Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Surely the swim will be canceled?




Dark, angry, waves crash on the pier in front of us.  

Surely the race officials will spare us swimming in these perilous seas?  I stand on the shore waiting for the announcement that the swim is being canceled and replaced with a 5k run. 

When the starting gun is fired I am still in denial - you can see me in this picture gingerly hobbling out over the sharp rocks and into the roiling ocean - I am in no hurry to plunge into the rough currents. 







Funny thing is, the Oshima race is touted as being welcoming for first-time triathlete. Welcoming because of the lack of cut-off times, not because of swim conditions. Swim conditions were certainly not welcoming.  On this day dozens of participants did not make it through the swim - some 20% are listed as "DNF" on the results.  Most of these poor newbie swimmers seem to have piled up in front of me when I arrived at the second buoy (the race's first turn). It felt like the sinking of the Titanic with the previous waves of swimmers in different colored caps, back-stroking and treading water.   





You can actually see my own struggles at the second buoy -- the squiggle in the upper left corner from this GPS image where the powerful waves pushed me back as I tried to get around all the drowning, flailing beginners and sight the buoy.
  

I begin to grow concerned myself that I would join all the DNFers being plucked from the seas. But I managed to calm down and remind myself that I have finished numerous open water swims and some were in even worse conditions. 
















After the slow swim I feel I am just absolutely blowing past these beginner triathletes around me on the bike - "Wow, be careful at such incredibly high speeds"  I tell myself, "I am soooo fast, I must be setting a land speed record"


But apparently I was really not cycling at incredibly high speeds.  

When I check my split after bike I am 3 minutes slower than my bike time at Oshima several years ago in similar conditions. 









So on the run I am just trying to maintain some effort, some intensity, some focus on the present ... though lamentably, I have largely given up on today's event and cannot keep my thoughts from drifting to future races..  


At this point, as you can see,  I have plenty of energy to high-five my fans  

I do manage to summon the will to at least break 40-minutes on the run.  

Splits:
Swim - 36:34
Bike -  1:13:22
Run -   39:45




1 comment:

TokyoRacer said...

It's nice to see people grinning at the end of a triathlon.