Webster Triathlon Time Trial

I find Triathlons to be a fun alternative to road racing. Unlike road racing, you can enter a triathlon with very mediocre fitness and still have fun. It’s not like you’re going to get dropped on the first kicker of a 60-mile road race. The only downside is that you get a potentially very embarrassing number next to your name in the results. Personally I couldn’t care less. They’re fun to write about though, so get ready for a long report.

Erica is getting competitive with triathlons this year, so I felt obligated to do at least one race this season with her. The Webster Triathlon is run on the same course as the massive Danskin Triathlon, so I decided to give that one a go. I also convinced brother Shawn to sign up and do his first tri. Webster is a sprint triathlon listed as a 0.5 mile swim, 12 mile bike, and 3 mile run (last year it was 2.8?). Claimed distances in triathlons seem pretty suspect to me, so it’s hard to gauge your efforts based on this.

Last year I entered my first real triathlon and had a blast. Cycling in adventure-style multi-sport races is what got me interested in road racing in the first place. The trouble for me with a traditional triathlon is this swimming thing. A roadie trying to do a triathlon is a funny thing. If you read my report last year for the Tobay Triathlon, you know that I’m not much of a swimmer. Actually, not only am I not much of a swimmer, it’s a struggle for me just to stay afloat and not drown. And, because my swimming effort was so stellar last year at Tobay, I decided it was unnecessary for me to go to the trouble of bumming a wetsuit off of someone again.

In the interest of training as little as possible for a triathlon, I have not been swimming since Tobay last August. Actually, I may have sat in a hot tub at a hotel one night, but that doesn’t count. As noted in the Tobay race report, it had been 9 years since I’d done a real swim workout prior to that race. As far as the running goes, I may have actually ran a few times in the off season. However, that was far from consistent training and I definitely haven’t been running since February, maybe even Christmas.

Needless to say I wasn’t exactly starting this race with any delusions of trying to win, place, or put up any sort of result that looks impressive. The only thing I had going for me was that I bike kind of a lot, so I thought maybe I could put the hammer down there. Looking at past results, the winning bike times were only about 24.5 mph average so I thought: Hey! I can do that! Because 24.5 mph seemed so slow, I decided to give myself a handicap and sell my TT bike the week before the race. I also loaned out my disc wheel cover to a teammate for the Giro di Jersey. That left me with my road bike, no clip-ons, my aero helm, and my carbon wheels. Game on!

All week the weather forecasters were predicting a nor’easter to come through and pour on us during the triathlon. I got to say I was a little disappointed that we caught a hole in the storm and it didn’t rain. The only thing that could have made this sprint triathlon a more miserable and humbling experience for me would have been pouring rain. Actually, hail would have been even better, but I don’t want to sound greedy. Unfortunately, we only had grey skies, 60°F temperatures, and no rain. Where’s the fun in that?!

The first wave of racers went off at 8:00 AM, Erica went off with the younger women at 8:09 AM, and the male 20-29 went off at 8:12 AM. Why are triathlons so early? You train your butt off, do a handful of races each year, and they all start first thing in the morning so you have to get up at 5AM. Maybe that’s why triathletes only seem to do a few races per year. Anyways, I was in the last wave, and I’m one of the slowest swimmers in the race, so it was shaping up to be a pretty lonely race.

Before I even started, the first wave of racers was coming out of the water. The top guys were finishing the swim in less than 10 minutes. I was shooting to break 20 minutes. Yeah, in my dreams!

0.5 mile Swim – Event of Doom

Our wave finally starts and I made a strategic decision to just stand there and let everyone go. I knew my place after last year when I tried to stay within the pack. It turned out I wasn’t the only one with this plan. About five of us just stood there for a good 10 or 20 seconds as everyone else powered away. Finally I started inching my way into the water thinking that it was freezing cold and wishing so badly that I had a wetsuit to keep me warm.

After a minute of wading in the water freezing my butt off and feeling like a nine-year old that doesn’t want to get wet because it’s too cold, I finally dove into the water. Because I’m a totally seasoned and experienced swimmer now, I knew my strengths and went directly into the back stroke.

Back stroke is comfortable for me because I can breathe, unlike other strokes. Breathing is cool. The only trouble with it is that you can’t see where you’re going. Again, I was experienced and knew how to handle this, so I focused on keeping my feet pointed at the same point on the beach that we started. No problems!

