Thursday, August 31, 2006

Triathlon Results

The Pfizer Triathlon has come and gone. The good news is that I finished. I was guessing my time would be between 1:15 and 1:20, and I ended up at 1:19:21, good for last in my age group (more on this later).

I'll start with the swim. The swim, I thought was easy, and I'd estimate that the real distance was only ~0.2 miles. I finished it in 7:34, the best time was an blistering 4:16 (someone from one of the teams, the best individual was 5:12).

The bike leg killed me. It was only 12.6 miles, but I poked along at 44:31 (~17 mph average if your scoring at home). Worse still was that it tweeked my back to the point that I had to stop and stretch during the run.

The first 1.5 miles of the 3 mile run was just painful. Fortunatley I recovered enough and finished pretty strong: the total run time was 24:33 (an 8:06 pace vs. the 6:40 pace I had last week - that's telling).

Only 5 people raced in my age group. The fourth place finisher I jogged with, and he pulled away at the end and the 3rd place finisher was only 12 seconds ahead of me - so finishing in the top-3 next year looks like a doable goal (ok, at least not finishing last).

Some general thoughts: First, the triathlon is clearly a biking event.

Clearly, and not surprisingly, the stage most correlated with overall finish time is the bike leg.
If I could shave about 3 minutes off of the bike portion (and not kill my back) - I would have done *much* better. Second though: unlike running - where finishing in the top 1/3 of your age group is generally pretty easy, the triathlon doesn't attract many casual exercise folks - most entrants are pretty into it. As a result, you can be in decent shape in still finish last. Finally: I really don't like biking. I think my dream race is the Rock swim (1.5 miles down, 0.5 mile swim, 1.5 miles back up) - simple. uncomplicated. Maybe I'll time myself a few times this year for fun.

Next week, I become an official New Englander, as I and my family travel to Cape Cod for a little vacation. Hopefully the remnants of Ernesto won't completetly wash us out - but the place we're staying at has an indoor pool - so even then we'll be alright.

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