My First Triathlon Is...Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the day.  We're going tonight to pick up race packets down at the race site, and the plan is to get there tomorrow when transition opens at 6am.  It's been an interesting few months mixing in some swimming and biking to my running, and we'll see if any of it has paid off.  I'm feeling good about the race, but it hasn't been my main focus.  I've actually slacked off the biking and swimming a bit in the last few weeks because of an uptick in running.  Anyway, here's how I'm going to approach the race:

Swim
My swimming expectations are pretty low.  I'll be starting in the second wave, so there will be the majority of 300 competitors starting after me, and thus I'll probably get passed pretty often.  Since I've got a 3 minute head start on the next wave of swimmers, I figure that I'll be overwhelmed by them before I even get to the turnaround.

I'm confident in my ability to swim the full distance.  Even if wetsuits are disallowed, I know I can make the full swim--it will just be considerably slower.  In practice, I was able to go 450 yards in about 11 minutes.  I figure that might be a good time goal for the race, but I won't be wearing my watch, and I'll be happy just to get out of the water.

T1
Well, you saw how well my T1 practice went.  I hope to just be as quick as possible without forgetting anything.  I will say to myself all during the swim: "double knot your shoes, double knot your shoes..."

Bike
This is where everybody who didn't pass me in the swim will end up passing me.  That's ok too, because I'm going to take the bike easy to leave something in me for the run.  Energy spent on the run will allow me to do better than energy spent on the bike.  I'm going to be a slow biker--I can be a moderately fast runner as long as I don't overdo it on the bike.  I'm also going to be bringing along a bag of Gu Chomps and I'll energize myself a bit over the course of the bike segment.

T2
Not actually worried about this as long as I don't forget anything.  I don't have the silly clipless that have clips fancy bike shoes, so all the I'll do is rack my bike, take my helmet off, and grab my race number.

Run
This will be the only part where it will look like I'm racing.  Even though it's a 3.3 mile run, I'm going to pace myself like a 5k and try and gain back as many places as I can.  I'm guessing most people (particularly in my age group) will be far enough ahead so that I can't pass them, but I can at least try.  If I can do the run in 23-24 minutes I'll be very happy, and as long as I'm under 25 minutes, all will be peachy.

I'm going to do the whole race sans watch, so it will be a good experiment to run without any indication of pace.  I'm going to go totally on perceived effort, and I hope this will let me run a bit faster.  I haven't raced sans watch since high school, so I hope I don't crash and burn here.

I have some secondary goals too:

• Don't drown
• Avoid sharks
• Don't get lost
• Beat any and all costumed competitors (no one wants to get beat by Elmo)
• Put left shoe on left foot and right shoe on right foot
• Helmet on forwards
• Discover a better way to go to the bathroom in my tri suit
• Get an intense and/or hovering race photo
• Avoid seizures 

Alrighty then, I'll have an update on how things went sometime tomorrow!