Subject: RE: Distance for 1st tri? The first race I ever signed up for was a sprint. I signed up in March for a July sprint (Toronto Triathlon Festival, 750m/20k/5k). When I signed up for the race, I was on the couch end of a couch-to-5k and had not been in a pool for fifteen years. In the past year I'd gone for a 20-mile bike ride two or three times, and had some shorter rides, all on my trust hybrid. The one thing that I had going for me was a substantial weight loss in the previous six months from diet and dedication to the elliptical trainer, but it's fair to say that I was less prepared for triathlon than the OP. After about two weeks of training, and reading a lot about the sport, I decided that I wanted the sprint to go smoothly, so I registered for a sorta-local try-a-tri (400m/10k/2.5k) in early June . I am super-glad that I did. I learned a lot about the swim (wetsuits make a difference, murky water means you have to rely on proprioception and not vision to control your stroke, sighting is a skill that must be developed, etc.), about the bike (it's easy to work to hard when you're busy thinking "I just want to pass that one person ahead of me" all ride -- in my case there's always going to be "that one person ahead of me") and about the run (I have no intrinsic sense of pace without my watch). Let's not even speak of transition zone setup. Jonathan, your experience is going to be different, but I guarantee that when you complete your HIM, you're going to be thinking: "I am so glad that I did that Sprint a month ago, because without it, I wouldn't have known to ________ and today would have been a little less awesome." |