I have to admit, I'm still new to this blogging thing so I tend to forget things essential to blogging. A camera. So this weekend was the 8th annual Honolulu Triathlon International Festival of Sports. It's a pretty big event with the Olympic and sprint distance triathlons, junior, youth and kids triathlons, sprint duathlon, open water swim, and a road race all on one day. I give them credit for holding such a huge event with races all going on at the same time.
So Saturday was packet pick up, body marking and bike drop off. This day before stuff is really nice since it reduces lines and makes race morning smoother, however since it's such a big ass race, the longs were quite long in my section. This year they decided to do the body marking before the race. I'm used to having the number written on me and getting high off the fumes. I lucked out, this year they had legit number stamps instead of pens. If you just so happen to stumble on my blog, I hurt my Achilles tendon a few months ago and had to changed 2/3 races over to relay events with me swimming and biking while having another run. This worked out at the Lanikai triathlon since it was a little on the smaller scale side. I was still able to change it over but talk about confusion on their end. I guess people don't really do two people teams that often or at all since they seemed a little lost on what I was talking about despite the approval from the race director. After I got that sorted out, I still had a feeling that they weren't sure on what to do.
On race days, I get up a few hours before start time to give myself time to eat, use the bathroom, stretch and check my bags to make sure I have everything and head out early. One of my things is arriving early on race day. By arriving early, it gives me time to set up my transition area, check the bike, use the bathroom, and try to relax.
Time for the race report. Since I was doing a relay, we had to start dead last for the swim. Luckily I found another relay swimmer who was pretty decent so I decided to draft off of her for the first 500m but that was when things got interesting. We hit the mass of slow swimmers. From this point on, most of my time was spent avoiding the breaststroke kicks, sidestroke kicks and trying not to run any slow swimmers over. Not fun. It was like swimming at a crowed public pool. Somehow I managed to do the 1500 in 23 min. Not my best time but can't help it. On to the bike section. The game plan was to sandbag the ride for 13 miles and slowly pick it up to mile 18 and pound it for the till the finish.The plan worked out perfectly, allowing me to have energy to fight the head wind and pound it back for a 1:08.
I don't know the exact times for what we did, the times were taken from my watch and meter on the bike. Apparently the timing chip didn't work for the swim part, somehow worked for the bike and run. Remember I said I had that feeling like they didn't know what they were doing? Well I guess my gut was right, they messed up on the category we were in, thus making us not exist on the results posted online today. Oh well. We still had fun doing it. On another note, 2 more weeks till the Honu. I know I must have said this a million times but I pretty excited to do it! Can't wait!
3 comments:
Those are solid swim and bike times. Strange about the timing chip on your swim. I loved this race. Crashed (literally) during the ride turning off Lagoon but there was no bike damage and I was able to finish hard and get on the run.
Enjoy the Honu!
Thanks man. It is strange since it got a T1 time but no swim time. Lucky you didn't get too messed up from the crash and were still able to finish. You going to do the Tinman?
I would but my wife and I are going to CA and WA for family visits this summer and that takes me away from real training for those couple of weeks right before the race. And then school starts (I'm a teacher) the next day I think. So I'm not sure it's in the cards.
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