Bear Triathlon Race Report
Date: May 15th, 2022
Location: Lum’s Pond State Park: Bear, DE
Format: Sprint: 1,000-yard swim/10-mile bike/3-mile run
2022 Triathlon Race Number: 1
Career Triathlon Race Number: 166
Conditions: Favorable. Mid 60s, very humid—dew point in low 60s, foggy, light wind, water temp of 68
Background
Hard to believe, given the deteriorating condition of my-soon-to-be-replaced left knee, that I find myself at 4am waking up on this mid-May morning to do yet another triathlon—the 166th of my career and the first of 2022. I’m hopeful to do 5 or 6 this year, ultimately culminating in October at Kona where hopefully, Anders and I can at long last race the IM World Championship that we qualified for back in November 2019, in the pre-CoVid days.
As detailed in my blog below, I have been focused in early 2022 on a heavy volume swim/bike training program—lots of volume at very modest intensity. I’ve had 3 of my 5 highest career monthly swim volumes with March and April being my 2nd and 1st highest volumes respectively. I’ve also put in big bike miles with January being my largest ever at 1,714 miles and April, my 3rd highest at 1,404 miles. I haven’t run (nor hiked/walked) very much in 2022 as my longest run before this race was just 3 miles.
At the end of April, I had completed 5 consecutive weeks of 25+ hours/week of training and over the two weeks prior to this race, backed it down considerably (15 hours/week) to shed some fatigue and due to my travel schedule. I had just completed a trip to Utah to see Anders race the “2021” IM World champs in St. George and to visit at his new home in Boulder, Co. I still felt like my legs were heavy from the early season training load but wasn’t too concerned given the limited distances of this sprint race. I was also near race weight (about 170 pounds) as I had focused on a relatively strict diet, especially in January and April.
The race venue was Delaware’s Lum’s Pond State Park. The swim was in said pond, the bike on flat and relatively low traffic roads near the pond, and the run was on grass and muddy (lots of rain the day prior) trails within the park. I’ve raced at this venue several times before. My first time racing here was back in 2002, in my 8th triathlon, where I finished 46th overall and 7th in my AG—early days! I remember how disgusting the pond was back in August of that year but on this May morning, with low water temps, the venue looked pretty good.
There were 225 people in the Sprint race (there was a simultaneous Olympic distance as well) and 9 in my new 65-69 year-old Age Group. I didn’t do any of my usual competitive research on my AG competitors and planned to just focus on my own race, essentially an individual time-trial, as opposed to optimizing competitive race tactics. It’s early in the season and I hadn’t raced in 8+ months so I just wanted to shake the cobwebs off and execute a well-managed, limited mistake, drama-free triathlon.
I arrived shortly before 5am, as the race venue was just a 20-minute drive from my Delaware home. As I pumped up my front tire, the rotating screw top of my Presta tube broke off. The tube didn’t leak but I thought there would be a good chance it might as I raced, so I executed a tube replacement. Beyond that, just the usual, and I was able to warm up (bike/run) and soon had my transition zone, at my assigned rack spot, all set up. I didn’t have a very good, assigned spot, as it was near the end of one of the racks in the middle of transition. I was also crammed in with all the old dinosaurs and two of my competitors decided to bring chairs to transition (to help with the transition process presumably) and one of them was blocking my bike. I chuckled, smiled and didn’t say a thing, and figured I’d just work around it.
The Olympic race went first, and my Sprint wave didn’t start until 7:28am (second Sprint wave), so I had plenty of time to hang out and reflect on things. Frankly, I felt relatively nervous to race and to be honest I was even questioning myself “what am I doing?” given how challenging these things are with a knee that needs to be replaced. I ultimately concluded that I would just race a relatively easy, controlled race. I’d focus on staying safe and giving it a good, solid effort and not worry about whether I was winning my AG or where I placed in the overall standings. Soon, it was time for the old guys to jump into the chilly pond and kick-off the 2022 season.
