Cool Breeze Triathlon Race Report

Receiving my 1st place age group blanket

I won’t preface this with much, I’ll just jump right in to Saturday afternoon when I was getting everything together for the race.  I was getting my triathlon shoes out and found that the front part of my cleat had broken off (must have snapped off at the end of the duathlon earlier this year).  Unfortunately I didn’t have an extra set of cleats around the house, something I should probably remedy, so I had to take one of the cleats off my road shoes.  Unfortunately I had a hard time finding a Sharpie to mark the cleat placement on the road shoes, so this whole process ended up taking about 45 minutes.  Other than that getting ready went smoothly.

Didn’t sleep well, combination of still being on Cancun time and being excited/nervous for the race.  Eventually fell asleep around 1 AM, not ideal, but I’ve never felt the sleep the night before a race was critically, two nights before is a completely different story though.  Got up at 5 AM so I’d have three hours for breakfast to digest a little before the start of the race.  After my race day breakfast (bagel, sliced ham, and a banana) got my race clothes on, mixed my Infinit, and put everything in the car.  At this point I asked myself “What did I forget for this race?” it’s rare that I don’t forget something, usually it’s not very important, but there’s usually something.  I went through what I would need for the race and thought I had everything.

I ended up about 30 minutes later than I had planned (no shock to those that know me), but I had given myself extra time along for the other steps along the way so I knew I still had plenty of time During the drive to the race I found that I didn’t have a charger for my Garmin navigation, and of course it was very low on battery.  Fortunately I’ve been to this race location about 10 times and getting there is really easy and didn’t have any problems getting there.  While feeling around my car I did make a discovery:  the charger for my Garmin running watch, which I had been missing for a couple weeks.  I was pretty excited about this because it meant that I didn’t have to buy a new charger (yeah, I know it’ the little things in life).

Got to the race about an hour and thirty minutes before start.  Got another participant to help me pump up my disc wheel (which is a REALLY big challenge yourself).  Got my packet and the women who I was picking it up from said that they had to change my swim time because it had come up at like 4 minutes instead of 77 seconds (so much for lying about my time), but she said she looked at my past races and put in an appropriate time, which I was very thankful for.  When I started setting up my transition area and found what I had forgotten for this race:  my towel to wipe my feet off in the transition area (not a big deal).  Had time to warm-up a little on the bike and run (something I don’t always end up with enough time to do).

Swim felt good, I didn’t try to go really fast, but tried to be relaxed and smooth and use it almost like a warm up for the rest of the race.  The swim time they put in for me was good because I didn’t have to pass anyone, and no one passed me.  Got out of the pool feeling better than I have coming out of any swim, much thanks to Mark Privette for his help on my swim:  so even if I wasn’t any faster I was certainly fresher starting the bike than I usually am.  Had a quick, smooth transition, got on the bike, and started riding.  Felt very comfortable on the bike and powerful (unlike the duathlon earlier this year).  My average watts were around 215-220 through the first half, by the end it was almost 230 (without feeling like I was working any harder), which isn’t were I want to be, but was way better than the duathlon, and averaged about 23.5 mph (again, not where I’d like to be but pretty good).

Dismounted from the bike and was rushing to take off my helmet, ended up dropping it on the ground, had to back track and pick it up. . .oops.  Hung up the bike, grabbed all my run stuff, put on my Newton Running shoes and headed out of the transition area.  Went out fast but felt pretty good, wasn’t sure if I’d be able to maintain that pace, but there’s only one way to find out.  Felt like I was running fast but didn’t feel like I had any extra if I tried to pick it up (I guess I need to do a little more speed work. . .something to look forward to).  Near the turn around my small bottle of Infinit mix fell out of my pocket, and so I had to go back 5-10 yards to pick it up.  Shortly after that, right before the turn around a volunteer was handing out bracelets to ensure that people ran to the turn around.  Trying to grab it I ended up slipping on the wet grass and ended on my butt on the grass.  Even with these mistakes I was feeling good and had a really positive outlook.  Run continued uneventfully to the finish, no one passed me on the bike or run:  a really good sign for how I did overall.

One really nice thing that Set-Up-Events has added is to have live results scrolling on a large flatscreen TV, so that almost as soon as you finish you can see your time and were you’ve placed.  This is really cool that you don’t have to wait for them to print out the results (and is much easier to see than when they are posted on paper).  Finished in a time of 55:16, 5^th overall, and 1^st in my age group, all of which I was incredibly happy with.  After taking a couple minutes to walk around went back to the transition area and grabbed my Infiinit recovery drink and put on my Swiftwick compression sock.  Overall I couldn’t have been much happier with a race except for the small issues I had in the transition area and during the run.  Having such a good race will be huge for my motivation coming up:  for me there’s nothing quite like a good race to keep up/improve the training that I’m doing. 

Full Results