The water quality in Lums park was horrible. Having never swam there, I was totaly unprepared for the murky mess that the lake was. I literall could not see 12 inches in front of my face. It made drafting very difficult. To add to the visability problems, the return leg of the swim was directly into the morning sun so I couldn't see anything even when I pulled my head to try to sight. I didn't see the swim exit until we were about 50 feet from the shore. Even walking in the lake was a challenge. It seemed like you would walk five steps and suddenly sink two feet into the mud at the bottom.

The transition area was a quarter mile from the swim exit.

The flatness of the course seemed to lull me into going faster than I should have until I just got that god awful quad burn. The course was relatively flat amd it kept burning the same muscle groups for the entire ride. It never gave you a chance to change effort. I caught myself hoping for the hill of the bridge because it would at least allow me to change position. In retrospect, I definitely went out too hard. I wasn't watching my effort early on and got caught up in playing tag with a couple of riders before I finally let them go at about mile 20. I went over the Bridge on the way out and kept pushing the pace until about mile 30 where the effort seemed to get much harder. At that point I went from doing a lot of passing to just trying to hold my place and finally to trying to limit my losses. I kept up that struggling until about mile 45 or so until I consciously backed off a little and tried to recover. That seemed to work because I was able to pick up the pace a little and to resume catching people from mile 50 on.

Go out slower. Use a more measured race strategy. I didn't record my bike mile splits but I rode the first half of the race at about 23 mph and the last half at about 20 mph.

My legs were shot when I got off the bike. I literally couldn't run from the dismount area to the bike rack so I just walked the bike in.

Hot. We had a slight tailwind for the first six miles which definitely kept the run very warm. Since I had struggled through T2, I knew the run was going to be a nice long stumble through the dessert. I resorted to a run walk strategy early and walked for 30 sec. every mile. Once we turned around, I started to feel a little cooler from the headwind. I still walked the two slight hills and all of the water stops but I felt a little better than I had thought. The last mile was probably my best mile and I was able to hold a decent pace for that mile. The only bright spot on the run was that I didn't really hurt (from previous injuries) at all so it looks like I'm finally over the disasters in august.

Given that I had blown up on the bike, I'm not sure that I could have done much differently on the run.

Pacing - I think I blew my race during the first 40 miles of the bike.


I enjoyed the race and thought it was reasonably well run. While I didn't like the swim course, I'm not sure that they could have selected a better swim location given the limited number of places to do an open water swim. That said, I think another water station on the bike would have been nice. Additionally, it would have been nice to have the following at at least a few of the aid stations on the run(maybe even just the aid station right before the turnaround): sponges, ice, and some type of food (pretzels?).