The Swim
The swim course was relatively similar for both the Olympic and sprint races. Here is the course map:
In looking at the course, pre-race, it seemed to me that there was no way that the Olympic course was 50+% larger (1,500 meters vs. 1,000 yards) than the Sprint course. Further, by my eye (and I’m a good judge of this), the Sprint course looked significantly longer than 1,000 yards—maybe 20-30% longer. I viewed this as a positive, as I felt with all my 2022 swim volume that I was likely to be a relatively stronger swimmer, as compared to the field as a whole.
At the start I calmly waded it, in a restrained shuffle, and then started to ease into my swim. I haven’t done a whole bunch of higher intensity swimming this year and had not practiced aggressive starts, so I was focused on keeping my heart rate under control. I stayed to the right, nearer the shore and away from the buoy line to avoid traffic. I was giving up the drafting advantage, but I was focused on a controlled, drama-free race.
I could quickly see that I was up towards the front of my wave and in relatively short order, I began passing a bunch of the slower, younger swimmers from the first wave. As I passed the first turn buoy, I glanced at my watch and saw that I was already near 500 yards, so I knew then that the course was going to be long. I swam very easy the whole swim, knowing I was leaving some time on the table.
My training swims indicated I should be able to do about 1:45/100 yards with relative ease. As I exited the water I glanced down at my Garmin and saw that the swim took me 22:54 and that it had covered 1,216 yards. I tried to run the math in my head as I jogged towards the transition area. This proved difficult but I could estimate that I was over 1:50/100 (actually 1:53/100). This was disappointing, but I guess not surprising, given my easy-peasy approach to this swim.
My swim dynamic stats were:
- 750 total strokes
- 1.62 yards/stroke
- 32 strokes/minute
My 500-yard splits were 1:48/100 and 1:57/100. I didn’t feel like this was happening but apparently, I pretty much dogged it in the back half of the swim.
This distance per stroke is poor for me. I would have expected at least 1.9 yards/stroke and when I’m really on my game I can hit 2+ yards/stroke. Based on this data I’d have to give myself a “C” for this swim.
They didn’t have the swim end timing mat until just before the entry to transition so the longish jog through the woods was also counted as part of the swim time. This jog took nearly 90 seconds before I entered the transition area.
Competively, I had a pretty good swim. I was 45th overall (80.4 %-tile) and had the fastest split in my Age Group. In fact, I was a full 2:51 ahead of the next fellow in my Age Group and had I known this I would have been quite pleased. As I thought about my AG race, I had thought I probably needed to be ahead by about 4 minutes after the bike to have a chance of winning, given my slow run (due to the knee), and so I was hoping to pick up 2 minutes in the swim and another 2 on the bike. Here is where we stood after the swim:
1. RC --------
2. Wilkins + 2:51
3. McNew + 3:04
4. Capista + 4:20
5. Fischer +10:02
Transition One
As I jogged up to my rack space, I could see that I was the first one in my AG to have completed the swim. I didn’t know by how much, but figured it was pretty a solid lead as no one joined me while I prepared to bike. I soon lifted my bike up over my competitors chair and began the long jog to the bike mount line. I didn’t see anyone in my AG and figured that I was probably near my 2-minute lead objective.
I’m not sure why they did this, but when you finally reached the parking lot, they had you push your bike another couple hundred yards before they allowed you to mount your bike (this is real fun in bike shoes). They had my T1 at 1:25, which was the time between the two timing mats in transition, but my actual T1 (time at the end of my swim to the time at the start of my bike) ended up totaling 5:15.
For the official measured part of T1, I had the fastest T1 in my AG and was able to put significant time into most of my competitors. Here is where we stood after T1:
1. RC --------
2. Wilkins + 3:03
3. McNew + 5:44
4. Capista + 7:14
5. Fischer +13:24
The Bike
The bike course was about a 1.5-mile road within the park, out to about a 7-mile loop around the park and then the same 1.5-mile road back to transition. The road within the park was relatively poor with a bunch of speed-bumps and potholes to navigate, but once out on the loop, the pavement was excellent and overall, the bike course was quite fast in my judgement. I recorded about 335 feet of elevation gain, so the course was also relatively flat (average gradient of about 1.2%).
