University of Akron indoor triathlon - Rusty rusty rusty
First race of 2023.
I signed up for this race after my coach said it's a good idea.
Readiness level - Physical (7 out of 10). Mental (1 out of 10).
Honestly, I don't know where January and February had gone. I remember coming back from the around-the-world winter trip and here we are at the end of February. I signed up for this race because it's on campus and I wanted to support the students. The race was put together by the UA triathlon club.
A couple of days before the race, I received an email about the race info and which wave I was in. Since there could be only 8 people starting at the same time, the participants were assigned to different waves and my wave did not start until 9:10am! (woo hoo. more time to sleep).
I showed up to the race, which was in the Student Recreation center at the U of Akron about 20 minutes before my wave started. After signing the waiver form, a volunteer walked me to the locker room in ONAT (Ocasek Natatorium) pool where I usually do my weekly swim. I know this place real well.
There were 6 other people (mostly undergraduate students) in my wave and all of them were for sure younger than me. Some of them did this race as their first triathlon. I took the time to stretch and be with myself (aka trying to calm myself down before the race).
Around 9am, the race director showed up. There was no race briefing and the race was not well organized. We had one volunteer counting the laps for every 2-3 athletes and some of them showed up looking sleepy (like they just woke up 10 minutes ago). Since I treated this race as a warm-up race and I wanted to support UA students, I was not annoyed with how unorganized they were and tried to go with the flow.
The race format was - Swim 10 minutes, bike on a stationary bike for 20 minutes, and run on the indoor track for 15 minutes.
The swim went really well (IMO). I was able to push myself and swam faster than my average swim pace for the whole distance. I finished with 550 yards in 10 minutes and 25 seconds (and they rounded up). The transition was really long (10 minutes) because they wanted to give time for us to change and I did. I was the first person to finish changing and arrive at Studio A (bike studio) to set up my bike station. I honestly did not like the stationary bike and how it's set up. I did my best to adjust the bike but at the same time kept telling myself that it's going to be only 20 minutes. The volunteer who did the timing was very quiet and she did not tell us (or maybe she did but in a very soft voice and I missed it) when we could start biking so everyone started at different times. However, they only cared about the average watts so I was ok with that.
Biking was extremely boring. I could not use my clip-in shoes because it's on a different system so I had to bike with my running shoes. I also wanted to save my energy for the run later so I did not push too hard on the bike. After the bike was done (the timing girl did not tell us the time either and we had to ask her constantly how much time we had left), everyone walked up to the indoor track. I think one lap of the track was about 1/10 of a mile so that was a lot of running in circles.
T2 was about 5 minutes but everyone waited for one person to finish changing before we started running. My strategy was to start easy and then speed up toward the end. The first mile was easy and I picked up the pace during the last couple of laps and went all out toward the end.
Comments
Post a Comment