Hyvee Race Report

It has only taken me a week and a half to get this up and I just stole it from my Register blog instead of writing a new one. Basically I just want to forget about it and move on because it wasn't an A race for me, things went wrong, but there were things that went right. So anyway...

Hyvee Triathlon Finish: 2:48:09 12/73 Age Group 104/418 WomenSwim 37:20 T1: 1:11 Bike: 1:15:29 T2: :59 Run: 53:14Am I happy? No. Why am I not happy? I don't know. Looking at my times, I should be very happy, but why am I not. I had a very disappointing swim. I contribute 80% of that to my start. I had a great starting spot. Right behind one girl on the right center. I started a little further to the right last year and had a great start so my plan was to do the same. I was to far to the center and I got hammered. After about 20 meters into the swim girls kept hitting my legs so I just could not get going therefore they all swam over top of me. I tried to make my way to the right further to get out of the mess, but there was just to many people to my right. All the way to the first buoy was horrible. When I got to the first buoy, it got worse. Since I was right up next to it, I got hammered again and even panicked a little bit. It was the first time ever I had considered stopping to let the crowd pass, but I kept at it. I went around the buoy and made my way almost off course to the way inside since everyone else had kind of went out wide. The traffic cleared up, but to much so now I did not have a draft. I started to make my way over behind another girl, but she could not swim straight for anything. She was running into people all the time so I decided to abandon her and just swim my line and wait for someone else to pass and jump in behind them. Well no one else had passed until the last turn where it got a little crazy again. I swung out wide to avoid the mess. I started getting into some heavy traffic from the 2 waves in front of me. Spent most of my time navigating around them and not really swimming. I felt really good on the swim and was relaxed, most of the time. I knew I had been in the water longer than I wanted, but did not expect what my watch read when I finished. 8 min way to long. I was going to have to make up serious time to meet my 2:40 goal. In and out of transition. I love transition. Out on the bike. It was great. It was flat and very fast. I just went hard. I had expected the wind to be more of a factor, but I really didn't feel it so then I thought maybe it isn't out of the West. I got to the turn and nope the wind was behind me. Awesome! I flew. There was not one person I passed that I didn't just fly by. It was great. Gave me a lot of confidence. Coming into T2, I was unsure of how my legs would feel because of how hard I pushed the bike. I jumped off my bike and ran through T2. Calf almost cramped up. I put on my shoes and went off on the run. I felt pretty good. Stomach was a little upset, but forced myself to throw up before the second aid station and that made me feel so much better. No mile markers so I wasn't sure of my pace which was tough because if I needed to pick it up, I wouldn't know. I got to about 5km and finally my legs had completely loosened up and I could push it a little more. I need to do more bricks to get my legs going a little earlier. I had a great run. The hills were big, but I just focused on keeping my knees up and my cadence quick. Having not run any hills for about 3 months, I was very surprised at my run time. I will take what I have learned from this race and keep improving. I will come back stronger next year. Each day I am realizing I should be happy and each day I am becoming more pleased with my progress. I want to thank the DSM Register for the opportunity to share my training with everyone and send out my congratulations to all the athletes.I will change my focus to my training for Ironman Louisville August 30th of this year. I will continue to focus on my running because I feel I can improve in that "easier" than I can with my swim. Swimming is so technical that it can take a couple years to drop a couple min off your time. The run, I should be able to drop a good min off my 10k pace by the end of this year to be back to where I was last year. I need to continue to work on my nutrition. Still having major GI issues and heartburn pretty bad. I am finding that this extreme endurance training is wreaking havoc on my body big time. All in all, I love triathlon more everyday and will continue to push my body to its extreme to see what I can really do.