After I had already made plans to come up to Juneau for a bit (flights and all), I found that there was a triathlon the morning after I was flying in. Since I am doing the race in San Francisco later in the month, I thought this would be a good idea to do, in order to get used to colder water swimming. So, I signed up for it around a month ago. All day Friday while traveling and Saturday morning also... I was regretting that decision... not really up for it. After the race started was a different story though.
I bought some neoprene socks and a neoprene cap for the Alcatraz race, so I planned to try them out here. I didn't see anyone in transition with the cap, so I stuck with just the socks. Turned out this was about the perfect setup. The water was surprisingly not cold (seemed maybe warmer than Boise, probably warmer than the first race I ever did in Show Low). At the start of the swim, I took off pretty fast. I felt like I was up in the top few for the first couple hundred meters. I felt like I was going too fast really, so settled down a bit. I was swimming with better form, but still heads up way too much, and once again the back of my neck paid the price (just slight rash, not as bad as Boise). I really need to figure out why I don't swim more normally in the open water. I got to the turnaround and back closer to the exit, and decided to try to read the clock... it was at 12 minutes and something, I was surprised. I ended up getting out of the water at 14:30, which blows away my previous PR for that distance by another 4 minutes or so (which I just set a couple weeks ago). I wasn't expecting that, but after it happened I had to keep pushing to try to put together a good overall race.
Running up back to transition was a long way, but my socks helped a lot there. I would not have been very comfortable running where we had to in bare feet. I got my swimming stuff off, my feet dry and into socks, and I was off on the bike. The bike that Rich borrowed for me was pretty nice. The handlebars were set pretty low, and right off the bat I almost made a big mistake due to that. Going out of the UAS parking lot was supposed to be no-passing (I guess), and there was a woman in front of me, who had to slow down because of a van in front of her... and there were speedbumps. I missed my brake the first time, so was about to run into the back of the woman or the van, so I had to swerve myself to the left. I passed the woman a little, who then said "no passing"... but I gave back the spot once I had my control back. The bike course was fun. I wasn't expecting the couple of hills there, but the downhills were fun. It started to drizzle a bit, so that was fun too... heh. Made it out to the Mendenhall Glacier parking lot, around the loop and back without much incident. Bike time looked pretty good, so back into transition I had to push myself even more on the run.
The run course started off with a pretty steep switchback section to get down to the road. This weighed on me for most of the way back, I didn't want to run up this at the end. As it turned out, it was not that bad. I walked a couple times on the run, but overall was pretty good. I walked farther back than I usually do close to the finish, but I was still able to run up the switchbacks, getting faster even and sprinting to the finish. I pretty much spent it all there, so I was really happy with the race. I set a new PR for this distance, and new PRs maybe for each leg of the race too. Overall time was 1:24:51.
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