This was my first wave start, and boy, was that a wake-up call. I lined up towards the back, and to the left to go wide around the bouy. Problem #1 - there was a rope with small little bouys attached that squeezed all the women together into a small group, and going to that first bouy, which was 1/3 of the swim, I never got to put my head down and take a front crawl stroke because of the massive amount of people around me, and feet in my face. And looking around, other people were having the same problem as well. After I got around the bouy, I was able to do a bit better, and after the second bouy, I actually had mostly clear water. Took long enough.

Figure out a better place to line-up, maybe even see if I can brave it and go more towards the front.

There was a long run up, which contributed to this longer time, but overall I just wasn't in a hurry and decided to take my time and allow my HR to come down some. It was in the 170s after that swim, so I needed it down.

The bike went okay, but showed why I really need to warm-up. I came out and did decent, averaging around 15mph. Not fast, but comparable to what I had expected. I was mainly disappointed that my legs weren't working on the hills, which is usually my strong point. It was around mile 13, right after the steepest hill that I had to granny gear, that my legs finally decided to work and I finally got comfortable in the aero position. My avg speed jumped up to 15.6 for the entire course, and I felt great coming into transition.

I really need to warm-up for at least 5miles before the race. Maybe then I will actually be able to race with good legs.

This transition went a little better. Still needs some work

This was one of my better runs. As I was coming out of transition area, I noticed that my time was 1:24, and it occured to me that I might be able to get in at 2:00, which would have far exceeded my goals for this race. I did the first 1/2 of the run really watching my HR instead of how I felt, which wasn't a good thing. When I hit the 2mile marker, I had 11minutes to get back in under 2:00. So at that point I said screw the HR monitor, and just went for it, and ended up coming in at 1:59. And I still felt great and like I could have kept on going.

Listen to my body instead of the HR monitor numbers. If I had listened to how I felt, I would have been a couple of minutes faster.

Walked around, met up with TexasMPGal, and met some other BTers.


Lack of warm-up, and paying too much attention to the HR monitor on the run.


Overall a good race, although the whole disco thing was a little weird. Fun, but weird. I didn't have many expectations for me coming into the race as it's my first one of the year because of injury. But I performed much better than I had expected. My initial goals were: swim 10-12min, bike 1:05 - 1:20, and run :35-40. I met every one of those goals, and was on the lower end of them. I went back and looked at my old race logs, and for the ones that were a 5K run, this was my second fastest ever during a tri. So I am making improvements here, but I still have a lot of work left to do on the run. (and other parts as well)