Having the advantage of racing on Sat instead of Sun, guess I'll be the first to post a report.
Another weekend, another tri!
This weekend was the Beach Blast II Olympic distance Triathlon (1500m/40k/10k) in Mexico Beach, FL. Just a little south of Panama City and Tyndall AFB, it ended up being a little over 2 hour drive from our house. We headed down on Fri night and stayed in the El Governor Motel, with a great room on the 4th floor overlooking the gulf. Basically every room in the place has a wide open balcony gulf view, very nice hotel. The racers also got a deal at $85 a night versus the normal $139 or something, and you could tell almost the whole place was filled with triathletes. DW decided to sleep in on this one, as she put in heavy hours of cheering last weekend and will be next weekend as well.
The race seemed a bit disorganized, as our 0700 start time ended up sliding right several minutes since 10 min prior to that one of the big buoys we had to swim around was still sitting on the beach.

The announcer was pretty annoying, and must have said "Swim to the RIGHT BUOY FIRST" like 238497 times during that 10 minutes. Olympic distance was two loops around the triangular course, with two buoys out at the far corners and one real close to the beach to swim around to start the second loop. There was a sprint distance tri going on at the same time starting 30 min later, so I was a bit worried I was going to get run over by them since I'd be starting my 2nd and they'd be flying through their first. As it turned out I had nothing to worry about since I came through the first loop at 13:00 when I was expecting 23:00 or so. Sadly this wasn't because I had improved, the course was just significantly shorter than advertised. This lead to a 20 minute faster than normal split time which isn't really useful to gauge anything.
Swim:
26:30 65/73 OA 5/5 AG
A long run across the gorgeous white sandy beach, up a carpeted bridge, across a major highway blocked by volunteer cops, uphill and upstairs across another bridge, past a parking lot and eventually into a baseball field was the run to transition. Managed to not forget anything this week and the only major mistake was being within 3 feet of a fireant hill, causing me to get bit about 10 times as I was packing up later.
T1:
3:30
The bike course was just up the coastal highway less than a mile, then turned inland and followed that highway out to the turnaround at about 12.4. I only got passed by a couple speed demons doing the sprint, and one guy who changed positions with me about 20 times during the course of the leg. He was 43 and on an old road bike so that wasn't doing wonders for my motivation every time he came around me again. I initially thought the northbound leg away from the coast was upwind, but after turning around I didn't get much of a boost, so wind was probably not really a factor at all. Just the fact that the course was closer to the advertised length than last week led to me cutting about 30 seconds off my PR overall, but my avg was slower than last week since I travelled less distance.
Bike:
1:10:54 - 21.0mph avg - 26/73 OA 3/5 AG
Not a lot to say about the second transition, in/out and on with the run.
T2:
1:42
The run was pretty bizarre, it started by running about a half mile into a residential area where it appeared to just dead end in a cul de sac. I stopped intially and looked around for a trail or something and was basically just confused. Looking behind me runners were still coming so I wasn't really sure what to do. Finally I spotted on the ground a chalk dot and arrows that said "turn here." With no volunteers or cones or anything on that section of the course it seems some runners might have easily turned too early or too late. Shaking that off I kept zooming along, feeling pretty good through the first mile while trying to find a water station. "It's right up there" was common chatter from runners coming the other way when I posed the question. Turns out it was actually at mile 2, causing me to be late on my initial gel/hydration. More bizarre was my splits coming out of T2, as instead of my 9:30 avg from the week before I opened with 8:43 and followed with 9:04. I was a bit afraid of blowing up later, but I still felt strong and consistent so I just maintained pace. My HR was very steady right about where it should be for the whole first 4 miles. The course was essentially a real long out and back for the rest of it through residential areas, almost completely deserted. The smaller size of the race meant 1 runner about every 50 to 100 meters, so there wasn't a lot to do out there. At the 4 mile marker I still felt good so I decided to push it in from there and try to catch the guy wayyy in front of me. I caught up to him but his finishing kick was too much for me as I'd used it all up making the catch. Closed with a 8:32 mile, insane compared to last week. The course was about .14 short, so would have to add about a minute to get an accurate 10k time, still a drop from last week.
Run:
54:29 9:00pace - 44/73 OA 5/5 AG
So overall I'm again kind of half and half on this one. I feel the reason my bike and run splits lowered was probably because I only had to swim for 20 min shorter than normal. If you tack on those 20 to my overall time it still shows me beating by goal of sub 3, but the benefit of not being as tired as I should have been probably made the difference. I found myself looking forward to next week a bit even during this race since I'll be a trying a half ironman which will tie the longest I have ever gone. So this was a good training race of sorts anyway. Oh and the fire ant bites on my wrists are itching like @#*($&@#$ Ended up not quite getting into the top half overall and as usual got crushed by everyone in my age group in every event other than the bike.
Overall:
2:37:05 40/73 OA 5/5 AG
Ok now that my babbling is out of the way, who else has a race report?!? Cmon there are like 50 of you listed up there!
