They called this "Arizona's Hottest Triathlon!", I would of named it "Arizona's Hilliest Sprint Triathlon!" Now, I know I'm new to the whole triathlon thing. This was only my 2nd race, but I've been a spectator at a half dozen other races and this course had more ups and downs then Britney and Paris combined. All kidding aside, despite the hills which I haven't prepared for at all this was a beautiful day and a great sprint race.
Set the alarm for 4:30am, already had everything ready to go so I sat down to some hot oatmeal, vitamins and water. Woke the family up at 5am, got the kids dressed and in the car by 5:20am. We had packed them a breakfast to go the night before. Got to the venue at 6am and it was looking like it was going to be a beautiful day. Plenty of room in the transition area, I got marked and laid everything out. This took a little different planning then the last race being that it was a point-to-point race. All running gear had to be put into a transition #2 bag to be shuttled over to transition #2 by the race directors.
I entered the water about 5 minutes before the 7am start time. About 50 percent of the participants looked to have wetsuits on, I won't be buying a wetsuit until I really need one. The water felt great, my only warm up was the 100 meters or so to get over to the starting bouy. The gun went off sharply at 7am and we were off. I tried to start off on the outside again but there was still a little contact with some people up until the first turn about 200 meters into the swim. The rest of the swim went much like my olympic tri 3 weeks ago. Kept to the freestyle for most of the swim, used breast stroke to get my bearings every once in a while. I tried to draft off of other swimmers, follow their bubbles so to speak, but many times their pace was different and so I found myself moving to the outside with nothing but open water in front of me. I came out of the water a looked at the clock, 22 minutes. This would make my pace just slightly faster than my first race. Transition #1 went faster than the previous race as well, by the time I got onto the bike the clock read 25:54.
The bike started out with a large climb away from the lake and out to the park entrance. I haven't done much biking at all let alone any type of hill training. This race had about 6 climbs where I was fortunate to average about 9 miles per hour. Of course there were a number of downhills as well where my speed was reading about 35-37 miles per hour. No problems with the bike and I pulled into Transition #2 with a bike leg of 46:48 averaging 18.3 mph. T2 was less than a minute given that I don't have cycling shoes yet and already had my running shoes on. Plus they took our bikes and racked them for us, so all I did was take my helmit off and put a hat on and off I went.
I guess another thing I didn't know going into this race was that 2/3 of the run portion was going to be a trail run with softball sized rockes that you had to navigate all the while climbing more hills! I was feeling good though and I was passing quite a few people. At mile 2 we got back onto the pavement and the course threw one more hill at us. I finished the 5k run in 26:27 which gave me a total race time of 1:39:09. I was pleased with this time given the toughness of the hills. I ranked 63/121 in the men's division and 9/19 in the men's 35-39 age group and 88/237 overall.
I think that was my last tri until the fall, I was thinking about doing the Timex Triathlon in Tempe and then maybe going for the Soma in October. I'll keep up with my training, I'm still trying to drop 10-15 pounds to get down to about 185.
