Tri the Parks - John Tanner State Park - TriathlonSprint

This was a very dissappointing swim. One of my athletes who is an incredibly fast swimmer was in my wave so I was planning to draft off of him for as long as I could keep up. That lasted about 25 meters or so and he was gone. Somewhere around the 150m mark I got a nice kick to the ribs/stomach area that caused me to swallow some water and knocked the wind out of me a little. I had to stop and tread water for a minute to regain my composure. It scared me a little since I couldn't breathe for a second, but after that the rest of the swim was OK.

Try not to get kicked in the stomach? In all the tri's I have done over the years that was a first. Better here than at Gulf Coast in two weeks.

No problems getting off the wetsuit. All of those people who yap about how geting off a wetsuit costs you the time you gained on the swim are either really poor transitioners or poor swimmers. I guarantee that the wetsuit didn't cost me anymore than 10-15 seconds in T1 and I am sure it saved me at least that much during the swim.

Nothing

I couldn't get my HR to come down after the swim. It was jacked up to around 168-170 the first few miles of the bike. To make matters worse I didn't reset my computer so I had no idea how far or how fast (sound familiar? I did the same thing last year at St A's). So I just hammered the entire bike, no one passed me and I passed quite a few people. I caught Jonathan at mile 9 and he hung with me until the end. Never did feel comfortable on the bike.

Get my HR down, crazy things going on HR wise during this race, hopefully just a freak occurance.

Slipped my left foot out of the shoe with no problem, then when I tried to get my right foot out the entire shoe popped off (I need new cleats), so I ran into transition with one shoe on and one shoe off. In and out with little trouble.

Get new cleats before Gulf Coast

I felt great during this run, I kept my cadence up and my stride short in order to have a good turn over. This is only 10 seconds off of my open 5k PR from earlier this year.

Push a little harder up the hill and try to have a sub 7 for every mile.

Got some water and cheered on the remaining athletes.


I think I was a little dehydrated and/or tired from this weeks workouts. My legs felt awful during the swim and I knew it wasn't going to be a banner day. That being said, its a C race and (hopefully) I made all my mistakes this week and will have a seamless race at Gulf Coast. I didn't post this on my log but here are my times that I was targeting vs actual time:

Swim-Target-10:00 Actual-11:55 (getting kicked probably didn't help)
T1- Target-1:00 Actual-1:11 (no big deal)
Bike-Target-30:00 Actual-31:30 (HR wouldn't come down after the swim, legs felt dead)
T2- Target- 50 sec Actual-51:48 (no big deal)
Run Target-19:50 Actual-20:47 (could have pushed harder and taken the big hill into account when figuring out targets)

Overall a B+ effort, somethings could have been better in the execution, lots of positives, fewer negatives.


Tri the Parks is a great series. They always put on a great race.