I swam hard for the first 3 or 4 minutes without looking where I was going, trying to get into a groove and cover some ground. When I finally stopped to see where I was, I was pretty crushed to find that I was only about 1/3 of the way to the first buoy (the course was a triangle). Also, I had taken a path that was off course by about 30 degrees. So much for racing in a straight line this year.

After that I had to stop pretty much every minute to check where I was going. By doing so I stopped using markers to keep track of where I was going, and I started zig-zagging all over the place. This got worse and worse and worse. I also couldn’t see ANYONE else around me, and I was pretty sure that I was in dead last place.

I finally reach the first buoy and made the turn to the second buoy. This part of the course is into a headwind and parallels shore. I could see a few people behind me that were having incredible amounts of trouble. One guy was lying on top of one of the buoys. That would probably have been me if I weren’t in decent aerobic shape from cycling. As it was my heart rate was probably 190 bpm and I was barely moving.

Swimming into a head wind while doing the back stroke is brutal. The waves crash over your head and you swallow all sorts of water. I had also ditched my goggles because they didn’t work at all (obviously I didn’t test them before hand), so I was getting tons of water in my eyes. My only stroke wasn’t working for me, so I invented a new stroke. I call it the upside down breast stroke. It’s like the breast stroke, but on your back. Erica says that I can’t claim credit for inventing this because it’s already used as a survival stroke, but I’m going to take credit for it anyways.

Anyways, this survival stroke was awesome. There was one guy next to me at the half way point, and once I started doing the survival stroke, I put all sorts of ground into him. This was really exciting. Had I finally figured out how to swim fast? Thinking that I had, I got into a killer groove and started hammering.

I hammered for a minute or two before smashing into another swimmer. I say “smashing”, because it was a head-on collision with another swimmer. We both stopped swimming, he looked at me, I looked at him, looked around, and then it dawned on me.

“Am I swimming the wrong way?!”, I said? The other swimmer said “YES, YOU ARE GOING BACKWARDS!”

Dang, just when I thought I was getting the hang of this foolish sport, I go and do something worse than not moving at all. This marked an all-time low.

After that, it was stop and go for the rest of the race. I had an entourage of life-guards on surf boards and people in canoes following me because I was so close to the back of the race. It was kind of like being in a breakaway in a bike race, only not really in a breakaway at all. Actually it was kind of cool because I could stop and take a break on life guard girl’s surf board. That was pretty key.

The rest of the swim was pretty uneventful. All survival stroke and stopping every 30 seconds or so. My Mom was watching me with binoculars and said I must’ve swam the length of the course 3 times. It was that good. I finished in 26:29, 426/448, 17 minutes back from the leader and almost exactly 3x that time.

Transition 1 – Dizzy Time

Getting out of the water was brutal. I realized just how hard I had been working because I was wheezing and gasping for air. I had water in my ears and couldn’t hear at thing. I was ridiculously dizzy and it was hard to run in a straight line. You know how in between innings at baseball games they have fans put their forehead on a baseball bat, spin around in circles, then do some sort of running similar to doing suicides? That’s how I felt. Oh, and it was about a ¼ mile from the beach to the transition zone. I was about the 10th to last person out of the water, and there were no spectators left other than my parents. They probably would have left to watch Shawn and Erica leave on their bikes if they weren’t seriously concerned that they might have to call an ambulance to rescue me. As I ran up to the transition zone I had to weave through spectators that must’ve thought everyone had finished the swim already. I would say “excuse me” and they would move to the side and say “Oh!... good job! Keep it up!”
I rule at swimming.


12 mile Bike – Payback Time

Payback time, or so I thought. I felt sick after swimming, but it did feel great to get on the bike. I didn’t have my power meter on, but if I did I am 100% confident that it would have been the most pitiful 34 minutes of power output that I’ve ever recorded. I’m guessing about 220W average, which is a nice 5-hour endurance ride on a normal day.

I knew that there was a pretty decent hill about 4 miles in, and that the rest of the course was pretty much flat. There were certainly a bunch of rollers along the flat parts, but they weren’t anything you couldn’t power over with a couple of pedal strokes.

Having finished the swim ahead of 10 people out of nearly 500, you can imagine the caliber of cyclists I passed for the majority of the bike leg. Lots of mountain bikes and some of the worst fitting bicycles I’ve ever seen. Some of those people had to have been borrowing bikes from friends or something.

