My first tri ever - UBC

I haven't posted anything for a while, but there's been a lot going on. Since my first post I've basically just been training lots but at lower 'base' intensity. I joined a Masters swim program in mid January that has me in the pool twice a week at 5:30AM. Ouch. Other than that most of my cycling has been alone and running has been alone or with Niki.

Right now I'm at about 12 hours per week and it feels pretty good. Thankfully no injuries yet but a few little pains.

The biggest news is that I've got a coach now, and I'm REALLY excited about it. Just by luck a friend of mine introduced me to a recent Ironman Canada winner who agreed to take me on and be my coach. I am really honoured to be working with him and have already learned a bunch just in the last two weeks. My first official day of training under his plan actually starts today.

Anyway, the UBC Tri was yesterday and I'll post the race report I sent to my coach:

"Swim - No place to warm up whatsoever so I started out at a comfortable pace and I only hit that really uncomfortable period for a few hundred metres. By 500 or so I was in a pretty good rhythm (I'm not saying fast...). I'm not exactly sure what my time was but I'm guessing 32 min. in the actual pool. That's with 30 walls and some very amateurish turns on my part, ducking under lane lines, and we had to get out after 800 and walk back to lane 2 to swim the next 700. Anyway, I've definately got LOTS of room for improvement here.

T1 - We had to walk around the pool, get our change bag, go into a tent, change into our winter clothes, then run 300m to the bikes. My low point of the day was a serious bout of nausea that hit me after I changed and started jogging to the bike. It lasted about a min and then my stomach gradually started to feel better. I'm not sure what caused it...something we'll have to diagnose.

Bike - I found my heart rate elevated quite a bit (+10bpm) at the beginning, which may explain my stomach. I was DOP (a car racing term - down on power) compared to how I felt a few days ago when I rode the course. I have to admit that the run was in the back of my mind and I was a bit concerned about what my stomach would feel like so I backed it off a little bit. I averaged 202w which was good for 20.0 mph, about 1:11 on the bike. The other day I did 225w good for 21.8 mph. I was in some fairly bulky clothes, training wheels, and regular helmet. My stomach still wasn't 100% so I only got through about 3/4 of my gluekos supply.

T2 - This was funny. I'm coming down the hill, get my feet of out my shoes, and ooops, the dismount line is RIGHT THERE with the guy pointing at it. Back brake wasn't enough, front brake was too much, and over the handlebars I'm going right in front of my family. My wife yells 'Oh shit!' All I'm thinking as I'm flying through the air is 'how embarrassing!'. I didn't even feel the impact because of my embarrassment, popped up and kept going. The rest of the transition was much smoother.

Run- I feel this was my best performance. My feet were numb from the cold for the first few k but I still felt pretty good overall after about 750m. I kept a fairly even pace, but there were a few pretty good hills in there where I had to bear down. I felt quite good until at least 8km then started to fade a bit in conjunction with 2 hills that come near the end. Anyway, I averaged 7:15/mile for a time of somewhere around 45 mins.

I didn't eat or drink anything after about the 80% point on the bike and I don't feel it cost me anything.

I'm not sure what the overall results look like yet. This event is funny for the results because they don't break out the transitions. All of T1 (which is pretty long) gets added to the swim, and T2 gets added to the bike."

So that was written before I actually got the results, which had good news and bad news. The good news was that in my age group, M35-39, I had the #1 bike time and #2 run time. The bad news is that my swim was pretty bad, #15 in the group and 38min including T1 time. Even moderately decent swim would have seen me win the age group, but instead I finished 5th.

Overall I was 34th of about 225 people, including men and women. I'll take it for my first ever triathlon but there's still a lot of work to do before IM Canada in August!