Five Mile Lake Triathlon 2009 race report

[salsabike]

Five Mile Lake Triathlon, 6/20/09

Last year, as a sort of “what would I like to do to renew life” after a very painful 06-07 year culminating in losing my mom in June ‘07, I decided to try a sprint triathlon. I had to start, last spring, to relearn how to do the freestyle properly, after not having swim instruction for about 40 years since I was a kid (I’m 55). I had to walk the runs, having never been a runner.

I finished both sprint tris last year, which was good, and found that walking the run loses its charm pretty quickly. So I took an 8-week “Learn to Run” class last fall with a certified Chi Running instructor that went well. Started working with a great triathlon coach in January. Have been running 6-12 miles a week. I have lost a lot of weight in the last year but am still about 40 pounds overweight. I have been able to run injury-free, which is great, but running with any sustainable speed is a real work in progress for me. I am still very much in the base-building phase, and if I don’t go pretty slowly, my heart rate goes up and stays up and it’s hard for me to keep up any kind of reasonable pace. On the other hand, my slow running pace is quite a bit faster than my walking pace was last year (I am a born saunterer).

Five Mile Lake is a little park in Federal Way, Washington. It’s a nice venue and a small women’s tri (limit of 500; 215 raced yesterday). The weather was ideal for my tastes---slightly grey, in the high 60s. Nice and cool. The swim is in a small lake, the bike and run on local roads that were open to traffic but with lots of police and volunteer controls, so the traffic was not a problem.

Before the race start:




Swim: I am a tiny bit skeptical about whether it was a full 400 meters, only because they lost a small buoy overnight and had to adjust the course---although they said the distance was the same. If it was the full 400 meters, then, yes, I am pleased with that time! It’s certainly a faster pace than last year’s. They didn’t have timing mats in and out of the swim, so your time started when the wave started all together, and ended when you crossed the timing mat into the transition area---maybe 45 seconds away for me. I still think I have a lot of room for improvement in swim speed, but I am happy with this today. Small murky lake, calm day, nothing hard about the swim conditions.

Coming out of the swim---that's me in the blue Quintana Roo wetsuit.




T1: Still have trouble getting that damn wetsuit off my feet! The rest of it goes off quite easily, but the foot part still takes too long even though I stand on it per instructions. By the way, this is a new Quintana Roo that I bought from Susan Otcenas. She never used it because she lost so much weight that it didn’t fit her anymore. I too lost about 30 pounds in the last year so needed a new one. This one fits me very well and I like it a lot.

I put WAAAAAYYYY too much powder in my bike socks! I was leaking copious quantities of powder everywhere, wads and wads—it was very funny. I should have been out of T1 faster. Think it was: a) wetsuit and feet, and b) stopping to drink briefly, and maybe a little c) trying to stay calm so HR wouldn’t go bonkers. Lost cause, that last....

Bike: Oy at the beginning--chain fell inside while driving to site, so had to stop and put it back on. Did that fairly quickly, then got rolling. Lesson from that —don’t just check bike at home; check it when you get to the parking lot before the race! The bike leg is 14 miles---two loops of a seven-mile, mildly rolling course. There are two hills on that loop that slowed me down. They’re not huge, scary, or impossible. It’s just power to weight ratio at work. One slowed me down to about 11 mph, the other to about 8 mph, I think. Need to lose the rest of this weight! Need to keep training and doing hills. Etc. I guess I would say I’m also okay with the bike time given that it wasn’t a completely flat course. But would have liked to go a little faster on this leg. HR: 160+ damn near all the way. Pondered that a lot as I came to transition.

On the bike:




T2: So, tried to use a couple of extra minutes at transition to slow that HR down again. Stupid idea. Didn’t really help for long. Won’t do it again. Both transitions could have been faster, I think.

Run: Started quite slow because of the whole HR 160+ thing. And...that’s where it stayed during the whole run, at 160+. There are also several hills on the run course, I think maybe three, and two of them come pretty early. I did not stop and walk at any time. I really didn’t want to walk. I just tried to keep it steady and just bearable in the cardio sense for the first two miles. Found I could not speed up all that much in the last mile but did speed up some. For where I’m at, I am not unhappy with this—although I realize it’s quite slow in runner’s terms. I just need to keep working on this. Looking forward (okay, maybe that’s not the exact term) to three-run-workout weeks this summer—think I need them. But that’s okay—last year I would not have been 193/215 on the run, I would have been dead last, being the slow walker that I am.


400-meter swim: 9: 34.8 (rank 130/215)

T1: 4:00

14- mile bike: 54:31.9, 15.5 mph (rank 126/215)

T2: 3:50

Run (somewhere about 3 miles; they say 3.1, Garmin says 2.98): 41:12.5 (rank 193/215).

Total time 153:09.8

177/215. Age group rank, 8/10. I guess people in my age group in this tri are the damn serious ones. And maybe I’ll race Athena next time, since I would have ranked higher in that group than in my age group. Although relative rankings are not very meaningful to me at this point—I care much more about besting my own previous times.


At the finish:




I have fibromyalgia and mild RA, and thus I have some chronic hip-area tendonitis from running. So I reread my coach’s recovery instructions from a few weeks ago and said...I need to make this ice bath thing work for me. The first—and last—time I tried an ice bath some months ago, I made it so cold right away that my toes couldn’t even deal with going in it. Then I read a TE triathlete’s description of how she ran the bath---started with her in the tub running coolish/lukewarm and slowly increased the cold of the running water, and THEN dumped the ice cubes in. I think maybe it was Urlea because I seem to remember a truly cute picture of her in her ice bath. I tried that and it was much more bearable. I wore: my SmartWool mountaineering socks--the warmest socks I have for riding when the temp is below 32; my warmest bike jersey, for ditto purpose; and my silk balaclava (definitely unnecessary!). It worked. So I sat in the ice bath for 15 minutes. It was strangely soothing, as long as I didn’t move around and introduce new parts of my body to the cold water. Got out and hung around for a half hour so as to not wipe out the effects, then took long warm shower.

In the ice bath:




Chris was a great tri spouse—carted stuff around, yelled encouragement, took pictures. What a guy. My soon-to-be ex-boss, the one we all love whose job was eliminated, was there with her friend and also did reasonably well. Given what an awful month she’s had with the job loss, that made me very happy also.

I am really happy with my coach and my training. I got lucky with that.

There was a 66 year old woman who finished in 1:23.19. Yowza! I love that.

I am sure there will come a day when I’ll do a coed tri. But I would like to say that I still appreciate the support that women give each other in a women’s only tri. And the volunteers are the best, especially the kids. I tried to talk a few of the kid volunteers into doing the Sammamish Splash Kids’ Triathlon later this summer.

Next triathlon---Blue Lake near Portland, August 1.

My coach and Colby are both in Ironman Coeur d’Alene today. Sending them the best race vibes!