Greenfield Race report

They had to cancel the swim for today's race due to high bacteria count. At first I minded as I was really plannning to push the swim to see what I can do; however, I found out the water temp was only 57 degrees. I'm o.k. with the swim having been cancelled.

They started the race with a sprint to the bikes. Due to my groin injury, I did not push that first run very hard and unfortunately had to let a few people by me that I really would have liked to keep behind me. There were no rules about what you could and could not wear on that short run, so I wore my helmet and riding glasses to keep the transition time down - all I had to do was put my bike shoes on.

I biked hard. This was the hardest I ever pushed in a triathlon and it felt good. There are two hills on the course - the first is right out of transition and is long and gradual. The second hill is short and steep. I stood on the hills and kept power to the pedals. I did a lot of passing on the hills and no one passed me after the hill. I believe my average speed on the bike was around 23 mph but will need to see the official splits to confirm that.

One of the reasons I biked so hard is I had no clue what I would be able to do on the run due to the groin. It felt better this morning, but still a little sore. I came off the bike and started running and it felt amazingly good. I could feel the groin, but it did not hurt enough to effect my running - at least I don't think it did. The other issue I thought I might have in the run was dead legs from pushing the bike so hard - the legs felt great! I'm looking forward to seeing the splits. I don't think it was a particularly fast run, but I think I may have beat last year's run time which I did not plan to do because of the groin and pushing the bike.

My overall placing was 25th vs. 51st last year. That suggests that I squashed last year's bike split. My overall time was 1:09. The following are last year's and this year's splits

2008 2009
Swim 10:09 N/A
Sprint to t1 N/A :53
T1 2:00 :43
Bike 43:41 41:20
T2 :51 :48
Run 26:45 25:23

The math has my bike average speed at around 21.72 mph; however, my computer had it closer to 23 mph. I would like to believe the bike computer. The running pace calculates to 8:11. It shouldn't be much longer before I'm running under 8's which is my goal for this summer. I'm not sure how far I can go with this, but I'm fairly certain I am still on the improvement curve.