St. Peters Rec-Plex Fall Triathlon - TriathlonSprint

I'm just not a very strong swimmer so I was relatively pleased with my swim. I got caught up in traffic a little bit and it was hard to pass people in those first few (more narrow) lanes, but overall I felt like I set a pace that was on the quick side for me but didn't get me into the red.

I'm just going to have to keep training on my swim and try to get faster. This is emerging as my weakest leg, the guy who beat me in my age group took 2 minutes out of me on the swim and at the end of the day I lost to him overall by 1 minute, so you do the math...

they included transition times in the bike and run times, so I estimated the T1 time by subtracting my computer's time from my posted bike time. It was a bit of a run from the pool to the transition area so that took some time. Other than that uneventful transition

I suppose at some point I could buy some tri shoes to speed up my T1, but for now my cycling shoes are fine.

My background is in cycling so this was, as usual, my strongest leg and I managed to put around 5 minutes into the 2nd place guy in my age group--but I was still relatively disappointed in my ride. For whatever reason I just didn't feel great once I got out on course. Since I was worried about the 5 mile run to follow (which is longer than I've done in prior races) I elected to back off a bit and stay out of the red zone rather than push super-hard despite not feeling great. It paid off on the run but it lead to a bike that felt underwhelming.

Preview the bike course the day before no matter what per my standard pre-race routine.

Don't know my time, not reported, so I'll guess 1 min and subtract that from the reported run time. T2 went pretty well though. I get slowed down a bit by my refusal to run without socks, but I feel like its worth it.

After I saw my run time I was happy I stayed within myself on the bike. I don't have any background in running so this has been challenging for me in prior races, and this run was 2 miles longer than the 2 other sprints I've done. But I've been training for this run at the expense of riding my bike and I improved a lot compared to previous races. I had some trouble breathing in the first mile or so--I think I have some exercise induced asthma that gets set off by heat and humidity--but I worked through that and it got better. The run was long and getting to the turn around point was ROUGH, but once I got there things got a lot better psychologically. I pushed hard on the return loop and had a good kick at the finish.

keep training over the winter and try to further improve on my run.

Went inside the Rec-plex, which my girlfriend discovered had an ice rink, and got cooled off (it was great). I also managed to grab a shower in the rec-plex which was a welcome post-race luxury.


being a slow swimmer.


There could have been more water stations on the run course and ankle timing chips would have been nice so we could get better split times, but overall the race was very well organized the volunteers were great and I have a hard time thinking of anything to negative to say about the race. Oh, although I heard they didn't adjust bike times for train delays and that's just silly--it wouldn't be hard to put one person there to record race numbers and how long people were delayed. At any rate, race was great and I'd recommend it!