Up at 5am, got dressed, packed the car and checked out of the hotel. Ate a bowl of fruit salad an had a Snickers Marathon bar, then swung through 7-11 for coffee and a donut. Event parking was over a mile from the start/transition so everyone had to haul their gear on their bikes.

Hit the lake for a bit of swimming but nothing formal.

The first ~200m was good old fashioned combat swimming. I got knocked around a good bit but eventually everyone spread out and found their own place. I managed to find myself a set of feet to follow for a while but I'm still learning to sit in the draft. The swim is advertised as a mile but it was probably a bit on the long side...it sure felt long. By the time I made the turn to head back to the beach I was starting to feel the heat build up and was definitely overheating by the end. I still don't know how to push myself on the swim like I can do through the rest of the race. Swimming is definitely my biggest limiter and this is where I lost about 3min to the leaders, which was about the margin to the winner when all was said and done.

Had a hard time getting the wetsuit off over my feet and that probably cost me a good 15sec.

Boring bike course but it was kind of cool to keep an eye on the comeptition as we zipped back and forth. After the first lap things started to get a little sketchy since there was a lot of slower traffic entering the course. There were several times when I was ripping down a long hill at 35mph and people would be riding down the middle of the lane or riding 2 wide. I had to get on the brakes hard twice to avoid taking someone out or bailing over the curb. I didn't have any guidelines for pacing with my PM for shorter races like this and the hills mad it a little more tricky. I didn't really pay much attention to the PM except to make sure I didn'[t hammer too hard on the ups. Normalized Power ended up being a bit under 90% FT and I guess I ran reasonably well so maybe I could have pushed it a bit harder.

Training in the hills would help. Running my 12-25 cassette probably would have kept me comfortably in the big ring through the entire course but the gear changes really didn't bother me.

Decent transition. After dismounting the bike you had to drop down a very steep grass/dirt bank into the transition area...interesting.

Run course was definitely short. The hills were brutal for a flatlander but I just kept chugging along. It felt like I didn't have a very good run overall but apparently it wasn't so bad compared to everyone else.

Took off back on the run course for an easy 15min jog.

Lack of training on the hills.

It's a nice location in general but the bike course is especially limited (4 laps) by the local community and the event parking is well over a mile from the transition area. the overall organization ws good and I think they made the best of what they had to work with.

Race Reports Modeled with Permission from
Endurancecoach's Triathlon Post Race Analysis Sheet.