Sometimes when my alarm goes off at 4:00 am on the morning of a race, my first thought is "whyyyy do I do this to myself voluntarily?" On this particular race day, however, when my alarm went off my first thought was "I get to do a tri today!" That's a pretty good start.
The Oakland tri is only about a mile and a half from our place, so Travers and I loaded all of our stuff into backpacks, put our wetsuits on, and rode down to the transition. You can imagine who might be out in Oakland at 5 am on a Sunday morning (Saturday night?), and I wonder what people think when they see us riding down the road wearing wetsuits on a bicycle. We got to transition with plenty of time to set up and get to the start. We even found a bathroom in the JLS parking structure that nobody else seemed to know about with real sinks, which was a huge win! What a great start to the day.
Swim
The swim was a straight shot from the ferry terminal east to the boathouse. During warmup I didn't feel that great, but after about 5 minutes of swimming I got into a groove. The swim was current-aided, which I don't really like because I don't bust my ass in the pool to get carried to the finish during the race :p But I can't complain too much, since it makes the swim safer than going against the current. Since there weren't any photos of the Olympic distance swim finish, here's a photo of a random person I don't know jumping in. It's a very Oaklandish picture, which makes it awesome!
Even though after I got warmed up the swim felt great, I have to say it was very confusing. While I didn't have to sight very much because it was a straight line, once we got near the final buoy I had to stop several times and look around to locate the finish. We were in the second wave and I had passed some people from the first wave, and the people who were in front of me seemed to be dispersed everywhere. Luckily stopping to sight helped and I found the swim exit.
Swim result: The website seems to have subtracted 2 minutes from everyone's time, so I don't really know what my time was. 17:56 according to the official results and ~19:56 according to my watch. 2nd AG/2nd overall female, got completely smoked by a pro (the eventual AG and overall F winner).
T1
There was a 0.8+ mile run from the swim exit to T1 including 3 flights of stairs up and down, so the race took our shoes to the swim exit for us. I'm usually a really slow transitioner, but I think adding a long-ish run helped my time look not-so-bad compared to everyone else. 10:18.
Bike
This was probably the best bike ride I have ever had! First of all, in every Olympic tri I've ever done my leg muscles felt like they were going to detach from my hips by the end of the bike ride. It took me until June of this year to realize that it's because I don't train in aero ever but then I try to hammer the race in it (duh, Rachel). So over the past 5 weeks I trained as much as I could in aero, and it really paid off! The ride felt great, I negative split the two loops, and was having FUN riding a bike!
I'm not really smiling in the photo, probably because it was taken during a turn. I'm not great at turning my bike, and there were a lot of turns in this course. Still tons of room for improvement, but my fastest ride ever.
Travers passed me really early on in the race, around mile 8. Last time we raced Oakland I held him off until mile 19, but not this time! I knew he was having an awesome race and he did... 21 mph! I should be pushing myself harder on the bike so I can get closer to that speed!
Bike result: Course was short (~23.6 miles), time was 1:15:11 for a speed of 18.8 mph. 4th AG.
T2
A regular transition. While I was putting on my running shoes I saw a fellow LMJS team member and we chatted briefly. I probably shouldn't be chatting since as I mentioned, I'm a very slow transitioner. 2:15.
Run
This run was on "home turf" and I just knew it was going to be way better than the Pleasanton run. I tried to hold back the first couple of miles because I was worried I was going to crash, but I was clocking ~ 7:15 miles and feeling good! I think my face says it all here:
I try not to worry too much about racing other people, but I did notice that around mile 2 I was passing back the girl in my AG that I saw pass me on the bike. After a loop around the lake, which is the place I know better than any other for running, we headed back into Jack London Square. The 3 flights of stairs up and down added about a minute to my 10k time (and everyone else's), but after that the finish was in sight!
Run result: 45:34, 2nd AG. 7:20 pace, but if you subtract the overpass it's ~ 7:10/mile.
Due to the cooler weather and nicer course, I was much happier heading into the finish line at Oakland than I was at CIT!
Overall result: There's still that 2 minute discrepancy from the swim... my final time was either a 2:31 (race results) or 2:33 (my Garmin). I got 2nd in my age group so we stayed for the awards.
The winner only beat me by 22 minutes!
So what's next? I signed up for the Catfish swim/run (my favorite 2-sport combination) at the end of August. After that I'm not quite sure what to do. Last winter I didn't bike at all to focus on running, but I feel like I'm starting to get into biking and will kind of miss it. I also haven't figured out how hard I want to train for Healdsburg, if I want to run Boston, etc. I probably ran too much last winter since I ended up with a torn groin, but I guess we'll see how it goes when I start planning my fall/winter/spring racing.
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