Cleveland Triathlon race report

Sadie and I ended up leaving later than I'd liked to get to the event and I was late getting setup in transition. They had people waiting in line to enter transition so they could have body marking done. After I stood in line for several minutes looking at my watch, one of the volunteers came by and told anyone doing the super-sprint to move to bypass the line and get into transition right away. I was thinking they might start us late (I know dumber move than getting there late to begin with).

I got my stuff set in transition and then went outside of transition to have Sadie help me put the wet suit on. I then went through the crowd down to where the swim was. When I got there, people were already coming out of the water from my wave (the very first wave at 6:45am), and the 2nd wave was already well under way. I rushed down to the dock along with another participant from the 2nd wave who was running late. The wave probably left 1-2 minutes before I jumped in the water. I then removed my flip-flops, which I'd forgotten to take off earlier and threw them on the dock under the ramp leading to transition.

At this point the adrenaline was pumping quite a bit higher than normal and I began the swim. I wanted to make sure I was going in the right direction, so I began swimming with my head up out of the water. I did this until I noticed what I was doing, but by the time I tried to swim with proper form, I was out of breath and had to keep my head out of water at this point. In hind sight, I should have just tried to stop, get relaxed, catch my breath, and settle in to a good free style stroke, but I continued to swim head up until I couldn't anymore. I then began to do a back stroke about 3/4 of the way out to the buoy.

As I neared the buoy, amazingly enough, I was catching people. I swam really wide to make the turn back in, and began to alternate the back stroke and the heads up freestyle. On the way back in, I swam to the outside of one of the kayaks and the guy asked me if I was warming up (probably because I had a different swim cap color compared to everyone else in the water at this point). I told him nope, but I wish I was only warming up...

As I finally neared the dock, I had actually passed 1/2 a dozen or so people from the wave ahead of me. I swam toward the biggest guy near the end of the pier, and he plucked me from the water with no trouble. I then made my way into transition as quickly as possible. When I got there my bike was the very last one left in the racks from my wave.

Once in transition, I managed to get out of the wetsuit and into my MTB shoes and helmet fairly quickly. I was able to run well inside transition in the shoes and got out of transition pretty quickly. I wasn't sure where I was allowed to mount the bike at, so I ran a little farther than I needed to, but this also allowed me to pass a few people who were slow in mounting their bikes outside of transition. I quickly began to pick people off during the bike.

I had to be careful passing people, because it looked like I was doing 5-10mph faster (it felt like I was going twice as fast a lot of people). At the first turn around, the cornering skills from Westlake kicked in, and I swept around effortlessly. Heading westward, the road began to incline fairly significantly as I passed Browns stadium. I had to shift to the small ring and use the base bar instead of the aero. Once I crested the hill, I was back up to speed and picking people off left and right. Toward the turnaround, I kept wondering how far I had to go because I didn't have a computer on my bike. Once I saw people heading back in, I knew it was getting close.

At the 2nd turn around, there were no other cyclists, and I whipped through. The volunteers were telling me to slow down and practically jumping for cover. I made the turn around pretty wide but with no problems and got back up to speed. There was a slight uphill back to Browns stadium and then a down hill until the off ramp. I passed a few more people and made my way up 9th street.

As I'm speeding toward transition, I see a guy crossing the street who's not looking and carrying a children's cars seat of all things. I yell "head's up" twice and other people were yelling at him. He was just about to enter my path when he stopped, but I had already started to brake hard to the point that my rear wheel was fish tailing. Once I saw that he was stopping, I was able to punch it for the last 50-100m leading up to transition. I got off the bike quickly (not sure if I dismounted earlier than I needed to), and ran into transition.

Once I got my running shoes on and tied, I just remembered to take my helmet off and I booked out of transition. I passed a couple of people with-in the first 100 - 200m and then figured I should ease into my pace and not go out too hard. I settled into a pace that I could probably keep up for a 5k, but it felt managable. There wasn't anyone really close to me, but I could see I was slowly gaining on those in front of me. I picked off a few more people and got the last guy about 300m from the finish. When I crossed the finish line, I was suprised to see a sub hour time on the clock, given my late start. I was 13th OA, 11th male, and 3rd in my age group. I was 3rd from last on the swim, had the fastest bike leg by 1:30, and the 2nd fastest run time.

OPEN MALE 30-34:
Place No.   Name                  City/state            Rank Swim    T1      Rank Bike    T2      Rank Run     Time  
===== ===== ===================== ===================== ==== ======= ======= ==== ======= ======= ==== ======= =========

1   283 Todd Glyde            North Olmsted OH         1    5:26    1:59    3   28:22    0:22    3   11:17   47:24.2
2   569 Brad Crellin          Avon OH                  4    6:47    1:36    2   27:48    0:35    4   11:44   48:27.0

3   183 Gary Burkholder       Parma OH                 9   13:47    2:49    1   23:44    1:22    2   10:36   52:16.1