I was a bit nervous in the days leading up to my first olympic tri, primarily because I haven't done much in the way of training for the past month due to IT band soreness. This would also be my first competition using my new total immersion swimming style (in which I have generally been poor at sighting and swimming straight), and I haven't done much cycling at all this year.
So, in the end - I decided that the main goal would simply be to see what its like to do a race that is fully 2x the distance of a sprint. Though not too awful concerned about time, I figured I'd end up around 3 hours - about 40 minutes for the swim, an 80-90 minutes for the bike, and the remaining 50-60 minutes for the run.
This particular tri was also the USAT regional championship, which meant there was a good deal of competition. That was another reason why my goal wasn't oriented around finishing within a certain percentile of my age group - because I was probably going to be disappointed if I did.
The swim portion went pretty well for what I was looking to do - maintain form throughout, and not exert myself too much. I had intended to do some bilateral breathing for practice, but I ended up skipping it. I haven't practiced the bilateral breathing enough yet to be proficient, and as it was I knew right away I was going to be relatively slow in this portion of the event.
About 1/4 of the way through, I noticed that someone else was swimming the entire portion backwards. He was off to my side - about 10 feet away - and he was doing a lazy backstroke. Except I can't really call it lazy when I was only barely able to keep up with him when I was doing freestyle.
Around the 2/3 mile mark, I noticed that I was being passed by a few people. During one of my quick breaks for sighting, I looked back and saw the wave of swimmers who started 5 minutes after my wave - they caught up to me!
Exiting the water, I saw only one other person in my wave exiting around the same time. I think we were the last blue cap swimmers out of the water. In the end, though - the primary take-away from the swim is that I have to balance better. I found I still keep my head up too much, so I'll be needing to work on that.
The transition to the bike went much better this time than it did during the Webster Lake Tri. I definately had more energy coming out of the water, which was a good sign. Plus, this didn't require a 1/4 mile barefoot run to T1.
The bike portion was probably the most comfortable portion of the whole event - but I didn't know by how much at the time. The swimming gets boring, and I knew I was going to have IT band issues during the run. The bike route was relatively flat - a few rolling hills. Knowing the distance for the bike was quite a bit longer, and that I'd have 6 miles of running afterwards - I kept at what felt like an even steady effort. At one point, I was watching another rider, and saw that her cadence was much higher than everyone elses. After having done some cadence work with running, it seemed she was much closer to the ideal cadence of 90 that most cyclists try to achieve. From that point on, I decided to be more active in shifting so that I could maintain a similar cadence. I found that this allowed me to have more energy going up the hills, and helped conserve energy overall. This was a good lesson to have learned - but it also highlighted the inefficiencies when the gear shifters are on the front of the frame as opposed to on the handlebars.
Once the bike was finished, I was curious to know how long I could go before feeling the IT band. I had been hoping that it would be around 4 miles - at least as long as I'd been able to run before, plus a bit extra because of the couple days rest. I was also hoping that running 4 minutes followed by walking 30 seconds would really extend the time, and maybe - just maybe I wouldn't have a problem. In reality, it wasn't 4 miles before I felt it, more like 40 yds. Almost right away I could tell that there were going to be problems. For the first 1.5-2 miles, as it started getting more and more uncomfortable, I kept rolling over in my head how to handle it. I thought maybe I should stop all together and prevent further injury. I thought that maybe I could just suffer through it and deal with whatever ramifications that would have. Maybe I should take more walk breaks.
Then, I had a bit of an epiphany. I noticed that when my foot hit the ground, it felt as though my foot wanted to keep moving forward inside my sneaker. In other words, my sneakers were acting like breaks and preventing momentum from carrying me forward. I elongated my stride a bit, and concentrated on landing more on the balls of my feet. Shockingly, the IT band almost nearly stopped complaining! My calves started whining a bit more - but they are muscle, and so they could just deal with it, as far as I was concerned. Not only did it feel better, but I sped up a bit too. I could tell because there was someone who was passing my during my walk breaks, but during the 4 minute runs I was passing him. Once my stride got longer, I passed him and never saw him again.
Unfortunately, that wasn't a cure-all, as the IT band still started complaining again. But the combination of walk breaks, landing on the balls of my feet, and having a stride long enough that my sneakers weren't effectively putting on the breaks was what allowed me to finish.
Total Time: 2:59:12
Avg HR: 163
Swim Time: 36:09
Swim Avg HR: 165
T1: 4:34
Bike Time: 1:21:04
Bike Avg HR: 159
T2: 2:00
Run Time: 54:59
Run Avg HR: 167
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