The last week of August (including Oakland Tri race report)

Posted by Rachel

Taper week

Taper week started last weekend post Livermore ride/wine tasting/earthquake. The first activity of taper was bioluminescence kayaking. We did this up in Tomales Bay and it was AWESOME. The weather was great, the water was warm, and we saw a lot of bioluminescence. Unfortunately, when you try to photograph biolumescence it looks like you took a photograph of black construction paper, so instead you'll need to imagine what that's like and enjoy these photos instead.

Go ahead and leave your vote for "best dressed" in the comments 

The work week began with me eating a whole lot and training barely at all. I always worry that I'm going to gain weight at this stage, but luckily I don't own a scale so I can only speculate and I don't actually have to quantify this.

Expo day

Fast forward to Saturday. It has been a while since I cooked so we decided to host a pasta dinner for the triathletes and supporters. In the morning, I prepped by making the cake and the pasta.

I didn't get any pictures of the final products but you can imagine what these raw materials may have turned into

Then we went to check out the expo. The expo was pretty cool- small enough to feel like an intimate local race, but big enough that it had interesting stuff to buy/look at. Afterward, the guys "practiced" the pedestrian footbridge that we had to cross twice during the race- once during T1 and once in the middle of the 10k run. Of course, I had practiced extensively the week before, analyzing average time to cross and whether I should take every step or every other. It was amusing to see a stairway that is almost always deserted littered with triathletes practicing going up and down stairs.

An important part of the race!

Race day

This was one of those nights that I didn't sleep well before the race. I think I was anxious about having mechanical issues on the bike, because I kept having dreams that my bike was not functioning. I love triathlons, but there is so much more gear to worry about than just running. Finally at 4 am, it was time to wake up. Fellow blogger Brandon and I left the house (we rode bikes to the start- love local races!) a little bit after 5 in these stellar outfits:

What sport are we doing?

Traers isn't as Type A as me, so he left the house about 40 min later and somehow ended up getting a better spot in transition. Such is life :p By the way, the 3 of us did the Olympic distance for this event.

The swim 

The swim was in the Oakland estuary, which as a resident is slightly disturbing. Considering I had already paid to do the race, I was resigned to the fact that I'd have to get in there at some point. They were very transparent about the water quality results (which were actually good from a bacterial standpoint), and I knew people who did training swims in there and survived, so the outlook wasn't too bad. The water was warm (66 degrees) and I wore my sleeveless wetsuit (which I had never swam in before). I LOVED the sleeveless. I felt so much more like myself when I was swimming, and I highly recommend it to others if the water temps allow.

The Oak Tri did something interesting- they started all men and women 30-34 in the same wave. I had started with men once before at Alcatraz, but I wasn't really competing in the swim at Alcatraz so I was pretty chill about letting people do their thing and being patient to work around others. Here, I wanted a PR and a good swim and I wanted to go after it. As we were lining up, I noticed there were a LOT more men around me than women. As it got close to the horn, people (men) started really pushing line (kind of like what happens at a concert when the headliner is about to come on). After the start, it was quite a bit rougher than I'm used to. It wasn't necessarily aggression-I've been in swim starts with aggressive women; it's just that the guys are a lot bigger. Up until the first buoy (~150 m?), there must've been at least 30 people with gold caps in front of me and I felt like I was swimming in a washing machine. After the turn, I went toward the outside and most of those people faded a lot. Apparently they didn't realize they had 1350 m left :p The rest of my swim felt great. The swim times were way fast due to the aid of current, but I was thrilled with my strategy and pacing- I felt really strong the whole way. T1 was LONG (0.36 miles according to my Garmin, plus the pedestrian bridge which is 3 stories of stairs), but by ~24 minutes after I had started I was already on the bike.

The bike

With the triathlon being in Oakland, I was very familiar with the bike course. It was dead flat with only about 4 miles of it being directly into the headwind. The real disadvantage of this course is that it had so many turns. I am really, really bad at turning my bike. I had a secret goal of biking 18 mph, but every time we turned I'd have to slow down to < 10 mph then get all the way back up, which really does expend quite a bit of energy. Nothing really remarkable happened on the bike course. I didn't love the whole ride but there were times when I was actually having fun on the bike, which is nice. The bike course was 2 loops and we got to see our awesome fans (Chen, Sandi, and Will). I drank a whole water bottle and ate twice on the bike, which I'm also really proud of because taking my hands off the handlebars at any time can be a risk for me. I knew I was doing pretty well when Travers didn't pass me until mile 20 or so (we had started together). I rolled in at 17.9 mph- just shy of my goal. For me personally, turns slow me down way more than rolling hills, so I think on any comparable, straighter course I would have made my goal.

The run

T2 was unremarkable (although I'm a pretty slow transitioner). At the expo I had bought one of those race belts because I didn't want my bib on my shirt during the bike ride. I won't make any admission of guilt here on the internet (I'm not sure if this is a punishable offense), but I may or may not have forgotten to put on the bib for the run. $10 well-spent for sure. When I started the run I felt GREAT, but I tried to hold back because in all of my tris except Monte Rio I started the run strong only to realize later that the great feeling did not last. The run was very "home turf-y"- it passed right by our place at mile 1.5. I was holding pace in the 7:20s and it felt awesome. I passed Travers around mile 3- he looked great too and made me feel better about that mistake I alluded to that I may or may not have made in T2. Eventually I got to the pedestrian bridge in mile 5 and I still hadn't crashed yet. There were some random people cheering and I smiled and thanked them and they said I was the only person smiling. What can I say...running is just so much more fun than biking :p I came over the bridge (sprint tri athletes who were walking up the stairs were super courteous about moving out of the way in the narrow stairway, which was awesome and I was grateful for) and STILL felt great after the bridge, so I hammered the last mile and broke 7. My 10k ended up at 44:44 (it was a little shy of 6.2 on the Garmin, but the footbridge added a minute to the times so it was probably sort of close). 

Overall it was a 9 minute PR for this distance (total time 2:34). The course was fast but I felt a lot stronger than previous races and I trained really hard this summer. This is a good sign, since I'm about to start training for one that's 4x as long. 

The celebration

We had PRs all around (Travers and Paige) which was great. The food/beer line was long, which I was fine with skipping except we missed out on an awesome mason jar. We spent the rest of the day lounging and drinking (some more than others).

Next up: I become a runner for a couple of months (keep the cross training with volume reduction, and add running miles). My plans to do a fall marathon have been changed slightly with my goal race being the Healdsburg half. The course is challenging with some decent climbs, but I've had a couple of good runs at the ends of tris this year so I'd like to go after it. But first, a week of laziness.