Smells Like Mediocrity

Did the race yesterday and, overall, I did OK. So, of course, I'm disappointed.

There were good and bad points. The swim went very well, way better than I expected. I started wide outside and passed the main knot of swimmers in my group by the first buoy. From then on I was picking off people one at a time with a good steady pace. I managed to pass several of the slow guys in the prior age group who had a 5 minute head start.

I had a decently quick transition time, that's owed mostly to the various gadgets I bought.

Then the bike leg... and the disappointment. My average came out to less than 18mph, which means I spent almost an hour on the bike, which means I've got a lot of work to do on that. Towards the end of the ride I started getting some flareups of side aches. Those are something that I had pretty well under control during training, but not this day.

I made it about a 1/4 mile into the run before the side aches shut me down completely. None of my tricks worked to get rid of them and my pace was a little slower than a ninety year old woman with a walker. Just before the halfway point I finally burned through them and was able to somewhat run the last 1.5 miles back, but the damage had been done.

By my clock I finished somewhere in the 1:43s. Not good, but I've got a bench mark now.