Race Result

Racer:	Steve Hayslett
Race:	Spud Short Triathlon
Date:	Sunday, June 13, 2004
Location:	General Smallwood State Park, MD
Race Type:	Triathlon - Sprint
Age Group:	Male 25 - 29
Time:	1:38:51
Overall Place:	80 / 393
Age Group Place:	8 / 27
Comment:	good race lots of people and lots of fun...

Race Report:

Short story:

w/ exception of the race jitters causing poor sleep and the early morning, i entered spud, well rested. This is my third tri and second of the season. during the past month my bike and swim training was ramped up to compensate the lack there of this year.

Spud was good. I was impressed by it's size and how smoothly everything went. It was amazing that they could pull of a swim w/ the tiny little beach. The bike course was hillier than i expected. The run course, well.... I only figured it out after doing it.

results from from watch, not very accurate:
1:38:52
swim 18:27
T1 4:07
bike 49:11
T2 0:53
Run 26:12

results from race timing:
Swim: 19:28 Pl 217
T1: 2:39
Bike: 48:58 Pl 53
T2: 1:33
Run: 26:13 Pl 95

I also placed 6th out of 17 in the clydesdale div.

Long Story:

The swim started about 25 minutes late. After waiting down in the water warmed up waiting for the race to start, I realized that i needed take of some business when the race director came down and started the race. Starting off in the first wave I decided to sight off using other swimmers. I swam the inside line keeping a few meters from each buoy. After passing the first buoy i took care my business, and grabbed the front of my collar, to hopefully dilute the damaging effects a grown man incurs on himself when he pees in his wetsuit. I reached the .25 mile turn in 8:00 minutes. I was excited, that had probably been the fastest i have every swam in open water.. My muscles were worked, but not exhausted. Figuring i'd make the return trip in about 9 minutes, a few errors then occurred. I some how made it to the outside of the group. Reverting back to the orginal plan to sight every 7 to 9 stroke cycles was in order. As the fast kids from the waves behind passed, i started to get thrown around alot more. After being tossed around for while, looked up to sight, and found out I was swimming perpendicular to the swim course. I stopped took a breather, and slowly eased my way back to the next buoy. The rest of the return trip was done in a leap frog pattern, so I didn’t make the expected 9 minute return plan..

Interestingly, my girlfriend said the 5th guy out of the water was a 12 year old boy. What a stud!

T1:

T1 was long. climb this big hill, run/walk a long way on pavement, finally arrive to my bike. After cautiously removing the bottom half of the wetsuit, I Grabbed my helmet, hosed my feet off w/ my water bottle, put my cycling shoes on, took a shot of water, and I was on my way. Jogged to the exit, and began the bike.

Bike: Once I got out of the park, my new HR monitor decided it was not going to be part of this race. The power lines were interfering, or my strap was in a weird place. It was consistently reading around 50 to 60. I used other indictors to judge my pace. I quickly passed 10 or so people and then found my pace group of 4 for the rest of the ride. We made many exchanges of the pack lead. The others were faster climbers, I tried to maintain my normal cadence of 100-110, and used the flats and down hills to catch up. The rolling hills went by fairly quickly. I managed to take down 5 servings of hammer gel, and 20 oz of water. The pace was probably low z3a(lactate threshold) for the hills, and the rest was probably z2. I've heard the bike course is actually 16.5 miles not the quoted 15 so... maybe my average was faster than my calculated 18.3.
My thought rolling into T2, is i could of went harder.

T2:

As I entered T2, i found my girlfriend yelling at everyone to slow down. I quickly responded w/ "don't tell me what to do", secretly i was thank full for the notification to quickly dismount. Leaving my cycling shoes on, I unclipped and headed for the racks. After hooking my bars on to the rack, throwing off my helmet, slipping on my shoes, grabbing my number belt, i was off. My running shoes had baby powder in the bottom to prevent blisters and had some "lock laces" that I bought at Tri-Speed the week before, they are essentially elastic string and worked well.

Run:

The run start absolutely stinks at spud, i think they are intentionally trying to turn ankles. After taking the start area slowly and cautiously, I built up to z2 once on the road, and then low Z3a. During the first half I passed several people on the down hills. I am proud of this, cause I’ve spent a lot of time switching to a POSE style running method and developing a method to run hills w/ out pounding killing the knees. After reaching the turnaround point and turning onto the dirt road, Mother Nature started calling again. Not knowing how much was left, I slowed down to z1, went slowly down the long down hill, ran through the campground, and then decided to go into the woods and took care of my problem. Several people managed to pass during my little experience. Shrugging it off, I built z3a after a couple minutes. Had I known where I was on the course, this whole thing wouldn't have been a problem. I reached the wooden bridge, crossed the line.

After crossing the finish line, my thoughts were, i could of gone harder. Although, not going hard enough is much better than too hard. I'm happy w/ my performance and look forward more races.