I finally did another race! Yay! It has been a MINUTE! Now it’s race report time. The race was the Southern Utah Triathlon (not a very distinctive name to be sure but whadaya do…) They had three options for distances and I picked to do the Sprint Distance. Sprint distances are funny races because they kinda get to do whatever they want. As long as it is shorter than an Olympic it is called a Sprint. And I kind of have them in my heart since my first triathlon experience was a sprint.
This one had a 750 meter open water swim in Quail Creek Reservoir, a 12.4 mile bike ride and a 5k run. Both the bike and run were out and backs so I was really happy with my decision to do the sprint instead of the olympic because that meant I only had to do each out and back once instead of twice 😂. Plus the bike route showed about 1,000 feet of elevation gain. Mostly in the first 6.2 miles. It was nice to be able to do it once and be able to say “sayonara! See ya Never!”
Things I Learned:
1. Pay attention to transition layouts before setting up your bike. Not all spaces are created equal. Once I got to the race start I found out that there were no assigned rack spaces. No big deal, carry on. It wasn’t until after I had my bike all set up that I realized the area was not designed so that everyone had to run the whole thing during both T1 and T2.
2. Putting the flattened grocery bag under the front of my wet tri-kit was total GOLD! I had heard about this from The Crushing Iron Podcast but had never had a need to try it…
3. People get really nervous about “cold” water. More on that later..
Things I Did Well:
1. Splashed water on my face and neck before the swim start. This was another thing I learned while listening to the podcast. They said it will take away a lot of the initial shock you feel when getting into the water and lets your body relax into swimming quicker. And I can now say that I have done it and it works!
2. I brought a Gu and water bottle to the race start with me. Aka something I could eat/ drink around about 5-10 minutes before the start of the race. I say around about because races rarely seem to start exactly when they say they will and either way it has been a long time since breakfast! Dude, I want lunch by the time these things are starting! To be fair, I want lunch about an hour after I have had breakfast so this might not say as much about race starts as it does about me and my relationship with food.
3. I planned for it to be a chilly bike ride. My toes can get cold enough to make my kids jump when I am in my nice warm house. There was no way they were going to stay warm in just my bike shoes on a 54 degree (Fahrenheit) morning when I was already soaking wet! Not gonna happen! So I did the plastic bag trick, had arm sleeves on, as well as socks, shoe covers and a neck buff.
4. Actually pushed on the downhill instead of simply coasting. Normally I’m a very happy coaster on the down. But this time I made sure that if I had any traction in my gears, I used it.
Things I Would Do Differently:
1. I would take my second Gu earlier on the bike. That and I apparently need to practice eating them on the go. I’m pretty sure I only got half of it down and didn’t have the bike control necessary to be able to squish it like a toothpaste tube to be able to get the rest. I mean come on! It is at least a two handed job and somebody has to keep driving this thing!
2. Uh and definitely need to work on my hairpin turns…yeah, I almost fell off! I ended up somehow un-clipping my shoes, circling the turn cone twice and getting passed by 5 people while I struggled 😅🙄
3. Figure out a safe place to stash my bike at the finish line so my husband has free hands to get a better frickin picture!
I would say a good 90-95% of people had wet-suits for the swim. Which was a really good idea (if you have one) since the water temperature was only 70 degrees while the air was a balmy 54 degrees. Triathlon rules state that wet-suits are allowed and eligible for awards when water temps are below 78 degrees. I had one sweet lady say she would have brought her extra one for me to use if she had known I didn’t have one. Number 1 lesson there is that people are great! She didn’t know me from Adam and was regretting not having brought her extra wet-suit to the start to let me use it.
Luckily I have found that those temperatures are actually scarier to look at then to swim in. Because after standing around in 54 degree temps, getting into water that is 70 degrees feels pretty nice. Though standing around in just a race kit while you are waiting to start does make you regret not having one. Needless to say, I made sure I was one of the first ones to get into the water for my wave start!
It was a dock start that sent all the swimmers out northeast and into an inverted triangle. They blew the whistle and off we went. And once I got about 100 meters into the swim…I didn’t care about the water temperature. It was all about where is the next buoy and am I headed straight for it. My neck did start to tighten up sometime between the first and second buoys but man, I actually wished it was longer. I got to the end of the swim right as I was starting to feel comfortable.
