Summerland Triathlon and Swimming Provincials

Here is my report of my last triathlon and also a bit about swimming provincials to wrap up a spectacular 2011 season. During the summer months I have been focusing on my swimming technique and decided to join competitive swimming. I would practice 3-4 times per week and then there was a swim meet on the weekends. This year my biggest accomplishment for me was winning bronze medal in the Regional swim meet which also qualified me for the provincial championships. Since I had never been to anything province-wide it was truly an amazing experience for me (even if I only got to swim for 2mins) and I was not expecting to qualify since it was only my first year. I ended up 17th in the province for 100M breastroke and 10th for 200M freestyle relay. I have developed a fairly strong bond with competive swimming and enjoy the adrenaline of such short sprint races.

This triathlon had me feeling really pumped and ready to rock. My plan was simply "win". I decided to give it my best shot just to see how much I have improved over the year. I have been racing the same people all year so we become fairly familiar with each other's strengths and weaknesses. At the starting line I scoped out the rivals and I knew that a few would beat me on the swim but once I was on my bike the race would truly begin. I did not wear a wetsuit as the water was a balmy 17.5 degrees (burr!) I had decided it was not worth the hassle and would just end up costing me time trying to yank it off. The swim started out nice I was beginning to find my groove when somebody started to push up beside me and push me in the wrong direction so I was forced to bring my head up and let him go wherever he was going and continue on my way. This was a 500M swim which is 50M longer than Mr.T's. I got out of the water in 9:53 in 5th place. I was of to a good start with a time that was 20 seconds faster and 50M further.

I went through transition super-fast not wasting any time on the small things. I began the attack with 1:40 to make up. Within the first 5km I had caught 2 people and still had to more to catch. I decided to wear my heart rate monitor just to see how high my HR gets but I didn't look down at it until the end when I found out it had leaked water into the watch itself and stopped working. Luckily it was just my old HR monitor and not my polar rs300x. On the next 5km stretch I passed one more person putting me in second place going into the run with a time of 18:36 for the 10km ride.

My second transition was once again fast which put me in a good chance of catching the guy ahead of me. I was down by about 40 seconds from the first place guy and I knew I had to gun it. Once again for the third time this year my legs where totally worn out and sore for the run portion. I have been practicing doing brick sessions and transitioning from bike to run but I have come to a conclusion that these sessions are not the same intensity as a race situation therefor it is hard to get the skill to be able to handle the sudden change. Although my legs were hurting I continued to push on and actually made up some time on him but not enough to catch him. So I ran 4km in 19:37 and finished 2nd overall in my age group. My final time was 48:06.

I was happy with this race because it showed me that despite all the time I have put into swimming it is still the difference between coming 1st and 2nd. My limiter for this race was my intense effort on the bike led to a jelly leg feeling going into the run. Throught the winter I will hopefully find a way to minimalize this feeling. What a great year of triathlon racing!

Thanks for reading