Portland Triathlon or how to swim and bike fast but still have a bad race

I'm a huge fan of books and articles that have alternate titles. So I'm making a alternate title blog post of my own blog post.
Portland Triathlon is the last tune up race before ITU World Championships and I was all set to have a great race. I had been swimming the course almost every Thursday for open water practice and felt fairly confident about it. Also I received a new wetsuit from Paul at one of my new sponsors Fit2Race (F2R) The suit is a huge improvement over the seven year old Ironman suit that I have been wearing. Coach Lara has really got me working on sponsorship stuff and I've been able to get a few. More on that in another blog post.

On the bike I was using a different set of wheels, real carbon race wheels. I've been riding on a set of alloy wheels and what a huge difference carbon and a deeper profile makes. The run course was a two loop course that covers a section of one of my standard training runs so I knew that one too.

The swim was awesome! I made the turn at 17 minuets and headed back. The return trip took only 15 minuets. Total time 32:02! That's almost 4 minuets faster than I've swam any open water 1500m before. (Except for the Hudson at Nationals but with the massive current that hardly counts).

I had a reasonably fast transition except for someone putting their wheel spokes around my breaks that I had to untangle. The bike section was a slightly technical three loop course with some good climbing and nice down hill. I rocked it.

Now comes the bad part, the run. It was bad. I cramped up in my abbs so badly that each stride hurt to land. I'll summarise to say that I almost didn't even finish and a 54 minute 10k is not a good time for me at all.

Next week is Hood to Coast and then I'm off to the ITU ParaTriathlon World Championship.  Wish me luck!!