Here I am leaving the park:
I navigated the park road without incident and began to push once out on the main road. I was pleased to feel that my legs had a lot of “pop” in them, and I was generally running everyone else down on the bike. There were a couple of Olympic race draft trains that came by on their second laps, but I didn’t pay any attention to them.
In my pre-race preparation, I noted that my power-meter’s batteries were dead, so unfortunately, I have no power nor cadence data. Also, I couldn’t locate my HR strap, so I basically had to ride by feel. My main evaluative metric for the bike was average speed, and prior to the race I would have thought that 22-mph would be a pretty good effort given my lack of high intensity interval work so far in 2022.
As it turned out I could tell that I was going to ride faster than that. I was typically seeing 24 mph or so on the flats and hit 27.4 mph at one point. I was slower on the modest climbs, of course, but was able to average 24.0 mph for the first 5 miles. My second 5 was slower at 22.4 mph due in part to the back half being generally more uphill and maybe due to a little fatigue.
I didn’t feel like I was on the rivet at all during the race, just riding comfortably. My Garmin optical HR had my average HR at 156bpm. I don’t know how accurate that is, but it seems to jive with my perception as I typically will average above 160bpm when I’m really after it.
All-in-all, it was an easy, drama-free ride that I measured at 10.24 miles and took me 26:42 to complete. This turns out to be an average of 23.0 mph and given everything, I’d have to grade this ride an “A” effort.
One of the interesting things is to compare my recorded time on the bike (from my computer) to my official time, which was 30:51. This is a difference of 4:09 and that time is essentially the elapsed time it took me to push my bike from transition, out to the parking lot and around the parking lot to the bike mount line, and the reverse of that at the end of the ride. This was easily over a quarter mile in total.
There was a 50-year-old (Hicks) who passed me pushing his bike around the parking lot at the beginning of the ride, whom I passed during the ride, and who then re-passed me while I was pushing the bike in transition after the ride. His recorded bike time was 30:00 or 51 seconds faster than mine. I think I was maybe 10-20 seconds faster on the actual bike ride, so I lost something like 60+ seconds due to this extended transition (and the fact I can’t run fast--while pushing a bike). I think this deficit was probably generally true against most, if not all, of the faster bikers. This means that my official bike time, relative to the front of the pack, was probably penalized.
With that in mind, I officially had the 21st fastest bike split (91.1 %-tile). Hicks was 14th (94.2 %-tile) and so most likely, I was actually in the top 5% of the bike—which is normally where I finish in a race like this. Further, I probably could have gone 60-90 seconds faster if I had really pushed it (but then would have paid the price on the run). So, as I suggested above, an “A” bike ride.
As for my AG, the race was effectively over as I put 8+ minutes into all my competitors. Here is where we stood after the bike:
1. RC --------
2. Wilkins +11:22
3. McNew +13:26
4. Capista +17:02
5. Fischer +21:50
Transition Two
As I entered T2, I was pleased to see a paucity of bikes, which confirmed that I had indeed had a solid bike ride. Importantly, at my rack spot, there were no bikes, so I knew I was still leading the race and although I didn’t know by how much, I suspected that I had a pretty solid lead. I lifted my bike up over my competitor’s chair and racked it and worked through my transition chores.
I had left wearing socks or not as a T2 game time decision and decided at that moment to not put on my fluorescent yellow (Cedar Island Swim) socks on. There is a funny story with that, which I’ll share shortly.
My total T2 was 3:26 (and 1:41 officially) and this was the 2nd fastest in my AG. Except for Wilkins, I was generally able to further pad my lead against my competitors:
1. RC --------
2. Wilkins +10:26
3. McNew +13:52
4. Capista +18:04
5. Fischer +22:10
The Run
So headed out for my first run in 3+ weeks and I immediately felt the bone-on-bone in my left knee but went into my “I’m-not-going-to-let-it-bother-me mode”. I ran at a slightly uncomfortable pace. I wasn’t really at my limit, but I was mindful that I was in a race.
