After a full month of NOT training, after being sick for about a week-and-a-half, after not planning anything until the last second, I completed the second annual Tri 4 Real #1 in Rancho Seco Park on Sunday.

My finish time was a bit slower than last year (by about 11 minutes), but I still came in under three hours. I think that I probably would have had a better showing if I had been better trained (duh!) but I'm still pretty happy with my performance overall, considering the LACK of preparation that went into this race.

The swim went amazingly fast. Of course, it is a faster-than-a-pool swim. Glassy water in a ten to twelve foot deep lake that is naturally around 80 degrees. My watch reported a 25-minute swim split, and amazing as it may seem that matches my swim split from last year on this same course.

The bike is generally downhill, with the wind at your back on the way out. I split the turn-arouns and it was 37:29 to the half-way point. Of course, the way back is generally uphill, going into the wind. Not exaclty condusive to a negative split on the bike. I still managed to get a second-half split of 41:34. Of course the official splits will include both T1 and T2 in my bike time, so I expect it to be higher than what I've got here.

The run...well, the run blew chunks. I really see a problem here now. My run times need some SERIOUS help. I split on every single mile mark and for the 10km run I saw 9:13 (not bad), 11:23 (what?), 9:38 (pacing issues!), 11:29 (d'oh!), 11:00 (not doing well here), and 10:07 (better, but a bit slow). I was shooting for a nice 10-minute average, but failed miserably. Note that I did not get a good split for the last 0.2 mile of the run. Regardless, I know my run time is going to be around 1:06:00-ish, which just plain sucks!

Last year I trained my running a LOT and let my biking slack. I didn't really see any slowdown in the bike, but no improvement was made either. This year I foccussed mostly on the bike, and while I feel that I'm a lot stronger on the bike now, I'm not seeing any significant time improvements. And I -AM- seeing some serious degradation of my run times. I think I'm going to start doing more run training over the next seven weeks.

I have one more "check-in" race before the 1/2 Vineman in August: Tri 4 Real #2. We'll see how that goes.

Oh, and by the way, I'm ranked #49 in the running for a $2000 purse that pays down to 5th place. No new entrants are allowed (it is a three-race series), so I can only move UP the list. Now if only 44 of those guys would either not do the next race in the series, or have a flat or something that makes me faster than them..... (as if)

TBF posted the split times for the race last weekend.
Swim 27:27 (good!)
Bike 1:26:15 (includes BOTH transitions, so also good!)
Run 1:04:19 (ARGH!!)

As expected my run time was... "not optimal". It works out to a 10:21 minute/mile average. That's a full minute per mile SLOWER than my best Wildflower run time and a darn near 15 full minutes slower than my best 10km time.

Only seven weeks to Vineman.