SWIM: 2.1 miles in 1:11 a pace of 1:55 min/100yard!
RUN was gonna
Holy SH!T do you see that! I hope to G0D that course was accurate because that is an AWESOME number I'd like to bank on. Perfect day aside from the cool mid-60s air temps. Cloudy, warm water in the mid-70s, great friends, wonderful!
A group of four of us drove down: TH, BE, and VT. Only BE and I were doing the 2 miler, and the only SUCKAS with wetsuits. It was a small race, only 70-80 people, and it was sure a different crowd than we're used to. There were a lot of triathletes, but more swimmers I think. They looked so smooth and easy in their warmups!
The 5K went off first, then us. In the 10 minutes between our waves I started fidgeting with my goggles, and managed to get sunscreen on them. They were so smeared and fogged I couldn't see the buoys. I ran out of the water, grabbed a paper towel, wiped them out, and luckily cleared them. Yay! That would have been tough, as the big triangle course only had 3 buoys and from the beach they looked really far away from each other.
It was an in-water start, and with our small field there was only a few bumps with others as we started. I settled in fast, the only issue being that I kept inhaling little splashes of water. This normally freaks me out, and I stop to bob and make sure I'm OK. I moved on without stopping, minor sputtering. But what also happened in the first buoys was that I seemed to inhale some water! I got the urge to burp and had an uncomfortable pressure on the back of my throat. Once I settled in, the splashing stopped and I was mindful of not swallowing. I didn't think I was swallowing air, but I must have been?
First turn, everything is feeling good. Some chop to the second turn, all still good. My new suit was feeling good, and sometimes when my arm extended a cool rush of water would flood the suit and hit near my legs. The water was comfortably warm, but I was still glad to have the suit. Third turn and back to the start! I didn't check my time, we didn't really pass through the start zone to mark a lap time anyway.
The second loop went surprisingly great. I'm usually tired, frustrated, distracted by now. But I just kept my nose to the water and kept it turning over. Some things I did note: I could site without a full stop, instead I peaked fast and just noted the buoy or tree super fast. If I needed another look I waited a few strokes before peaking again. I was swimming remarkably straight and didn't need much course correction. I didn't kick much, knowing that my kick increased my arm cross-over, so I just ruddered a bit and stretched now and then to prevent cramps (didn't have those at all today). I did a great job using the tree lines to site instead of the far-off buoys. I picked a dip in the line, a tall tree, anything that helped decrease the amount of head lift. This is likely a major factor in my time improvement -- I used to have to near stop to site and correct my direction. Instead today I only full-stopped a handful of times to check my course and re-assure myself.
So between the Evolve improvements and the above notes, I totally PR'd!! If I can swim this in an iron distance race, I'd swim a 1:21, a TWENTY MINUTE IMPROVEMENT!
There's another swim race coming up in a few weeks, I was waiting to register until this race, and now I think I really need to do it. I need to work on that back-of-the-throat discomfort as that plagued me the rest of the day. Did I swallow a bunch of air? I did that in IMCDA, passed lots of it in the bike (hehe) and did pass some throughout the rest of today. Something to fix, as I can't have that discomfort on top of everything else at MiTi!
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