Rest Day

Today was a well earned day off from training.  I actually feel pretty good today though.  I'm surprised.  Normally if I run a 5K all out my legs feel like hell for several days.  A fellow tri club member recently said to me that sprint tri's actually have a shorter recovery time than road races due to the slow warm up progression of swim to bike to run.  I think there may actually be something to that theory.  I feel worse more from having to load a truck in the heat today for an upcoming show I'm headed off to than from the sprint.  I think it also helps that I've gotten much smarter about my recovery as well.  It sucks getting old... but now I know the value of taking it easy after a race, and the value of compression clothing to make my legs feel much better.  That combined with getting horizontal and elevating my legs does wonders for me.  Add in a little self massage with "The Stick" and some stretching and my recovery is so much faster than my old methods of just taking some ibuprofen and going about my business.

Results from the triathlon are now up online so I was able to take a closer look at how I did yesterday. 

Here's the breakdown....

22nd out of 214 finishers

7th out of 33 in my age group which in this case I am fairly certain is 30-39 year olds. (I'm 37)

 1/3 Mile Swim Rank: 92nd  9:47 (top 42%)

10.5 Mile Bike Rank: 24th 31:48 (top 11%)

3 Mile Run Rank: 20th 21:15 (top 9%)

Final Time 1:02:50

So as I mentioned yesterday I'm pretty damn happy with 22nd place.   Thats the top 10.2% of the field.  Considering how slow my swim is in comparisson to the top guys I think thats pretty fantastic.  Taking a look at my age group there were 7 of us in the top 22 finishers.  So my age group essentially made up a third of the top 10% of the field.  So finishing 7th in that age group I think is something to be proud of.  Especially for my first time out there.  That said though...   I definitely have some room for improvment.  Clearly my swim time has the largest area for improvement.  If I had gotten that to around a ranking of 22nd that would have gotten me 4th in my age group and 19th overall.  Make up another thirty seconds on the bike and on the run to shave another minute off and were starting to tickle third in my age group.  These are realistic goals I think.  I also should remember that I didn't taper for this race at all and did a monster brick and long run on back to back days right before it.  What would have happened if I'd tapered?  Well I think were going to find out to some extent.  Looking ahead to the Barrington sprint the way my training schedule is going to work is that big brick that should be this weekend is going to get pushed to tuesday/wednesday of that race week.  After that the intensity goes way down before the Saturday race.  Its still not exactly a taper but at least its more than only one rest day after a hard two day training block.  This week is also going to be tricky as the schedule on the show I'm headed to is brutal, so fitting more than an hour's training in a day is going to be near impossible.  So intensity this week after tomorrow is going to be low.  Anyway...   point is I SHOULD be a little bit fresher going into the Barrington sprint than I was today.  I'm told the field is also a little more competitive there so I had better bring my A game.  I'm going to really try and push my swim as hard as I can in that race as well and see if I can make up a little time there too.  We'll see....      Oh I should also note that transition times are include in the above times.  I'm not sure where though...  I THINK that T1 is included with the bike and T2 with the run.  However I'm not entirely sure. 

Here's another shot from the race.  This one I grabbed off the Naval Sprint facebook page....   this is me right before the bike dismount.  You can see my bare feet are on top of my bike shoes getting ready to dismount.  I'd look a lot faster if the shirtless guy on the hybrid bike wasn't in the shot.  He's a straggler from the 1st wave.