2016 UBC TriDu: Kick off to 2016

The UBC Triathlon is always a fun spring race to get your feet wet for the season. Vancouver is always a gamble with the weather, and especially this time of year, you can pretty much guarantee rain. However, after torrential downpours overnight, the sun decided to shine through, and conditions were perfect this year.

I’m going to be honest, and I know it sounds weird to most people, but any distance shorter than a half Iron is definitely not on my “favourite” list. They hurt…. In a “my heart is gonna explode and I think my lungs are bleeding” kinda way. Point is…I am just not a short distance person…..no fast twitch muscles in this girl! Nonetheless, from a “fun-factor” point, and not a competitive point, it’s nice to get out and support local races, and encourage all the athletes just getting into the sport! These races are not meant to be competitive, it was more of a test for myself to see where my fitness is, and to see if I had improved at all from last year.

Speaking of improvement…. FINALLY all this time in the pool has paid off. Over the 1500m swim, I was able to knock almost 90sec off from the previous year, and came out of the pool as a legit “second-pack leader”. I know it’s just a small race, but I will take the “fastest women’s swim time” for the first time in my life! And for once, I was completely relaxed during the entire swim. For those of you who don’t know, I am prone to panic attacks, especially in short-distance swims, so this was a HUGE thing for me!

I was eager to get out and totally hammer the bike, so I ripped out of transition (which they moved this year), and out onto the bike course….. only to be directed past an important turn that was blocked at that moment by a truck. I soon realized that I was definitely alone on the road….on the wrong road. I turned around and headed back to the last point that I saw traffic people, and got back onto the right track…. 2min and 15sec laterL My brother and I had a bit of sibling rivalry going on for the race, and I had beat him out of the water, but I knew this bike error and put him ahead of me…watch out everyone! Woman on a mission! I honestly just hammered the bike course, not paying attention to anything my computer was telling me. Sometimes it’s fun to race with no numbers. This bike has course has seven 180 degree turns on it, so getting in a rhythm is hard anyways. I knocked a good min off my bike time from the year before (3:15 if you count my extra little joyride), so all in all, good result!

My legs were a bit heavy on the run… probably a combo of lots of training, no taper, and an interval-like bike leg of this course, so it took me a good 5 min to get into a groove. I wanted to push myself, and cardio-wise I could have, but physically, my body didn’t want to go. Did it really matter? No…. this was a race against myself, and nothing else but fun beyond that. The run course was 800M long, so if I factored that in I still squeezed in a PB. And for some reason, even though the run was long, it seemed like the shortest 10km I have ever ran!

My 2:10:42 time was about a min slower than last year, but factoring in the long run and detour on the bike, it was faster by a good chunk of change. I still ended up with a 4-peat overall win and a PB in each of the 3 disciplines. I was happy with the day, and it was a great, fun way to start off the season. Now to buckle down for the next two months of training…..next up…Ironman Texas!