A Weekend Of Firsts!

This weekend I had many firsts including doing my first Olympic distance race!  I road-tripped with racing friends Jason, Genna, and Jackson down to Iowa to do the Pigman Olympic in Palo, IA.

RESULTS

Swim: 36:20 (0.9 mile)

T1:  2:26:03

Bike:  1:22 (25 miles)

T2:  1:30

Run:  1:02:27 (6.2 miles)

Total:  3:05:41

Here is the breakdown of my race.

Swim:

The swim start was a new format for me. In all my previous races I have done a wave swim start. Today, I had my first time trial swim start and loved it!  One racer would start approximately every 3 seconds. It was nice to have room in the water and not be swimming on top of 30-50 other people. After consulting my Garmin, I realized I actually swam 1.07 miles instead of the 0.9 mile swim. Guess I need to do a little work on my sighting. However, I did struggle seeing the buoys today as they had quite a distance between them and blended in with all the pink swim caps in my wave. This distance is officially the longest swim I have done and I didn't even drown. ;)

Bike:

I was slightly mislead on the bike course (I won't name and names). ;)  Mentally I had prepared for a flat and fast bike course. However, the course had many great rolling Iowa hills. The out and back route took us though Palo, IA and along the countryside.  I was happy to still manage an 18 mph bike average over the 25 miles, considering all the climbing I did.

Run:

The run was the most challenging part of the race for me. I felt as though I didn't have any running legs left around mile 2-3 of the hilly run course. I resorted to doing a walk/run to finish out the race. Amazingly, I sustained a 10 min/min average throughout the run. 

 

A Weekend of Firsts

• 1st Olympic Distance Triathlon
• 1st out of state triathlon
• 1st time trial swim start
• 1st medal with a pig on it 
• 1st trip to We Run (running store) in North Liberty, IA (www.werunllc.com)
• 1st pair of Pearl Izumi triathlon shoes
• 1st out of state road trip with the Migalas' (check out Jason's blog- www.triracingafter30.com)
• 1st time trying Normatec Recovery Boots (www.normatecrecovery.com)

The Olympic distance was a great learning experience for me and I am looking forward to getting a few more triathlons of this distance under my belt!