Combat Sprint Tri Race Report

Less than a week after Silverlake, I found myself at the starting line of another triathlon! I did the Combat Tri for the first time last year and it’s such a good race that I had to do it again. I don’t know why I never did it before last year either, since it’s the tri that’s closest to home. The weather couldn’t have been more different — yesterday we got the typical hot and humid summer morning instead of last year’s downpour of rain. I’m not sure which is worse. I mean, riding in the rain always feels a little absurd, but at least the rain makes things cooler.
First up: the results! I only wore a watch on the bike so that I knew my speed; I wore nothing on the swim or run. Turns out I had a good day in the pool, a great day on the bike, and a very “blah” day on the run. As I was telling everyone after the race, if this race had been an aquabike, I’d have been fantastic — in fact, my swim+T1+bike+T2 time would have been good enough for 2nd place not in Athena, but in my age group. This is a big deal for me. Actually, I would have finished in 4th of 12 in my age group yesterday, even with my 8/12 running time. That is also way cool. Oh, and I did repeat as 1st place Athena by more than 10 minutes, so I got another plaque to add to my collection. I seriously don’t have a place to put them all! Woe is me. 😉
300 yard swim – 5:40 (last year 5:29)
T1 – 0:56 (1:23)
15 mile bike – 46:07 (49:00)
T2 – 1:02 (1:07)
3 mile run – 33:37 (32:43)
Total – 1:27:24 (1:29:43)
More than 2 minutes faster than last year! It’s totally thanks to my new bike, but whatever. Heck yeah!
On to the recap! I put down 5:30 for my predicted swim time, just like last year, but there must be more people doing the race. The numbers are given out in order of predicted swim time to manage the logistics of the pool swim as effectively as possible, and last year I was #106. This year I was #115, which meant another 2 minutes of waiting before I got to start the race. No worries though. At least I wasn’t #397. With 6 people per minute, that poor guy had to wait more than an hour before he started his race.
I hopped into the pool in the wake of #114, who was a kid that looked to be maybe 15 years old. “3…2…1…” and I was off. The trick to pool swims is seeding yourself correctly, and I did ok in that regard. The guy behind me passed me within the first two laps (100 yards), so obviously he put down a time that was too slow. Then, as I passed the halfway point at 150 yards, I found myself slapping the feet of the kid in front of me — I had caught up to him. I thought for a moment about passing him, but in the end I decided that I’d just hang on his heels for the rest of the swim. I was swimming at a comfortably hard effort, and I didn’t want to get my heart racing by passing this kid in the pool, all in the name of saving a measley 10 seconds. So I stayed behind him. I slapped his feet at least once per pool length just to let him know I was there, and I did have to do a few strokes of breaststroke here and there to let him get a few feet ahead again, but I was happy enough with my position. All in all, staying behind him couldn’t have cost me more than 10-20 seconds, so I would’ve been right at 5:30 had he not been in front of me. I was happy with my 5:40 swim time and happy to see that I had seeded myself correctly.
I darted out of the water towards transition to the cheers of my BAM teammates still waiting to start the race. I ran to my bike, jammed my helmet on my head, pulled on my shoes and ran out of transition. Check out that T1 time! 56 seconds! I was smokin!
I hopped on my bike and put my sunglasses on as I started to ride. Here’s where I knew things would get interesting, because it was windy. As I drove down I-45 to get to the race, I’d been treated to the sight of every car dealership’s giant American flag sticking straight out in the stiff wind. It was coming from the southeast and going almost directly parallel to the highway. Since the majority of the bike course is on the I-45 feeder roads, I knew we’d have a huge tailwind going north and a huge headwind for the ~5-mile south portion.
The wind had died down just a bit by the time I got out to the bike course, but I was still flying up the northbound feeder road. I hit 24 mph and held it…and held it…and held it…and it was actually comfortable! I felt like I was flying. It was awesome. I got passed by two people but I didn’t care because hey — 24 mph! The turnaround came up fast though, and after hammering up the overpass I coasted down the other side, grabbed a sip of water, and prepared myself for the wind.
I gotta say, the tri bike makes the wind more bearable, mainly because being in the aero position lets me maintain a higher speed going into the wind. The slowness of fighting the wind has always been the mentally demoralizing part, so being able to maintain 15 mph into a stiff breeze keeps me in a much happier mental state. I pulled anywhere from 14 to 17 mph while heading south as the wind varied in speed, and passed a handful of people over the next 5 miles. It was disappointing to watch my average speed drop from 21.5 mph to 18.5, but I knew that was coming. I finally reached the second turnaround and grabbed some more water before heading north again. Whee! Flying time again!
The rest of the bike passed quickly. I raised my average speed back to about 19.5 mph and held it there throught the last couple miles, which involved a lesser headwind as we left the highway and rode back to transition. The bike was the only portion of the race where I used a watch, and I did it precisely because I had a goal: beat my time of 49:00 from last year. As I rode into transition, I knew I would finish 3 minutes faster than that, and I was really excited.
I ran into transition, changed shoes, grabbed my hat and race belt and headed out. I am amused in retrospect to see that my T2 was slower than T1; that rarely happens. There’s not much to say about the run other than it was hot, it was humid, and I sucked it up. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t hold sub-11:00 pace. Still, I finished strong and was very excited to see that I improved my time by more than 2 minutes over last year! Maybe next year I’ll get sub-1:25. 🙂
I took 1st place Athena again, more due to lack of competition in the category than anything else. But it’s always fun to get some hardware!
I thought about signing up for the Tejas Tri on June 8, but then remembered that I’ll be working the shuttle mission that week! So my next tri will be the Y Tri in Pearland on June 29. My mom will be visiting that weekend so she’ll be out there to cheer me on. And that gives me a whole month to work on my running…right?