Tri Turtle Tri

My first triathalon was a blast.  I will definitely do this one again.  It was a 1/2 mile swim in Wild Cat lake, followed by a 15 mile bike ride and finished up with a 3.4 mile run.  I was in the second swim wave (out of 3) and I finished a bit slower than I had expected based on my practice swims.  But the difference was 1) I wanted to save some energy for the biking and running portion, and 2) when 300 people are swimming in the water, it gets VERY choppy and makes it much more difficult to swim without expending extra energy on keeping water out of your mouth!  I did a fairly quick transition, considering I had to put on socks and shoes and get all the dirt off my feet (an extra bike water bottle did the trick nicely for me).  Next year I'm definitely buying a race belt which has your number already attached to it because it took me at least a minute to safety pin on my number.  I think I did really well on the bike portion, considering I had only rode the course once.  I passed several people and still was able to save plenty of energy for the running.  My transition to running was very quick since I wore running shoes for my biking portion as well.  Since I had time to spare, I quickly did a bathroom break and then was off running.  My goal was to set a steady pace and not stop, and not stop is exactly what I did, even on the hills.  I paced myself well because at the end I had still enough energy to pass the person directly in front me at the finish!  I didn't see the clock as I finished so after I passed through the finish line and looked around for it.  When I saw that it was still only 2:06 I was so happy since my goal had been somewhere between 2:15 and 2:30!  So with my 2 minute start time that put my official time at 2:04:17!!!

Here are my times for each stage:
Swim: 0:21:55
T1: 0:03:54
Bike: 1:00:19 (15.5MPH)
T2: 0:02:00
Run: 0:36:07 (10:37/M)

And here are my places:
Overall: 165 out of 339
Division: 28 out of 67