The swim felt labored - like I didn't have my wetsuit sleeves pulled up enough and it was constricting my shoulders. There was surprisingly little bunching, but I was held back for about half a lap by someone who had put in the wrong swim time - always seems to happen in a pool swim.

This was a pretty fast transition given that I had my wetsuit. I was pleased.

The first lap didn't feel that great - I had a hard time getting into a rhythm. The second lap felt much better, however I noticed that my avg MPH was not what I was hoping it would be.

Not sure. I need warm-up time to really get comfortable and hit peak power on the bike, and in a short race like this there's not enough distance to make up for any warm-up slowness.

I took extra time to wipe my feet to ensure that I didn't have any pebbles stuck to the bottom of them, as I felt a pebble stuck to my foot for the duration of the bike leg. This would not be good on the run. It did slow down my T2 compared to last year though.

Not much.

I put in a solid effort - cranking it in the last mile + (downhill) as I had planned. However, on the uphill parts I was hoping to keep from going over 7min/mile but I wasn't able to do that. Overall not bad though - 4 seconds slower than last year.

Do some hill sprints in the week leading up to the race. I needed extra rest in the lead-up week to recover from my HIM the previous saturday, however, so that wasn't feasible.

So when they posted the preliminary times after the race, I saw that I was about 4 minutes faster than last year, and that I had won my age group (I did last year at this race). I was scratching my head about this because according to what I saw on my Garmin my bike and run times were about the same if not a little slower than last year. For about 10 minutes I just kind of accepted that there must have been something wrong with my Garmin and that I had, in fact, rocked this race. WRONG! It turned out they forgot to add in the swim times, so I was in fact 1 minute *slower* than last year and that I was 2nd in my age group, losing out by 10 seconds to the first place guy. Ugh - what a tease those initial numbers were!



This was a well-run race just like it was last year.