Pic Spocket

While I did finish my first triathlon race last Sunday, I had a bit of a bad aftertaste in my mouth because of the way I behave during the race, as described in my last post. I really wanted to redeem myself with the next race. Time or position is one thing, but that is not what is important for me. What I wanted, is to feel I did what I could and be proud of my performance. I definitely lacked determination in my first race.

Therefore, despite the fact that it was a bit too close to the previous race, I headed to the Triceratops TRI in Brighton Michigan, only 3 days after my first race. That race was in the evening after work, a better match with my training sessions.

I have to say, when I got there, I almost chickened out and turned around. The temperature was crazy hot: over 35 deg C (95 deg F). But what scared me a little was the swim again. In Leamington, the course was a triangle, so that the bueys did not look to be far from the shore. In Brighton, this was a single round trip, with the buey at 400 m from shore… However, the lake looked awesome, with a nice sand beach surrounded by trees. So I decided to man up and registered anyway. There was many more competitors than in Sunday‘s race (250 compared to 76).

Overall, I am very happy with how I did. I performed better in all aspects: I was faster in all 3 activities than Sunday. Here are the official preliminary results:

>>>http://www.tguertin.com/pub/blog/raceresults/090624_tri_triceratops.htm#35Male
       (#10 of the 35-39 Male group)

It seems I was one of the only participant that the timing chip did not work properly. I had my GPS data logger with me, so I do have the times for biking, transition 2 (T2) and the running. Here are a few details:

Swimming +T1 – 800m – 21:08 (T1 = Transition 1)

The swim went much better than last time! No panic. It is still the area where I can improve the most and shave several minutes off my total time. I did not hold my crawl the whole time and did a bit of side crawling of backstroking at times to catch my breath. I also had problems with water entering my googles so I stopped a few times to empty them. Still, I did it much faster than last time. I lost some time in T1 because I had problems removing the wetsuit, and a guy came to give me a new timing timing chip.

Biking – 19 km – 33:24

I was much faster than in Leamington with an average speed of 35.1 km/h. That’s even faster than my best training session. The course was very nice, with a few hills that also made me reach my maximum speed record at 51.7 km/h. I passed a whole bunch of people there!

    Click here for speed graph | Click here for course map

Run – 5 km – 25:16

When I got back in T2, my calves were killing me, so I took time to stretch them before starting the run, and then went out (1 min 18 secs for T2). I have to say, I was dying to stop and walk again, but I remembered how angry I was at myself the last time after the race, so I had to tell myself about 200 times “walking is not an option”. So I allowed myself to slow down but never stopped running. As a result, I was slower than in practice, but proud of my performance!

SUMMARY

Total time:  1 hr 21 min 07 seconds, good for a 57th place out of 250 participants, 47th / 154 males. I ranked much higher than my expectations.

This venue was awesome and I really think I am going to do the next race they have on July 22.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 6:30 am and is filed under Sport and Races, Our news. 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.