Doing way too good a job preparing for success in this event.

Went to the Shadow Cliffs park after work to attempt to pre-run the course. There are a few hills on it and I wanted to know how much to hold back if any to make sure I would be able to sustain a solid effort all the way through.

Googling for "pleasanton tri for fun gps" turned up this.



I printed it out and looked at it carefully to make sure I knew what was what in the sections where the loops overlap. During the run I checked the map every minute or two to be ready for the next turn, but I still took a few wrong ones. I should have noticed you can also view a satellite image version, like so.



That would have made it a little more clear which trail to take, as there are quite a few out there that run parallel to each other and at ground level the trees block your view of where they go. However, the run I did was essentially similar. The climbs were the same. The distance actually came out a bit long. 100 meters over a 5k is within the margin of error on the GPS anyway so I am not going to worry about it.

Here's what I actually did.



The real shocker was the pace. Unlike in the race, I wasn't warmed up already before the start, so as my heart rate picked up it felt like I started out too fast. But then I remembered this was going to be a much shorter run than usual so it should hurt a bit. Mostly the focus was on keeping up the cadence, remembering to breathe, and checking the map. Having decided to do the swim with a shirt already on (to avoid having to wrestle one on in T1) I did the run in my favorite rashguard. This also means I can put the heart rate monitor on before the swim and that's another thing not to have to do in T1.

Nearly 8:00 minutes flat per mile is pretty good for me. Heart rate was pretty stable low 170s once I warmed up. 180 is something I can maintain for about an hour, so if I push 170 on the bike I can probably up it to 180-185 for the run. That may mean a slightly better pace in the race. It is also possible I'll be more tired then and won't get the same speed for the effort. Or maybe I'll be lucky and a bit of fatigue will make me run looser. 25:50 was several minutes faster than I could have hoped.



Have I mentioned I'm looking forward to this?

Now all I need to do is practice putting socks on while my feet are wet.