Pleasant Prairie Triathlon - International Race - TriathlonOlympic

With a grand total of zero swims since Spirit of Racine my plan was just to go out and swim easy or what felt easy, trying to think about making each stroke good.

About 300 yards into the swim I thought "Holy Crap" I was squarely in the middle of the pack (was expecting to be toward the back. Lots of rubbing but was feeling pretty good.

Made the turn for the back stretch and realized that sighting into the sun was going to be difficult and infact drifted off course quite badly. I realized it and bridged back to the group, not losing much time. about his time I realized a couple things I was hot and getting hotter and my goggles felt like they were going to squeeze my eye out of the socket (not comfortable).

Finally made the last 3rd and final turn bouy and things were not going well I was super hot, my eye was coming out of my skull and now my stomach was starting to reject all that I had done to it earlier in the morning. I slowed waaaay down and actually threw up a small amount a few times.

I promised myself at this time that once I got to the bike I could quit, but I had to get there.

Nothing new on race day, it seems obvious, but his was almost a real disaster. Training more could be worth something. If the water is warm like that think about going without a wetsuit.

I trudged out of the water, got my cap off, goggles off and wetsuit pulled down. I then simply walked back to my bike, people were flying by me left and right, About half way things started to feel a little better and I decided that I would continue on.

The only thing I have done since Spirit of Racine was get some decent bike riding in, for some reason that has felt good.

With that in mind, my plan was to go out and hammer the bike and whatever happened on the run would be fine.

I went out and killed it really not a lot to describe here, held very steady power at 194 pnorm, would have liked to have seen that about 10 watts higher, but I think the start, turn arounds and a couple forced zeros brought it down along with the IF up.

As I was finishing my second lap the volunteer was yelling "olympic to the left" and so I went and did a turnaround and started what would be my third lap somewhere I realized that I had missed something and I needed to turnaround. I added about 2 miles to the bike course this day, which is fine I was loving it on the bike.

You gotta know the course, its just that easy. Had I not done two extra miles I would have been 5 minutes faster pretty easy, 5 minutes is pretty hard to take off anyone of these events.

I got back to transition and there had been a complete yard sale, I needed to move two bikes so that I had room to put my bike on the rack, probably threw a minute away here, if I was concerned about time this would have really pissed me off.

At races where there are not assigned spots, it is probably worth while to stay away from super crowded rack spaces so that you can just get it done.

With very little running in the last 4 weeks my expectations were not very high for this part, also I had just given a pretty good effort on the bike.

A fun little addition to my day was that my Garmin came on and said data full, so there are no records of what transpired.

Hit the first mile at around 8:30 pace, roughtly what I wanted to be doing. Same for the second.

Third mile and the day fell apart, slowed down to somewhere around 9:30s and continued to get slowere from there, taking some pretty major walking breaks. Trying to get some gatorade down and water over my head to get cooled down.

This was a miserable run and I am not sure that the fun of riding hard out weighs the price on the run.



If I was doing this as an A race I would really want to think about a pacing plan from bike to run. I would also want to put a little more than 6 or 7 total miles per week running together.

layed on the grass with some cool towels gatorade water


Lack of training, trying new things, poor race plan

Upon getting my stuff put together I realized that I had also maybe drank about a quarter of my nutrition on the bike, it was really pretty amazing that I was as well of as I was.


As I sit here thinking about this season of racing (it was fun to be back at it after a year off) and looking towards next year, this is a distance that I find very appealing. While it is possible to get through it on very little training, it is also possible to get pretty good at it with the training that I am capable of putting in (as opposed to the HIM which is still mostly about finishing).

Next year I might try to work solely on this distance and see what I can do. I feel like had I shown up in the same shape that I was in just a month ago did all the proper race prep a 2:30 would have very easily been in the cards, which puts me into the top 1/3 of the race. With another season of work who knows.