Twas the Night Before Triathlon

So it's my 4th Apple Sprint Triathlon - what's the race plan this year?

First off, it wasn't my typical Day-Before-The-Race for me. Erik and I went to bed early so we could get up at 5am and get to Erik's FIRST ever triathlon this morning!!!!  Whooo hooo!!!

As a last minute decision, Erik signed up for the Kelowna Apple Try-A-Tri with a 300m swim, 15k flat bike, and 3k flat run, and in typical "Kelownaguy" fashion, did some last minute swim cramming to prepare for his race.  Once he confirmed that that the water was indeed only 3-4 feet deep, following the shoreline, he knew he'd be able to complete the race, so he swam almost every day at the pool or at the lake, to get himself ready. By race day, he knew he'd be able to do the 300m swim about 10-11 minutes, using a variety of strokes and allowing himself a few stops to catch his breath.

In the end, he killed the race, coming in 19th overall (109 people), 14/45 men, 2/4 in his age group.  Here are his splits.

Swim: 10:48
T1: 2:31
Bike: 26:38 (2nd overall in the bike - yahoo!)
T2: 1:22
Run: 15:04

I was so proud of his efforts - great work honey!

After the race, we went home for a shower and lunch, then we picked up our friend Chad (from the Can Do Tri Podcast) and went down to Tugboat Bay to swim the race course while the log boom was still set up. We met up with our friend Darryl H and Catherine (Tiscath) down at the beach as well.

I went out at a steady but comfortable pace in the choppy water and felt really good. I finished the swim in 16:37 which was considerably faster than I was expecting so I will revise my previous goal is 18:00 down to 16:30.  I'm pretty sure I can swim it faster but we'll see how I feel in the bigger crowd. Previous swim times were: 2008 - 17:30, 2009 - 16:27, 2010 - 16:21


I still don't know how the bike is going to go but I'm hoping I'm not much slower that 42 minutes, especially if there is no wind like there was for the past two years.

And as for the run, well, I haven't run a fast 5k since last year so I think a goal of just under 30 minutes should be reasonable.

16:30 + 3:00 + 42:00 + 1:30 + 30:00 = 1:33:00 and there you have it.


For the most part, I just want to go out and have fun - I love this race!

If you are interested, here are my previous race reports for the Apple Triathlon:


2008 Apple Sprint Triathlon Race Report

2009 Apple Sprint Triathlon Race Report

2010 Apple Sprint Triathlon Race Report

So that's it - holy cow, I'm doing it again!!