MITCS Health Track Indoor Triathlon

Well, it's official. First Triathlon complete, indoor though it may be. What an intense, crazy race it turned out to be. I don't have official results yet, but here are some of my collection of pictures, along with a few comments...



My first experience with body marking. I was number 1536, which meant wave 15, swim lane 3, and bike 6.


There I go... We were two to a lane, but I was quite a bit faster than my lane partner so it wasn't too big of a deal.



Knowing the swim was limited to "most laps in 10 minutes" meant my pace was nothing but "as fast as I could go the entire time. It made for a more intense experience than I really was prepared for. It also turns out, I was a decent swimmer, in comparison to most of my wave. I was at least MOP, maybe better.


Since this entire thing was going down at way beyond my normal pace I decided to throw flip turns out the window and take a few extra seconds to gasp for air!

My unofficial swim was 19 laps in 10:00. It was a 25 yard pool, so 17 laps was 1/4 mile. This was far beyond my expectations. Thank you EVF and adrenaline!



Here I am setting up for the bike. Some cool points about this race. On the second floor, right above my head in the picture, there is a club DJ spinning dance music, with lots of "wicky wickies." That was really cool for sure, but I preferred to suffer with my own music for most of the time.



Another really cool thing about this race was that every athlete was assigned a "coach" that followed you through all three sports. The coach's job was to (as far as I can tell) record your distances, yell at you to go faster, give you advice on how to race an indoor race, and make sure you had water. Anyway, my coach, ChristinA, was to my immediate right in this picture...

My unofficial bike time was 6.34 miles in 20 minutes. That ends up being 19.02 Mph. There were two people in my wave faster than me, a few the sameish speed, and a few slower. I wasn't as fast on the bike as I thought I would be. Either because I've been working too hard on my other sports, or possibly because it was just a screwy indoor bike.


My legs were completely toasted after the bike, as I quickly found out when I tried to climb the two flights of stairs to the track in T2. After a bad/confusing start I found myself in the back of the pack in the run. No big surprise there though. After about three laps, I found my legs again and knew it was time to go for it. Here I am passing the rest of the BOPs.




This was with about 5 minutes left on the clock. I was at max heart rate for several minutes at this point, and just trying to stick out the rest of the sprint. The problem with a race this short is that the efforts were all totally anarobic. It was really brutal!


This is me, getting ready to be lapped yet again by a crazy fast runner. This guy must have passed me 4 times!

My unofficial run time was 18.5 laps in 15 minutes. That ends up coming out to 9:19/mi, which is insanely fast, but given that I was running as hard as I freaking could, sounds about right.




Here I am after the race, showing off my fancy body markings, and holding my arm at a weird angle to cover the reflector on my shirt for the camera. I'm also marked on my opposite leg, which seemed weird, but I guess if I stepped on a landmine while running they'd know who I was. So I've got that going for me, which is nice...


And here I am, after cleaning up a bit, completely exhausted and ready to go home.

There is a small chance I might have placed in my AG, but I won't know for sure until tomorrow. Stay tuned for that, and it would be cool but really more than I could expect for my first race. Either way, I think I finally earned that shirt. Six weeks until my next race...