Ironman 70.3 World Championshps (St. George) - Part 3 of 6 (Swim)

 

Race morning!  So wild that we were finally here.  After a nice and early 3:30 am wake up call, we drove down to take buses out to Sand Hallow.  I spent 30-40 minutes going over all of my gear, pumping up tires, and filling nutrition bottles and then we started to get corralled up into our waves.  This is a picture taken by Bill Plock who is a friend of us from 303 Triathlon.  Ed, Brian, and I were all in the same wave and geared up.  You actually see us in swim skins, not wet suits, as the water was too warm to be wet suit legal. 

It was my first swim without a wet suit in a race, but I was actually fairly excited to see how it would go.  It is always a bit intimidating lining up for a 70.3 swim for me as 1.2 miles always makes you feel it.  I kept talking myself through the strategy I can worked out with my coach Eric Kenney to try to go easier in the first 400 m and to find my own rhythm.

I was mostly able to execute the strategy to plan, though my goggles fogged up a bit on the way back in which made navigating a bit harder than expected.  This is a picture of me running up the boat ramp after coming out of the water.

My split for the first 0.6 miles was 16:13 (though it didn't appear to be centered perfectly on course) and the back 0.6 miles was 19:43, for a total time of 36:26 or 1:53 min/100m.  This was 131st out of 350 in my 40-44 AG.

 

Overall, I was happy with this swim.  I expected to be a bit slower without a wet suit and generally I felt fairly strong through the whole effort which was my main goal.  I always wish a would swim a bit faster, but happy to be back on dry land and start working on the other two legs of the triathlon where the real racing starts for me.