Official Race Timing - OSIM Triathlon

Swim: 00:53:37
Bike: 01:23:10 (includes T1)
Run: 01:08:26 (includes T2)
Total: 03:25:13
Position: 75/118 - Age Group Olympic Distance Male (40 - 44 YEARS)

I DID IT! (OSIM Triathlon Race Report)

Praise God, I have finally completed my first Olympic Distance Triathlon! You ironmen/iron ladies out there will laugh at this, but it was much tougher than I thought it would be.

Pre-Race
I slept rather well last night, none of the usual nervous energy that keeps me awake before races - I think not having any expectations except to try to finish works well for me. The nice thing about my wave starting at 10:40am is that I can wake up late and have a leisurely breakfast - coffee and 4 pieces of toast with peanut butter and honey. I even managed to take a quick self protrait before setting off (sorry for the poor aim, there's not much hair left up there anyway). :-)I arrived more than an hour before my wave starts, which gave me loads of time to fuss over my transition area. I even had time to watch some of the elite triathletes flying by the transition area - man, they are fast!

Swim (2 X 750m)
While waiting for the swim, I overhead the announcers making multiple warnings of a rough swim due to strong winds - seems the fastest swim by the "elites" has dropped from 16min (last year) to 21min. That's a whopping 30% increase! I tried not to think about it too much, and got in a quick warm-up swim, and sure enough, it was choppy. I even managed to drink some yucky sea water in the warm-up swim thanks to the chop. Not good.
Nervous minutes ticked by and it was my wave start. Perhaps having the mental expectation of a tough swim helped, and I did not struggle too much. I tried to relax and just bob along with the waves, so the swim did not turn out as uncomfortable as the NUS Biathlon. Still, there was lots of physical contact pretty much throughout the swim because the current was causing us to bunch up into groups. I even got kicked in the face twice by guys swimming breast stroke - which is exactly why I use a swim mask instead of those tiny goggles. Swim Time: >50mins.

Bike (4 X 10km)
The good thing about being a slow swimmer is that there is loads of room at the transition to put on my socks and cycling shoes. :-) I have always liked cycling, so was happy to be able to pick up the pace from the start and catch quite a few people early on. I don't like to fuss with HRM/speed/cadence meters in races. I like to just feel the wind in my face, and hear the buzz from the drive train. I had decided to put a bottle of Gatorade on the bike (which I would finish during the bike leg) and also a gel for "spare". The 1st 3 laps went by in a blur, and I was having fun. Lap 4 is when I started to tire, and I just could not keep up the pace and stay on the aero bars consistently. The sun was bearing down and I could feel the uncomfortable feeling that my entire back is dry and hot - mental note: maybe bring a bottle of water instead next time so I can splash some on my head and back. I decided to take the gel and wash it down with Gatorade - yummy! Decided to slow down and leave some strength for the run. Bike time: 1:20?

Run (2 X 5km)
The run was a totally different matter - I just never got up to pace on the run. It felt like I was just "surviving" and trying to make the distance. Somehow the 5km loop felt like it was going on forever - Mental note: maybe I gotta check the run distance sensor on my Polar, perhaps I am running short during training. Turning back for the 2nd 5km loop was a real morale buster - it was all I could do to keep running and not give up. Out of the blue, it started raining - a sudden tropical downpour. I didn't exactly pray for rain, but I did tell R1 & R2 that if it rained, it might be a good thing because the noon sun can be pretty terrible in this part of the world. I was thankful for the rain, it brought cool relief, but the downpour soon soaked my shoes and made them heavy and uncomfortable. I gotta be careful what I wish for, I guess. :-) Somewhere along the 2nd loop, I gave up my target time of 60mins and re-set the target to just being able to complete without walking. I was telling myself, "God brought the rain, you better not give up." :-) Run time: 1:10 (?)

So all in, a tough event for me. I did wear my trusty Timex, but I managed to mess up the lap times, so you will have to wait for the official results to see how I did. I did not put in quite as much training as I would have liked, so I am very thankful to be able to finally complete my first Olympic Distance Triathlon. There's actually a Night Olympic Triathlon in Oct, but that's the LAST thing I wanna think about right now. :o)

Pictures from JP Morgan Chase Run

Pictures from the JP Morgan Chase Run that I wrote about in this post.

Chilling out on the company bus. Hmmm.... I guess we were expecting a whole lot more to take the bus...

The obligatory team photo before the start. It's nice to be able to run right through the city centre, check out the city skyline in the back!

Let it be known that Ol' Nitrox takes his warm-ups very seriously. No need to ask who's that leaping off the ground then. ;-)

Best way to busy up the weekend...

Sorry, I seem to have caught blogger constipation. So much has happened in the last 2 weeks so I have a feeling there will be multiple posts from me this weekend as I purge from my system all the pent up blogging. :-)

Was busy all last weekend - Yup, seems one of the best ways to busy up the weekend is to volunteer to babysit a 5 month old labrador puppy. It also helps that despite claims of being house broken, "Brother" (don't look at me, I didn't name him) peed on everywhere but the papers, and has the habbit of whinning/barking late at night and early in the mornings. Seriously though, it was good fun having him, and a good lesson for the boys on what it means to have a dog. Having Brother for the weekend also confirmed that R1 is the more emotional of my 2 boys - he cried when Brother was returned. R2, on the otherhand, was nonchalant abt the whole episode.

