Cedar Lake Sprint Tri #2 Race Report

One week after Lake T it was time for another sprint triathlon to sharpen up for the following week’s big half ironman.  The goal here was to race a bit harder than the week before.

 

Unfortunately I forgot to charge my Garmin so I was flying completely blind.  I also went to the race sans support crew so no pictures other than what I could pull from the race’s Facebook site.  That also means a brief race report.

 

This race is pretty short, about a 350-400 yard swim followed by a 9 mile bike and a 5k run.  The weather was on and off rain showers during the day creating some wet roads.  While it did not rain during the race it did immediately afterwards.  The bike course was extremely technical with a lot of 90 corners, wet patches, and a fairly good size downhill into a 180 degree turn which meant a big uphill.

 

Here are some shots of the swim start.  It was a nice small field of about 70 racers.  I started on the far right.

 

I felt like I swam really hard the whole was knowing it was a very short swim.  I did wear a wetsuit as the water was cold enough.  I came out of the water about 1/3 of the way through the field.  The transition area is very small and had a pretty fast transition.

 

I then started on the bike and tried to make up some time on the faster swimmers.  After a couple of early passes I was in no mans land riding by myself.  Approaching the turnaround I started counting riders on the other side of the road.  I counted myself in 10th overall.  That only motivated me more to push hard up the hill and try to catch more riders.  That didn’t happen but no one caught me from behind either so I was starting the run in 10th.

 

Shot approaching T2:

 

After another fast transition I set off on the run course right behind 2 other runners.  This is where I was most worried about the lack of Garmin as I don’t have a great sense of my run pace without it.  The runners in front of me quickly left me behind and my target became keeping people behind me.  I felt like I had a much faster run than the prior week, probably mostly because of the flatter course.  The only hill is right before the turnaround and I stayed steady up that with the idea being to work the downhill and try to push for the finish.  In the last mile I had a few people approaching from behind but I was able to hold them off.  For this point in the year it was a pretty good run.

 

Approaching the finish:

 

I was happy with the race and it felt like a better effort than the week before.  And I was certainly happy with the top 25% overall finish especially in a run heavy race.

 

	Time	Distance	Pace	AG Place	%	Overall Place	%
# Entries				10		69
Swim+T1	7:51	400 yards	~1:34/100yd	6	60%	23	33%
Bike	28:24	9 miles	~19.16 mph	2	20%	10	14%
T2+Run	25:13	3.1 miles	8:13/mile	7	70%	39	57%
Total	1:01:28			4	40%	17	25%