Finding Momentum

At the end of last month, Nate, Bruce and I did the Golden Gate Triathlon together. This was only my sec­ond triathlon ever (after last year’s Tri for Fun), and I intended to train hard for this sucker.

Given my plan­tar fasci­itis, this was slow going. For­tu­nately, this gave me a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ties to focus on bike and swim: long bike rides with the Regen cycling crew, open water swims with Nate in Alameda and Jeff every week in the DeFre­mery and Lions pools.

The course was: 0.93 mile loop a lit­tle off the Crissy Field beach. Then an epic 25 mile bike ride up and down from the Crissy Field Warm­ing Hut lot, up over the Golden Gate Bridge park­ing lot entrance and down Lin­coln (past an epic view of the coast) and then back — six times. Finally, a 6 mile run out and back over the Golden Gate Bridge. It goes with­out say­ing that the views were gen­er­ally epic.

Swim

We hud­dled up by the beach and lis­tened to the race direc­tor describe the course. Two loops around three buoys.

This pho­tog­ra­pher knew what s/he was doing.

Wet­suit: I got a month rental at Sports Base­ment in early June. That sucker chafed at my neck a LOT. Remem­ber next time to Body Glide it up. I was sur­prised at how buoy­ant the suit was. I also need to work on my swim tech­nique. I pop up too often to look, when I could keep my head down and do a few more strokes before I take another look.

The plot got inter­est­ing when we saw the first wave of women jump into the water and start their wave. Within sec­onds, they started drift­ing side­ways – really drift­ing — and fight­ing the cur­rent. I thought noth­ing about it, fig­ur­ing that’s just how it is when you swim open water.

But no, when I got in it was frickin tough. I rounded the first buoy, keep­ing up at the end of the pack when we turned the cor­ner and bam. Tread­mill sta­tus. I pad­dled for what I thought was ten min­utes, and noticed that I had basi­cally moved 10 feet. What?

So I pan­icked a lit­tle. And then had to calm myself down by remind­ing myself two things:

1. You won’t drown.
2. You’re strong enough

I fig­ured I needed to swim harder and started to kick a bit more and kind of men­tally pre­pared myself to dig in and be swim­ming for an hour or so. But by then I had fallen really far behind (I’m not that strong of a swim­mer) and I couldn’t quite make out the tar­get buoy in the dis­tance because I was star­ing into the sun.

Then another swim­mer grabbed me and yelled for me to go back to shore. “They can­celled the swim!”

I really just felt relief. Upon hit­ting shore folks were kind of in a daze, con­fused. Some were sprint­ing for the T1 sta­tion, so I kind of jogged on over. The tri had just become a duathlon.

I checked my watch and real­ized I had been in the water for 32 min­utes and hadn’t even made it halfway around the first lap. So good thing they can­celled the swim. I woulda been out there for a long time.

I had a hor­ri­ble T1. I fig­ured before the race I was just gonna strip the wet­suit and throw on my bike jer­sey. No way. Skin’s too wet. I fought with my jer­sey for a cou­ple of min­utes as Bruce and Nate blew on past me. Ugh. Finally I got my jer­sey on and I was on my way.

Bike

I fig­ured I was an okay biker, but I had made a mis­take and gone on a work­out the morn­ing prior to race day. I’d nor­mally never do this on race day, but I fig­ured some­how that it wouldn’t hurt.

But the course hurt a lot more than I’d antic­i­pated. If you weren’t zoom­ing down a hill, you were climb­ing one. There were next to no flats. And it was a bit men­tally tax­ing keep­ing a count of the lap you were doing in your head. I half expected to either ride one too lit­tle or one too many laps.

It was kind of fun rid­ing a loop course though. And the view down Lin­coln was epic as usual. Every time I’d pass Nate going oppo­site direc­tions I’d give him a lit­tle grunt of encour­age­ment. Next time I’m gonna have to catch him so I can ride with him.

I fin­ished the bike ride at 1:43:14.

25 miles later we hit T2 and I threw on my shoes and was outta there…

Run

Rock­ing $1 Wayfarers.

I was both the most con­fi­dent and the most shaky about the run. Running’s my strength, and I knew I could crank out a 10K pretty well. But I hadn’t run over 4 miles on a work­out in months. I’d have to trust my gen­eral car­dio train­ing on the bike to sus­tain me for the run.

We looped Crissy Field and headed up to the bridge. I didn’t feel as much quad burn as I noticed after my first tri. I actu­ally stopped to use the john halfway up… I drank too much on the bike!

I felt great on the steps going up — tak­ing them two at a time and gen­er­ally feel­ing springy. We hit the bridge and it became a game of catch-the-next-guy and dodge-the-tourists. There was a lot of dodg­ing (and I nearly had a cou­ple of close calls with unwary tourists). I felt really good drop­ping run­ners though.

One crazy thing hap­pened — the run­ners went through a low tun­nel on the way up. The girl run­ning ahead of me smacked her head on the top of the tun­nel and flew back­wards and landed on her back. We stopped and grabbed med­ical help for her — there was a good amount of blood and it could have been bad. She was con­scious though and able to talk through it though. Scary.

I fin­ished the run in 43:46. Which is 7:04/mi pace, includ­ing a pee break and a quick detour to grab a course vol­un­teer. Awesome.

End

Done, done, and done.

I fin­ished with an over­all time of 2:28:20, plac­ing me 10th in the race and 2nd in the Male 30–39 divi­sion (sweet! Also: they had reg­is­tered me at 36 years old :D). Nate edged me out by 39 sec­onds at 2:27:41, and Bruce fin­ished with a respectable 2:58.

After­wards we enjoyed the pos­trace glow with a lot of peanut but­ter jelly sand­wiches (glory!). And Clif bars. Then I found a cafe and had a big mocha. And took a fat nap.

Sweet! So I’ve still not tech­ni­cally fin­ished an Olympic-distance race, but maybe that’ll be next time. All in all, I’m happy with my per­for­mance, espe­cially on the run.