Stryka’s BodyBlog

I have been so excited about riding a fast bike in todays tri that when I woke up this morning to bucketing rain I was almost ready to go back to bed instead of racing. But I didn’t, I got ready and by the time I got to the beach the rain had eased to a light drizzle. The race was still on, I had already paid my entry fee, so I stayed and got ready.

By the time the race started the rain had pretty much stopped. The temperature was about 17 degrees C which is about perfect for the race, there was no wind to speak of but there was a fairly decent swell.

We started off and I eased my way into the surf, I don’t see much point in rushing too much at the start, would just mean everyone would swim over me and before we hit the first buoy. Today the swim was tough with the swell and on top of that my goggles fogged up so I had no idea where the far buoy was so I could only go off the main bunch which fairly quickly left me behind. Basically I zig zagged my way in the general direction. Although Today I only decided to quit about 5 times instead of the 10 last race. And each time I made that decision I pushed through that little bit further before all of a sudden I was only 15 metres away from the buoy, I only had to get around that and I could then swim towards land so I swam back out to it (I had gone off course again) and then headed for the beach.

Just as I thought I would never reach the sand my hand hit the bottom and without realising I was back in knee deep water. Another race without drowning.

I was sucking in some pretty deep breaths here and my transistion felt slow. I enventually got the bike off the rack and looked at my stopwatch, roughly 12mins had gone past. I was two minutes slower than my first swim. Need to learn to swim in a straight line The swell obviously accounted for some time too as did a very slow transistion.

Now for the real test - I have only had my cycling shoes for about a week and I haven’t gotten used to walking in them yet let alone run on the greasy wet road to the mount/dismount line. I hobble and I hop on the bike, again because of the road surface I gingerly take off, my intention was to really but the big power done out of the turnaround points but because of the road we have to really slow down to get around the turn and then it took a couple of turns to get full power out of the turn. I was dissapointed I couldn’t really get a good idea of how much improvement I had made since the first race because of the difficult conditions but I know I was faster and when I looked at my watch about 36minutes had elapsed. Average speed was roughly 30kms per hour including hobbling through the transitions trying not to slip over.

The run started well. It wasn’t the fastest ever 3kms I have run but it felt ok. And when I got towards the finish I picked the pace up a fair bit. I finished strong with a total time of around 48minutes. Roughly 30 seconds slower than the first but faster than the second and in pretty average conditions.

I am satisfied with this. Today for the first time I felt like I competed instead of just dragging my ass through it (well except the swim). I mowed down about 5-6 riders as if they were standing still and ran down another 5 or 6 on the run. I wasn’t last out of the water which was a race goal and I think that I should have achieved my other two goals of top ten splits on the bike and run. 

I am eagerly awaiting the official times  

Now to eat some more so I can get in a good weights sessions this afternoon

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.