Treasure Island Triathlon

I did it! Actu­al­ly fin­ished my first tri yes­ter­day morn­ing. I fin­ished over­all #775 with a fin­ish time of 3 hours 23 min­utes 22 seconds.

First was the 1.5K (0.92 mile) swim, which was cer­tain­ly the hard­est part for me. The water was cold, and it gave me fits try­ing to breathe. Even in a wet­suit (and THANK YOU to ham­mer­head for lend­ing me yours!) I fre­quent­ly can’t get my face in the water with­out imme­di­ate­ly feel­ing my body tense up and pan­ic for oxy­gen when I’m in cold water. It took me almost a full lap to get to where I was tak­ing reg­u­lar strokes. The swim por­tion was com­plet­ed in 47:41, my over­all rank for the swim was #990 of 1004 swim par­tic­i­pants (there were only 973 fin­ish­ers, so it’s a lit­tle embar­rass­ing that my place­ment in the swim leg was high­er than the num­ber of peo­ple who com­plet­ed the race!). It’s fair to say that I’m not a strong swimmer.

My tran­si­tion time from the swim to the bike was 10:14, which, all things con­sid­ered could have been worse. I was grate­ful just to get out of the water and it took a while to get coor­di­nat­ed and changed. I dis­cov­ered that try­ing to get a bike jer­sey on over a wet body is trick­i­er than you might think.

The bike por­tion took place on the city streets of Trea­sure Island, and was a lot like a cri­teri­um, with a lot of 90-degree turns. My stom­ach was both­er­ing me through the whole thing andI’m guess­ing it had to do with swal­low­ing salt water dur­ing the swim. I was get­ting side-stitch­es pret­ty bad­ly and the bike por­tion was a lot tougher than I expect­ed, most­ly I think because I’ve been lax in my cycle train­ing, focus­ing much more on run­ning this year.

Even so, I fin­ished the 40K (24.85 mile) bicy­cle por­tion in 1:26:39, which ranks me #577 of cyclists in the race. In sim­ple com­par­i­son to oth­ers, I did best on the bike por­tion. Not bad for a guy rid­ing on down-tube shifters, drop bars, and entry-lev­el com­po­nents (Shi­mano 105s) My aver­age speed was 17.1mph, which I think is good con­sid­er­ing that I have neglect­ed my bike train­ing this year and that I got on the bike after a swim, which I don’t usu­al­ly do.

The sec­ond tran­si­tion was con­sid­er­ably eas­i­er and faster, and I got through that tran­si­tion in 3:57 and went on to the run.

The run felt hard. I thought I was crawl­ing along with no steam what­ev­er. There were two laps of the same route, and I took it as easy as I could for the first lap, then tried notch­ing up the inten­si­ty through the sec­ond half, and par­tic­u­lar­ly through the last quar­ter of the run. It was real­ly dif­fi­cult to turn the inten­si­ty up when I was already run down, but I told myself at the last straight­away that I might as well use up every­thing that’s left. That did­n’t trans­late to a sprint fin­ish, but I pushed hard and fin­ished the 10K run in 54:51, or #609 of finishers.

When I logged that run into my train­ing soft­ware, I real­ized that I’d done it faster than 9 min­utes per mile. For me, that’s a pret­ty respectable pace for a 10K that does­n’t have a swim and a bike as a warm-up.

Over­all in my age class, I was #142 of 154 men age 30 – 34. Yes, that puts me at the bot­tom of the heap, but for one thing I was there with an entire­ly high­er cal­iber of ath­letes than I nor­mal­ly com­pete against. Even in the half-marathon I ran a few weeks ago there were some peo­ple out for a long walk not expect­ing to run at all. Those who show up for an olympic-dis­tance triathlon are only the high­er lev­el. So my ter­ri­ble place­ment does­n’t both­er me at all. I feel like I’ve grad­u­at­ed to the bot­tom of a high­er class.

Also, bot­tom line: I fin­ished. DFL (dead f***ing last) is bet­ter than DNF (did not fin­ish) any day of the week. I got out there, and I did it. Feel pret­ty good about that.

Last, I want to men­tion how glad I am that I went as a mem­ber of the Gold­en Gate Triathlon Club. I got my jer­sey and shorts the day before the race and it got me a bunch of cheers of encour­age­ment from peo­ple I don’t even know at all, includ­ing a lot of the peo­ple on the course. Get­ting passed by stronger ath­letes is a part of life, but get­ting encour­ag­ing words from the ath­letes who were pass­ing me? That makes me feel good about the sport.