I had my eyes set on the Enumclaw Olympic tri on 8/7 but that race was cancelled so I looked around for other race and found Whidbey Island Sprint Tri. Great race to do instead of the Olympic as the swim distance at this spring was .5 miles instead of the .25 many other sprints have. Thanks Cody and the boot campers, my running is getting much better but the four week vacation away from my bike didn’t really help on the hills. Big thanks also to the team at Mr Crampy’s and the experienced triathletes that help out at the swim clinics at Beaver Lake as these really help newbies like me getting used to the triathlon specifics of an open swim.  Like their page on Facebook and join the clinics for some fun.

It was a 9 am start but I needed to catch the 6 am ferry to have time to check in and then set up my two different transition stations since this was a point to point race with Swim at Goss Lake and then the run started and finished at Community Park. The organizers really did a good job managing the transportation between the transition stations that are 7 miles apart and overall this was a well managed event and even if the first transition is really odd it was a great day on beautiful Whidbey Island.

The swim was in Goss Lake in 70+ degrees and I though about wearing the wetsuit or not but given that I have only done open water swimming in the suit I opted to use it.

Started the swim at the front right side and quickly found a couple of bubble makers to draft off but for some reason I lost them a couple of minutes into the swim so I continued in a good tempo and I didn’t realize I was going the wrong direction until it was too late… oh that is why I lost those feet   I excited the swim at just over 14 minutes which is a bit slow for me but I had just done an extra 100 meters or so.. The transition is really odd, you run up and change in to your bike gear which is stuffed into a plastic bag before the race and then you run to your bike in other place in T1.

Bike ride started with a hill and luckily I had heard about that so had my bike set on low gear and was able to get a good start. Just a 10 minutes into the ride my legs were on fire, pulse was way up after the swim and due to the hills in the first few miles. The cheering from the locals really helped me getting into the zone and my second time around was better and I felt ok even if I was passed by many on the long hills but but happy to say that my downhill and flat riding is fairly fast so I was able to catch up and pass a few as well. The hills weren’t steep but long and I think I should do some more Hollywood hill training rides..

All in all the bike was ok and I’m really thankful to one of my fellow riders who took time to let me know that the first part of the run would be all uphill. I fueled up and tried to flush my legs on the last mile. Transition 2 went well , found my shoes and hat and left my bike and gear at T2 and headed into the dark forest on Whidbey Island. Run started up up up for about a mile through a really nice trail through the forest ending on a soccer field and after that it was all flat or downhill so even if my first mile was just over 9 minutes I was able to finish the run in just under 8 min per mile which is basically my goal for these runs.

How did it go? When I crossed the finish line I was happy to see that it was under 2 hours and I wasn’t totally out of breath so maybe I didn’t quite go all out on the run..

Official Results where you can see that the winner was in my age group and was “only” 25 minutes before me Whidbey Island 2011 Triathlon Results and that my different splits except the swim were all ranked around 75th and my swim ranked 30th.

Net Time: 01:54:14
Swim (1/2 mile) : 00:14:05
T1: 00:02:48
Bike (19.5 miles): 01:07:08
T2: Not recorded so estimated to 1 min in table below
Run (3.8 miles): 00:30:12

I finished 67th overall out of 219 and 5th out of 11 in my age group which is a really nice improvement from the first sprint and if you read my blog after that race you might remember that my goal at next sprint was to get into the top 50%. The Cottage Lake sprint wasn’t as competitive as the other two so placement is a bit misleading. Swim and run shows improvement in pace but the Whidbey bike ride was much harder.