Sunday, June 19, 2016
June signals the beginning of triathlon season here in Ontario, Canada. As I’m writing this blog, its the last weekend of spring (summer officially starts on Monday), and while the water temperature is still quite cool (Lake Ontario’s Cherry Beach measured a chilly 11C (52F) when I went for my last swim on Friday), the air temperature has begun to rapidly heat up.
I always find early season races difficult to train for as the open water swims are freezing cold (even with wetsuits), transition zones awkwardly fumbled through with numb hands and feet, followed by a de-thawing process on the bike, and a final completely juxtaposed run as the day heats up and the sun beats down on the pavement and cooks our tired bodies. Needless to say, practices haven’t been smooth for me so far.
This season I am training for long course triathlon (olympic to half-iron distance) and had originally, planned to do the MSC Welland long course (2km swim, 55km bike, 15km run) on June 26 as my first race of the season. However, on a whim, I decided to add in the Guelph Lake short course (750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run) on June 19. Although I hadn’t been training for this distance, I decided to do the course for two reasons - to support a friend I was coaching for this particular race, and to work out any race rust I might have before my first major long course of the season the following weekend.
The swim portion of the race was being held in Guelph Lake, and with a reported water temperature of 21C (71F), I was looking forward to swimming in warmer waters than those of frigid Cherry Beach. It seemed the air temperature would also be balmy, it was 18C when I woke up at 5am that morning, with a high forecast for 31C later that afternoon. Fortunately, with a start time of 9:00am and estimated finish of 10:30am, I would be done before the real oppressive heat of the day would set in.
The race course started with a swim in Guelph Lake, with a steep uphill run into the transition zone, before heading out onto the bike course (which was still open to road traffic unfortunately), turning around and ending up back into the same transition zone before heading out onto the run which was enclosed in the campground.
The beach was nice and I tried to managed my pre-race nerves by making superhero poses in my wetsuit.
The swim start was probably one of the most chaotic I’ve ever been in. Perhaps it was just the large size of the age group I had to deal with in this race, but after 100m of constant kicks and bumps I decided to just pull over to the edge of the pack and swim in my own space rather than deal with the constant and furious barrage of legs and hands. I felt I made the right decision. Things calmed down for me after that, and I found a nice swimming rhythm for myself over the remainder of the 750m swim course. Later that day, my friend watching from the beach told me it looked like the water was boiling when my wave entered.
Although the race officials had laid down narrow mats into T1, I found it was hard to avoid the stones and pebbles on the ground, and felt my T1 time was slower than usual. I know, it was hardly the broken glass scene from Die Hard but it still slowed me down enough to be painfully annoying.
The bike course was fairly standard, although I still felt uneasy with the open road traffic. There were several instances I almost crossed the centre line (which would be an automatic DQ if witnessed by a race official) to avoid some trucks, and in many cases truck drivers just kept on driving and waved me on to pass them in the left lane, while they still blocked the entire right lane, which was incredibly frustrating for a triathlete who wanted to follow the rules to avoid any risk of having a DQ beside her name. I was probably barely averaging 30km/h at most, if that. (In fact it was 27.6km/h.)
I’m always glad to get off the bike in T2 and get to my favourite part of the race - the run. The first 1km of the run is always awkward, your legs never feel normal after enduring the swim and bike portions, but experienced triathletes learn to shake it off, and I find that with each step the run gets easier, and by the 3km mark I felt I had found my stride and was running well, with a pace of 4:47/km. Naturally, I’m a strong runner and my legs really kicked in as I turned up the last hill and passed many of the other runners, both male and female, coming into the home stretch.
Overall, I finished with a time of 1:27:18. I did it in under 1h30m, which is good, but still shy of breaking the 1h25m mark I've been chasing.
Here are my official race stats:
Swim 750m - 17:58
T1 - 2:48
Bike 20km - 41:22
T2 - 1:16
Run 5km - 23:57
Overall finish time - 1:27:18
Gender placement - 50/260
Age category placement - 15/46
In the end, I was less than a minute off my personal best for a sprint triathlon (PB @ Wasaga Beach 2015 with a time of 1:26:21). But because so many racers showed up for this event from all over the province, the talent pool was quite deep, and I ended up finishing in 15th place, instead of the typical 7th place finishes I’ve been posting most of last season. To put it in perspective, this year there were 600 participants in the sprint race (334 men, 260 women), while last year there were only 407 participants in the same race (229 men and 176 women).
I was talking to the lady at the registration desk shortly before the race began and she said that they had actually ran out of registration forms for race day registration, and that staff had to draw up registration forms from scratch on sheets of loose leaf paper! That’s how many people showed up to race that day. Seems everyone had a fever, for more triathlon!
Alas, the awkward first triathlon of the season is done and over with, and I’m looking forward to a much better outing at Welland this coming weekend.
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