Wow. The swim just plained sucked. I'm a slow swimmer. I lack confidence in the water. And I have serious problems keeping the water out of my nose when my head goes under water. Combine those factors with the pool swim, where I can't seem to keep deal well with the narrowness of the lanes and you get some bad results. Like . . . I totally panicked! I had to flip over to a backstroke in the first 100 just to catch my breath!

Ended up getting slightly better the rest of the swim, and I'm determined not to let my fear and swimming inadequacy get the better of me. My next pool swim start WILL be much better.

Practice practice practice. And will definitely be practicing the under water under rope technique before the next version of this race in a few weeks. Maybe I'll prefer OWS???

Took my time, more to get my breather under control than anything, and to get my long sleeve shirt on (it was COLD out there) and some gloves, as I was worried my fingers would be numb coming into T2 if not.

Okay, I know it's a product of my lousy swim, but if I'm proud of anything from this race, it's the fact that I passed 20-30 people out there, and NO ONE passed me!

The course was moderately to significantly rolling, but I thought it was quite fun. A couple of tight corners that I handled with reasonable speed, and otherwise just a nice route out into the Kentucky countryside.

And sure, I was passing some fat tires and the like, but more than once I passed a skinnier guy on a much nicer bike. That's gratification.

Took it easy for the last half mile, and a non-flying dismount. I think the volunteers thought I was really winded, but instead it was back pain that would allow me to straigten all the way up for a few seconds.

Not much. For my first outside ride of the year, I'm very satisfied with the results. I was just one minute away from being in the top 5 in my AG!

I'm still slow, but I seem to be getting incrementally faster with each passing month. It will be fun to see what happens with bike pace once the half-marathon training is over and I can up the number of bike sessions.

Pretty quick (for me) here, but had to change shirts (from long sleeve to short sleeve), since the other shirt had my bib on it.

Wow - they were really cruel. It's an out and back on the trails in the park, but place on the return leg with a little over a mile to go was a killer hill. Actually, from the turnaround to it was all uphill for about .75 miles.

I wasn't expecting a killer 5k time or anything, as I've been training more for volume than for speed, but I'll take the results. Not bad for me.

In fact, it's the fastest 5K time in several years and 7 sec/mile from my PR - okay, that makes me much happier with the run.

Maybe even push it a bit more - it's a race, right? Shouldn't I have been nearly puking at the end?

Got a banana and some water, and started packing things up. Wanted to hurry home to the kids.


Body weight? But I'm getting better (and slowly thinner) - don't have much to compare to yet, but I equalled or bettered my prior tri results.


It's just a nice semi-local race with a small field.

Look, the swim sucked, but I take that as a challenge, and I'm actually excited to hit the pool tomorrow morning.