The Tri for fun triathlon is billed as 400 meter swim, 11 mile bike, 3.1 mile run. After going through it, I think the swim and the bike (more like 10.4 miles) are short. They also kept referring to the swim as 400 yards on the PA system. My fellow Americans, yards are not the same as meters, they are shorter. But I think it was shorter even than that. The run was spot on. In a few ways the event challenged me more than I expected. The swim I expected would be hard, and it was, but not for the reason I had long feared. More on that later.
Here's the complete course showing all 3 sports. Click any pic for a larger version where you can see detail.
Expectations up front were
- 10-14 minute swim (plenty of time for a meltdown or two)
- 30-34 minute bike (18-20 mph)
- 27-31 minute run (9:00-10:00 min/mile)
- 3-5 minutes transition time
- 1hr10min-1hr20min total
Planned effort:
- 130-140 bpm swim (not sure what my max is in the swim but this is comfortable)
- 170 bpm bike (max on bike is 180, this should hurt a bit but is OK for 30 min)
- 180 bpm run (max on run is 195, this should hurt a bit but is OK for 30 min)
How it actually went down:
- Swim 9:54 (~40 min/mile)
- Transition 1 3:34
- Bike 31:04 (20 mph)
- Transition 2 1:59
- Run 29:44 (9:30 min/mile)
Today has been a long time coming.The day began at 4:30 am. The alarm went off and I woke up without being too groggy, loaded up my gear and bike in the truck and drank some water and toasted a half bagel and topped it with some peanut butter. If I ate that on the drive I'd still have about 90 minutes to digest before the race. Mornings have never gotten along with me, and most of that is because my stomach takes a few hours more to wake up than the rest of me. Days when I have to eat right after getting up are pretty hit or miss. The bagel was less palatable with each bite and I never finished it. This is a short event so I wasn't too worried. Looking back it may have actually been better to not eat at all.
Aside from doing something amazingly impractical like adapting to a schedule where I go to sleep at 6pm and wake up and 2am, I have no idea how to address these stomach issues and reliably be able to do organized races, since they are always early in the morning.
Arriving at the park it was a pleasant surprise to see that the two lane entrance road, which would have to accommodate cars containing 1000 racers, families, friends, etc. between 5:30 and 6:30 or so had a short line. Parked up quick, got registered and body marked. Volunteers with magic markers put your race number on one arm and one leg, and your age on the back of one calf. The former makes it easy for them to identify your corpse floating in the lake. And the latter makes it easy for your competitors to judge whether or not they want to take it personally if you are in front of them. After that I started moving my stuff to a transition spot. The spots convenient for short trips through from one sport to the next were all taken immediately when the park opened so I took a nice out of the way spot at the end of a rack where there would in theory only be one neighbor to contend with. While preoccupied with getting set up, I forgot to get my event t-shirt. So sad for me.
So. There are three things that have a proven record of being able to cap my performance below normal levels. Heat, dehydration, and stomach problems. The race was starting about 15 minutes after sunrise and the forecast was mild so heat wouldn't be an issue. Water intake had been good for the previous 24 hours, so no problem there either. It would all come down to whether or not the stomach cooperated. This was still an open question at like 6:30. That bagel wasn't going down without a fight.
In June I came to this event as a spectator to see how it all goes together and to help myself mentally prepare. That was a good idea but I still managed to overthink what was going on around me and screw up getting in the right wave of swimmers at the start. The waves were 1) Elites, 2) Women 15-39, 3) Men 40+, etc. and went off at 5 minute intervals.
They were limiting waves to 150 people at a time, and I totally misread how this would affect the schedule. My plan was to get in the water and warm up when the elites started, which would give me 10 minutes to acclimate to the water and shed some nervousness. After the first timers meeting I got my swim cap, goggles and earplugs, and turned on the Garmin Forerunner 305 and tucked it up under the back of the cap where it would stay dry and be right on the surface of the water, thus making it possible to get a GPS plot of the full course including the swim. Only the heart rate data would be missing from the swim, as the monitor's signal isn't strong enough to pass through water.
