Elma Triathlon Race Report

Last weekend was my first triathlon of the year and my first triathlon post skiing accident. I was pretty stoked and nervous to find out how this was going to workout for me. I've been doing lots of training in the water, on the bike and on the run and even some brick workouts. However I haven' put all three things together until now and that's the big challenge.

I arrived in Elma about an hour before my race just after a big set of rain showers had come through. The ground was wet and parts of the transition were muddy. It was pretty cold out And I wasn't the only one dreading the swim. Thankfully I had my wet suit gloves with me. Keeping my right hand warm is always a challenge. Because of the nerve damage I have bad circulation and it gets cool fast.

The swim was a bit of a disaster. Mass starts are always mayhem for the first 100 meters until the faster swimmers swim over or around the slower ones. I got swam over, kicked in the face and general had to fight for position. I had just finally got in to a nice rhythm and then the turn came. I had to go wide around it because of so many swimmers hugging the corner. On the return I got into a nice rhythm, The side stroke was good and felt strong. However sighting is not my best skill. So I swan a little farther than necessary.

T1 (transition from swimming to biking for you non-triathlon people) did not go well. I rushed out of the water stripping off my wet suit as I went. Or rather trying to take off the wet suit. I got it stuck on my left hand and couldn't get it off. Then it was stuck on my left foot. Then my shoulder brace wouldn't go on. Then the person across the rack said, "You know your nose is bleeding, right?". Then I had a heard time getting my gloves on. Well you get the idea. The more things went wrong the more frustrated I became. My transition time had to be close to 5 mins, truly awful.

Next came the bike and I'm happy to say I crushed it. Super frustrated from the transition debacle I jumped on the bike. The first 2 mins I worked my frustration out and really got my legs working. Then I got into a nice solid high cadence Z3-Z4 pace. I started to pass people right away. First it was people on mountain bikes (good for them, getting out and discovering triathlon) then people on road bikes and finally after the 1/2 way turn around people on time trial and triathlon bikes. Passing a guy rocking a disk wheel was pretty cool. I wrote a pretty big check on the bike and started to think about T2 (bike to run transition) and the 5k run ahead.

T2 went super smooth. Bike parked, gloves and helmet off, shoes on and done! 30 seconds or less. I'm not going to lie. Crushing the bike made the run hard. It took a good mile for my legs to feel ok and I never really got my heart rate to recover. At the run turn 2 guys passed me and I didn't have enough left in the tank to follow them. I got one guy about half a mile from the finish and almost got another who finished 7 seconds ahead of me.

All and all a great race, I'm pretty happy for my first one. Here are the results.