Boulder Peak Triathlon - TriathlonOlympic

The swim start was the worst open water swim start I've ever experienced. Mostly my fault though as I think I started too far back. I never really had any space to myself except for maybe a 5 minute period when we were headed into the sun. Fortunately, I could use all those extra bodies as navigation tools, cuz I sure couldn't sight off of anything because of the sun. I swam over several people but nearly drowned a girl from the wave in front of us. Apparently, she was taking a break. All I saw was a swim suit and then a panicked face gasping for air. I stopped and made sure she was ok, then kept going.

Despite the difficulties, I never felt uncomfortable and the new wet suit performed flawlessly.

Start more towards the front!!

I think I can trim a bit of material off the bottom of my wet suit to make it easier to get off my heels. Would probably save me 15 seconds in transition.

Trim the ankles on my wet suit.

Once on the bike, it's a slight up-hill all the way to Old Stage. I had to really back off as my HR was hovering around 183. Once I calmed my HR down, I settled into a rhythm, but never felt strong. And I felt even weaker as guys in my AG seemed to pass me at ridiculous speeds. I just hoped that I would catch them on the climb up Old Stage. Sure enough, I caught many but not all of them. As I was climbing, I looked down into my bento box and remembered to start taking my Endurolytes.

Going down the back side of Old Stage was torture!! The 35 mph speed limit is completely unreasonable and there seemed to be a lot of people blowing by me even though my computer read 35 the whole time. Once through the speed zone, I dropped the hammer to take advantage of the rest of the down hill. I played cat & mouse w/ a couple guys that I know would eventually drop me, but it felt good to work the legs out. I finally started feeling a bit stronger, but still made sure to keep my HR in check.

Nothing. I didn't make my goal of averaging 20.4, but I'll take 19.9 on this course given my conditioning. It was still faster than last year. Obviously, I still need spend more time on the bike and a decent set of race wheels would be nice too.

First I had a tough time finding my rack and then when I did, it damn near fell over as I racked my bike. I realized that the whole thing was about to fall over without my help so I had to unfold the rack a little bit and also be careful not to knock over the other two bikes that were already there.

I dunno - maybe just lay my bike on the ground and be done with it.

This is supposed to be strength for crying out loud!!! My run has sucked all year and this was no exception. Coming off the bike, my legs felt ok, I grabbed a gel on the way out which helped a bit and I just tried to get my legs to turn over. About a mile and a half Julia (juliapurr) caught me and gave me a hard time about running slow, so I picked it up and ran w/ her for a while. My calves and achilles were already angry w/ me, but surpisingly enough, speeding up seemed to help them. Then bad things started to happen. As I went to pop my last two Endurolytes into my mouth, I dropped both of them. In retrospect, I should have gone back and picked them up off the ground, because not long after that, my left quad started cramping and I had to let Julia go. From there on out, it felt like a death march. At the turnaround, I felt better knowing that I was heading back toward the finish line and even with my periodic walk breaks, I was catching some of my AG competitors. With 2 miles to go, I decided that I was done with the walking breaks. I found some people to pull me along and I just gutted it out. It ended up being one of my least favorite runs ever.

1. Go back for my Endurolytes. They've become invaluable.
2. Run training!!! and bricks!!!

Water, bananas, oranges, beer hang out w/ da crew.


Nutrition and training.


The BoulderPeak is always a great race!!!