The Naperville Sprint Triathlon is the first real triathlon I participated in ten years ago with my wife Sue. We’d met in July of 2013, gone riding and running together right away, but then she had a bike accident (her tri-bike slid on a slick section of bike path during our ride together) that injured her shoulder badly enough to require surgery during the fall for a torn rotator cuff.

With her shoulder out of action, she couldn’t do the swim portion of the Sprint Tri, so she recruited a friend Lida Bond Keuhn to swim. Sue would do the bike portion, and I ran the 5K to finish the relay.

During the morning, Lida and I talked quite a bit and I passed the ‘girlfriend test.’ And then, we won that day! Lida’s a former collegiate swimmer who went on to become a solid triathlete not long after that sprint relay. Her career includes Olympic, Half-Ironman, and Full Ironman finishes. She travels to Worlds 70.3 in Finland later this month.

And, she won her age group yesterday! Even with all the turns in the swim course, she swam 6:53 to complete it. Her bike pace was 22 mph and she ran 9:09 miles for the women’s 60-64 group win.

I was not so fortunate, placing fourth in the 65-69 age group division after a travesty of a swim segment in which I stopped and started so many times it did not qualify as a “swim” so much as a paddlefest through dozens of competitors thrashing the water from start to finish. Perhaps I should have started at the back of the 6-8:00 group rather than in the middle of the 8-10 group where much slower swimmers got out ahead of me, creating an impenetrable logjam through which I did not navigate well.

The Naperville Sprint Tri swim is conducted in the Centennial Pool, which is a chlorified quarry of sorts with a sandy bottom. It’s a large swim area if you’re not jamming thousands of people through a looping set of roped-off areas monitored by a phalanx of lifeguards. I don’t do well in those conditions at all. I’d warmed up thoroughly in the pre-race swim and felt relaxed waiting for my turn in the 8-10:00 group after the 6-8:00 bunch took off. I learned (yet again) that standing around for 15 minutes isn’t the best preparation for the swim portion. I need to keep my arms warmed up especially.

Thus the swim segment didn’t go well at all. I have only myself to blame for that. My mindset should have been more progressive (even aggressive) rather than regressive (responding with trepidation). Yet my past associations with that swim including the last race in which I encountered a woman treading in place while slapping the water and shouting “Goddamnit Goddamnit!” Anxiety is my tarsnake when it comes to the swim segment triathlons.

I’ve had many successful open-water swims thus far. But this was something different. That panic mood probably stuck in the back of my mind, and stopping and starting isn’t my favorite thing to do. This year it wasn’t much different. As I was heading toward the third turn, a lifeguard dove into the water right next to me to haul out a swimmer whose head dropped below the surface for far longer than it should be. He hauled the woman out of the water with his float.

Gathering my wits

Turning to the breaststroke at that point, I gathered my wits around a turn where we could stand up in the shallows. Breathing out to relax my mind, I dove in and swam the next fifty yards with something resembling an actual freestyle swimstroke. But then we got plugged up all over again at the next buoy, with people clamoring this way and that. There was no flow. The last 75 yards were slow and I got out of the swim at 10:00 plus. “Damnit,” I muttered to myself. “Oh, well.”

That was all disappointing because in a pre-race swim workout the previous week I’d done sets of 50-yard intervals adding up to 400 meters (the Sprint Tri swim was 375 meters). In practice I’d averaged a healthy 1:47 per 100 pace.

Great! I thought, thinking I could do perhaps 8:00m for the swim. That was not to be. But it would have kept me competitive with the other guys in my age group.

The rest of the race was super respectable. I was a mile-an-hour slower on the bike than the winner and two miles-an-hour slower on the bike than second place. But on the run, I kicked all their butts with my 7:41 pace. The other drawback was that my swim-to-bike transition was long too, over 4:00 due to having to cross two full parking lots in a mincing set of bare feet.

Bike out

I’d done enough bike workouts to figure that a 21 mph average was possible for me over 13 miles. A few weeks back during a Swedish Days group ride with some faster friends, I’d managed 22 miles at 21 mph on my Felt road bike in a group ride. So I knew the legs were in decent enough shape. The new Cervelo Tri-Bike in aero should deliver the same level of performance, I figured.

It did indeed. I averaged 21.4 mph for 13.3 miles on the out-and-back bike course, proving yet again that I’m not the world’s strongest or fastest cyclist, but I am still improving. At sixty-six years old, I’ll take that as a good sign. The wind was tricky at some points but I concentrated one being “one with the bike” in terms of pedaling smooth for the ride so that I’d have good legs for the run too.

That was a great strategy, as I ran really well yesterday. On Thursday, I’d gone to the track with Sue and did a set of two one-mile paced internals with a 7:12 and 7:19 result. That meant I had something in reserve with plans to run sub-8:00 miles for the 5K in the Sprint and ultimately the 10K in my Olympic races. In this race, my run pace was essentially a sprint to respectability even if it fell short of a podium finish.

No complaints or woulda-coulda-shoulda

No complaints really about this race. I learned that my brain still doesn’t deal with crowded swim conditions that well. The same thing happened earlier this summer at Pleasant Prairie, where I had a strong panic attack at the start and had to calm myself to actually get swimming. I’ll need to work on that to avoid having swim calamities in future races. In previous 1.2 mile swims segments I’ve been swimming the 1.2 mile distance in Open Water in about 38:00 .

When I do the Muncie 70.3 this fall my plan is to try to ride close to 3:00 for the 56-mile bike, then average 8:30 for a significant portion of the first half marathon, likely slowing to 9:00 miles at some point, and seek to break 2:00 after the 56-mile bike. If all that goes well, I will be close to 6:00 or just over.

Most of all, I need to stock up on nutrition during the bike segment, and do a salt load in advance of the race and take salt tablets/capsules during the ride and run. I’ve learned the hard way that I’m a salty sweater and that guts me if I don’t take that aspect of nutrition seriously.

But overall the Sprint taught me that I’m progressing well on the bike and run. Adding more time in the pool is good, and adding more salt to the race-day diet is paramount. I’ll close with this photo taken from Lida’s Facebook page. It captures what I most like about triathlon. We’re all individuals even if we’re all coached by different people and compete for different teams or brands. Encourage each other. It’s the best part of the sport.