From the vantage of the warmup area like they had more than 150 elites and had to split them into two groups. I was in the water on the beach as the first wave entered the course, but never saw what looked like wave 2 (which you'd think would look distinctive, i.e. a bunch of women and no men) go off. So I thought they had split wave one into several parts, separated by 5 minutes, pushing my wave back. Plus the warmup area was full of women with ages like 28, 35 etc. marked on them. So, yeah, you guessed it, the men 40+ wave went off and I wasn't in it. Another wave after the Men 40+ went off and it finally dawned on me I had screwed up. By now I'd been in the water for like 20 minutes and was getting cold. Suddenly the idea of using a wetsuit in a 400m swim in a 72 degree lake started to make sense. It would sure make the waiting around more comfortable.
The last wave (number 6) allowed anyone in who wanted to opt out of their age group wave for some reason, so I went over and got in line for that one. The warmup area if nothing else had been a good place to spectate and you could see that at least one person in each of the early waves (even the elites) had abandoned the swim and been ferried back to shore by boat. At the time I thought maybe it wasn't a bad thing I was moving back to a less competitive wave.
Let's Race!25 minutes after the elites started, they sent us off. I pushed the start button on the 305 and jogged into the water until it was deep enough to swim, pushed off and started a crawl. It took about 5 strokes to run into someone's feet. I looked up and there was a wall of breaststrokers across the whole course. A few times I tried to shoot a gap but no one was swimming straight and folks were changing strokes. At the first buoy I nearly collided with a guy doing what looked like the dead man's float. So it was freestyle until I ran up on someone, then breaststroke to see where there was clear space. It was frustrating, I couldn't get into a rhythm at all and was not exhaling fully, which made it feel like I was holding my breath.
Honestly, all the swim practice I put in had made me a better swimmer than I needed to be. At least to finish. More practice is on order though, to build up enough extra ability to swim more aggressively around problems instead of getting stuck behind them. Coming out of the water I pulled off the goggles and cap and retrieved the 305 and was surprised to see the elapsed time still ticking in the 10th minute. That's why I think the swim is shorter than advertised. No way can I cover 400 meters in the pool in that time if I don't freestyle the whole way.
Here's the GPS track of the swim. The little pause symbols show where the roadblocks were extremely bad. The rectangular lines in the water are the recreational swim area that is a regular part of the park. For these events they put up temporary buoys farther out in the open water and have a flotilla of lifeguards on hand. Normally you aren't allowed to swim outside the roped in beach area.
This graph (click for larger version) you will see three times. Each with a different section highlighted. In this one, you don't see the heart rate during the swim, but as soon as I am up out of the water enough for the chest strap to be above water level it starts recording, and you can see high 160s bpm, which is way way too high for me for the swim. I think this is part of why I felt totally gassed for most of the rest of the race.
The transition area was completely blown up. Every other wave had already come through to get their bikes. After using a squirt bottle to wash my feet I put on socks and bike shoes, helmet, sunglasses and number belt, and popped the 305 into the bracket on the bike. Transition was a place where I expected I'd come out of the water a
bit flushed, but could catch my breath for a minute and start the bike fresh. when I actually got there it didn't feel like there was much oxygen in the air, if you know what I mean. I was breathing hard and the simple T1 tasks seemed tiring. My stomach felt kind of sour and tight.
However, I'd survived the swim! We were past the part that had held me up in a holding pattern in training for so long and it was still less than 15 minutes into the race. Normally when I run and bike it can take that long for my heart and lungs to get going so it was on with the rest of the plan.
Here's the transition area. You run out of the water, get your bike, exit on the road to the left, ride a loop out around the entire park, come back in the way you went out, park your bike, then run out the lower left to the run course on the park trails, and finish at the red dot.
Jogging out of T1 and jumping onto the bike the 305 said 14 minutes and something. Where did the last 4 minutes go? There's a quick, steep hill on the park entrance road and man there were a lot of mountain bikes in front of me. Unlike when my friend John and I pre-rode the bike course, there was pretty much no wind at all. Spinning down Stanley it felt like I had no power. Ideally here you'd be in the drops and pushing hard in a high gear here as it is straight and flat. It just inflamed my gut to bend down like that and it seemed like I was moving pretty slow, but people were coming backwards at me continuously, so I kept the cadence at 90 or above and pushed the tallest gear I could manage. At the maximum effort I felt I could maintain for 30 minutes my heart rate was about 165-168, about 5bpm lower than the target. After passing what seemed like 200 mountain bikes I was starting to pass road bikes and tri bikes, and was seeing people who had started 10-15 minutes ahead of me.
