Bridgeland Sprint Race report

Bridgeland Sprint Race report

So I finally raced this season and even though it was a sprint, I still find myself having a lot of thoughts about how the day went and how it could have gone better. To start off  this post you need to know 2 things: 1) I haven’t done a sprint tri since like 2008 and 2) I’m really not good at going fast. * I only have two speeds. Half Ironman and Ironman.  Shorter races do not, in general, translate into much faster pacing.  NOTE: I KNOW this is a relative term. But let’s put it this way. I would rather do a half marathon than a 5K ANY DAY OF THE WEEK. 5Ks hurt. A lot.  I would rather take a mile or two to warm up, ease into a tough but sustainable pace and stay there than redline to the point of vomiting.

So now that you know that, you can tell I probably wasn't too optimistic about how my performance was going to go the day of. I had scouted out the finish times of the ladies in my age group from the previous years and just didn't see a way where I would end up in the top, but I decided I would give it my all, and that if nothing else I would force myself to go as fast as I possibly could. If I had energy left at the end of the race, I definitely didn’t do it right.

Jeff was my super Sherpa for the day, and after a 3:30 am wake up call, we make our way to Cypress, TX.  On the way down there, I decided I should probably look up my wave start time (oops) and saw that I was in the LAST WAVE behind women 60+ and Athenas. I wasn’t going to start until 7:37. Great, I got myself mentally prepared to swim over a ton of people.  After getting transition set up it was time to wait for my wave to go off.

After waiting for what felt like an ETERNITY (and basically after all the spectators had left swim start) It was time for my wave to go off…

Swim 550 meters

 If you had asked me before this race, this swim was about 2.4 miles long. It was a point to point and I felt like it went on FOREVER. Nope, 550 meters apparently. The swim was mostly uneventful, except for the usual punching, kicking and grabbing. It felt more pronounced this time but maybe that’s because I felt I had less time to move away from it. By the time I found my rhythm we had less than 200 meters left in the swim. Also, this was a no wetsuit swim. The water temp was about 85 degrees. So imagine doing a 500 meter threshold swim in your neighbors hot tub and that’s about where I was.  So the swim was ok, not great but enough to put me at 4th out of the water in my age group

T1. Nothing special. 59 seconds. 

Bike 13 miles: Other than not being used to mounting Thor (giggle, sounds dirty) the ride was smooth. I felt strong basically from the beginning but it took me a second to catch my breath. The P2 has a compact crank and I’m just not used to the gearing yet. So I alternated between hammering it out, and a fast spin at like about a million RPMs against the wind. Typical day in the life of Chipmunk Racing. The biggest frustration here was my last wave start which meant I was going to spend the greater portion of my ride passing-  and a lot of these people weren’t too interested in moving out of my way. I made a concerted effort to yell” on your left” from a good distance back, but I found myself losing momentum. Apparently,  the bike course is a social opportunity that warrants riding two across for a good chat. Look, I know it’s a sprint, but why pay 120 bucks to show-up and NOT try your hardest? I managed to average over 22 mph. I felt like I was going to cough up blood in the process, but I did it. Again, sprinting sucks.

 

(picture courtesy of hubby, Jeff )

T2. Not sure why T2 was slower than T1, but nothing special here. 1 min 29 seconds.

Run 3.2 miles: So Houston is hot. I came off the bike and within 2 minutes of starting to run I was dizzy, my legs were wobbly and I just wanted to quit. But as fate, and pride, would have it, I wasn’t going to let that happen and decided that I could put up with anything (even 100+ degree heat and 80% humidity) for 3.2 miles. My only goal was to not let anyone (from my age group) pass me. I hadn’t seen anyone from my age group out on the bike course, so I was fairly certain I had ridden my way into first place. I just had to hold onto it, which was going to be harder than I thought. In the end, I managed 7:20s or 7:30s the entire time- certainly not the fastest I can run, but it was the fastest I could run at that moment. Ice cubes down my jersey came to the rescue on this one.

In the end I came out with a time of 1:10 for a 550 meter swim, 13 mile bike and 3.2 mile run. I won my age group by a solid 5 minutes and was 4^th age group female overall. It’s really easy to get caught up in long distance racing and forget about the work and huge amount of concentrated effort that goes into short course. That said, I’ll take long course any day.  Next race should be the Houston Triathlon on Labor Day. More short course misery :)

Other than that training is pretty solid- even though masters team decided they are allowed to take a “summer break” and cancel practice for a week. I’m sorry- you can’t take break in the middle of triathlon season. That’s like that time the library closed the week before my dissertation was due. Not cool man, not cool.

Also- I’ve committed to purchasing a power tap (I’ve officially crossed over to the dark side). I should get it sometime in September, so stay tuned for the insanity/confusion/frustration that comes about due to my inability to understand what the power tap is supposed to accomplish.