First Triathlon - Summer Open

There aren't many pictures for this because I was flying solo, mostly because the weather was downright awful.  In any case, here is a bit of post race review looking back.  It's kind of a novel but might give some insight into the race I had.  As a first tri race, it was a good experience and also one of the more miserable race conditions I have ever seen in all my days of racing.

Swim: I was hesitant to get a warmup in, but glad I swam a bit.  It was chilly, but certainly wasn't cold enough to really take your breath away when you put your head down.  I started toward the back of our AG pack and it took a bit (5 - 10 seconds) to actually start swimming by the time I was deep enough in the water.  I swam hard for most of the leg toward the first turn buoy though it felt a lot more like thrashing than focused swimming.  Just prior to the first turn buoy I did have a small panic attack and had to pull up.  I was drinking a fair amount of lake water with the waves that were kicking up and someone punched me in the head trying to turn early.  I got around the buoy and tried to take some better strokes and found a little bit of rhythm but then panic'd again and paused while I looked for the nearest paddle board.  I didn't see any so I thought I better keep rolling and finally was able to settled down a bit for the second half of the swim. Not surprisingly, my sighting is also fairly poor and got off track at least once on the back stretch.  The swim files on the Garmin/Strava show a lot of this story too.  I think I should have a decent swim if I can get into an earlier rhythm and remove the panic issues.  Swim time ended as ~ 9:42 for 641 yards which was about 1:31/100yds.  Feel alright about my first open water swim, but certainly room for improvement.

T1: Was alright I guess, but had trouble with getting my first leg out of my wet suit where the timer chip was.  That took an extra 10-15 seconds easy to mess with.  I couldn't see anything with my glasses being wet so that was also challenging but put on my socks, grabbed my bike, and ran. T1 was 1:50.

For the Bike: We decided to clip my shoes onto the bike for the mud run (which was wise) but I had a hell of a time getting going.  Twice, I dug one of my shoes into the mud trying to start pedaling because I didn't have bands to strap the shoes to the right position for a flying mount.  Once I finally got both feet on top of the shoes and was moving a bit, it was very difficult to get my feet in the actual shoes with no strap to pull on the heel with true road biking shoes.  Also, fingers were too frozen to really tighten the ratchets on my shoes effectively so one of my shoes just stayed a bit loose the whole ride.  Finally got riding though and felt alright.  Heart rate was a bit high in the beginning but tried to bring it down while holding the target power.  I think mostly I was able to push where I wanted to, but really focused on going easy on the bike to not overdue it.  Ended with power somewhere between 204 - 209 W for the effort and a ride time of 36:18.  I was targeting ~210 W and think I could easily push harder here.  This is the picture below of my bike after the race in my garage trying to clean up from the bike ride!

T2: Felt pretty fast, fingers and feet were frozen but could just slip on the shoes so no big problem. T2 was 1:10.

Run: Run felt alright out of the gate.  Started at that ~ 7:30 pace we had talked about.  Slowed probably a bit too much on the big hill before the 1 Mile mark but pushed again down the back side.  Ran up the back false flat more steady and a bit faster and then pushed again for the last mile home.  Total run time was 22:49 with mile splits at 7:52/7:25/7:05.  Felt strong through the whole run, but also an area I think I could push a bit harder on.

Total time was 1:12:08.  Happy to get through the first one but I think there is some low hanging fruit to improve upon.  Some of it might clear up just due to better weather, as well