In terms of my daily bible reading, I am afraid I have now slipped to being an entire month behind schedule. :-( Given that the scriptures are being emailed daily to my office email account, this also reflects the sad state of where I am at work. I am literally getting "mailbox full" messages every 2-3 days so I am operating on the "if it is urgent, they will call me" mode. Hopefully when 1st June comes and I hand-over one of the 2 roles I am currently holding, things will get a little less crazy - call me the eternal optimist. :-)

Having said that, I did manage to inject a bit of work-life balance on Wed (23rd April) by participating in the JPMorgan Chase Corporate Challenge ® (5.6km road run). Hopefully I can share more pictures later when I copy them off my colleagues. We had a team from work ranging from sub 25mins sprinters to 60+mins strollers, and the company management was kind enough to sponsor race entry fees and even provide company team shirts. Over 10,000 runners showed up, many in their corporate colours, so it lended to a carnival atmosphere right in the centre of town. This was a "self seeding" race, which meant that we were supposed to line up at the start according to our expected finishing times, but it felt like we were the only ones doing it. You guys/gals know ol' nitrox ain't a fast runner, but I was dodging and weaving through strollers and joggers pretty much for the entire 5.6km route!

Despite that, I came in at 31:38 which is a decent timing for me (I am happy to turn in sub 30mins 5 km and sub 60mins 10km), and I was surprised to see that I was 7th in the team from work. :-) I started off pretty slowly as it was hard to settle into any sort of rhythm with the constant "stop-start" squeezing thru the joggers/walkers that decided they wanted to start in front. Felt good and comfortable throughout the run, and when I look back at where I was 3 years ago when even 2.4km was too far to run, I am amazed that 5.6km is considered a short run for me now. I looked at the guys/gals struggling through the route and think to myself "that was me just a few short years ago", and am encouraged that the training has made some tangible difference - Praise God! It is easy to forget that I am getting fitter and stronger when I am putting in the training hours and still rounding out the bottom of the pack in races. :-))

More big news to share including yet another sexy bit of "go faster" kit for my bike, but more on that later...

Race Report: NUS Biathlon

Pre-Race (Sat 16 Feb '08)

I am having a nervous week leading to the race tomorrow. Even though I had timed it such that I would have the race at the end of a rest week, I just do not feel like I am recovering well from the previous 3 weeks of training. I did short run and swim intervals this week, but felt slow and lethagic. This will be my first ever biathlon, and my first 1.5km open water swim in race conditions. I am still half serious about sleeping in tomorrow and forgetting about the race. :-)

I decided to use my "Chinese New Year" red New Balance 835 (bought at a warehouse sale for SGD$35/USD$20) as my race shoes because they are lighter than my regular MR846 training shoes so I switched the Lock Laces over. Somehow, switching over the laces had a calming effect as it made tomorrow's race finally REAL somehow.

Let's hope I feel MUCH better tomorrow morning when I wake up.

Race Day (Sun 18 Feb '08)

Didn't sleep too well the night before - too much nervous energy - oh well. I don't believe in omens, but perhaps I should have guessed that the swim won't go too well when I saw the swimming caps being handed out. Yes, that is what you think it is - a swimming sperm!?!? I tried to encourage my buddies by reminding them that we were all made by the fastest swimming sperm at some point, so DEEP down inside us there must be a fast swimmer. :-))

Well, the swimmer DEEP inside me didn't quite surface - the swim was downright awful for me. There was a deceptively strong current going from right to left, and the swim lap was an inverted U - we swim 250m out, turn right for 250m and then swim 250m back (2 loops to make 1.5km). On the swim out, I got kicked a few times and decided to head for clear water. Problem was, the current brought me about 50m out to the left. Then I turned right at the buoy and pretty much came to a standstill because I was now swimming against the current. Sounds funny now, but it was pretty demoralizing to swim 8 strokes or so, sight, and find myself at pretty much the same position as before. When I finally get to turn back to shore, the current was literally pushing me against the ropes and I couldn't really swim proper strokes, but at least I was finally moving again. It took me 26 mins to swim 750m, that's 10 mins more than in my last Sprint Tri. When I had to run back and do the 2nd swim loop, there was STRONG temptation to just give up on the swim. There wasn't even a timing mat to record the number of swim laps completed! Somehow, I found the fortitude to continue and jump back in, despite noticing that I was literally one of the last swimmers still heading back in for swim loop 2.

The 2nd lap was pretty much a repeat of the 1st lap and I finished the swim in an embarassing 50:56, but at least I finished, and it looks like I even did a negative split (since the swim times included the swim-run transition). Out I go for the run then, which was pretty uneventful, except that again I got stitches on the run, which made breathing difficult and speeding up just about impossible. I don't know why I get stitches in races but never in training - can anyone help? One of my buddies say it is probably because I am too tensed up in races, gotta learn to relax a bit more. After the disastrous swim, I somehow managed a sub-60min 10km (59:23) - ok, not by much, but sub-60min it is, and a PR it is. Someone I met started telling me that the run course was probably short, but I just DID NOT want to hear that. :-)

So total time was a disastrous 1:50:19 for a 1.5km swim and 10km run, and race results confirm that I am in the last 10% of the Men's Open. (So my fears about coming in last in a race organised by the local university - where most of the participants & organisers are half my age - came true.) I sure hope this sets the baseline for improvement towards the international triathlon I am planning to do in June/July.