Rocketman Triathlon 8/29

The weather was close to perfect Sunday morning. Overcast with a temperature hovering around 80 degrees, you couldn't really ask for anything more. I was really siked about this race since it was the first time I raced against a lot of the guys I train with (Jeremy, Derek, Justin, etc.).

In order to make the swim upstream in the Tennessee River a little less daunting, they shut down the damns upriver to bring the current down as far as possible. Nevertheless, the swim was arguably the most difficult part of the day. The first 500m of the course was swimming straight upstream. I did a fairly decent job the first 500 and then around the second buoy. One of the buoys floated the away, so the distance between the second and third buoys was a little less than half a mile, very difficult to see with fogged-up goggles. In the end, I probably swam between 1600 and 1700m total after getting off course a couple of times.

Then it came time to rock the bike. The first 10 miles went by really fast. I averaged close to 24 mph and was really excited about the rest of the bike. Once I hit mile 11 I figured out why I had been going so fast, I was being carried by a nice tailwind, which turns into a bad headwind on the way back. The last 8 miles I was passed by both Jacob Mueller and Drew Williams which encouraged me to push through.

Once I got out of T2 I hit the run hard, running my first mile in 7:40. The gravel roads slowed me down, especially when it was coupled with rolling hills. The second mile was more challenging and I rolled passed the second mile-marker at 16:00. Miles 3-5 went by without a hitch and I averaged about an 8:10 mile. I kicked it up the last mile and pushed through sharp pain in both quads to turn in a sub-50 minute 10k. All in all it was a good race, congrats to Derek getting second in his age group. Start training for my marathon this week :)

Swim (1500m) - 34:33
T1 - 1:00
Bike (40k / 24.6 miles) - 1:16:13 (19.5 mph)
T2 - 1:08
Run (10k / 6.2 miles) - 49:54 (8:02 m/m)

Total - 2:42:46