Sunday morning’s triathlon at Lake Afton was blessed with about as good of weather as a person could hope for this time of year. After not doing a triathlon since the National Championships in Omaha last August I finally dug out my racing gear and decided to jump back into the racing scene. This was a race I’ve done numerous times, but never on such limited training.
Usually it was done while I was in the midst of training for an ironman race, so the half mile swim, 15 mile bike ride and 3.1 mile run would be nothing compared to what I was doing on a daily basis. In the past I had often signed up for this particular race in order to get an opportunity to race against my son, Eric, and we had some good competitions. One of the last times we raced there I was ahead of him for awhile and he caught me in the last mile of the run, taking the overall win and leaving me with 2nd place overall.
This weekend was not like that. For one thing, Eric is in Oregon going to school, and secondly, I have done only a very small amount of training compared to my normal regimen. This left me a little anxious to see how the race would turn out for me. The race I was entered in is called a sprint, meaning you basically go all out for a shorter duration than say, an Ironman race, where the distances are 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of biking and 26.2 miles of running and proper pacing is paramount.
Honestly; I was just hoping not to get beaten by too many people. I had no idea what my swim pace would be but I figured if my training partner Billy was in sight somewhere I was probably doing ok, because he has swam way more than I have. I’ve also done a little biking lately but nothing that resembles going as hard as possible for 15 miles, so I knew that my top end speed was going to suffer some, but I just wasn’t sure how much.
The only activity I’ve done consistently since last Fall is run, so I wasn’t worried about that, especially after doing a 5K (3.1 miles) event on the 4th of July, which let me see that I hadn’t lost all of my speed during my racing hiatus.
As the swim started I could see Billy off to my right. Eventually he disappeared out of my sight and I just tried to keep a strong effort going. Towards the end of the half mile swim he reappeared into my line of sight and we finished within just a few seconds of each other. Then it was on to the bike where I was riding my race bike for only the second time since last September. I had a good first half of the ride but the second half was a bit more difficult mostly due to lack of race specific conditioning I presume.
After the bike turn around I had gotten a good look at some of the riders in my vicinity and wondered if any of them would be catching up to me. I could see several of my friends not far behind me that I wanted to stay ahead of and a couple in front that looked like they might be too far ahead to catch during the short run.
Immediately following the bike dismount and a quick change of shoes I was off running. The pace felt good and I was surprised to see my first mile split come in at 6 minutes 35 seconds. Mile 2 was the same and after a little slow down on the 3rd mile I still ended up averaging 6:37. The run moved me up a few positions to 6th overall and 1st place in my age division. Billy came in a little behind me and also took first in his division. Another friend, Kyle, who I was hoping to run down capitalized on great swim and bike splits to keep me from catching him and he took 2nd place overall.
The moral of my story is this: We can’t always be in peak form so we should just go do the best we can with the fitness we have at the time. Exercise is supposed to be fun, and that’s what I was reminded of on this particular day. Live Well Today. Everday!