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

I had a short panic attack swimming out to the start line, and just about turned around and came in. Once my wet suit filled and things settled down, I felt all right. I've definately got to learn how to swim. I was hoping for 45-minutes. Came in at just under 50. I think improving my navigation could take at least 5' off this time.

Get in the water before the start to get aclimated and settle down.

Used the wet suit strippers. They were great. Run to T1 was carpet, and T1 was concrete, so everything stayed very clean. Racks were numbered.

Tape nutrition to the bike so I don't have to mess with it.

Ride was very flat. On the way out there was very little wind. On the way back, a cross-wind began to gust. Wind didn't present any majopr problems for my ride. I tried to pace off the HRM, which was a first for me. This seemed to work pretty well, although my first few minutes were very high. Took about 10-minutes to really settle in on the ride. I planned on taking a gel every 30-min on the bike, but forgot to pick them up in T1, so ended up just using gatorade hand-ups, dumped into my aerobottle. I did manage to snag a two gels at one of the hand-up stations. The hand-up volunteers were standing so close together that I thought it was tough to get more than one thing per station. Bike worked great and I managed to stay aero for about the whole ride, with a few quick stretches.

Not much......seemed to go well.

Decent transition. I ended up messing around with the HRM a little to get it switched over from bike to run mode.

Nice comfortable run. Wanted to try to uuse the HRM for pacing. This worked pretty well, but it took me a while to get the garmin working and on the right screen. First mile ended up being way too fast. Slowed down for the reest of the race and ran very comfortably.

Overall a good run, but could have picked up pace for the last half and cut a couple of minutes off. I think I had quite a bit of gas left in the tank when I was done. Maybe the idea should be to run the HRM off at 10-miles and just run.

Walked around for a few minutes, then went and collected my stuff from transition.


gotta do something about that swim.....


Good race. Very well run and professional. Easy course, which is kind of nice for an early season HIM.