Swim went pretty well. This being my first tri, I was a little nervous about the Mass start. It all happened pretty quickly. Was still walking down the steps to the water when he yelled the 60 second warning and everyone kinda rushed in to the water.

Maybe I heard wrong, but I could have sworn during announcements in the morning, he said the swim would be counter clockwise. It wasn't, and really I wasn't too familiar with where all the buoys were when I jumped in. I decided I would just follow the crowd. Got bumped and jostled a bit but eventually made my way to the outside of the pack. My goggles were pretty foggy so sighting wasn't great but i was able to look up every few strokes and see well enough to make sure i was going somewhat in the right direction. I'm sure I lost some time, cause i ended up a bit farther outside than i would like on a few occasions.

When you take into account the time added for running to the transition, i was happy with my time.

Need to work on sighting better, even as I was swimming the course I was doing it more so based on people around me rather than actually knowing where the buoys were.

Took it pretty slow, definitely room for improvement.

Had definitely read a lot about this bike. I read a race report a little before the race that someone wrote, saying the first third of the race was the hardest and to push through that hard so that was my mindset as I started off. Felt good on the hills, and then had the great long stretch to really settle in as you approach the large hill around mile 21.

I hit the hill and was doing well the first half, but the moment came to switch into the lowest gears. I had had some trouble in the past with my gears popping off when I switched to the lowest set, but I took the bike to the mechanic the week before to make sure I was good to go. Unfortunately, I wasn't. Gears popped off in the middle of the hill. I hopped off, but couldn't get them back on the chain and was getting pretty frustrated. Finally I got them back on, but not correctly apparently, as they popped off again after a few seconds back on the bike. That happened 1 more time, before I finally got them on right and was good to. I think I lost around 7 minutes which was pretty frustrating.

Have to get the gear situation worked out. Still want to put more work in to the hills.

All the bikes were gone out of the row farther on the left (may have been used for the sprint distance) so changed how it look when I came back and ran into the wrong row when i first came in.

Not much, had a quick mental lapse when finding my area.

Slow run for me. When i jumped off the bike my legs felt great, but as I started to run my stomach started giving me issues. Really held me back the whole way.

Need to change up my nutrition plan a bit, hadn't really had this issue before but the sports drink consumption during the bike had me feeling iffy on the run.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the time for my 1st time - and it always feels great to accomplish something you set your mind to.

After doing 1 I definitely want to do more in the future. I have a lot of areas to make easy improvements on and I want to get under 3 hours.