Race Results!!!

Well, I did it! I am officially a triathlete. This past weekend I did the San Diego International Triathlon, a 1000meter swim, a 30k bike, and a 10k run. (translated that is a .6 mile swim, 18.6 mile bike, 6.2 mile run) I'm going to write a whole play by play on the experience in my other blog (bigreddoesatriathlon.blogspot.com) when I’m not quite so hungover from an insane karaoke night, but I really for now just want to report the results, that weren’t as slow as I had anticipated!

In my age group , I finished 50 out of 68 women…ok, so it was definitely in the back of the pack, but there are good things to report within that stat, that I’m proud of, and it also gives me a way to see where my weaknesses are for further training.

First off are the numbers.

Overall time: 2:41:51 (773^rd place in the entire field – out of about 900 doing the full distance)
Swim: 19:26 (663rd place)
Bike: 1:08 (764 place)
Run: 1:06:58 (785 place)

My transition from swim to bike took 3:52
My transition from bike to run took 2:59 (these figures include running all the way into the lot where the bike rack is and back out)…

The good things to report are these:

My swim time was in the top half of my age group and I even passed some of the people in the wave before us (they send us out every 5 minutes based on our age). I finished 3+ minutes faster than the last swim race I had done 2 months ago, in under 20 minutes!! You can see that if I had kept up the pace of my swim thru the bike and run, I would have finished 663^rd instead of 773^rd (I lost a bit on the 2^nd 2 legs, ahem….).

The bike was ok – I had no idea how I would rank in the pack. The run was about as horrible as I expected, but to finish 6.2 miles in just over an hour, doing slightly slower than 10 minute miles is really cool, considering I couldn’t run a full mile 4.5 months ago when I started all this.

Compared to my teammates doing the race, I was surprised to learn how close in time I was to some of the people I thought were in considerably better shape.

Overall, I finished, I survived, and I can see that I need to start hammering it harder on the bike and run – building my legs and fitness up for those events, as well as improving on my swim strokes to be more efficient and strong when I emerge from the water.

Anyway, I’m proud and happy to have accomplished this goal and milestone and am looking forward to keeping at it!! Thanks for the support from those of you who have watched me on this journey!