Bath County Sprint Triathlon

The race I've been training for over the last few months finally happened this past Saturday. It was kind of an experiment to see if I could train for a triathlon without Team in Training. I loved the team, but the fundraising took a lot of time and effort. I can't do races with them all the time, but maybe every few years. Anyway, they taught me well and I felt very prepared for this race. I knew exactly what to do and how to set up my transition area like a pro.

This is my transition area all ready to go for the race.

This race was a sprint distance triathlon ~ 750 m swim, 20 k bike, 5 k run ~ half the distances of the race I did last fall. My friend, Mandy, had done a few longer triathlons before, but she had never done a sprint race, so she joined me for this race. It was the first sprint for both of us.

We drove down to Bath County after work on Friday. It took quite a long time to get there since we couldn't go very fast at all on the windy back roads that took us deep into the George Washington National Forest. We stopped at a little restaurant en route to carb load on some spaghetti and meatballs. We reached our campsite just before 10 pm where we set up our tent and crashed for the night.

The morning was chilly and we packed up early to go in search of the race start site. In anticipation of the race, I was most concerned about the water temperature. Summer still isn't in full swing here and, being in the mountains, it was even cooler than where I live, so I was afraid the water would be quite cold. It turned out to be 72 degrees though, which was perfect.

I had predicted my times for each leg of the race based on my training and I stayed right on par with my predicted times. The official results haven't been posted yet, but my swim was about 18 minutes, my bike was about 50 minutes and my run was a little over 30 minutes with a total time of 1 hour 48 minutes. I was happy with that. Mandy is a much stronger swimmer than I am. She finished the swim ahead of me and stayed just ahead of me the whole race, finishing 5 minutes before me. She ran to get my camera to take my picture as I finished (wasn't that thoughtful!), but I was too fast. We got pictures of both of us by the finish line afterwards though.

All hot and sweaty from the race, we decided to take another dip in the lake to get rinsed off and cooled down before our long drive home. It was so beautiful out there!! They served us a great meal with BBQ pork, beans, macaroni salad, fruit and lemonade. It brought out the country girl in both of us. It was so nice to get away from all the stresses of city life!

The swim portion of the race started out at the end of that dock. Here I'm getting back in for a post-race swim.

I was really comfortable with the sprint triathlon distances. I had energy left at the end of the race and I'm not a bit sore. I'll definitely do one or two more sprint races this year. And maybe, just maybe, another Olympic distance race in the fall. I'll have to see if I can train that hard by myself and if I can find someone to go with me on my little weekend racing excursions. I'm very grateful Mandy joined me for this one as both a camping buddy and a racing buddy. It was a lot of fun!