This swim felt pretty good, although I caught myself pushing a little too hard in the beginning. Anytime the national anthem is played, I get a little emotional. Especially since this was the "Vet's" triathlon. I wish more events would take this on as standard practice.

This was the first swim that I crawled over two people on two separate occurrences. I just completely swam over one guy doing the breaststroke, and another was treading water to catch his breath. I appologized to each and kept going, felt kind of bad though.

Unless I dedicate more training to my swim skills, I can expect similar results every time. I ran up the hill after we exited the water, so I dont know what else I could do with this leg of the event. I exited the water around 7min30sec, so the extra 1 min was runtime.

This was a straightforward T1, no surprises. Had a little trouble finding my rack, but not enough to cause any delays. I rode this bike leg without a shirt, so this saved some time in transition.

Mark the isle side of my rack. Everytime I set up I tell myself that I will remember which rack I am in. I even counted racks, but still ran one past it. Easy enough to fix....

I pushed really hard on this one.....only I made a very stupid mistake. I filled my bottle with Powerade but didn't dilute it with water. Powerade by itself is too strong for me to drink "straight" at high effort levels. I usually cut it with water, but somehow thought I would be OK with the as-is concoction when I was setting up. Yeah right, after mile 7 I "vurped" some of it back up. Couldn't really hydrate too well after this happened. In spite of my stupidity, I felt strong on the bike and passed several people.

Train with water, race with water. Pretty simple but somehow so difficult...

This was the worst part of my race. I felt really strong entering T2. Found my rack and ripped my helmet off. Bike shoes came off easily, then trouble hit. I placed my socks on top of my shoes when I setup. I leave them partially turned inside out so I can get half of my foot into them and pull them the rest of the way on. When I arrived during the race, only one sock was remaining where I left them. So there I stood with one sock on looking dumbfounded at my other shoe (where the sock was perched earlier). So I think, "I can just do without socks as its only a 5k". I ripped the one sock off my foot and put my right shoe on without a sock. No way did that feel good, so I had to take the shoe off and dig out an extra sock from my bag. Once I got both socks and shoes on, I was actually mumbling to myself, "this is bad...this is bad." Great motivation eh?

It turned out to cost me about 26 seconds extra compared to other T2s in the past.


1)Tuck socks into shoes, dont just lay them on top of the shoes.
2)Wear socks during bike leg of the race
3)Pack a baseball bat in my T2 bag so I can whoop whoever unintentionally scatters my gear.

This just plain hurt. I think I was underhydrated coming off the bike, plus my mental state was shot after a poor T2. I knew this was going to be a struggle and it was. My left calf muscle was still tight from last week and I had to really slow things down to pull it together. I knew that if I could segment the remaining 3miles into small goals I would make it in a reasonable time. Run slow for 25 steps then slowly pick the pace up, trying all the while to maintain cadence.

This was definately a challenge and I started to feel great after mile 2. With about .5 miles left, this kid was trying hard to root us on. But he said something like," you need to be the tip of the spear thrusting through the competition.......so you may be the handle right now, but you are still part of the spear." The guy behind me just chuckled. What a dorky/insulting thing to say to a couple of age groupers in obvious pain. Oh well, he was still out there volunteering which is better than the alternative for a kid his age.

I finished with a solid sprint/kick for the last .25miles.

Hydrate and not try a race in a new pair of shoes. Oh, and add bricks to my workouts....common sense prevails once again.

1)Tried not to puke on the girl who was handing out medals (seriously)
2)Walked down to the lake and tried to cool off while stretching
3)Drank copious amounts of water


Hydration....gotta be smarter than trying to drink something I knew would be a problem. Losing 26 seconds in T2 really put me in a funk at the start of the run. Really came close to my goal of 1:10, and improved my time by 30 seconds from last year. I guess it could have been a 1min improvement without the T2 incident, but still a solid effort. Even with that I would have had to take another 2minutes off my time to place in my AG which was my "stretch" goal.

I had fun and pushed myself....what else is there (besides placing)?


I really enjoy this race and the people who attend. Every year it seems that I meet friendly folks at random.

I wonder if they will add an Olympic distance next year? It would be a good course for one....