Race Night

Short post tonight.  Gotta get up at 4:45 a.m., standard wake-up call time for triathletes everywhere.

As I've mentioned this week, tomorrow morning is the Newport Beach triathlon.  It's a sprint, which means today I rode 35 miles on the bike as if it's any other training day.  But the scenery changed (pictured), which was welcome.  I rode tomorrow's Back Bay race course, which is primarily flat and very pretty. Mostly marshland, and outside of the afternoon cross-wind, numbingly consistent.  There's one brief climb that takes me from heart-rate zone 2 to 4 quickly if I'm not careful.  It's roughly an 11% grade for about 50 yards, and then drops off to 7% for another few hundred yards after that.  I rode the course loop at least five times today, so I actually feel more prepared for this race than most.

Overall, I learned today that sprint triathlons are probably not valuable for my Ironman training considering I'm working towards endurance and not necessarily bursts of speed.  I chose to compete in this event since I did it last year, when I was less strategic with my race selection.

As I told Coach Gerardo tonight via text, I think this is my last sprint tri for quite a while.

He agreed.

As for goals, last year I completed the course in 1:32:54.  The swim was just over 17 minutes, the bike was slightly longer than 48 minutes and the run was around 22.  My T1 was nearly three minutes and T2 was just over two minutes.  I'm hoping to shave off around three to five minutes total.

Wish me luck.

228 days and counting.