Anyways, I felt almost bad for these ill-equipped people as I went flying by. It wasn’t even fair. On the other hand, they would probably say the same thing about me swimming, so maybe it is fair. On little rollers I would power over while the mountain bikers shifted down to granny gears to grind it over. I’m talking speed differentials of 20mph vs. 8mph. I get a kick out of this.
I made sure not to go too hard before this one hill on the course. I knew when I came to it because there was a cyclist walking their bike up it. I thought I could see the top, so I kept it in the big ring and just about sprinted all the way up and passed so many people in doing so. The poor mountain bikers were absolutely crawling up this 8% (guessing!) grade.

I got to what I thought was the top and went downhill for about 5 seconds. This took me around a corner that showed me a last little kicker to get over. I was hurting real bad from the first part, so into the little ring and up the hill I went. I was still passing racers every 3 seconds, just not quite at the ridiculous rate as the first part of the hill.

The descent off the hill starts right after you crest the top. It was steep and there was no need to pedal. Even still I continued to pass people. It was as if they had their brakes set with automatic controls to prevent their speeds from topping 30mph.

After the hill it was all rolling flats with no significant climbs. I spent a lot of time resting my forearms on the handlebars wishing that I had aerobars. My forearms were getting bruised from hitting cracks in the pavement and gusty winds were making it extremely difficult to control my bike.

I really wasn’t pedaling hard at all by the finish. There was still a constant stream of cyclists to pass, but my legs felt like garbage and I can’t imagine I was doing over 200W. The last section was into a nasty headwind too. What really alarmed me was when I passed a runner at a low speed differential. I had passed cyclists at greater differentials. I felt like a kit trying to push through this headwind.

I made sure not to slow down at all on the last few turns before the finish, and made a super sweet cyclocross dismount just before the transition. I totally deserved a time bonus for this but no such luck. My bike split was 34:02, 24th place overall. 4 minutes back from the fastest time. Not exactly the stellar bike split I was hoping for, but given that I had to swim 3x as long as the leaders and I didn’t have aerobars, I wasn’t too dismayed.

Transition 2

I took off my bike shoes. I put on my running shoes. It was awesome.

3 mile Run – Most Boring Sport Ever

I could see my brother leaving the transition zone as I entered the transition zone. It was all going to come down to the run. He’s done some recent 5k’s in the 24-25 minute range. I haven’t done any recent 5k’s, and 8 minute miles is about as fast as I really want to run, so I didn’t know if I’d be able to catch him. It was pretty sweet for me though, because I could see him up the road dangling out there like a 30 second man in a time trial. This was key because it gave me a reason to run fast. Otherwise, I probably would have just followed the person in front of me like a lemming and doddled comfortably to the finish as a cooldown.

My legs continued to feel like garbage as I started the run, but I still felt at least one million times better than I did when I finished the swim. My calves were super tight and it was difficult to stretch my stride out even a little bit. I avoided pushing the pace in the first half-mile and just ran comfortably to get stretched out. It seemed like everyone was just following the person in front of them and there was very little passing going on. As slow as I felt like I was going, there was no one around me going significantly faster. During the run I was slowly passed by two people, both of which were barely going any faster than me.

Not long before the turnaround point I caught Shawn. He was going good, but I guess I was going just a tiny bit faster. Making a pass running seems so boring compared to cycling.
After that I didn’t have a carrot in front of me and I pretty much lost all motivation to go fast. My transponder was velcro’d around my ankle and was really digging into my skin, so I took a break and stopped to fix it. The rest of the run was entirely uneventful. I felt great when I crossed the finish line. Certainly better than I felt when I finished the swim. My run split was 22:14, 189th place. I finished in 1:29:37 and in 247th place.

Summary

Another fun triathlon in the books. I just like going out and doing something different for a change. The swim was awesome as always, but the bike was a bit disappointing averaging only 21 point something mph. I really wanted to be able to lay it all out in the bike, but I’m starting to think I’ll never be able to do that if I don’t learn to swim at least a tiny little bit. Maybe next year, right? Oh yeah, the run. I don’t know. Running is kind of really boring.

Erica smoked me by 8 minutes and finished 6 out of 30 or something like that in her age group. 90 seconds faster and she would have been in third. As her faithful coach/boyfriend, I feel it’s my duty to make sure she has aerodynamic toys for her next triathlon. No sense in spending hundreds of hours training if you’re not going to spend $200 to buy 2 minutes and move up to 3rd or possibly 2nd place.

Shawn did the swim in 17 minutes. I would KILL to be able to swim that fast. His bike split was 41 minutes, but I doubt I would have been much faster on his 28 pound Iron Horse. He finished just 40 seconds down on me which put him into 15 out of 40 or so in the Clydesdales division. Solid first triathlon.

Results are up here.