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June 30, 2008
First time on the podium!!
Well this was a good weekend for me. I have been slacking on the blogging front again, but I promise I will get better, especially since I do not have a race for almost three weeks so I can start training hard again!
I do not know if I even mentioned this before but I had a race this past Saturday, up in Loveland, Colorado. Loveland is about an hour north of Denver, which is a long drive on a Friday afternoon and that is no joke. This was a Saturday race which is unusual in my short triathlon experience, and it was a bit of a pain as we had packet pickup Friday afternoon. Um, don't race directors know some people have normal jobs? Anyway, that is the end of my rant about that.
Since I have two A races this year - Boulder Peak and Age Group Nationals - I did a big fat one day taper for this race. Basically I had a normal training week until Friday when I just ran 3 miles. Thus my expectations for this race were not all that high. However, as my college coach always said, sometimes low expectations are the way to go! When you put less pressure on yourself you can be surprised by your results.
Anyway, the race on Saturday was an Olympic but like all Colorado Olympic triathlons I've ever done it had an abnormally long bike - 30 miles (actually a short 30 which I believe was 29.3). That is good for me since I am strong on the bike but sometimes I feel lazy and wish I could do a normal Olympic (24 mile bike). The end result was that my time was 2:39.45 which was good enough for third place in my age group, which I was really excited about! Stay tuned below if you would like all the nitty gritty details.
And here is the detailed report...
Swim - 28:45
I was actually thrilled with this swim even though the time does not sound awesome. They had a really long swim to transition run so I got out of the water at 27:14, which was a huge PR for me. Anything under 30 minutes still kind of blows my mind and in every swim I convince myself that I am going really slow but somehow I seem to pull it out. My swim is still my worst sport but I am getting better, I hope by next year I can be in the 25 minute range which would help me start in a better position on the bike.
T1 - 1:13
I felt like I was in transition forever but this wasn't actually that bad. Sweet!
Bike - 1:23.42 (21.5 mph)
The course was actually really hilly so I was very pleased with this time, especially considering that I dropped my chain (meaning that my chain basically fell off the big ring on the front of the bike), and I didn't know how to fix it, so I got off my bike and manually put it back on. I think it cost me about a minute, which sucks because the girl who got second in my age group only beat me by 15 seconds, so I probably would have gotten second had this not happened. I am hopefully going to take my bike into the shop this week or weekend so the guys can take a look as it's just kind of noisy when I shift and I do not like how it sounds and I am very annoyed about the chain droppage. Other than that I am really happy with my effort on the bike, I passed a ton of girls in my age group here.
T2 - 0:48
This is a very solid T2 time for me which just goes to show that practice makes perfect.
Run - 45:15 (7:25 pace)
Considering that in a sprint two weeks ago I only ran 10 seconds per mile faster I was thrilled with this result. My goal was 8:00 pace with a stretch of 7:30 pace so I am really, really happy about this. To be more competitive I do need to get faster but I think I can do it. The run course was really nice and flat and I did pass two girls, at least one of whom was in my age group.
Post-race I feel pretty good although my Achilles and arches are a bit tight. I am going to a yoga class tonight with a friend, I think that should help. By tomorrow or Wednesday I think I'll be back up to normal volume, and this weekend I am hoping to get a few nice, big workouts in. If you have read this far, you probably deserve to be on some type of patience podium yourself, so with that I'll leave well enough alone.
Posted by barb at June 30, 2008 10:39 AM