Tune-Up

Today we took a trip an hour south to Fort De Soto park where I raced the Sun Coast triathlon, a sprint distance event. I first want to thank Fred from Design Sports for organizing such a great event. It was great to see so many juniors participating in the sport.

The start of the event was at 7:30 am and with the sun rising only a few minutes before the start, it was still dark when we arrived to register and set up transition. Pretty crazy atmosphere running around in the dark trying to get oriented. Then when I finally got out to the beach, I was greeted with choppy water like I had never raced in before. Plus the salt water swim was a first for me.

Getting through the tough 1/3 mile swim ended up being not as bad as I thought. Although keeping on course was tough when waves were easily above the markers at times. Also the wave start system they used meant I was catching many of the earlier starters, which made for a few close calls of pushing someone under the water by accident.

Onto the bike I pushed near maximum pace and averaged around 45 kph. A little tail wind also helped get speeds of 55 kph on the back stretch. Pretty fun to hit that kind of speeds.

In the run I wanted to push my pace and work on speed. The 5km distance flew by and I was very happy with the feeling my legs had.

In the end I finished with a time gap over 2nd place of about 5 minutes. With this kind of fitness, I am feeling more and more confident this world championships will be a good event for me. Hopefully all the other parts of the puzzle come together in the coming weeks.

Next on the plan is a few more days of harder training before the final recovery period.