So I’ll start my race recap with the swim. Sunday morning was very cold, upper 40’s when we arrived at the reservoir a little before 6am. This was somewhat troubling to me as I had driven out to the res the Thursday before for a final practice swim and the water was freezing even though it was warm outside.
I must say, surprisingly, the water was quite comfortable. It was almost a relief to step in to as the water temp was in the mid-upper 60’s and warm in comparison to the outside air temp. I was wearing a full body, long sleeve wetsuit so I can’t say how it might have felt if I didn’t have the extra layer on but the temp was really nice.
Rattlesnake Triathlon has a strange swim start. You run down a little chute one at a time in reverse age order, women first. I actually liked this at the beginning of the race as there was no mass start, fists flying, legs kicking chaos. It wasn’t great in that you couldn’t stand in the water and wait to begin. The other thing that I found, as did a number of my teammates, was that by the time you rounded the corner of the triangle and were swimming back to shore people started to bottleneck. SO…… just when you might have started to fall in to your rhythm of swim strokes you were suddenly getting kicked or water in the face as you came up for a breath. It was just an interesting experience, I’m not sure if it was good or bad, just different.
All in all the swim portion was fine, slow for me, spending 13:40 to cover the 500m, but a success. I didn’t flip out, I didn’t find myself wishing I hadn’t signed up for the race, I just kept returning to some Total Immersion Focal Points I learned over the winter when training with Brian at FDS coaching in Denver. As Yoda might say, Speedy I was not, but calm I was.
A pretty steep uphill exit from the swim beach back towards transition brought me to the wetsuit stripping area which was great. By then the sun was up, it was feeling a bit more warm, and I eagerly entered transition, slid on my arm warmers and hopped on my bike…..
I’ll break own the bike portion tomorrow.