Portarlington race review

The portarlington tri is the 4th race in the Gatorade series and their longest sprint distance race. Apparently this was the 29th running of the portarlington tri and the winner of the inaugural event was competing in my age group! This race is longer than the others in the series as its supposed to help competitors step up to Olympic distance in the final race of the year (coming up on the 30th). Consequently it was the longest race I had done in my very short time doing triathlon. Being a few hrs out of Melbourne, the majority of competitors stay somewhere on the peninsula and so have a short ride, walk or commute to the venue. We ended up booking a house in portarlington so I had a short drive to the foreshore where there is plenty of parking. The venue itself is great although the transition area is right at the bottom of a hill so your riding and running up a hill before you get onto a relatively flat course - something I should have taken better notice of when setting up for the race.

For me I was not worried about finishing the distance, though an 800m ocean swim was further than I'd swum in the ocean before and the swim leg is easily my worst leg. I figured with the relatively flat course I would be able to make up time on the ride and the run, particularly given my run had continued to improve over the season and I was now regularly clocking under 5min/klm pace. I didn't count on having an upset stomach though and this made it a race where I was never going to get close to my PB's in anything other than race distances. I had checked out the setup on the Garmin the night before and figured it was all setup and ready to go. Start the triathlon app as you go into the swim, hit lap at the start and finish of each transition and stop at the end. Easy! Mostly the watch worked great but for some reason,at the end of the event, the swim details don't have any map associated. It seems to have largely got the distance correct (if you assume that walking and porpoising in the water is not counted as swimming by the watch), but it didn't send distance details to strava when it synced. I'm not entirely sure what happened as it picked up map details for the other two legs. The only thing I can think of is that while I was waiting in the water for my swim wave to start, I started the app, made sure we had a gps signal (which came through really quickly) and then didn't think about it again until just before the starting hooter sounded and I realized my watch had reverted back to a normal watch. I hit start again just as the hooter sounded, saw it was on the triathlon app, hit start again to start the app, then one more time to get the little green triangle (like "play" on your CD player) which seems to be what the Fenix3 displays to indicate an app has started. I figured all would be fine but as I mentioned, it didn't seem to track the swim and produce a swim map, though it may have been down to user error, but I probably won't know till my next open water swim.

In terms of the race, the start was good and I felt good for the first 200m of the swim before making the turn at the end of the pier. While we had been waiting for our start the wind had whipped up and so as we turned, we turned into some reasonable swell. I struggled for the 300m out the front of the pier and then when we turned back to shore I took a short rest and felt good for the final 200m or so. IHowever in the swell  had swallowed a heap of water - in fact so much that I walked the last 30 meters into shore (or maybe the tide was out, it was either that or me drinking it all, who can tell). I guess I could have swum the last little bit and I'm not sure which would have been faster, but there is something about having your feet on (relatively) firm ground when your a poor swimmer. Headed into T1 and the watch says I was over 4 minutes - poor! It may well have been though as I had to put on socks and I came out of the water a little slower than I probably should have for no other reason than a lack of concentration. I got the bike gear on and ran out past the mount line and realized I had made a real rookie mistake. I had the wrong gear selected for trying to start on a hill and wasted about 2 minutes trying to get my feet in the pedals and get going up the hill. But once I was going the legs felt good. Unfortunately the stomach didn't. I felt really bloated from the seawater and really wanted to throw up. I didn't, but managed to burp up a lot of sea water over the next few klm's (sorry if your eating your breakfast!). Whilst my legs were feeling good, the 20-30klm/hr southerly was now squarely in my face, and remained so up to about the 13-14 klm mark, so I tired quickly. However when we turned off the coats road we turned into the only hilly part of the course, so whilst my speed increased, it wasn't considerable and it took a bit more from my legs. I was starting to feel ok though and was getting through my Gatorade which I usually carry on the bike for a little carb intake during the bike leg. The last 7 klm's I was motoring and managing to average over 35klm/hr and was actually feeling quit good. Into T2 and as soon as I started running it all fell apart. My stomach started cramping along with my left calf and as I walked up the stairs out of the transition area I felt really disheartened, thinking I might have to walk the whole way to get this done. I started a "Cliffy young" shuffle and managed to get a few klm's down the road. I couldn't stand straight because of my stomach, though my calf had come good and my legs felt fine by about 3 klm in. The stomach never quite recovered and consequently my run leg was pretty poor, though when I looked at the times I actually thought it was going to be worse than it was. So I finished feeling not so good with a very average time, but I did finish and I had a couple of good lessons learnt.

1. Be more careful about what you eat the night before, particularly if your allergic to anything.

2. Know something about the course and select the right gear for your bike before you get on it and try riding!