This is actually my problem with the sprint distance races in general. I feel like by the time you have warmed up and get good and settled into each section, you switch.
I did pass a couple people in the swim, some who were even in the wave ahead of mine. Which doesn’t sound all that good except when you know that all those people had a 10 minute head start on me. Booyah! We don’t need to talk about how they were probably the ones who were talked into doing this race (last week) by an overbearing friend and can barely swim so are also probably some of the bravest people to toe the starting line. And once you finished said swim you got to “run” up a 36 meter boat ramp that’s slope felt like the side of Mt. Everest.
Then it was time to focus on getting what I needed so that I didn’t freeze to death on my bike! Like I said, my feet get cold in a warm house. I have had them go numb when riding in 60+ degree weather on a sunny completely dry day. So when I saw the weather report I knew that I was going to have to take time in transition to make sure I wasn’t miserable on the bike. I put a flattened grocery bag (thank you Smith’s) under the front of my wet tri-kit, sat down to put on socks and full shoe covers (no tiny little toe covers here!), arm sleeves and a neck buff. I had actually brought gardening gloves just in case but that didn’t end up being necessary.
I’m really really happy with how I biked. Overall anyway. I did already mention that I almost fell off at the turn around. The turn was at the top of a largish hill and I was still in push it mode when I made the error of taking my eyes off the turn when I said “thank you” to the volunteer. Who then got to witness, up close, my almost collision with the pavement. Yay 🙄
Then it was back to business. I now had to re-catch all those people who had just passed me! And since the ride is so short over a sprint I tried to not just spin up the hills but at least push a gear that was slightly past comfortable on the up and then I defy my tendency to happily coast on the downhills.
I had one kind of tense bit during the last 1 to 1 1/2 miles where a car had passed me on a slight downhill but it was a small town area so his speed limit wasn’t very high. Aka he kinda sloooowly creeped past. Then he went on to start passing the next bike. Which was my next goal as well and then we hit one of the steepest downhills of the day. So he was hitting his breaks and I was flying. I caught up to both of them at the same time. My choices were to slow down and get behind the other bike (lose all the momentum I had gained) or (very carefully!) squeeze between them…all while trying to suck on my second Gu… not to worry though! I made the only possible choice, I went between them 😁 Then it seemed like I blinked and I was in transition. Where I successfully made it off my bike without crashing it. As you can see, I have set myself a very high bar.
The transition from bike to run was much faster than the one going from swim to bike as striping off bike shoes, arm sleeves and such is way easier than putting them on, especially now that I was mostly dry. And I already had my socks on so the only thing I had to put on was my shoes.
My run went pretty well. I was actually starting to feel uncomfortably warm when I realized I still had the grocery bag under my kit. Luckily it was right before the only aid station so I was able to ditch it in the trash box and keep moving. Once again, the course was an out and back. It only had about 300ish feet of elevation gain but it still felt monumental. And the truly hard part was that it was as if you took the bike profile and swapped it. Aka we mostly ran down on the way out and then got to run back up on the way in. I did have 2 ladies come to try to pass me within the last 100 meters or so. They had mostly made the pass when we hit the sharp u-turn to go down into the finish line. And I had the inside lane…😈 I was able to make a much quicker turn and successfully passed one of them and crossed the line 2 seconds ahead of her. The other ended up edging me out by 0.5 seconds. Which is the kind of ending that makes things really exciting. You already feel like you are giving it all you have and then somehow you find a way to put in a surge to try to stop the pass from happening.
And then its over. You find your family, and you tell them all the details they didn’t want to know. Like how you saw this really beautiful bike go flying by in the other direction or how you were excited that you swam in a mostly straight line etc… The race director was really trying to be efficient during the awards so there wasn’t much time to take a good picture. But my boys got to see me win my age group and for a minute they thought I was cool. 🤷🏼♀️ Then we went to the waters edge so they could throw rocks into the reservoir. It's the important things in life. But I learned a lot at this race and I did something that still makes me nervous so yeah, I’m really happy with it.
Swim 18:54(1:05 for the hill)
Bike 45:59
Run 26:57
T1 2:43.3
T2 2:21
Total Time 1:36:54.3
1st Place in the 35-39 Age Group
8th Female Overall
30th Overall Finisher
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