Sprint!

In case you forgot (I almost did), I have my third and final triathlon of the season tomorrow. I signed up a couple months back after getting an awesome deal for half off registration and convinced my coworker to sign up as well as her first triathlon. I've only done one other sprint before, and it was my first triathlon ever. I had fun, but I didn't train much for it so it was pretty challenging. Since I've been focusing on training for the Chicago Marathon over the last few weeks I haven't had much time for swimming and biking. I just keep reminding myself that I completed a half Ironman distance last month, and compared to that, this little sprint triathlon should be a piece of cake. I'm excited to see what I'm capable of after several months in the pool and on the bike and it should be interesting to do this distance with such a new perspective. My race plan is simply to go balls to the walls and push myself as hard as I can while still trying to have fun. I don't know much about the course other than swimming in Lake Natoma and biking and running around Folsom, but I'm not expecting anything too spectacular. Good or bad, it should be over fairly quickly, and hopefully I'll still be smiling!

Nimbus Damn near the swim start!

As for goals, I do have some general ones. I'd like to finish the 1/2 mile swim in approximately 15 minutes, which should be doable. I had some wetsuit drama at work today (which I'm not going to get into because it would just piss me off again), but I managed to find one that will work. I will say that a men's suit was not designed to accommodate any sort of hips! For the 14 mile bike, I really plan to push as hard as possible. I'd like to average anywhere from 17-18 mph, and being such a short distance I'm just going to go all out and not worry too much about pacing. Hopefully will finish between 45-50 minutes. On the run, I know from my many brick workouts that I can run fairly fast coming off the bike, and since I only have to go 5k, I hope to come in around 25 minutes. I hope to keep T1 around 2 minutes and T2 around 1 minute. I'm a little sore today after doing my 17 mile long run yesterday to accommodate for the race, but I'm hoping my body can still go hard for a couple hours tomorrow. We'll see!