2019 CapTexTri Race Report

Pre-Pre-Race

It’s been two years since I raced a triathlon. As my athletic pursuits have moved in other directions, I have had less time and training bandwidth for triathlon. In addition, I’ve had a variety of health-related reasons I haven’t raced. Several years ago, I started having issues with my knee and after various consultations with an orthopedist, realized that it’s just not going to get better. So I’m really not running much at all. Then, after signing up for the Sprint distance of CapTex last year, I broke my foot about a month before the race so I deferred to this year’s race. 

Then this year, exactly five weeks prior to race day, I had surgery to remove a cluster of potentially pre-cancerous cells from my breast. Needless to say, I didn’t do much in the way of running or swimming prior to the race and before that, I really hadn’t been running much since having foot surgery in December for the aforementioned fracture (and knee business). I last swam in January off the side of a catamaran in the Caribbean and before that I don’t even remember. 

I have, however, been teaching a lot of spin classes and HIIT classes and done a fair amount of strength training. And I knew it was only a Sprint distance so I wasn’t worried about completing it. So we slapped the race wheels on the bike and I gathered up the giant pile of triathlon gear and set about finishing the race. 

Pre-Race

One thing about racing the Sprint at CapTex is that you don’t have to get up ridiculously early. I slept in all the way until 5:30 AM and it was glorious. I ate breakfast and drove down there, parked and made my way to transition to set up. 

Once set up, I grabbed my wetsuit, cap, googles, water bottle and a really old iPod shuffle that I didn’t care if I lost and made my way out of transition with about 15 minutes to spare before they closed it.  Then I just had to wait for the Sprint waves to start. I listened to some music, drank my water, and used perhaps the most disgusting port-a-potty I’ve ever encountered. (And that’s really saying something, given the number of pre-race port-a-potties I’ve used over the years.) 

When it was getting close to my time, I wriggled into my wetsuit and stuffed my water bottle, flip flops, and iPod into my little string backpack, stashing it near the relay tent before heading down to the edge of the water to find my wave. 

Swim

The swim at CapTex used to be a deep water start with everyone in your age group wave, but these days, it is a dock side time trail start, which I feel like is more comfortable and moves more quickly but has the downside of it being hard to find someone to draft off of. When it was my turn I dutifully jumped into the water and began my swim. The other downside to a time trail start is that I don’t feel like I start as fast/push as hard at the beginning.

I was primarily on my own the entire swim. There were just no good feet to choose from so I made my way around the course. It was congested and I had to swim around a lot of people. At one point the sun came out for a bit (it had been cloudy) and was right in front of me, so I was sighting right into the sun. Because of this, I got really excited when I came upon a big orange buoy (as opposed to the small yellow ones dotting the course) because I knew I needed to turn and head for shore at the orange one, but it turned out that this was a different orange buoy. A little after that, I had a small incident where I was swimming and went to take a breath and someone in front of me kicked up a big splash of water and I took in a mouthful. I paused for a moment to cough and stutter before moving on. I came out of the swim with a time I was very pleased with especially given that I’ve done literally ZERO swim training. 

T1

The run into transition at CapTex is long and it’s even longer to get the Sprint distance transition area than the Olympic I’m used to. It felt like I was trotting along forever. Once I reached my bike, I began trying to get out of my wet suit, but my timing chip was huge, so I took that off first and of course it promptly fell off the strap. So once I had the wetsuit off, I then had to get the chip back on the strap and then back on my body. It was not my finest transition. 

Bike

Okay, this is where I should be awesome, right? I teach at least three cycle classes a week, if not more (I sub quite frequently). Okay, but here’s the rub, the spin bike setup is REALLY different than my tri bike and by the time I was halfway through the first loop I was feeling muscles that I had completely forgotten I had. Ouch! But I had decided that with very little run training, I might as well hammer the heck out of the bike so that’s what I did.  As I started into loop 2, I was feeling tired when I was in the aero position and felt like I had more leg power sitting up. However, there was also a fair amount of wind and I was really torn on what to do. I sort of ended up splitting my time somewhat. I would stay in aero for awhile, then come out of it and really push while sitting up. Lap 2 wasn’t as fast as lap 1, but overall, I’m still really quite happy with my bike split. 

T2

I sort of forgot how to be a triathlete and when I arrived in transition, I began putting on my visor when I remembered I could do that while running. Then I chided myself for setting up my transition wrong. I should have put my shoes on top so I would automatically do things in the right order. Well, chalk another thing up to lack of practice. (I had practiced my quick shoes-on-the-bike mounts/dismounts so at least I did that well.) 

Run

My legs didn’t want to do anything. I made a running sort of motion with them and they vaguely complied. Right, I forgot about that whole awful leg feeling when trying to run off the bike. Maybe if I’d actually done some bricks (maybe if I’d actually done any kind of training) I would have remembered. I thought to myself that I was probably doing about a 12:00/mi pace. Oh well, that’s just where I was, I figured. I snuck a look at my watch and it said 10:20/mi. Oh hey, that’s not actually too bad for the start of my run. So I just started to try to build a little bit and I hoped that my knee wouldn’t start hurting and that my foot wouldn’t start hurting and my boob would’t start hurting and just kept putting one foot in front of the other. 

I celebrated that I would only have to do one run loop. Every single time I’ve done CapTex, I’ve looked at the Sprint folks and their one run lap and felt so defeated every time I had to run a second lap. I always wondered how in the heck I would make it through that second lap (spoiler alert: I always did except for that one year with the rainstorm, but that wasn’t my fault). I just kept running with that thought at the back of my mind: I don’t have to do another lap. I was pretty happy that I ran the whole thing since I figured I was probably going to end up walking some of it. I walked through an aid station to take on a bit of sport’s drink, but that was it. And at the end, I had a little left to pick it up in the finishing chute.

I was done and I didn’t feel like an exhausted mess like I often do after the Olympic distance. Whew! I may have to stick with the Sprint from here on out.  I was also pleased to learn that I was 6 out of 24 in my age group which is actually pretty great, especially, again, considering the whole lack of training business. 

Swim - 15:17 2:02/M

T1 - 4:12

Bike - 41:35 17.75 mph

T2 - 2:36

Run - 30:13 9:43/mi

Total - 1:33:51

I didn’t really have a goal, it was sort of a “about an hour and a half” estimate and I was about there, so that was good. It’s sort of funny, all of these paces are eerily similar to the olympic distance I raced two years ago (that I actually trained for). At double the distances, my swim pace was 2:00/M, bike page was 18 mph and run pace was 9:43/mi. 

Overall, a good day, and I signed up for next year. Yes, the sprint. ;)