San Diego International Triathlon - Olympic - TriathlonOlympic

Practice open water swimming more than 3 times before a race (the race was my 4th time in open water). It's way different swimming in a pack, getting kicked in the face, trying to sight, and making it around the bouys. My swim time for the 1k was ~30 minutes (official times not posted yet). I freaked out in the beginning and backstroked for about 5-10 minutes (I'm embarrased to tell you that), which killed my time. I bought a new pair of goggles, which leaked the entire time. I got a good face plant with someone's foot right in my nose when I power-surged at the end and didn't look where I was going. Lessons learned. Overall, the swim took me about 7 minutes longer than what I had thought, as a quick but not all-out pace in the pool for me is ~2:10 for 100m. I'm mad about the swim, too, b/c I was SO comfortable last week swimming here - just totally freaked out FOR NO REASON!!!

Bike - went great! I think I averaged in the 18mph range, b/c I finished in less than an hour for the 18 mile ride. I broke 38mph on the decents, and felt totally in control. The only change I'm going to make is to rig a hydration system that puts the drinking spout up front...since my bottle was in the cage and I stayed in the aero position, I ended up not drinking at all and cramped up in the run.

Run - wow, need some work here. All the time I made up on the bike (everyone I passed) I watched pass me on the run - ouch. My Garmin shows a pace of 9:36/mile for the six miles (which is about what I guessed I'd do), and I really see that I need to work at picking up the pace. I did try to kick it in for the last 1/2 mile, but was so dead by the end that I felt totally out of steam the last 100 yards - luckily, the crowd was loud and cheering, so that totally helped. The best thing I did for the run was (1) stick to the nutrition plan I had set out and (2) wore sunglasses with that little rubber nose so I wasn't pushing my glasses back up every five freakin' seconds.

My total time for the race was 2:30:23 according to the results; no split times available yet but I'm pretty sure that (minus transitions in there somewhere) I was Swim: ~30 min, Bike: ~60 min, Run ~60 min. At the next race I want to get my swim 100m time down (averaged ~3min for 100m on this race) to ~2min, keep the bike about the same (of course, faster is always better but I'm somewhat ok with my time), and cut the run down by (ideally) a minute or so per mile minimum if possible. My next race isn't until September 30th in San Dimas - distances for that are: 1.5k Swim, 40k bike, 10k run.