The wind had blown the buoys out into deeper water the night before so instead of 2.4 miles, we swam 3.1 miles. I thought the course felt a little long!
All the half and full athletes started at the same time so it was pretty rough going for the first 400 meters or so.

Nothing... but I hadn't planned on swimming a 5K

No much to comment on here. I did change into a cycling jersey and had my pockets pre-loaded with nutrition. That way I didn't need to stop for a special needs bag.

Nothing

Wind and hills. Nothing you can do about the wind, but the hills did take me a little by surprise. Between mile 24 and the turnaround at mile 28 was some serious rollers. I'm still happy with my bike split and was third overall on the bike.

Had I known it would be this hilly, I would have driven out to Clermont Florida to train more.

I did change into running cloths. Additionally I have a DonJoy offloader brace that takes a couple minutes to get on and positioned correctly.
The forth place bike did beat me out of T2 so he was currently 3rd overall at the start of the run. I wasn't worried about that at all. My goal was to just finish the marathon - I wasn't even thinking about placing.

Nothing. Took my time in T2 and felt relaxed when I started the run.

This was tough. Temp hit about 90 with some shade on the run. I liked the four loops since I got to see my wife several times on the run.

I wouldn't do anything different. Fortunately for me I had done lots of trail running prior to this race so running in the sand wasn't a big change for me. If you weren't used to trail running, this was a death sentence.

Walked around for 10 minutes or so. Grabbed an ice cold bottle of water. Had a recovery shake in the car and couple of cold beers when I got back to the hotel.


Training in the Clermont hills would have helped me on the bike.


I really liked the race. I thought HITS did a good job. It was pretty lonely for the Full athletes and I believe they said 17 DNF'd the full. There was a lot going on for the half finishers - music and such. When I came through the shoot it was just me and a photographer. No music and a volunteer here or there wandering around. I didn't really care about that because I was just doing this race for ME.
Even for the full athletes there were plenty of volunteers and lots of food/water/heed/coke at the aid stations (both bike and run).
I'm bummed that the swim course turned out to be 5K and I wish they had gone out to measure it in the morning since it had been crazy windy the night before.
But... I did the full for $250 and that's about 1/3 price of a WTC event, so I feel I got my money's worth. If I had paid full price I might have felt differently.