I'm glad I did a lot of reading/preparing before this, because I was fearing this swim. My goal was to first make sure I paced myself then to make sure my form was good. I was going dead on but got bumped into a couple times by one dude on my left going crooked and then one person in front of me who slowed significantly.

The groups were relatively small so drafting didn't really occur, and the water was fairly calm so there were no waves. The buoys were large and easy to navigate.

Either swim faster or let people swim crookedly past me (or just be more aggressive ;-)... j/k).

It was awful, I was one of the slowest in this transition. I couldn't get the wetsuit off... should've practiced more. The big issue was I didn't step out of it, I tried to use my fingers to pry off the legs, ended up exerting a lot of energy, got frustrated, fell over and scraped myself up pretty bad, then the rest went fine when it finally did come off.

I made a last minute decision to put the shoes and socks on and trot to the mount line instead of doing that flying squirrel/strap in while riding nonsense.

Learn to take the wetsuit off properly.

I biked as hard as I could and was still getting passed, even on downhills where I was in top gear and in a good aero crouch people were still whizzing by me. I definitely need to improve on my biking.

The roads were ok, at times they were a little bumpy, traffic wasn't bad at all.

Get better with technique on the bike, get my gear shifter fixed too.

I decided to just unclip the shoes at the dismount line, then trotted to the transition area, took a little while to find my transition area, racked the bike, put on the running shoes fairly easily, and was off!

I'm glad for the lock laces and practicing getting my feet into them and running in them, it sped up my transition time a lot.

Find my transition area faster.

The feet were like blocks of ice after the bike, but the pace was solid and I was feeling good. Almost twisted my ankle a couple of times on the dirt road not paying attention.

Run faster? Honestly I felt really good about the run part.

Just walked around on the grass and chatted with fellow athletes, not much in the way of stretching (though I probably should've, even though I'm not sore right now). It was great talking to the other athletes!


The first transition area, my lack of bike skill.


The event was well organized (though I have nothing to compare it to since it was my first triathlon). After the race was nice: they had plenty of refreshments outside and inside there were warm drinks and fruit. The "goodie bag" that came at the beginning of the race had a lot of good stuff in it, the awards at the end were nice... I got a glass for finishing in the top 3 in my division!!! Though my division was only 4 people...