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| Gee, I had no idea I signed up for the Silent Hill Marathon! |
This past Sunday was the Long Beach Triathlon! The swim portion was an 880 yard (half mile) swim through the usually calm waters of the Alamitos Beach in Long Beach. I swam an abbreviated part of the race course in a meet up swim clinic hosted by the
LB Tri Club. So I was pretty confident about completing the course. Unfortunately, after I dropped off my bike at the transition area, the fog had rolled on in! Visibility was extremely low. My friend and I walked the half mile from T1 to the start area. After a frantic search for an unlocked bathroom (and my friend lending me her shoes, since I really REALLY did not want to go into the toilet on my bare feet and I had to leave my flip flops in T1), we were busting out bottoms back to the start line a half mile back down the beach.
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| Putting on the Wetsuit :3 |
After I got sort of close to the start line, I started putting on my suit on. Good thing I was in the 7:12AM wave, since I was still putting the suit on when the elites wave started! XD
I did a quick warmup dive into the water and a couple of strokes. The water wasn't really that cold so I was satisfied with a 2 minute warmup and trotted back to the start line to see the two waves in front of me start. I was surprised how wide to the left people were standing to the left of the first turn buoy.
Conditions were slightly choppy, but at least the fog started to lift a little bit so we could see two buoys ahead. I had a whole strategy of starting a little to the left of the buoy and then going wide since I didn't want to get entangled in some arm/foot/face fight for position as my A goal was to swim well, and B goal was to complete the swim, so I played conservative
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| Warm Up in the Water! A little choppy... |
I checked out the waves before me but with the excitement I forgot to keep a closer eye at how the people actually swam when they went out, so I missed signs of there being a pretty strong current going north along the shore. No bueno!
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| Strolling into the water :3 |
Our wave finally started. I was lined up pretty to the left and strolled into the water behind the other races. I was immediately caught into the current and had to backtrack a good number of yards back to the first buoy >_< Lesson learned about really paying attention to the waves ahead of me instead of zoning out!
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| Action Shot! There's my right arm :3 |
Aside from that, and having a life guard point me back on course later in the race (the fog rolled back in again and it was very disorienting.) everything went very well. I swam wide outside the buoy line so I didn't get much swim contact from the other races, which worked to my advantage and well worth the extra 50 yards to the swim. I should have also pre-walked the swim course along the beach to see how the buoys were positioned (but I was looking for a bathroom!) since the part where I pointed back on course by a lifeguard was when the buoys took a diagonal from the straight, and that was this weird loop thing I was not expecting for the end part of the course (probably because they pulled the race buoys inside the regular swim buoys due to the fog and they needed a slight loop hook to make it a half mile swim.)
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| Run run to T1! |
I walked up the beach since I aggravated my foot injury running in the sand after the swim. I think this may have thrown off my swim time. I stopped my watch when I got out of the water so it looked like the LONGEST T1 ever as I walked the 100 yards back to transition. Once I hit the concrete I started running :3
All in all a great race :3 The bike was a bit difficult what with the random fog rolling in, but the run went well and when you do a first race, you always PR :3 I learned a lot about race swimming here so I'm glad I entered. (I also learned a lot about transitions, too. UGH, same thing happened with T1 an T2 about plans going out the window due to the excitement XD)
