Friday Tri: Lessons from Echo Triathlon 2012

I have finally coaxed a runner friend of mine who had a serious injury into trying out triathlon. I’m not saying there are no injuries in triathlon, but they don’t tend to be the same overuse injuries, because you’re doing 3 different sports. Anyway, she did a swim sprint race with me in May and last weekend was her first attempt at an open water race.

What I learned from watching my friend:

1. Open water swimming is not like pool swimming. At all. I suppose I had forgotten this, after so many years of switching back and forth easily. I try to do an open water swim once a week in the summer, and I’m very comfortable in the open water. I do occasionally make sighting mistakes, but not often. When I took my friend out to swim in the open water to practice a few days before the race, she kept going wildly off course. I told her she needed to lift her head out of the water and sight every 10 strokes, not every 100 as she thought she should.

2. Race conditions change so much in triathlon that times are not as transferrable as in running races. My friend had set her goal at a 2:45 time, based on looking at times from the year before. But the race itself turned out to be very different than the previous years I have done it. For one thing, the water was so low that we had to run 1/2 mile after the swim to get on our bikes. That meant longer transition time by about 3 minutes. Also, there was a significant wind on the bike, which meant that bike times were a bit slower, maybe just a minute or two, but it added up. It also meant that you were slightly more fatigued on the run, so both of us ran about 50 minutes for a 10k, which isn’t great. But adding up those changes, her time was surprisingly like her goal.

3. You can’t judge your performance based on your placement. This race was super well attended. There were people from all over the West who attended and a lot of them were better than me. I could count about 5 women I knew were better than me just by looking at the start list. But I don’t know everyone, of course. I ended up being 12th overall among the women, which isn’t as well as I usually do. Still, I was very pleased with how well I did. I got a PR on the swim and the bike. My run suffered because I was maybe too excited on the bike, but I was happy to take 2nd place in my age group.

4. You do the best in the sport you do the most. Whatever your default is, you’re going to shine at that. For me, it’s the bike. I realize it when I watch myself choose what to do on an easy day. I don’t run. I love swimming, and I would swim if I had easier access to a pool. But since I don’t, it’s the bike. Hurts my joints less and I don’t know, I just like it better. My husband’s default is the run, where he does better than on the bike, which he doesn’t do as much of. I don’t know that I should change this, but I realize that the default exists.

5. Helpful people are not always helpful. There were some nice guys who wanted to pump up my tires for me before the race. Professional bike shop guys and all, but they ended up deflating my tire accidentally and pulling off my stem. They were going to replace my tube entirely, then realized they didn’t have a replacement because my tires are the slightly smaller 650s. I have to admit, any advice they gave me was tainted by the fact that they didn’t notice that immediately and didn’t mess up. I wasted a good 20 minutes because of this mistake, and wished I hadn’t. It ended up costing me some time in transition because I didn’t go through my normal walk through of transition to make sure I could find my bike easily.