Steelman Triathlon - TriathlonSprint

My first open water swim. My time was a little disappointing - I can swim that in the pool and thought at race time I would be able to swim faster. Had to keep myself from pushing too hard at the beginning to keep up with the better swimmers. Found it a little difficult to relax and get my stroke down with all the contact from other swimmers.

I've only been freestyle swimming for about 3 months and totally self-taught. I need some lessons to improve my form and more structured training. I was mainly focused on just finishing this distance. Now I have a time to beat for next race.

I lost my bike...someone at the end of the row had a big Nemo balloon flying in the sky that I was using as my row identifier, but when I came in the balloon was on the ground and I didn't see it. Didn't have my wits about me to start looking at the numbers on the row. Wasted a good minute to 2 minutes just finding my set up.

Slow down coming into the T1 and find my bike the first time. Also might use some sort of more visible indentifier to find it quickly. Pre-rolling socks would have been a good idea.

As with the siwm, I haven't been biking for very long. I need to get off the bike trail with its long flats and short, steep hills and find the longer, more rolling hills that I encountered in this race. Also time to ditch the toe clips and get cleats.

Getting real cycling shoes, training on longer hills.

I still have toe clips on my bike, so only had to get off the bike, throw my helmet and gloves in the bag, take a bite of my dark chocolate bar and swig of Gatorade and get moving.

This part will be more challenging next time, as I'm planning on having cycling shoes and will have to deal with more of a transition than I had to in this race.

Somehow I ended up only 21 seconds off of a PR in the 5k. I didn't feel particularly fast, but I passed a lot of people and didn't get passed by very many. Pace felt good, though I did weaken during the last mile and didn't seem to have anything extra when I tried to push harder.

Nothing - I think that run was as good as I could have hoped for at this point.

Pizza, chicken fingers, gatorade and a banana....and a short rinse in the cold showers they had set up at the finish :-)


Very happy with it for my first race. Very well organized, and the race director gave a very nice overview and explanation of the course and rules the afternoon before. Will definitely do this again next year.