Tri again...
We had another triathlon on Sunday - my third, J's second. It was intended to be a sprint tri - 400m open water swim, 20Km ride, 4.5Km run. However the cycle leg got canceled, owing to excessively exciting & gusty side winds (apparently cyclists were being blown into oncoming traffic on the Sumner causeway...), which kinda sucked, but I don't think anyone faulted the organisers for it given the conditions.
About the only irritant with the alteration was that it happened in the middle of the swim leg, so we weren't warned about it in the race brief - as I ran into T1, someone shouted something about cycles to me, but I didn't hear what they said (and people are always shouting at you as you go into transition - for some reason the swim section leaves you with the IQ of a cabbage, and if they don't shout things like "get your bike and go out the cycle exit - the CYCLE EXIT", people are likely to attempt to take their bike into the water), and it was only when, as I buckled on my helmet and grabbed my bike, Jase shouted at me that the cycle leg was canceled I looked up, saw they'd taped over the cycle exit, and worked out what was going on.
To step back a little, the swim was really interesting - we've done a certain amount of open water swimming, including some in pretty crap weather, but it's been in Corsair Bay, which is a bay off a long harbour, so while it can get choppy, it doesn't get swell coming in, and swimming in swell is quite different to swimming in chop (as I discovered) - chop is low amplitude & high frequency; you stay basically level as waves go over you - you breath in the troughs and can sight over the top without too much difficulty. Swell is high amplitude and low frequency - you end up staying on the surface as the surface moves up and down, which is a very different feeling - you can breath at pretty much any point in the wave cycle (more or less), but you can't see shit if you try to sight from a trough. Also, as doppleganger_ notes, we had a little realisation about navigation and turning corners: after you've been swimming in a straight line on a particular course for a while it seems you subconsciously adjust to the direction that the waves are coming from, and use that as a way to keep on course. When you round a buoy all of a sudden the waves are coming from a different direction, and if you don't think about it, it's really easy to reorient yourself to the same wave angle, and all of a sudden you're haring off in the wrong direction. The cure to this appears to be to sight extra specially frequently after changing direction - live and learn.
Swimming as part of a pack was also interesting - it meant that I was mostly sighting off the swimmers in front of me, rather than trying to pick landmarks on shore (which were mostly grey on a grey background). Happily, noone at the front decided that it might be fun to swim to Australia, so this worked quite well.
Other than the cancellation of the cycle leg, T1 was made interesting by the discovery that a ten odd minute swim in one meter swell completely destroys your sense of balance - after a couple of attempts to put my shoes on standing up, I gave up and planted arse in the grass.
The run felt quite good - I was quite out of breath at the start, but settled down, and by the end of the third leg was feeling very relaxed and flowing, and was breathing easily. I got a bit of a lift at that point, as literally seconds after I'd thought to myself "cool, so this is what they mean when they talk about relaxed flow when racing", Jason appeared over my shoulder and panted out something along the lines of "you bastard - you keep picking up the pace" - to which I replied something caring like "nope - I'm cruising; I was just about to pick up the pace" and then did. However, I shouldn't crow too much, as J was quite firmly coming down with a cold, and I think that did kind of screw his performance.
There was a surreal moment in the first leg of the run - the run was in a two lap, out and back format. However, while the triathlon kiddies had been completing their swim leg, the duathletes had been doing their first run leg, so there was a marshal standing on the run course about three quarters of the way along, turning back the duathletes (as their first run leg was shorter than their second/the triathlon run leg) - I was at the front of the pack I was running with as we approached the first turn around, and was a bit perturbed when the mark that I was running towards all of a sudden turned around and ran off - we proceeded to chase her for a couple or three hundred meters, until we got to the actual turn around point (which hadn't been visible from where she'd been initially standing, so the whole thing had been highly bizarre).
Don't know times as yet, but without split information, it's of limited use; I'm mostly looking on the race as a good open-water swim practice, with some transition practice and a nice run thrown in.
In other news, we had our work christmas do on Friday - it wasn't as much fun as last year, but wasn't too bad - chatted a bit with various people and generally schmoozed around a bit. Ended up going into town with Araposa and a few others - got to bed at three am, and then got woken up by my faithful body clock at ten past six... Wasn't well impressed with that. I went for a bit of a ride, then tagged along on a vineyard crawl for Sonja's birthday (but ended up crashing after a couple of hours and napping in the back of the van.
