Milkman triathlon race report

Today June 6th 2009 was the Milkman triathlon in Dexter NM. This years Milkman triathlon was a very important race because it was a qualifier for the National triathlon championships & gave 11.125 points for the overall winner in each age group for the South West Challenge series.

It was a 500 meter open water swim in lake Van. I'd heard horror stories about how nasty the water is here, honestly I didn't think it was that bad. No worse of water to race in than Storie lake outside Las Vegas NM or Buffalo Springs lake outside Lubbock TX. Definantly better than Tempe Lake in AZ!

I felt great the first half of the swim & felt really fast. Not sure why but on the 2nd half I slowed way down & ended up with an average 500 meter swim time of 10:31.

I had a decent 1st transition of 1 minute 8 seconds. I was in a poor spot, 3rd farthest bike rack from the entrance & exit of transition.

The bike a 20 kilometer (12.4 mile) out & back. The bike was on an incredibly rough road! I was very surprised by just how rough this road was. When I had pumped my tires I didn't fill them up as high as normal to avoid bounce back.

The bike started with a slight uphill. I'm a poor hill climber so this was no good for my overall time. I was looking foreword to the 2nd half of the bike because I'm really good on down hills. Unfortunantely there was a really strong head wind on the way back so I had an equally poor return trip. I really hammered the bike today, but for some reason I had a poor time. I ended with a 37:36 bike split.

My T-2 was really fast. I only took 46 seconds to get off my bike, into the transition area, out of my cycling gear, into my run gear, & out onto the run course.

The first 2.5 miles of my run was really poor. Not sure why, but it was. I was able to get my run legs back & pick up my pace on the last part of the run leg. I was able to start reeling in some of the triathletes who had passed me, but with only 3/4 of a mile left I wasn't able to undo much of the damage done.

My total race time was 1 hr 16 minutes 37 seconds. I finished on the podium 3rd place Clydesdale out of 10. 63rd overall. Honestly one of my worse race performances of the year, but a bad day racing is still better than a good day doing anything else;)

Thanks for tuning in.