Lone Star Triathlon Festival - Half Iron - Triathlon1/2 Ironman

Just a crappy swim. I was slow, I could never get settled into a draft, I wasn't confident in my navigation, my goggles fogged, and my wetsuit tore me up. I think the course was a bit long, since the best time in the AG was barely under 33 minutes.

I really need a new wetsuit. The neck on mine was chaffing to the point that I didn't want to sight be the end of the swim because lifting my head would cause it to dig into my neck.

Decent T1. I took it a bit easy just because I wanted to get my heart rate down before getting going on the bike. If I do that, I fare much better.

I almost certainly could have gone harder here. I ended up averaging only about 174 watts over the ride. Normalized was 178. I decided to just take it a little easier, though. I settled in to a legal draft off a couple of people and just cranked away.

Slower T2 than in the sprint, but I needed a pit stop.

This was an odd run. When I first started out, I was tight, of course. I just pushed on, trusting that my legs would loosen up after a couple of miles. I wasn't pushing too hard, but ran 8:00 miles right from the start. That was good. After a couple of miles, my legs loosened up, but I started getting this weird numbness in my legs and feet, especially on the right side. I stopped for a second bent over, shook my legs out, and tried to loosen up the leg band on my shorts. That helped a bit, so I pressed on. It kept happening and I was getting a bit freaked out. At about the halfway point, though, it just went away. Still don't know what happened.

The run was still going well, I maintained the 8:00 miles through mile 7. Mile 8 suddenly got a lot slower, though I didn't feel like I slowed down. From there to the finish, I was definitely plodding. I imagine that was the sprint from the day before catching up to me.

Got a massage, food, hung out for the awards and giveaways.


Not enough swim training and the sprint the day before.


I'm dinging this race just a bit compared to the sprint because it seems like Keith had some volunteers not show up. Unlike the sprint, there were no volunteers to help racers out of the water and navigate the ramp. Also, the two bike stations definitely needed more people. I only saw 2 people at one and 3 at the other. The rest of the stations were all well manned, though, and the race itself was awesome.