Managed to maintain a reasonable pace, actually in the 9:25 range for the first two, two and a half miles. Eased off to walk through the water stop about a quarter mile from finish, worried about pace and what it'd do to me on the bike, and that slowed me down.

Not much. Tough not to go out too hard when there's not that many in the group.

Fairly quick, especially considering a futile attempt to squeeze cherry-flavored ice from my frozen water bottle into the bike bottle, with very little success.

Have a full bike bottle already on the bike. Which means not freezing your sports drink the night before, you nimrod.

Did better on the bike this year than last, and broke an hour for the distance. Climbs were still slow and painful, but I felt stronger than I recall feeling last year, so they didn't seem to take as much out of me. Official race time shows I spent an hour and 40-something minutes on the bike!! Not sure what's up with that, especially since it didn't screw up my overall time, which agreed to the Garmin.

Tough bike course for me, so not too much.

Didn't have time to get my feet out of the shoes before having to dismount. Then had a little difficulty racking because my rear wheel got tangled with the handlebars of the bike next to mine, a Cervelo...sweet bike, obviously belonging to someone much faster.

Get my feet out of the shoes earlier.

Brutal, as expected. Knew I'd be slow after the ride, but ended up worse than expected. Became a mental slog about halfway in, with a lot walking.

Wasn't adequately trained for this distance, so that's probably the main thing. Hadn't had a lot of opportunities to run off the bike this season so far.

Walked around until I got my breath back.


Overall conditioning


Nice little local race and a great early season test of fitness. Pretty small turnout this year, but those who showed up were pretty freakin' fast.