Well, despite the horror stories I heard about Lake Geneva Extreme Sports, I couldn’t find any other olympic distances this past weekend so I went ahead and entered Pewaukee Lake.
It was my first olympic tri. I did finish it and I did it much quicker than I had thought I could (3:13 vs. my goal of 3:30). That was the good news. The bad news was, I AM SO BAD, especially on the bike.
The day began not too hot and cloudy. What a blessing. The next day was a 100 degree flame fest but this day the high only got to about 80. I left my house in Chicago at 4:12am and got there by 5:45, no problems.
My swim was shockingly fast (for me) at 22:50 for 1500m. Granted I had on a wetsuit but I really think they must have made the swim course too short (more about their measuring later). I swam the 450yards at Warsaw in 9 minutes so that would really be some improvement. The weeds weren’t as bad as I feared but boy was the water murky. You couldn’t see a thing. Plus, I lost my swim cap somewhere as I was walking into the water so my hear rate was already high as I started thinking I was going to get DQ’d in the first 10 seconds. The director just told me to go ahead.
This tri has got 2 transition areas that are totally removed from each other. I mistakenly put the sunscreen at the other one. Oh well. I came out of the water and got on my bike. UGH, THE HILLS. I am totally unprepared for these as I train on the lake in CHicago (totally flat) and am a rank amateur on the bike. I tried cranking as hard as I could on the down hills (got up to 33mph) so I could have some momentum going up the uphills but it didn’t work too well. In the end I averaged only 15mph and that was pretty much the slowest bike split of the any of the 75 people in the Olympic race. I am just so damn slow on the bike. I need to figure out how to speed up.
One confusing thing was that they run a sprint, supersprint and olympic together. The olympic was a single loop bike but the sprint and supersprint people were on a different loop and part of their loop was going the opposite way from us. I thought there must be a turnaround somewhere so I kept asking the people going by–“Is the turnaround up there?” and they looked panicked and would say “WHAT?!?” but by then they would have blown past. There wasn’t water on the bike course so I brought 2 bottles of gatorade on the bike and downed them on the way.
As I switched to the run, I was feeling ok and the sun was still behind the clouds and not too hot. People had said you needed your own water but they had water and gatorade at the table at the turnaround. Get used to it because the olympic means 4 laps of the same course through some residential neighborhoods with mild hills. I was getting pretty tired. Plus, we come to find out that they didn’t measure it accurately so the run ended up about 1 mile too long. I was running about 8’45" per mile and my heart rate was reasonable (<155). God, I really could have benefitted from not doing an extra mile at the end, though (I guess my time would have been around 3:05 if it were measured right). As I came to the finish I could see a guy ahead of me and I caught him with about 20 yards to go. He yelled “HEY! WHERE DID YOU COME FROM” and started sprinting after me. So now I had to sprint to stay ahead of him. Looking back it was a pretty dumb thing for me to try. I did stay ahead of him but then my legs were really hurting.
I guess my expectations were low given all the stuff people said but I must say that the race was really quite fun and I thought the organization was decent except for the measurement snafus. I am still debating whether to do the Lake Geneva half iron in September but a) given how sucky my biking is, do I want to do an event with a 4 hour bike and b) what if they mismeasure the 1/2 iron course. They might have to carry me home.