First of all, I did not feel I had a good swim, but I didn't know how bad it was until I finally saw my time.

It was a wave start with approximately 50-60 guys. I edged my way to the first third and ran to the water at the horn. As soon as I dove in and dolphin kicked, my goggled fell down my face. I quickly put them in place and pressed them to my face and hoped for a good seal. No go. Kept leaking and when I looked up to site, all I could see was the sun. Not good. I let this bother me way more than I should have. After over 20 triathlons, I don't know why I was out of sorts.

I started chugging along, feeling the back of stronger swimmers leave me behind. I made the first turn and focused on relaxing and just swimming cleanly. After the second buoys, someone kicked my watch and I heard it beep. Did it pause? Did it think I was in T1? I contemplated what to do and ultimately decided to leave it alone. I was thinking about leaving my watch in T1 anyhow, so I don't know what I was distracted by this. I swam to shore until my fingers hit sand and then I exited the water for re-entry on lap 2. I peaked at my watch and saw I was in "transition". I left it and started swimming. On the way out, I was kicked again and my watch beeped. WTH! I wish I had left it behind. I looked up again to site and couldn't see, just sun. Since the swim exit was about 100 yards South of the swim start, the route out to the 1st buoy on lap 2 took a different angle. Normally I swim very straight, but I found myself off course a few times. Eventually, I made the turn right and felt more comfortable (for the final 300 meters). I'm not sure how much extra swimming I did, but my siting was not great.

I should have relaxed more. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong. My swim has been feeling good and I'm averaging about 1.40/100 in the pool in all my swim.

When I entered transition, I saw my wife (racked next to me). Her wave went off about 3 minutes before mine. I was expecting to have passed her in the water, but with my awful swim, I was not real surprised that she was there. She told me "you better hurry up" and then she left. I was a little bit cold. so I took the time to put on my arm warmers. They probably were not needed and it definitely slowed me down. I also put on socks, which I don't normally do for Oly distances. I finally got out of transition and ran with my shoes on (the parking lots surface is very rough, and with frozen feet, it's even worse).

Did not need the arm warmers...they took at least an extra 30 seconds to slide on.

As soon as you leave transition there is a slight incline to get out of the park. I got clipped in and prepared to go to work as soon as we exited the park. As soon as we turned right onto the main road I started pushing. I wanted to catch wife as soon as possible, and I did about 1 miles up the road. It was really nice seeing her and also knowing where she was on course, as I could watch for her. I really wanted to push pretty hard, because at this point I had no idea if the calf/leg was going to allow me to run. I did a good job of drinking my Infinit (one bottle in my fuelslage and one BTA. I took about 3/4 of a waffle at about mile 20.

One highlight of the ride was seeing a lady I recognize from years past. She's about 50 years old and rides the exact same Shiv as me. She wins her AG every year and normally passes me about mile 5 of the bike. This year, I was the one who passed her and I never saw her again.

At about mile 20, I realized that I had not taken any nutrition apart from the Infinit. Not sure I needed it, but I quickly gobbled up a Honey Stinger Waffle, just in case.

I pushed into T2 knowing that I had had a pretty decent bike. Since I didn't know what to expect on the run, I decided to speed through with a quick transition and get to work.

As I approached transition, I decided to take my feet out of the shoes to prepare for a flying dismount. I wanted my T2 to be much more "finished" than T1 had been (where I was a bit out of sorts). This proved to be a bad decision. My rack position was on the opposite side of the bike entry so I had to run all the way through transition without shoes. For some reason, this surface is extremely rough, so I ran gingerly. If I had run with my shoes on, I probably would have been a little faster and feet not hurting.

I can't think of too many mistakes I made on the bike. I rode pretty hard. I did not bomb the big downhills like I could have, but that is mainly because there was some course congestion and I did not fully trust the people in front of me not to veer off the course. I could have probably taken in the waffle earlier, but I'm not sure the timing was really off.

One final note: the course was in relatively good condition, however, the center line between the two lanes had a very large gap that has developed in the last year. This meant that moving to the left side lane was pretty dangerous unless you took a hard angle. Because of this, I was not as adventurous in passing as I could have been.

T2 went pretty well, except for the previously mentioned running on the pavement. I didn't save any time by removing my shoes and may have lost a few seconds.

I started off the run and had the usual tight feeling in the legs. It took me about a mile to get my legs under me. I like this run course. There are a few slight inclines, but nothing too bad and the winding trail provides decent scenery as well as a few crossbacks allowing me to watch for wife.

I was running at about a 9min pace for the first mile. I inched it up a bit for miles 2-3. I felt pretty good and needed to do something to increase the pace. At about mile 4.5 I decided to start running in intervals (similar to what I do in training sometimes, but not enough). I decided to run 1 min by watch "fast" and then recover for 1 min at about 9/min pace. My "faster" pace was in the low 7's. I did this until about mile 5:75 and then just tried to run hard to the finish. About .1 mile from the finish, my right hamstring "tugged". I thought I was going to cramp, but I slowed down a touch and it went away. I ran to the finish and felt pretty good about my race.



Good run for me.

I got my medal, water and quickly grabbed my bag (right by transition and put some dry clothes on. Then, I headed to the run course to watch for wife.


This would have been a PR race for me, but my swim was just awful. In mid race, I didn't feel great about it, but when I saw the results, I was very disappointed. Despite a good bike and run, my swim was awful and my T1 was below average.


I really like KC Tri. I think Ultramax always delivers a very good value, and run the race correctly. Nothing to complain about. The swag was nice, the course is fun and fair, (although it can get slightly congested on the bike course), they really do a good job on all aspects of the event.