Salem Sprint Triathlon

Saturday proved to be chock-full of adventures. It began bright and early with my first ever Sprint Distance Triathlon. I have a tendency to take on the huge challenges and ignore the little ones...so I have only done Olympic Distance triathlons in the past. I LOVED this event!

Here I am inching my way into my new wetsuit. This was an adventure for me. I purchased a DeSoto T1 wet suit about 10 days ago. I had never swam in one before. It is a 2 piece wetsuit. At the tri store I a bunch on and swam in a endless pool. The DeSoto was my favorite.
On Memorial day, my neighbors and I went down to Utah Lake for an early morning swim. It was perfect. I loved my wetsuit, practiced sighting (something I never did as a swimmer in high school) and just felt great all over. I went into this swim ready to master the panic.

I am somewhere out there in the lake swimming. If you will remember I had a disturbing panic attack at the Spudman last summer. The first 2 minutes of the swim I felt the panic coming on. My wetsuit was suffocating me. The girls were just joyfully frolicking in the water...

Get Control.

Mentally I went back to my early morning swim in Utah Lake. I knew my wetsuit wasn't too tight. My body was playing tricks on me. I worked through it, keeping my head above the water in a slow controled breaststroke, and after just a couple minutes I got into a rhythm and had my best open water swim ever.

The bike felt great. My legs were a bit fatigued, from lack of training. But it felt great.

Finally the run. My body is not used to a 5k race, especially after a bike. I really wanted to be going under 7 min pace, around 6:30's but I ended up doing a 7:17 pace. I finished with a bit too much left in me. The run was over before it started for me.

Lots of room for improvement. My transitions were horrible! My wetsuit got stuck. I was just plain slow. But despite all this I ended up third in my age group and 16th overall. And actually my splits were faster or within 30 seconds of the first 2 girls, I just had slow, slow transitions. My official time was 1:22.08. I finished within 8 minutes of the first place Elite. And I had over 4 more minutes in transition time than her.

I feel confident I can shave a minute or 2 off my swim, bike and run. This was so fun I ended up signing up for another one in 3 weeks! We raced home to prepare for sixteen 4-8 year olds who would be converging on our house in hours for Ellery's birthday party. You can read about that soon!