The course was very flat (I recorded 48 feet of total elevation gain) and was about a half-mile of quite thick grass at the beginning and end of the out and back, and then a mile or so section of a very narrow, somewhat muddy path. The path was narrow enough that runners approaching each other both had to edge off the path to avoid ruing into each other.
I had trouble seeing my pace on my Garmin, due to my bad eyes and the insufficient light caused by the fog and trees overhead. I soon reached the one-mile mark well under 10 minutes, but given that my watch hadn’t vibrated and given me my 1-mile split, I immediately suspected the mile split was short. This proved true as I continued running for a bit and then hit the mile mark with an elasped time of 10:41. Shortly thereafter, I saw the 2-mile split for the return part of the run and new the mile markers were off and/or the run was not 3 miles (in an out-and-back 3-mile run, the 1 and 2 mile markers should be at the same place—1/2-mile from the turnaround.)
I felt reasonably good and thought that the 10:41/mile was fine. My hope had been to go sub-33 on the run. After the turn-around, I decided to not check out the other runners and see if I had an AG competitor closing in on me. I decided I was just going to try to hold this pace and if someone caught me, then so be it.
Several times during the run I shifted my visor around because it seemed uncomfortably tight for some reason—more on that in a moment!
I hit the second mile with a 10:39 split and then the 3rd went by at 10:35—so a nice, steady, slightly negative split pacing. As I neared the finish line, the announcer said: “Here’s comes Randy Christofferson, and he’s wearing my favorite bib number—420”. LOL--slow times at Ridgemont High?
The course was a little long and I finished the 3.06-mile run in 32:30, which turns out to be an average pace of 10:37/mile. While objectively, a pedestrian pace, this surprisingly turns out to have been the 2ndfastest in my AG and was the 107th overall (52.9 %-tile). My HR seems to have averaged about 164 bpm, which seems about right. Given that I had no idea how my knee would react, I’m happy with this run and all things considered, I’d give myself a “B” grade for the run.
I finished the overall race with a time of 1:30:44, which was good enough for 49th overall (78.7 %-tile). I was able to win my AG comfortably, having extended my lead by another 6-7 minutes on the run against my closest pursuers:
1. RC --------
2. Wilkins +17:28
3. McNew +19:57
4. Filtz +21:23
5. Capista +27:35
Here is my finish line picture. If you look closely at the side of my head, you can notice a splash of fluorescent yellow:
When I got back to my transition area, I was dismayed to see only one of my favorite yellow socks were there. I probably spent 3-4 minutes looking for the missing sock and couldn’t understand where it could have gone. When I took my hat off, the mysteries of the too tight visor and the missing sock were simultaneously solved as the yellow sock fell to the ground—I had a bright yellow sock sticking out of the headband of my visor, on the back of my head, for the whole race. I guess no one who passed me during the race thought it notable that a gimpy old guy would race with a sock sticking out of his visor!
This to me sums up my current Triathlon status. The old guy who races with socks stuck in his hat….
Finally here is my "podium picture" with Wilkins and McNew:
Post-Race
Pretty shocking to win with such a controlled effort combined with such a big gap. No offense meant, but this is probably more of a commentary on my competitors than a reflection of the strength of my race. Still, I was indeed quite a bit faster than my competition, and you can only race the people who show up on race morning. Also finishing around the 80th %-tile overall is not the worst result either.
This is my 55th career Age Group win (33.1%-win percentage) so there is that as well.
In the few days following the race, my knee/leg reacted poorly, and I’ve had to limit my training activity this week. This is causing me to reassess the logic of racing Eagleman70.3 in a few weeks. We’ll have to play that by ear over the next couple of weeks. This is clearly going to be a challenging year for me to navigate but at the end of the day, my principal objective is to get to the starting line of Kona with a reasonable chance of finishing it. And then I’ll get my knee replaced.
Onward and upward!
