I thought I would do better than I ended up doing. However, despite my eventual result, the highlight of my day was being able to compete at all. Hopefully I’ll always be thankful for this ability, but this race was especially meaningful as the previous year at this race I could barely walk and it was still questionable as to whether I would ever race again or not. People who saw me at RFS last year will understand…

I lined up for the 400 meter pool swim with the 7:00 group. While I knew I could swim as fast as some of the people towards the back of the 6:00 group, I would prefer to pass swimmers than get passed. Once in the water my placement worked out well as I wasn’t passed and I had passed 3 people by the end of the swim. I wasn’t real excited about how I felt in the water, my lack of focus on the swimming aspect of this sport has definitely affected my abilities, but I was confident that any time I lost in the water would be made up with my increased focus on the run.

After the long run to T1, I quickly grabbed my bike and headed out on the bike course. Things were really windy and I had to keep reminding myself that everyone else was suffering through the same wind. The bike course for this race is quite technical, staging a triathlon in the center of a city the size of Columbia doesn’t allow for a lot of options, it’s a wonder it can be safely pulled off.

It is a two loop course and towards the end of the first loop I had managed to get my average speed up to 22mph, at least until I got to the “wall” after which my average proceeded to drop some. This decline in my average speed continued up Old Hwy 63, another nice hill, not quite a steep but a longer hill than the wall. Once back on some flat and downhill stretches I managed to get my average back up above 22mph, but I knew I had to ride the wall one last time plus deal with the technical aspects of the course on the return back to transition. As I rolled into T2 I saw 21.5mph as my average, not as fast as I had hoped, but not terrible either.

I really thought I would excel on the run, but it turned out not to be my day. Not to come up with excuses, but from talking to others there was a really high pollen count that weekend and apparently lots of people had problems with allergies. My deal was that I couldn’t take deep breaths. Instead I was forced to take small shallow breaths, if I tried to breath deeper I couldn’t due to pain in my chest. I’ve experienced this before and have wondered if I have exercise induced asthma, I had never considered that it might be an allergy issue. In the end I ended up averaging 6:43 per mile over a course I expected to run 6:00 pace or faster.

I ended up in 4th place in my age group, back by 1:36. Overall I was in 15th place, around 8 minutes behind the winner. Definitely still some room for improvement!