First Triathlon in the books...

I'm just waiting for the official results (spoiled by marathons where they are updated in real time), but from my own timing I managed to finish in 1:17:43. Will write up a report as soon as I have the breakdown of the various bits, but either way it was an excellent experience and hopefully the first of many. The swim was a lot more challenging than I'd expected, not so much physically, but more psychologically as it was difficult to get into a rhythm in that mass of people. The transitions were a little rough (as expected), but the bike and run segments went without a hitch.

Part of that was due to the fact that I was way too conservative on the run. When I broke into a sprint at the end it was obvious that I had a lot left in the tank. I wasn't sure exactly how the fatigue from the earlier stages was going to impact me so I was renascent to risk an all-out VO2Max effort. As such, I held back a lot in the early portion of the run and didn't open up soon enough. With that said, this was my first shot at this so I elected to be cautious as I wanted to make sure that I could finish strong.


The one big mistake that I did make was that I assumed that my watch would automatically pick up the footpod when I switched from the bike to run segment. Instead, after trying to connect during the bike segment it obviously gave up and didn't pick it up in the run section. As such, I had no pace readouts during the run itself and, more significantly, I don't have any telemetry to look over after the fact. I did hit the lap button when passing the markers so I do have some rough splits, but the only second-by-second data I have is heart rate and elevation. In retrospect, when I hit T2 I should have stopped the exercise and then started a new one. For future races, however, I definately need to get a proper cyclocomputer so I leave the RS800 to the running bit.

More to follow...