The Swim Takes It

One thing I learned between this race and the previous race back in mid-June was how much stress affects me.  After my last race, I felt like was in a good space and then life stressors compounded by training stress and perhaps not eating and sleeping enough began to take its toll.  I had some blood tests to make sure I wasn’t having any medical issues and thankfully nothing popped up. It would seem I developed a case of overreaching or as some coaches say I was under recovering.  So with that being the case I backed off some training and took more rest days until I began to feel better. I had even thought about passing on the race, but being that it’s a special race for me and Shanna we decided to go forward and registered even if I could not race at full intensity.

There are two aspects to the race that make it a challenge.  The first being that it is a lake swim which means no help in terms of buoyancy or current like there is in an ocean or river swim.  The second is that there is some elevation to the bike and run segments which is a bit deceptive. Seeing I could not do much about the swim I began to focus on how to approach the bike segment.  The profile of the bike course has the elevation descending as you head away from transition with a few sections of hills to the turn around then climbing on the way back. I read up on time trial pacing when faced with hills and headwinds as well as discussed it with Coach Joy Murphy of Enjoy Fitness.  From there I developed my strategy to ease up just little bit going out and then using more power on the way back. Tactically I would use a lower cadence for the first half and higher cadence on the second half. This would be my focus for the race while shooting for an average of 21.5 mph.  This would be a faster than last year by almost a full mile per hour if I could execute the pacing properly.

The Race

There’s a saying in baseball that goes, “you cannot win the pennant in April, but can certainly lose it.”  In triathlon it’s the same, “you can’t with the race in the swim, but you certainly lose it.” Unfortunately, that saying would come true.  At the end of the swim, the gap between myself and the leader who ended up winning the division was 0:1:45. Even with executing my strategy for the bike segment spot on and then having the fastest T2 time, it was not enough to overcome the gap from the swim.  The closest I would get would be 22 seconds as I came out of T2 and could see him in view for the entire run. The winner would put another 28 seconds for a total gap of 50 seconds. A quick look at the table below tells you everything you need to know about how the swim cost me a shot at the division win.