I did my first sprint tri today. it was definitely a rough day at the office. first off i realized that i was most likely the largest guy there today and i noticed a couple of questionable clydes as well. i say that because they kicked my butt..... BAD
The race consisted of a 300 yard swim in the pool, 9 mile bike ride, and a 3 mile run. i will not have the exact numbers till Thursday of my exact times. The swim went so so. i ended up having to swim through a log jam. then the guy that was in front of me was holding me up but from over taking so many people left me a bit beat up so i stayed in his wake. finished the swim in about 6:45 which is a minute slower than what i would have normally swam.
The bike went good but not great. the temp was in the 50's. i usually perform much better when its 65 and above. i did learn one valuable lesson. it didn't click why it is recommended to put some Vaseline on the tip of the saddle. turns out that since i forgot that bit of advise, every time i stood out of the saddle to climb it was like my tri suit was sandpaper and the seat nose wanted to grab my suit off. the 9 miles went good, passed a bunch of people and ate both gels i taped to the top tube. the one bit of advise i actually listened to is tape the gel to the top tube so you can rip the top off and you won't have to use your teeth. i finished in 29 minutes. not horrible for not riding the course until today. so i am still happy but a bit beat up still.
The run is where everything went bad. OK not really. my standards may be a bit too high for this early in the cycling season. i was expecting to do the run in 36 minutes. it resulted in 42 minutes. i was spent in the run so i ended up instead of the sustained run i expected, to a constant walk run. my motivation to keep trying to run the next section was that i passed fellow clydes and wanted to be sure they didn't pass me back.
i do not know my exact time i crossed the finish line but was about an hour and 20 minutes or less. i was shooting for sub hour ten minutes. i think the first place Clyde finished right around sub 1 hour. i think i ended up finishing 14th in my division and around 140th place over all out of a couple hundred people. only winning is fun, but i still had a great time today so I'm happy.