Swim endurance was good, but slow as hell. Was passed a number of times -- the swim start was pretty mixed up, though -- but handled the traffic well. Rather than take it personally and over-reach my current abilities, I just drafted as much as possible, found a clean place to turn/swap lanes, and tried to relax.

I don't think there's much I could have done better in the event itself. I'm glad I started where I did, because it was nice to have full-service on course, which doesn't always happen later in the day. But I missed WAY too many swims in the last month, and I need to get serious about getting faster in the swim.

One of my personal goals for this race was to reduce transition times significantly. Though I'm still not practiced enough with jumping on the bike or the flying dismount, I did attach the shoes to the bike, allowing me to run the bike out of transition. And I ditched the socks, too. Together these literally cut my previous race T1 time in half, which I'm very happy about. I did have a little trouble mounting the bike. Even after practicing a lot on the trainer, I kicked the right shoe loose getting on the bike, so I had to foot the shoe around to get going. It wasn't super pretty.

More practice with the mount and dismount on the bike instead of the trainer should help clear up the mount problems. I also need to work out the logistics problems with sockless running. Though I didn't run into problems with some runs at home beforehand, I ended up with nasty blisters. I need to do some research into how to handle this.

Since I can't see my HR on my wrist easily, I just pushed hard, backing off slightly when I was panting heavily or when my legs burned badly. (Tried to maintain a slight but sustainable burn.) Slowed down a lot for the U-turns in case there was any gravel there. Downshifted twice while coasting into them, then accelerated smoothly out. Backed off a bit, too, down the long final hill into the transition entry to try and bring HR down.

In hindsight, I feel like I could have pushed a little harder here, but I'm not sure. I'm getting better about understanding and interpreting my body's signals as to performance in the current stage, but I'm still not great at predicting the impact a particular performance change will have on the next stage (swim->bike, bike->run). Need to work on learning this from my coach.

Getting out of the shoes was much easier than getting in them. Though my bike exit was slow (no flying dismount), it was smooth and effective. I ran hard through transition.

Ironically, I spent about five seconds looking down thinking "Isn't there something else I'm supposed to do?" No, there wasn't. So more practice to clear this up. I'm also going to look into a better race belt. Mine is annoyingly difficult to get attached, but at least I can do it while running out of transition.

For the first mile, I tried to stay under 9:00/mi and settle in, but I didn't overly focus on looking at the watch. Instead, I ran what felt like the stride/cadence of yesterday's race-pace intervals and checked every now and then to assure I wasn't sliding up or down pace-wise. There were a couple of hills around the middle of the run, and I allowed myself to slow slightly on the hills if needed. I picked up the pace when it was easy on the downhill segments if comfortable. At the 2.5 mile point, I stopped thinking as much about conserving energy, and once in sight of the finish (~800m out) I opened up.

This felt like a good run for me. I wonder if I could have pushed a little harder.

I walked a bit. Ate my first pancake since 2009. It wasn't incredible.


If anything, I think I may need to learn to just press harder. I'm still figuring out what my body has to give, and at least some significant percentage of my performance gains come from simply learning that it's okay to hurt a bit more. That may be the case here.


Good food afterward. Lots of volunteers who were very friendly. Easy packet pickup. Very well organized. I feel like this was a good race for me, even having finished so low in my age group. There were just a lot of fast folks there!