This time last year I did something really stupid: I attempted doing a sprint tri the weekend after I ran the San Diego marathon, which was my first marathon. NOT A GOOD IDEA.
Most agree that it takes your body at least a couple of weeks to recover from a marathon. Combine that with me not doing much training for a tri, and it became an interesting day. Common sense would suggest that I'd be in great shape after a marathon and should have no problem with a 1/4 mile swim, 11.5 mile bike ride and a 3.1 mile run right? Well....not so much.
Last year's swim was a horrific 16:57, bike was 32:46 and run was 27:28. With transitions, total time was 1:22:49, which was good enough for 322nd place, out of ~405. Not so great....
Fortunately, this year was a totally different experience. Gotta love starting the season with a 1/2 ironman - everything else seems much easier - Kinda like doing a 5k after a marathon - no big deal - just go REALLY hard the whole time. Today was a 9:39 swim, 30:23 ride and a 25:12 run, totalling 1:08:37 with transitions. A MASSIVE improvement to say the least.
Two things of note: 1. They changed the bike course and shortened it a mile, which explains some of the bike split being faster. 2. Even though I took over 8 minutes off of my swim, my swim time was still second to last in my age group.... Ughhh....Must get better at swimming.
I probably could have saved a couple of minutes on the swim with no more effort. I wasn't paying enough attention, and I let the current pull me 50 yds or so past the bouys, so I spent most of the swim working diaganolly back in, which probably added a minute or two.
The astouding thing today is that I placed 166th overall, out of ~405...again, MASSIVE improvement.
Overall, I couldn't be happier with my results today. It was an almost perfect race. Next time I'll definitely sight on the bouys a bit more, and make the first turn a bit tighter, and hopefully my swim times will fall into line with my bike and run splits.
Tomorrow I plan on doing a group ride of 30 or 40 miles and the morning, and doing an ocean swim in the afternoon - good way to end week 1's training :)
3 comments:
CONGRATS on such a fantastic improvment! WOW! I hope I do that much better at Danskin.
I just saw the new pictures. They are GREAT! My race pictures usually have me looking worse than I felt, but you made it look easy!
Thanks TEA - I was very pleasantly surprised that all three pictures came out well. Usually my race pictures look HORRIBLE!
Not sure how easy it was - my heart rate was above 175 for the whole race, and topped out at 209 at the end of the run when I sprinted for the finish line. So much for the 220-your age theory :)
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