The swim felt great, and my injured shoulder did okay. I'm a smidge slower than when I can swim at 100% effort.

Not much, except put more effort into drafting.

This time is a guess based on the other people since sbtiming didn't get it.

The bike course was bad, and not safe, except on a slow beach cruiser without a dense crowd of triathletes. The route used two-lane narrow jogging paths and was quite crowded with sprinters and the two-loops of long course cyclists. Everyone I talked to witnessed a crash. I saw one right out of t-1 when a guy's front wheel went off the asphalt onto the gravel.

One could only pass safely by waiting for an oncoming gap and pulling into the opposing narrow lane. The gaps were often small and rare. A few people were way too aggressive and constantly passed without reasonable clearance. With the normal range of athletes, you had to stay on the hoods and go slowly waiting for safe times to pass. It was safe to be on the aerobars maybe half the time. Most of the fast times had to have required unsafe passing.

There's no way to consider this a meaningful bike leg. Since I was in the last wave, I went 18mph at first, then 19 once the course started to clear. The fastest guy went 20, and there's no way to know if he passed safely and rode like Greg Lemond in between gaps. I'd normally go about 20-21 on a safe version of this course, and the fastest guys would have gone 23-24. The uniformly slow times say how bad it was, and slow even for the people who were dangerous.

This route isn't acceptable, at all, with this many athlete in the course.

All this said, tris aren't always about making the podium, (which I missed by 1 spot! ;) ) and I did generally have a blast, and was relieved that none of our people crashed.

The race was an easy effort since the bike pace was slow, so it was just a Sunday cruise. It was lots of fun to hang out with friends and cheer our people on the run course.


Thinking back, the only major mental effort was to focus on bike safety. Here are the results: http://www.sbtiming.com/results/goleta/goleta_aqua_2013.txt