Solana Beach Tri Results

The Solana Beach tri sure was an exciting event. Lots of people in a great location, and everyone's excited. I really enjoyed it. I always like the check in's on Saturday, and this one was particularly fun, and exciting. Heck, even Amanda Felder was out at the Avia booth dressed identically to her cover shot on Triathlete mag.

It was a doubly good event for me because my 71 year old dad was in it with me, and my wife and kids came out to cheer us on. I couldn't believe what a great feeling it was when I was truckin up that hill after the swim, and my family is yelling for me with big smiles "Go dad!". Just awesome!

I came in 32 of 72 in my age group and this met my goal of getting into the upper 50% of my age group for the first time. The splits were posted today, which is good because I forgot to split the times on my own watch. Though, something that annoys me about KOZ triathlons is that they don't give you separate T1 and T2 times.

On the bike, my computer said 21.8MPH avg speed when I got off. That's a personal record for a tri, but the bike was pretty short (9Mi), and for that matter so was the swim. Man that bike ride was crowded. They need to shut down the entire 101 to do that one. There were so many people out there on such a short ride, that everyone was seriously congested. I saw lots of close calls during passing (3 and 4 deep), and one during the Via De La Valle turn where a guy in front of me almost got run into the curb by another guy who drifted to the right. I'm glad the guy in front of me saved it, or it would've been a nasty wreck that would've included me.

My run improved, which is good because I gave up some bike training to work on that, but it's still a slow 7:43 pace. I guess on the bright side (depending upon how you look at it), that's a personal record. The top runner in my AG was Steve Thunder who turned 5:58 miles, but actually faster than that since that time included T2. Dang! As I entered T2 I was just 28 sec behind Mr. Thunder, but I would've needed to be about 5 minutes ahead of him at that point to have a chance of finishing anywhere near him.

Today I had a nice double training day. Times are not great, but doing two good work outs made me feel better about it:
2250 M swim this morning at 1:48 min / 100 pace.
6.55 Mile run this afternoon at 8:14 min /mile pace.

I've also decided not to stop training in order to rest up for a sprint distance race. Now that I'm beyond my initial goal of just doing any triathlon, I'm not going to miss training days for short races.

Looking forward to a double sport weekend coming up:
Surf Monkey 1 Mi swim / 5K run (I like the name and the monkey mascot dude)
Tour Of Buoys 1.5 Mi swim