I was pretty happy with this swim. This is a personal best OWS pace for me. I tried to sprint out from shore to get away from the crowd, but that was nearly impossible because there were so many people in the water. I have to say that I prefer single gender waves, but oh well.

Nothing really. I never felt like I got into a good groove on the swim (and certainly didn't draft) because it was a short course with a lot of people on it (waves of 50 spaced 2 minutes apart), but I'm not sure what I could have done to help that.

Like last year, it's a pretty long uphill jog from the beach to the T area. I had some trouble getting my wetsuit off of one leg, but not terrible.

Practice getting that wetsuit off in a hurry. It often gets caught on my timing chip, so I have to practice yanking it off hard enough to clear the chip.

I was afraid I would lose time on the bike compared to last year, and I was right. I haven't spent a ton of time on the bike in training, for one thing, and also, last year I rode a hybrid which is geared lower and better for hills. I wasn't too much slower than last year, but this is where the difference was in my overall time being about a minute slower than last year's. Also, there was a pretty good headwind for the last couple miles which didn't help either.

Cool though--I was in the last mile of the bike course and got passed by Chris Legh like I wasn't even moving. He was flying!

(As an aside, both this year and last, my bike computer had the course at closer to 13 miles than 12, and two other racers in the T areas were saying the same thing, but the official course distance is 12 miles, so I'm using that. UPDATE: After reading all the other reports from this race, it seems to pretty much be the consensus that the bike course is actually almost 13 miles, so it's not just whiny me. :) )

I MUST find more hills to train on, and then I just need to ride more!

Fairly straight forward transition. No real issues.

Still need to get speed laces. I actually bought them the other day, but didn't want to use them for the first time in a race. Next time!

I was hoping to get around 10 minute miles, and ended up with exactly that. About 5 seconds slower than last year's run, but the fairly strong wind off the lake more than accounts for that, I think. It got passed by Natascha Badmann in the first half mile of the run. Very cool to have pros on the course.

The best part of this whole run is that I didn't feel the IT band one bit. Not one bit! Woo hoo!

Keep working on the evolution running stuff. I think it's helping, albeit slowly

The usual nothing. I really should stretch, but I never do. I'm always just dying to find some water.


Bike training


This is a fun, well run, challenging race. I'm disappointed that I added time and dropped in rank compared to last year, but that just means I'll have to go back next year and do better! :) So nice to see all the BTers!