There was still that burning reflux feeling in my stomach but the effort was holding. Coming around the back half of the course it seemed flatter than I remembered. When we had the tailwind before on the front of the course, we had a stout headwind on the back that made a flat road seem like a climb. Today I made better time on the back half. Standing on the pedals up the little hill behind the park hurt but I got to the top before I popped and although it took a block to put any power down after that we were on the big downhill and it was into the drops to take some free speed, gut be damned. It didn't feel like I had come anywhere close to the effort on the pre-ride, and it was tempting to try and sprint it home to finish the bike to try and salvage some honor, but I still had to run so I spun it in. This probably saved my run.
Here's the bike data:
Into transition the second time and it was chaos redoubled. The formerly clear lanes between the racks were littered with helmets and shoes and all kinds of gear. My spot as last bike in the end of the rack was taken, and yet another bike was leaning on the outside of the end of the rack with its rear wheel smack in the middle of my towel and gear. Nice. So I scrambled around and found a place to park my bike and grabbed the bottle and 305 off of it. Ditched the helmet and glasses, topped off the bike shoes and stepped into the run shoes, snapped the 305 into the quick release wrist strap and headed for the run course. Had only managed a few sips of the bottle on the bike and kept it in my hand in case I got dry throat.
Here's the zoom of the run course: That road below the parking lots that bisects the lakes (sort of) horizontally is built up like a levee, so wherever the trail crosses it there is a quick climb and descent. A lot of people were walking the climbs.
Coming out of T2 I saw a woman with 41 written on her calf and decided to take it personally that she was in front of me. She was running my pace and it hurt a little to keep up, but that became my new goal. As noted above, there are a handful of quick up and over hills on this course, and one gentle climb and descent that take a minute or so each. Each time we hit a downhill I'd up my cadence and freewheel a bit (can you call it that if you do it with feet instead of wheels?) and let gravity speed me up, and this would slingshot me past her. She definitely saw the 41 on my calf and decided to take it personally and in each flat section she'd come huffing past me again. After about the 3rd time I said "just keeping you honest"while going by down a hill. She laughed and motored past me again down the next trail.
About halfway through the run my breathing started to feel a little more familiar, like my pace was finally matching the effort I usually put into it, and I started sweating for what seemed like the first time all day. At this point I stopped worrying that I was going to crack before the end, although I knew if I went any faster a very short fuse would be lit.
Having pre-run the course I knew the last half mile was mostly downhill and even though my body had clearly been telling me that my anaerobic zone was off limits today I still thought I could turn it up down the last hill and hang on for grim death to the finish line. Freefooting (you know, freewheeling, but with feet) down the hill I passed my nemesis and said "it's all down to the home stretch", and then began legging it. For sure I thought there was an attack coming back. A minute later it was through the finish chute in the classic data-geek fashion, with a finger on the stop button on the 305. She came across the line a few moments later and I gave her a high five.
Was very pleasantly surprised to see 1hr15min elapsed time. Shocked, you might say. Looking at the data later was fun, as the bike actually turned out as well as I could have hoped with a 20mph average. I didn't see another person doing close to 20mph the whole way. There was no drafting and I did all that work myself. The mismatch there between perceived effort and actual pace was most likely due to the lack of wind today, since strong winds had made the fast parts of the course seem artificially fast in the pre-run.
The run was a little disappointing considering the course is fairly flat. For that heart rate on a flat course I should have been about 30-60 seconds per mile faster. Even better would have been to hit my target heart rate, and go about 90 seconds per mile faster, but that just wasn't available today.
Here's the run data:
As for the transitions, wow, I don't know where the time went. But this was all just a learning experience today, so it's all good. Even the big scratch on the top of my bike frame that happened while I was out running is just going into the battle scar category.
What I would do different:
- Be more assertive at the swim start. Go with my age group wave and start about mid pack. I think my experience at the pool that a lot of people are slower than me now was not a fluke.
- Maybe recruit a buddy to come and one of their primary duties would be guarding the transition spot! It would have been nice to have some pictures too. And someone to maybe point out impartially that I should probably get in my start wave on time.
- Try something easier to digest for breakfast. Cheese danish was one of the few things I could stomach in the mornings back when I raced motorcycles. It might be better than nothing for these kind of races.
What I'll do before next time:
- More swimming. There's still a lot of room for my technique to improve a lot. There's free speed out there. Plus I could be better at sighting and swimming around people by feel.
- More bricks -- aka multi sport workouts. I think the way today went was a bit of a fluke, with stomach issues being the culprit and not the swim-bike-run, but some multi sport training days will answer that pretty quick.
