong. I will admit that maybe I was being petty, but at least I wasn't in the wrong. About 5 minutes after I passed the group they came up again (in a straight up TdF pace line, like 6-12" between wheels) and passed me. Then I told the asshole in back (the one that almost hit me) "Nice pace line you got going there." Of course there was no response.

The guy in the back of the pace line ended up winning his AG, and if I had been more of a dick I would have called him out on it. But I really didn't care that much once all was said and done. I don't understand why he rode like that in the first place though. He puled out a good time on the run, but maybe that was just because he was drafting the entire bike.

Either way, I ended up having a really good bike based on how I felt. There were tons of people on the course to pick off, so it is always kind of a mental booster to pass people even if they aren't in your AG or anything.

Not get caught up in people cheating since it put a lot of spikes in my power profile and likely fatigued my legs a bit for the run.

Running with the bike went much better than the other times I have left my shoes clipped in. I lifted the bike up where needed to avoid my shoes smashing into the ground (a shoe fell out of my pedal at a different tri when that happened).

Got to my rack and decided to rack by the brake levers, which was a mistake, again. The aerobottle sits low enough that both brake levers can't hook the bar but I always try to make it straight for some OCD reason. I gave up on that after a few tries and just started getting my run stuff on. The fumbling with the bike probably cost me 15-20 seconds.

Got all my run gear on pretty quickly with the exception of one sock that went on kind of crooked and I had to straighten it out. Started heading out of T2 and noticed I forgot my garmin on the bike. I ran back to get it which probably cost me another 10-15 seconds. I might have been able to run a bit faster if I had left it on there though.

Overall I think I could shave 30-40 seconds off of this transition after a bit more practice.

Felt ok on the run. I did a brick a week or two ago where I did 250W for an hour (on the trainer) followed by 7:30/mi for 3 miles. I felt really good on that brick so I figured I would be able to do similar today. Unfortunately I just couldn't get my legs turning over during the run. My Avg. HR was a little lower than I would have liked, so I probably could have stepped it up a bit to bring that up closer to my LTHR. Overall though I was only about 2 minutes shy of my open 10k, so not too bad.

I don't know if the spikes on the bike affected my run or if I mentally affected my run. It seems like the 8:30/mi pace is just a comfortable pace for me so it is easy to settle into it. I didn't feel bad at the end of the race so I definitely could have pushed more on the run, but I just can't figure out how to actually do that.

Run faster obviously. Try to figure out how to make myself hurt enough that I am improving my time, but not hurt enough that I am going to blow up before the end.

Crossed the finished line and got a water bottle. Then I saw that they had ice baths and jumped in. First time getting in an ice bath after a race and it was super nice. My HR went from 160ish down to 110 in less than 2 minutes. And as I am typing this up the morning after, my legs are not very sore at all (although maybe that is because I sandbagged the run?).


I lost a decent amount of time on the swim (coming in dead MOP) but then also gave up some time on the run. I should have been able to hold at least 8:00/mi.

Also, I need to start racking my bike by the seat so avoid the aerobottle issue (or change aerobottles).


Awards was terrible. They announced that they were going to start awards when I was in the middle of packing up transition. I stopped what I was doing to go there thinking they were actually going to start. They kept delaying it by "10 minutes" until it was ultimately an hour and a half late. I didn't really care about the time, but I did care that when they finally got to M30-34 and I got my award, unbeknownst to me, they had already started tearing down transition. When I got back to transition there were a handful of bikes left with no fences up. Nothing of mine got stolen, but it is annoying to come back and see that the people who are supposed to be in charge of ensuring $10s of k's of bikes are safe are completely ignoring them.

Other than that, the race was really well run. Although I will reiterate, that marina is like swimming in a sewer.