Well it’s already race week for the Cap Tex Tri! That came around pretty quick, but I suppose that’ll happen when you register 17 days before the race. First I need to remind you (and myself) that the race is on Monday, Memorial Day, and not Sunday. So don’t go sending me all those “good luck” texts, tweets, facebook messages, voicemails, candygrams, Tiff’s Treats*, or anything of that nature a day early. So race week means take it easy, right?
get your game face on
I took Monday off, so that’s a good start to get fresh for the race. Well, the reason I took today off is to recover from the hard weekend that passed. Saturday involved a moderately paced 13.2 miles in the near-suffocating humidity that is Texas in always early Summer. Can’t wait for the actually-suffocating humidity in the months to come. Overall it felt good and boosted my overall fitness confidence that I can still bust out a half marathon without thinking about it.
For Sunday I had the bright idea of practicing some open-water swimming. After some research I found I could swim in Decker Lake, where The Rookie Tri took place. Only a little more than 9 miles away I opted to bike to the lake in my tri gear, hop in the water for a 20-minute swim, and then ride back. That plan almost worked until I realized a) I still don’t like swimming; b) swimming into currents is hard.
The ride to the lake was solid. I locked up my bike to a “No Parking” sign near the water and hopped in the water near a “No Swimming” sign. There were several “No Wake” buoys lined up within reasonable distance so I decided to swim out to the first and then turn 90 degrees and swim down the strip of buoys, then turn around after about 10 minutes. Well, that went swell except for fact that I turned around when it felt like 10 minutes, and not when my watch said 10 minutes.
Turned out to be a total of 9:01 when I got back to the dock. Nine minutes, one second. The map (above) comes out to ~0.22 miles, or 350 meters. Ugh. Well hopefully the race-day adrenaline will carry me through the remaining 400 meters of the swim. Not to be discouraged, I hopped on my bike and cranked out some really fast miles on the way home, until I met a nasty hill, which did get me discouraged just a tad. That’s ok though! I bargained with myself on the ride home that in order to compensate for the poor swim showing, I’ll go for a run right when I get home. Fortunately, as has been the case recently, my run (the full 5K race distance) went very well, averaging 7:33 min/mi.
Happy to end on a high note, I’m not sure what to expect in the CapTexTri. The Sprint Distance starts around 9:00am, after the Olympians Olympic Distancers are all swum out, so hopefully the heat doesn’t become a factor. Right now my goal looks like this:
Swim: 21:00
T1: 2:30
Bike: 40:00
T2: 1:30
Run: 23:00
That works itself out to 1:28:00 overall time. A lot hinges on the swim and how exhausted I am coming out of the water. It goes without saying that I’ll have a race report up sometime next week, so you can congratulate / heckle me on a race well / poorly done.
*You can send me Tiff’s Treats anytime. Really. Please.