Race Report: Iron Babe

I decided to race on Saturday afternoon and was one of the last people to register. Seriously, registration ended at 5:00; I registered at about 4:50. The whole point of registering was to get in a smaller open water swim before doing Clear Lake next weekend.

As usual, I was nervous before the swim. The water had a bit of a chop to it (or at least I thought that it did). By far, open water swims are much better than the pool. Apparently, the participants in this race were pretty rough and there were a lot of elbows and people swimming over each other. As I heard people complaining about it afterwards, I remarked to myself that it wasn't actually that bad. I was glad that I didn't have to worry about the person behind me and felt like I could swim my own (slow) race. Towards the end, I finally just put my head down and did ten stroke intervals. The ten strokes turned into thirty and I was quickly out of the lake.

I do not mind the bike portion of the race at all. I had the bike adjusted on Friday before the race. At the beginning of the bike portion, I felt the seat move on the bike. Fortunately, it just moved along the bracket and there were no real problems. I now just need to figure out why my seat will not stay in the most forward position. During the race, I just tried to keep pace with those in my age group. I thought that the strategy worked pretty well.

The run was fabulous for me. Lately, I've been struggling on the runs; however, for some reason, I can't pull off a 10:00 mile for the marathon pace portion of a run but can easily run faster than that for the last leg of the tri. I haven't yet completely figured out how the garmin works in the multisport function. As such, I have no clue what my actual pace is during the run. It only gives me total time (including bike and transition) and total distance (including the bike). But, maybe that is why it is easier to do well - I'm not worrying about hitting a specific pace and just run.

Time: 1:17.32
Swim: 8:57.9 (no doubt where my weakness is)
T1: 1:36.6
Bike: 36:28.0 - 18.1 mph
T2: 2:05.6
Run: 28.24.1 - 9:28/mile

Age Group: 17/60
Overall: 128/362