Oh my goodness, this was the worst swim of my adult life! The water was so cold that my hands and feet swelled up and I got hives on my ankles. I swam about 50 yards and felt my throat and lungs get tight, I couldn't swim a decent freestyle for anything. I tried to flop over and do backstroke, and my throat still felt tight. I undid the neck of my wetsuit which didn't help. I puttered along swimming a few strokes, doing a few breaststrokes in between. I never warmed up at all, and the only time I felt reasonable coordinated was the last 50 yards which was a straight swim to the shore. Ugh!

Take an antihistamine a few days before to try and calm down the cold urticaria reaction.

AFter the awful swim, I didn't care how long the transition took! I used Michael Pates transition advice including the water bottle and towel, it worked well.

Not much

All flat, fast for me. Passed 4 people, all on mountain bikes! Need to learn to do long rides with water bottles in stead of a hydration pack.

Get a new bike, keep working out, not much different besides that.

Wow, this was tough! I planned on running 10 minutes, walking one, but as soon as I started jogging new that that wouldn't happen. I jogged 5 minutes, walked 1 minute and that worked pretty well, I knew that I'd hit a mile marker every 2 cycles. It was good psychologically

Train more, do more bricks up to race distance.

Non-existant!
Had a banana, an orange, a piece of pretzel, a container of green tea with honey and an ice cube.

later, sipped water for an hour, then had a post race meal of whole wheat muffin, hummus, tuna, olive oil, and lime juice


More training, cold water. Need more practice open water swimming


No timing chips made transition timing immpossible. Was worried about not getting my times right, overall not a big deal, though, volunteers took race numbers and I was so far at the end of the pack that they had plenty of time to get my number.