Better than the first, but not as good as I wanted to do…

"Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement." -- Brian Tracy

So – the second Half-Iron distance triathlon is in the books. I participated in the Redman Half-Iron distance event this past weekend.

Swim –    46:17

T1     -      3:44

Bike   - 3:07:00

T2     -      4:20

Run   -  3:16:00

Total –  7:17:00

I will say the race as a full-distance event was well-supported, even though it isn’t Ironman-branded. They offered full and half triathlons and aquabike events. A number of people apparently use this event as a warm-up for Ironman Florida. I was just happy to finish.

But lots of lessons learned…

1. First, and maybe the most important, I realized how much heavier my bike is than others. The obvious bike of choice is the Cervelo, and a LOT of the competitors also had race wheels. I am not sure if the weight factor on my bike is because of the metal bars, but it does feel very front-heavy. I hefted a couple of bikes nearby my rack position just in conversation with other folks and you could really feel the difference… of course, the riders were also a LOT smaller than me weight-wise. And I have never used race wheels, but the aerodynamics on them has got to be so much better than standard wheels. These are questions I will have to discuss with the Austin Tri-cyclist guys. They will probably look at this plodding elephant and just laugh. I don’t expect to ever be in contention for a race position (though I would have placed 2^nd in my age group for the aquabike half, had I participated in that event), but I would at least like to improve my own performance, and the bike is one component I can improve.
2. Do a better job of scoping out the swim course. I did not realize until the first wave went off that people could/would actually walk part of the swim. The outbound leg of the swim followed the lake shore and it was actually close enough that people were walking rather than swimming. Maybe that is a good thing if you practice aqua-jogging in the pool beforehand, but swimming into somebody’s backside as they stand up is not a good thing. I improved my swim time by about 3 minutes, but it could have been even better had I thought to navigate around differently.
3. I need to get into the wetsuit more often. It felt like the shoulders were straining against the wetsuit and I wasn’t getting full strokes. I will have to work on this some more… hopefully it isn’t a matter of the wetsuit being too small.
4. My transition times were better, though I didn’t feel as organized as I should have been.
5. I don’t know why I did it, but coming out of T1 on the bike, there is an aid station and a volunteer holding out a Gatorade bottle. I grabbed it, thinking it would be good to have a drink or two to get started and then chunk it at the trash can at the far end of the aid station… wrong! There was NO trash can. In the pre-race meeting the day before they had harped strongly on the fact that there would be a lot of USAT race officials out there and penalties would come for abandonment on the course, so I didn’t just want to chunk it to the side of the road and risk penalty. So I stuck it in my jersey pocket. Well, it fell out in the middle of the no-passing zone, when a race official was on a motorcycle right next to me! And yes, I know there is some discretion about “unintentional” drops, but I didn’t want to risk somebody interpreting that differently than I did, so I stopped and picked it up. Note to self: DON’T grab a bottle unless you have someplace to put it securely. Even more importantly, why take it in the first place?
6. The ride itself was fairly uneventful… the road was in bad shape. We drove the bike course the day before, so we knew what we were in for. But that didn’t make it any easier. Very rough, lots of road damage. I felt like I was drinking enough and eating a gel every 45 minutes, and didn’t have to make any stops. With the new aero bottle for water, I carried all mixed drinks in the other 3 bottles. Being able to grab water bottles at the aid station and push the water into the aero bottle really makes the ride a lot easier. One thing maybe I should have done would be to take some Advil in transition before the ride.
7. T2 went okay. With the size of this event, it wasn’t too crowded to get around in transition. The full tri and full aquabike competitors were still out on the bike route. I could have been out a little sooner but some of my stuff had been pushed around by people around me. I don’t know that there is any way I could have controlled that.
8. The run… well, it’s the run. Actually, the first of the 2 laps went pretty well. I was hoping to do the run in 3 hours, and my first loop was at 1:33:00 – just a few minutes off my goal. But when I started the second lap, my hips started to tighten up on me. So I ended up walking more than I had hoped.

Overall, I managed to cut about 12 minutes from my previous half-Iron distance tri time. I had hoped to cut it by 30 minutes, and get it under 7 hours. Not anything near trophy-winning performances, but I am proud of a number of my TNT alumni friends, who DID take home some hardware… congratulations to all of them. And I did get to meet a number of TNT competitors along the way.