First Olympic Triathlon: Post 4

After finding my transition station, which wasn't that hard in a race as small as this. I removed my wet suit and threw on my shirt.

For some reason, I didn't sit down to put on my socks and shoes. I'm not sure why. The ground was wet but so was I (after the swim). I wound up leaning on a fence.

I discovered that I had not prepared my stuff very well. I took a little time getting my shoes on because I had left them tied (double knotted). On top of that, I hadn't made sure that my toe clips were open far enough (I worried about a repeat of my first tri where someone (Johann) had tightened one of the straps so my foot wouldn't fit in)). It turned out those were fine though.

Arial came by with the kids. Through the fence, I told them about panicking in the water. Then, when I was finished putting on all my gear, I had a gel and pushed my bike out of the area.

What I didn't realize was that traffic had not been blocked off. When I turned on to the main road, I got lucky with the traffic since I wasn't really looking. There was a small gap in the cars that I squeaked into. Riders next to me stopped but I really had plenty of time. (Although, if I had stopped to consider the move, the safe window might have closed.)

Right away, I passed someone, that made me feel good. There were a couple bikers just ahead that I was catching too.

I was within 10 bike lengths of them when, just below my front tire I saw "OL" with an arrow pointing to the street that I was about to pass. The other bikers had already gone passed that intersection and I wasn't even thinking about a turn yet. But I quickly surmised that this was where the super-sprint and the Olympic separated.

While trying to yell to a volunteer (who didn't hear/respond to me) to find out if I was really supposed to turn here, I hit my brakes and started to make the turn. I couldn't believe that the people I was about to pass were on the super-sprint (because of logistics of when they when they started) and that made me nervous that I was going the wrong way. Finally, I saw someone up in the distance. When I passed him, I looked at his leg to see if he was in the Olympic race (he was).

I was passed by a few people and I passed a few as well, but on the whole, I saw very few racers out there. In fact, since the turnaround was actually an ~8 mile loop, I only saw the first 7ish competitors going the other way. (When I saw the leader, I was amazed that I was as far as I was considering my swim problems and the fact that a lot of these people in the race were in better shape than I.)

This race, I didn't seem Mrk on the bike. He was somewhere in the loop when I got to it. I did think that I saw him at one point. Off in the distance ahead of me was someone who was wearing a red shirt like Mrk was wearing. I was slowly catching this person.

I was hoping that this wasn't Mrk because that would mean that he had some sort of major problem. My best case scenario (if it was him) was that he had to fix a flat and figured he would then go slow to finish the race with me. When I got closer, it became obvious that it was actually a heavy set woman and not Mrk.

I mentioned at the end of the last post, that at the end of the swim I started realizing that this was going to be a challenge. That was really only an inkling. It didn't come to the forefront of my mind until I was on the bike for a while and it wasn't the breeze that I thought it would be.

That's not to say that it was really painful or anything. It just took more effort to move myself at the pace that I wanted to go.

In retrospect, I may have pushed myself a little too hard on this leg. When it started, I was thinking about making up time from the swim. I was also pushing myself to get a faster average speed than I had for the sprint because I now have a much better bike than I did. (As an aside, I was having trouble keeping my pace up and later Mrk told me that he found the course more challenging. That explained my speed issues but also made me wish that I hadn't put so much energy into it.)

At one point, I was close to passing someone when I dropped my water bottle. I yelled "Crap!" and slammed on my brakes (I really like that bottle). The guy just ahead of me looked back to make sure I was okay (I think) and then rode on.

I grabbed the bottle started again and eventually passed the guy (who turned out to be 76 years old). The rest of the bike, I was thinking that I *should* further ahead if I wouldn't have dropped the bottle. That made me push myself even harder.

By the end of the race I had drank both water bottles and eaten another gel. (That had been the plan.) I felt pretty good, better than I did at the end of the bike at the sprint tri.

I dismounted with none of the problem I had at the sprint tri (no volunteers thought that I was going to ram them this time) and that was the end of the bike.

mwz