2012 Kansas City Triathlon

It was a glorious morning for a triathlon. My first race of the season since I skipped out on Emporia the day after Tornadogeddon. The rains held off, and 90% of the Kansas City triathlon community turned out to race and spectate. To those that weren't there, we missed you! Thanks to everyone for the support and it was fun catching up. 

Swim 1500 meters: After two years of choppy swims with swells, we had nice water today for the Kansas City Triathlon 5150 (1.5 K swim, 40K Bike, 10K run adds up to 5150 meters...that is where that name comes from). The Garmin says it was about 1690 meters....hmmmm.


Huge props to Reds Coach Liz Weidling and Jenny Wise-Cook for helping me hike up my wetsuit!!!! After a heinous practice swim a couple of weeks ago where I had no pull, I knew the wetsuit hike-up would be key and yes I could actually move my shoulders this morning. Whoohoo! Basically if you don't pull up your wetsuit enough, it is going to restrict your range of motion which will impact your stroke and your speed. No bueno.

I'm doing lower volume swim training this year and was 1 second faster than 2011. Whoohoo. Also, didn't get kicked in the face like another gal I was talking to :( I had my own water for 98% of the race yet didn't have to get too far to the outside, just a little bit. 

T1: Took a hit here with + :47 seconds more than last year. Oh well. 

Bike: they changed the bike course this year so it was essentially a closed course (to general traffic) and there was some grumbling about the turnarounds but they were pretty wide and I didn't think too bad. I am a geek so yes I did check mapmyride.com and saw that this years course had a whopping 13 feet MORE of ascent :) I did like it, but with the crosswinds it did feel windy from more directions today. Not bad though considering yesterday we had 25+ mph winds! Yikes, yes we did luck out. 

I tried to start conservatively and ended up + 1:21 compared to different course last year. I was pretty happy with my effort though.

T2: Fine, but + :34 seconds. 

Run: Sigh. + 1:12 BUT...I felt really good. I just don't have the speed this year. And there were a TON of FAST runners out there today. They were just flying by. It was quite impressive. 

This year I have spent a lot of time learning about, planning, and working on my training and race day hydration and nutrition. And I think it really helped. Between the bike and the run, I averaged 683 mg of sodium per hour and did 3 bottles total of water. 220 calories / hour on the bike and 180 / hour on the run. And so far, I don't have that post-race feeling like a truck ran over me although I could use a nap about now.

My overall time was just under 4 minutes slower, but it isn't horrible. I had a really smooth, happy race and executed everything the way I wanted to so I'm happy. What I really need to do is drop some weight...it's killing me!