Wednesday, June 07, 2006

lake mills triathlon

[6/6/06 Tuesday]
REST Day

[6/5/06 Monday]
Run - 10.5 miles, 1:42 - easy pace
Swim - 2.4 miles, 1:09, Lake Wingra - including .75 miles with resistance

[6/4/06 Sunday]
Lake Mills Sprint Triathlon - 500m swim, 15 mile bike, 5K run - 1:21:40
Bike - 33 miles, 2:12

This was my first triathlon of the year and I was really nervous. I have been training so hard since January and I was nervous about testing my training. What if I was still slow despite all my hard work? What if after all of this, I did not improve over last year?

When I got to the race in the morning and saw the other triathletes, people of all abilities, I started to feel better. I knew I was well prepared to race. I put all my time goals way in the back of my head to keep the pressure down. My primary goals were: 1. do not go out so hard on the swim that i run out of breath and have to backstroke - have a nice hard pace, but not too hard in the beginning, 2. have awesome transitions, 3. put out a very strong effort on the bike.

I accomplished exactly these goals and that made it a good race. It was the first triathlon that I managed my swim pace well, my transitions were 2nd (T2) and 3rd (T1) place overall in the female division (faster than Nicole Deboom, the pro), and I flew like never before on the bike. It fell apart on the run for a few reasons. I was so busy thinking about the swim and bike that I didn't mentally prepare for or visualize the run. I didn't drink enough on the bike and my stomach was delicate from nerves, so I got big time cramps about 1 mile into the run which made it hard to go fast. I haven't put in comparably as much run mileage or speedwork that I have done in the other two sports this year. I was 11th in my age group, and the 35th female. In my age group, I was 8th on the bike, 9th on the swim, and 20th on the run. I know I can do that run 5 minutes faster than I did, so that would have taken me up considerably in the rankings. These are all good things to learn from and use when I do the Pardeeville sprint triathlon in a few weeks. Overall, Lake Mills was not my best race ever in terms of my time, but I made some great progress in learning how to deal with major pre-race anxiety, swim pacing, and bike effort. Now I have to get out there and start doing some track workouts to get my running back in shape.

After the race, I went out and did a nice 2 hour bike ride at an easy pace. Not bad for a day's work.

[6/3/06 Saturday]
REST Day

[6/2/06 Friday]
Swim - 20 min, Lake Wingra - sprint start practice
Bike - 30 min, 8 mi