Dan,
Thank you for your Newbie, advice column. Indeed, it should be required reading for even “experienced” triathletes. From what I saw last year during a brief foray back into “racing”, there are still many in this sport who do not have a clue what they are doing. Particularly, on the bike.
In dreadful shape, and not having raced or trained much at all for five years, in a fit of madness I jumped into a local race last year. It was one of these tri/du affairs. I did the du. The duathlon merged mid-field for the bike with the multi-wave 1,000 person triathlon. In all my years of multisport racing and cycling I have never been so scared and apprehensive on a bike. Where I was, people had never heard of the “ride right, pass left” mantra. People were all over the road. I had a sore throat by the mid-point of the ride from shouting, “ON THE LEFT”!! I lost count of centre-line violations after 5 minutes - myself included as I had to take evasive action to avoid someone walking their bike up a hill!! People where swerving every-where. Clearly, they did not know how to ride smoothly and efficiently on aero-bars. Thankfully I did not see any rear-bottle cage lauched bottle motars, but I did see people swerving dramatically all over the road trying to get bottles out of these cages. I witnessed two people changing flats in the middle of the road!! There was also a great deal of both blatant and inadvertant drafting.
This was all a bit of a shock to me. For years I had raced at or near the front, where people knew how to ride bikes, respected the rules of the road and one another. Not sure if this was an extraordinary experience or the norm for mid-pack in a multi-sport race these days since I have no context. I do know this, I was thankful to arrive back at T2 safe and unscathed.