My swim was slightly disappointing. In a way, I aimed to clock 36 min for the swim and it really started out well. Of all my triathlons thus far, this swim start was the best. I hit my rhythm fast and generally had very few problems up until the turnaround.

Problems all started at the turnaround. I turned around and my navigation went to all hell. Tupper Lake is known for it's glaring sun and now I can see why. The sun is just BEATING down on your eyes and you just can't see anything in the water. I had massive problems spotting the return buoys. It also didn't help that all the buoys were ORANGE. So in essence there was no way to tell if I was sighting off the return buoys or the out-bound buoys.

The advice mentioned by everyone was to spot off the smoke tower. For someone who's NEVER done this lake swim before, that advice is practically useless. But at least for next time, I know what I need to do to get this swim down. A really rough swim course though as well, as there were currents and all as well.

The next problem occurred about 3/4 through the swim when the wave following my group wave started catching up to us. This made the swimming much more difficult as people were literally piling on top of one another trying to get to finish beach.

Must sight better. Have to find a way to keep momentum, this swim should have catered to my strength.

T1 was fine. I took my time because I was slightly dazed from the swim but quickly got my wits. Shoes and Bike equipment were fine, no problem finding my bike, it was the only one left on the rack. I was practically last in my group! HAHAHA, BOPER is coming back!

need to move quicker. Need to have a sense of urgency in the transition areas. Quit messing around.

First 10 miles were warm-up. It sucks to get passed. It really god damn sucks to get passed badly in the first stretch of the bike. But it's the advice mentioned by everyone in order to prevent blow ups.

This course is no joke. Rolling hills, you're greeted with a pretty ugly uphill about 3 miles into the bike, it sure woke me up. The rest of the time the challenge was trying to gain enough momentum on the downhills to make it up the next hill. There were very few flat sections.

The first half had a general headwind. The second half also had some headwind but my time was significantly faster as my legs finally got around to actually competing today. It seemed like the way back has steeper uphill climbs but also faster downhills as well. Another problem I noticed was the heat was quickly rising. There were quite a number of people slowing down on the 2nd half (about 20 or so) of the bike... Those last couple of uphills really stunk. Stunk badly!

Can't take off the first 28 miles. I did feel as if I could have probably "gotten" into the bike segment earlier. But as was said, I was at the top of my Zone 1 and didn't want to risk anything this time around.

Also, nutrition is going to be an issue. i need to really evaluate how to set up my hydration system. I've tried front/back/down but need to make a decision as how I want to go about this. There were NOT enough calories consumed on the bike. I drank gatorade+carbopro and 1 GU and 1 Hammergel. In three and a half hours of racing, I had consumed only 500 calories.

Could have shaved another 30 seconds off if i didn't try to go to the porta-potty (was occupied) or look for my sun tan lotion.

Execution has to be faster, much faster.

Brutal. I never realized how hard a half marathon can be (and I come from a marathoning background). The run was sinister in everyway. I considered running my forte but now I can see why a good portion of the triathletes fear the running. The 90+ degrees for the run just made this a miserable experience. It completely reminded me of about a month ago when I did my Long Run in 90 degree weather and suffered a massive drop in performance during this time.

At the 7-mile mark, i clocked around 58 minutes. This basically means I slowed down in the 2nd half of the run. It's the first time I haven't been able to increase speed in a run in quite some time. But the drop in race speed was slight though, around 5-7 seconds per mile.

Some of the running was on trails (from mile 4 onward). This also meant insect issues. I completely forgot to arm my body with repellant but fortunately the unbearable heat acted as a natural shield from the critters. Unfortunately it also meant the heat was repelling me from running any faster. At around mile 9 or 10, there was this short yet intense hill that I jogged over. I didn't realize how SLOWLY I was jogging up this hill until I got passed by someone who was WALKING up the hill. I couldn't stop laughing to myself about this pathetic, yet humorous revelation...

As an overall theme, I never got my HR down to a manageable level. It was racing at about 160-170 BPM for the first 3 miles and even going to the porta-potty. HR was around 150-160s the entire time. At least I didn't blow up until I tried to pass some AG at the end. Saw two AGers with 0.5 miles left, passed one and ran out of gas trying to sprint the other one down. Oh well, next time I'll finish stronger!



Need to get some strides in. Need to completely work on getting the HR level down. While my first 3 miles were slow (around 9+ minutes), I have got to relax more with the run. It was over 10 minutes more than I wanted.

Also, couldn't get solid foods down. For the final 7 miles it was just gatorade as I could sense that any more energy gels and I might cramp up. Fortunately the Carbo Pro on the bike + gatorade gave me enough gas for the run...

None, got sprayed, cleaned up and jetted to get home.


Lack of experience. First Half Ironman for me. This is not a beginner's Half-Ironman type of course either. The swim is tricky. The bike is brutal, and the run was gut-wrenching. With exception of the bike performance, everything else was below average from what I expected execution-wise.


Great organization. The town is really into this race. I would do this course again in a heart-beat. It is definately not an easy race but we do the longer Triathlons not because they're easy, we do it because it's meant to be hard.

The carb pasta dinner was great. The post-race meal was ok though (somewhat disappointing with the selection of foods). But the BBQ atmosphere was fantastic after this event. But volunteers were abundant and were always making sure you made it out in one piece.