About the only irritant with the alteration was that it happened in the middle of the swim leg, so we weren't warned about it in the race brief - as I ran into T1, someone shouted something about cycles to me, but I didn't hear what they said (and people are always shouting at you as you go into transition - for some reason the swim section leaves you with the IQ of a cabbage, and if they don't shout things like "get your bike and go out the cycle exit - the CYCLE EXIT", people are likely to attempt to take their bike into the water), and it was only when, as I buckled on my helmet and grabbed my bike, Jase shouted at me that the cycle leg was canceled I looked up, saw they'd taped over the cycle exit, and worked out what was going on.
To step back a little, the swim was really interesting - we've done a certain amount of open water swimming, including some in pretty crap weather, but it's been in Corsair Bay, which is a bay off a long harbour, so while it can get choppy, it doesn't get swell coming in, and swimming in swell is quite different to swimming in chop (as I discovered) - chop is low amplitude & high frequency; you stay basically level as waves go over you - you breath in the troughs and can sight over the top without too much difficulty. Swell is high amplitude and low frequency - you end up staying on the surface as the surface moves up and down, which is a very different feeling - you can breath at pretty much any point in the wave cycle (more or less), but you can't see shit if you try to sight from a trough. Also, as doppleganger_ notes, we had a little realisation about navigation and turning corners: after you've been swimming in a straight line on a particular course for a while it seems you subconsciously adjust to the direction that the waves are coming from, and use that as a way to keep on course. When you round a buoy all of a sudden the waves are coming from a different direction, and if you don't think about it, it's really easy to reorient yourself to the same wave angle, and all of a sudden you're haring off in the wrong direction. The cure to this appears to be to sight extra specially frequently after changing direction - live and learn.
Swimming as part of a pack was also interesting - it meant that I was mostly sighting off the swimmers in front of me, rather than trying to pick landmarks on shore (which were mostly grey on a grey background). Happily, noone at the front decided that it might be fun to swim to Australia, so this worked quite well.
Other than the cancellation of the cycle leg, T1 was made interesting by the discovery that a ten odd minute swim in one meter swell completely destroys your sense of balance - after a couple of attempts to put my shoes on standing up, I gave up and planted arse in the grass.
The run felt quite good - I was quite out of breath at the start, but settled down, and by the end of the third leg was feeling very relaxed and flowing, and was breathing easily. I got a bit of a lift at that point, as literally seconds after I'd thought to myself "cool, so this is what they mean when they talk about relaxed flow when racing", Jason appeared over my shoulder and panted out something along the lines of "you bastard - you keep picking up the pace" - to which I replied something caring like "nope - I'm cruising; I was just about to pick up the pace" and then did. However, I shouldn't crow too much, as J was quite firmly coming down with a cold, and I think that did kind of screw his performance.
There was a surreal moment in the first leg of the run - the run was in a two lap, out and back format. However, while the triathlon kiddies had been completing their swim leg, the duathletes had been doing their first run leg, so there was a marshal standing on the run course about three quarters of the way along, turning back the duathletes (as their first run leg was shorter than their second/the triathlon run leg) - I was at the front of the pack I was running with as we approached the first turn around, and was a bit perturbed when the mark that I was running towards all of a sudden turned around and ran off - we proceeded to chase her for a couple or three hundred meters, until we got to the actual turn around point (which hadn't been visible from where she'd been initially standing, so the whole thing had been highly bizarre).
Don't know times as yet, but without split information, it's of limited use; I'm mostly looking on the race as a good open-water swim practice, with some transition practice and a nice run thrown in.
In other news, we had our work christmas do on Friday - it wasn't as much fun as last year, but wasn't too bad - chatted a bit with various people and generally schmoozed around a bit. Ended up going into town with Araposa and a few others - got to bed at three am, and then got woken up by my faithful body clock at ten past six... Wasn't well impressed with that. I went for a bit of a ride, then tagged along on a vineyard crawl for Sonja's birthday (but ended up crashing after a couple of hours and napping in the back of the van.