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When in Hawaii last year we got a chance to see some of the Ironman 70.3. This seeded the idea of someday doing a triathlon, especially since my knees were doing much better after a course of physiotherapy.

Then in December I saw an ex-colleague tweet that he’d signed up for the Wildflower long course. I checked out the website and noticed the Mountain Bike Course: a much more manageable 1/4-mile swim, 9.7-mile bike, 2-mile run.

I told my personal trainer about it and in February we both signed up. We trained in the pools and the gym at work, then at China Camp Beach on the weekends. The distances aren’t very long, so I was mainly focussed on getting a reasonable time.

Last weekend was the actual event. We drove down Friday and camped on the hill above Lake San Antonio.

On race morning we got up at 6, ate a solid breakfast of granola and expresso beans, and then headed down to set up the transition area before the long course got underway. I got pretty nervous while we watched the long course participants leave, but by the time it was my wave’s turn I was calm and ready to go.

There seemed to be a lot of people unprepared for the swim, and I caught up to the tail end of the first wave by the mid-way point.

My transition to bike was pretty terrible; I spent way to much time putting my shoes and gloves on.  But the bike course itself wasn’t too bad at all, with only a couple of hills of note. Everyone is marked with their “race age” on their left leg, so I could tell I was overtaking people from the first wave, which was very motivating.

My transition to run was nearly as bad as the one to bike; I managed to misplace the t-shirt that had my bib number and spent valuable time digging through my bag. The run is definitely my weakest leg and having pushed hard on the bike I found it pretty tough. I made it back to the stadium though, with enough energy to do a sprint finish :)

My end time was 1:04:43, placing 17th 16th of 131 in my age group, 59th 1012 overall. Some of the times are messed up so I’m not 100% sure of my overall ranking. My bike time didn’t record correctly so I don’t know how long I spent in the second transition, but if my first was anything to go by I think I should be able to shave 2 or 3 minutes off my time just at the transitions.

What next? I definitely want to do longer tri’s in the future but I think for now I’d like to focus on improving my time on sprint courses while working on my running.

Update: looks like they fixed the timing data.

Only one week until the Wildflower Tri. Having been training for a while now and reading blogs and magazines, I’m feeling a little lame only doing the Sprint course. But at least its a start.

Tessa came out for a bike ride while Sani and I did a trial run at China Camp. I’m getting more used to swimming in the cold, salty water, but it’s still not the most pleasant experience.

This week we’ll be winding down and doing some relatively light training. Don’t want to start the race with sore legs!