Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The Rookie Tri 2011

Ok, so I know that the name of this race makes it sound like it's for beginners, but I have always wanted to do this race.  And this year they moved the course to a venue that I have raced at before so that made me want to do it even more.  I guess the organizers realized that not just beginners sign up for this race because this year they created a "Veteren's" division for people who have competed in races before. 

This turned out to be a extremely fun race.  It's a super sprint with a 300 m swim, 11.2 mi bike, and 2 mi run.  I was anxious to start racing again to see how my foot was going to hold up after having been off of it for so long after my injury.  I had been running again for a little over a month and I knew my foot was okay because it never hurt on my training runs but I was still nervous.  I had set a goal of 6 minutes for the swim, 40 minutes for the bike, and 20 minutes for the run.  I really enjoyed the short swim on this race and was just 39 seconds off my goal of 6 minutes!  The bike course has some hills and I'm still trying to make friends with the hills but I was happy with my time of 43 minutes (3 minutes off my goal time).  Then I took off on the run and felt pretty strong out there.  I ended up with a 19:01 run (almost 1 minute better than my goal time)!  I ended up ranking in the middle of my age group with a time of 1:14:09, which was just fine with me considering it was my first race of the season.  Of course I seemed to have forgotten how to have a quick transition though, so that is something that I'm going to have to work on again.  Apparently I decided to take a nap or something between the swim and the bike, and then in T2 I wore new shoes that I've never worn on a race before and I had trouble getting my feet into them so I lost some time there.  Oh, well, live and learn! 

After I crossed the finish line and was talking with friends I realized that my foot didn't even cross my mind while I was racing!  This made those two months of not running so worth it so I could recovery completely.

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