A Race! I did a race!

Well it has been a long time, 2 years since my last bike race and over 4 since my last triathlon, but today I did a triathlon. And I didn't do too terribly! It wasn't a super competitive field, but I got 3rd overall female and 2nd in my age group.

The short race report is: Everything went pretty much as expected. I have no speed in my legs, so I didn't really feel that tired throughout or at the end, but I couldn't go any faster. I gave up a lot of time in transitions because I used my road cycling shoes, which I can't do flying mounts with. So that was kind of annoying, but I was trying to not take this too seriously and I didn't want to mess around with a different pair of shoes right before the race. I also took a risk by racing on my TT bike, which I hadn't ridden since May 2009 when I got injured. I raised the bars a bit, but it's still a super aggressive position, and I think it will take some work to get the position dialed before I can do any damage in a real TT. Oh, some fitness might help, too! I did have the 2nd fastest bike split, though... so not terrible. And my run wasn't so bad either: 24:01 for a 5K, which is respectable given that I didn't run at all for 3 years and only started up again a few months ago and only did 1 run over 25 minutes. So in general, I guess my fitness isn't that terrible.

You are probably thinking, "Wow, 2 years since your last race, and you are talking about performance? You should be happy to just race!" And yes, that is probably true, but there is an unfortunate side effect of racing at a high level in triathlon and in each of the individual sports for a long, long time. It is really, really hard to forget about the ingrained competitiveness. I used to be pretty competitive in triathlon, swimming and bike racing (I always sucked at running), so even after a 2 year racing hiatus, just finishing isn't really all that exciting for me any more. My goal in all my years of racing was to be as fast as possible, and I'm just naturally very competitive. It is hard to turn this off, which can be a problem. So it's especially weird to make my comeback at a race called "Finish Strong" because that phrase really doesn't embody my outlook towards sports at all... I guess I'm more of a go big or go home type of person.

Anyway, this certainly didn't give me the itch to return to triathlon racing more seriously. But I am excited about bike racing, which looms in my near future with cyclocross!

This isn't to say that I'm not super excited to be able to do a race. A year ago, I didn't think I'd ever be able to do a triathlon again, and my hip has made great progress in recent months. I did make sure to think about how much of an accomplishment this was throughout the race and in the days leading up to it. I'm very satisfied with how it went and excited to be out there, but I'm okay with putting triathlon back on the shelf for a little while.