It's a personal call. I've worn my wetsuit when it's been allowed at Raleigh...but I go with my sleeveless rather than a long sleeve. You may not save as much "time" when you factor in taking of the wetsuit and packing it up in T1, but you may save energy with less effort required when wearing a wetsuit. Good luck and have fun!

For me a wetsuit is worth a minute for every 750 meters so in your case nearly 3 minutes.

It's up to you whether it's worth it or not.

jaretj

I don't usually have problems with the heat until the run. Being a bit too hot at the start of the bike probably won't make much difference. I'll take the 10 seconds/ 100m that a wetsuit gives me whenever it's legal.

tough call, sounds like you're already a pretty good swimmer. If you think you'll be 1' slower in the swim, but not overheat, you've got 13.1 to make up the difference ~4.5 sec / mile.

for me that would be a long non-wetsuit swim, but I've also cooked myself in a full suit when the temps were similar. ~77 water and an afternoon race that had air temps in upper 80's. I didn't recover from the swim until halfway through the bike. Lesson learned

If the temps are going to be up, I have a 15 yo sleeveless suit I wear so I get some speed, but don't baste myself. There are times where I stop and quickly let some cool water in around my neck to cool down my full suit if I feel I'm getting hot. I'm easily going to make that time up with the efficiency I'm gaining from the suit.

post an update with how it goes

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Great things never come from comfort zones.

If it's wetsuit legal, why give up the free speed? Unless you really have problems with your wetsuit (range of motion, constriction, etc), I would wear it right up to the legal limit.

if your concern is getting out of it, just practice that. I can strip out of my suit on my own in seconds.

I don't understand how you are relating the wetsuit to the run though. Any body temp increase from the wetsuit will not carry through the bike to the run. Do you have issues with body temp regulation?

To clarify a little, there is a school of thought that by starting out a race warm in the swim you are accelerating the heating process. Your body temperature starts the bike and then the run higher. Now I actually saw a study a couple of years ago looking at this and it concluded this was not the case but it only looked at skin temp between wet suit wearers and non-wet suit wearers, not core temp.

I overcooked at this race 2 years ago when I wore a wet suit then ended up walking the run in on an 88 degree day. My coach is convinced that the wet suit wearers that year all had worse problems with the heat. I haven't discussed this with him yet this year but I will and I'm sure he'll tell me not to wear it. But he's also a college swimmer by origin and he looks for excuses not to wear his suit. I was just looking for some diversity of opinion here on ST.

I was actually doing calculations similar to Barry S. in my head as to the benefit. At the moment, given that I also have a sleeveless suit I am leaning toward taking the known benefit of wearing the wet suit over the unknown benefit of not wearing it. I just need to pace my run conservatively.

For all it's worth, I'm also coming to the conclusion of Barry S with roughly 1' to make on the run.

Where I'm having a problem is trying to figure out if you can really say you can run 1' faster by being cooler, or 1' slower because you put your wetsuit, and not just because of the heat during the run, not pushing yourself to the limit in the end, etc. Heat durnig the run could be such that it doesn't matter much if you put your wetsuit or not.

I would tend to go with the known variable (wetsuit) rather than trying to guess if I could make it faster on the run or not.

Sleeveless wetsuit is a nice compromise.