Saturday Sprint triathlon

This morning was a short sprint triathlon in the middle of nowhere Tennessee, well Pulaski, which is a town in the middle of nowhere.

Details: 200m pool swim, 16.7 mi bike, 3.1 mi run.

We started individually every 5 seconds and I started about 15th. I passed 2 old guys that shouldn't have started so early as they were slow and caused mayhem as traffic in the lanes. Water was very choppy with us starting only 5 sec apart. I gagged a few times and left just a little breakfast in the pool. Not fun, but I was out of the water in 3:11. Fast transition to the bike and rode what was 17.0 miles on my bike computer avg'ing 21.0 mph. The bike course had one really hard hill about 3 miles in that put me in difficulty. It took me a while to recover from that and get into a good rhythm. I didn't take the hills properly and need to work on racing up hills. We also had a few long inclines that had us all riding slow. I was passed by 2 guys on the bike, one of whom I passed easily on the run. The other guy I never saw again:(

The run was an out and back with NO water station! Fortunately it was in the low 60's when we started and I hydrated well, and I didn't crave water. Anyway, fast transition to the run (best so far this year), but I left on my cycling gloves. I didn't realize I had them on until I was heading out of the transition area and putting on my race belt (which holds my number). So I carried the gloves, no big deal. Actually good for wiping sweat. I paced one guy the entire run and he never got more then 30 yd ahead of me. Afterwards he said he kept looking back to see where I was. We ran basically the same pace, which was 7:00 miles. My max pace. I gave everything I had on the run and wanted to puke near the end, but didn't. The guy in front of me started a bit ahead of me and I beat him overall by 20 seconds.

I was the 11th overall male, out of about 70 or so (not sure exact number yet). I got 2nd in my age group with my time of 1:15:09. Pretty happy with it all. I would have won my age group if I was in the 20-24, 25-29, and 35-39 age groups!! One fast dude beat me, but the race was good.

See results at:
http://www.besttimescct.com/results/Monster07.txt

Lessons learned: take off cycling gloves with 1-2 miles left, learn to climb hills in a time trial better. My warm-up was good, but it took too long to get into a rhythm.