Woke up on race morning after no where near enough sleep (i think i got just under 4 hours), and flyer521 and i headed out the door. as we walked out of the apartment i saw it was raining pretty hard, great start to the day. after a quick detour to grab jackets we headed over to alum for the race. this was going to be just my 2nd oly distance race so i was pretty excited to see how things would go.
as we pulled into the park the rain stopped, and while it was humid enough that we probably could have swam in the air, it held off for the race. Reg and getting everything set up in transition went smoothly and we headed back to the car for the wetsuits and then down to the water for a quick warmup.
Swim: The horn went off and all the olympic distance racers sprinted into the water and took off. within 200 yards people were flying by me and i knew the swim was not going to be pretty. i’ve missed almost half of my swim workouts over the past 4 weeks due to various reasons and this was showing its ugly head in the race. somewhere around the middle of the 2nd lap i started pulling back in a few people and managed to find some feet and hold onto them until the final 150m where i went around the guy and came out of the water
25:xx
T1: ran through T1 without any issues, wetsuit off quickly and i was out of there, 2nd fastest T1 time:-D
Bike: the bike course is a rolling, two loop affair with a long uphill at the very end of each lap. because of this and knowing the course well i took a mile or two to get up to pace. within the 30 sec of leaving the park i started moving back past people that had swam faster than me, and you could tell by the looks on a lot of their faces that they had started too hard. a lot of them looked compeltly tanked already. by the end of the first lap i had moved through a decent number of people and was still feeling strong, so i decided to up the pace a little more over the last 2/3 of the 2nd lap. coming around the corner to the final hill i saw a line of people strung up it along the shoulder, just creeping along (this hill is long by central ohio standards but is by no means huge/hard to get up, deff aerobar climbing if you a decent cyclist), and i just blew by the line like they were standing still and took back a few more places. i ended up neg splitting the bike by about 2 min.
1:02
T2: went quickly, again 2nd fasest t2 time (i think)
Run: This was the big unknown for me, i have only done one oly before, and had a bad cramp, so i had no idea what to look for in the run. used the first half mile to ease into pace and then started picking off peopole. about 10 min into the run, some guy from OSU, and another from U of M came up behind me, and started pushing each other. within half a mile both of them were about 40yrds ahead of me, and duking it out. one would take the lead, start to move away, and then the other would come back up. i watched this for the better part of the first lap, and then to my suprise started moving back up on them. by the 5 mile mark i was within 25 feet or so of the two, who were both still going head to head. from there i kept trying to catch up, but everytime i did the two would pick it up a little more. as we neared teh chute i made it to within about 10 feet of them but could get no closer, and we all ended up finishing within about 4 sec of each other
42:xx
overall 2:11
in the sprint race, in only her 4th or 5th triathlon ever, and first this year (the race was her 2nd time on a bike this year) flyer521 (christiana) won the collegaite division and had the fastest overall womens sprint time. i’ll let her tell about that race though.
great race and thanks fatrabbit for hosting it.