The swim actually went pretty well. My main objective was to swim strong but not worry about speed too much. With the snake style swim and the relatively short course there was not much to be gained by going overly fast. By about half way through the swim I caught up my stager with the swimmer in front of me. At that point I elected to slow down and just draft off of him. It was too congested to overtake and there really wasn’t that much distance left in the swim. Next time I do a pool swim with I triathlon I should probably get a little more aggressive with my estimated swim time used for seeding the heats. For the data in the swim I initiated the T1 timing as soon as I got done with the actual swimming and not when I later hit the timing mat. That was so I could get a more accurate estimation for my actual swim time.

Nothing

T1 was definitely slower than last year. However for this on I think I am able to chalk up a lot of it to rainy cold conditions and how I set up my transition area in order to keep my items dry. Fishing items out of the trash bag keeping things dry slowed things down a little bit. However, the biggest slow downs came from the new long fingered cycling gloves that I bought the day prior to the race. The way they are made my fingers kept getting caught when I was trying to get them on. The arm warmers was probably the biggest slow down. They are hard to get on in normal conditions but with me being wet coming out of the pool. They were really difficult to pull on. I probably should have moved my Garmin 910xt to the bike prior to putting on the sleeves since they seemed to get snagged on that as well.

The plan for the bike leg was to concentrate on keeping about 90 plus on the cadence and target a heart rate of 156-160. Additionally, we were trying to keep the heart rate fairly constant and not have too many spikes. Well with this leg I got things about half right. I forgot to look up the plan again prior to the race. I thought that the target HR was 152… with that I did pretty good furthermore I felt like I did pretty good on the cadence side. Maintaining the high cadence made a big difference going up the hills. It felt like I wasn’t blowing up and still passing people on the climb. Aiming for too low of a HR is probably why I was about 40 seconds slower than last year which was a little disappointing. The other thing of note was that using the arm warmers and long fingered gloves made all the difference. It was really cold out there and it wasn’t all that bad while I was riding. I was only passed once on the bridge coming back into town though I am not sure if I passed him or not on the climbs back into town.

Go at a higher effort level.

This went way longer than it should have. When I got off the bike I found that my feet were totally numb. I could hardly feel them. I did manage to get to my gear and start swapping over to my run gear. It could have gone faster but my socks after the bike were soaked and I elected to change into some dry socks. Tick… Tick.. Tick. I finally got out of there after almost taking a wrong turn.. tick… tick .. tick… This is why you familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the Transition area. I probably should have done a walk through before the race started.

For the run the goal was 90ish cadence and an effort that would result in a heart rate around 170. Actual cadence average was 88. I was even closer to 90 if you take out the last hill climb and the final push for the finish. The hard part of the run was that I couldn’t feel my feet until about the half way point. I focused on ended up focusing in on “efficient” form. I got the cadence and the stride length down but never really got my HR in the desired area. I kind of thought it would eventually catch up with the effort but it never did. The one aspect of the run that I was really happy about was the big hill climb at the end. My cadence dropped but I kept my stride the same and I just motored right on up that hill and passed several people in the climb. This year’s effort ended up being about 30 seconds faster. However it felt like a much more even effort.

Not much


Not much to report here. It was still pretty cold and the air was moist so my main goal was to get the heck out of there and head home as soon as I could so I could warm back up.


This is a great early season sprint tri with enough difficulty to keep it interesting. It is a shame that this is the last year of the race. Hopefully, someone else will pick up the race venue and host future races.