I had never been to Walla Walla before this race and let's just say I was pleasantly surprised on how beautiful it is. I was expecting it to be really dry, flat and brown! Instead it has green rolling hills and was a perfect temperature. Although, it was quite warm on race day but mostly because I hadn't been in that warm of weather for several months. We ended up having to stay in Pendleton because all of the hotels and B&B's were full. I guess that same weekend the college there was having their graduation ceremony. In the future I'll have to check that stuff out. Pendleton was about an hours drive, which wasn't too bad since the race had a later start.
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| Bennington Lake |
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| Everyone had to park on top of the dam |
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| The women are off! |
The swim was a two loop course. I've only had one other race that did this and that was Hagg Lake Triathlon. I actually don't mind these ones too much. This is my first open water race for the season and one of my goals was to try and draft off of someone. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find anyone that was near me going at about the same pace. So I mostly swam by myself. I was able to draft off someone for about a minute and then some how lost her in a mass of guys that we were passing. The men went off about 5 minutes ahead of us and it felt like I passed the majority of the group, which was pretty awesome. There were some freakishly fast guys though that swam in the 18's. I ended up swimming a 24:43 which is a good time for me. I feel my swim is finally starting to come around. Of course it's still not where I want it to be but after this race it shows I need to do some more open water workouts. I've been doing well in the pool but it definitely takes a lot more strength for open water. Not to mention trying to swim in as straight a line as possible!
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| Heading up the boat ramp to transition |
I ended up having some of the fastest times for transition in both the swim to bike and bike to run for the day.
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| Transition Area |
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| Heading out onto the bike course |
Since I had a few issues at my last race with hydration and stomach issues I decided to try something different. I have been drinking Zola coconut water for quite a few months now and I love the taste of it and it is so refreshing. I've had other coconut waters and most of them were hard to swallow (i.e. tasted bad). Plus, Zola is all natural and not from concentrate. Well, the cans are. I know some of the big jugs of them are from concentrate but I will only drink the canned ones since they seem to be the most pure. So I decided to drink this as my nutrition for the bike since coconut water also has electrolytes, plus a bottle of water.
My goal was to get in all of the liquids I had on my bike and I was able to get in all of my Zola and most of my water. The bike course had a couple out and backs on some back roads through the rolling hills. I didn't know what place I was in once I got on the bike but with turn arounds is easier to see where your placement is. I was in 3rd place and the girls that were ahead of me had a pretty good gap and my biking legs weren't feeling super strong. I tried to make up time on them but I ended up losing some. They just had a stronger bike leg than I. Since they were so far ahead of me I didn't think there was any chance of catching them on the run. So I just decided to still try and have a fast run split since whoever had the fastest splits throughout the day for both men and women won some money. So that's what I was gunning for instead of trying to catch them. My bike split was 1:15. About 6 minutes behind first and 4 minutes behind second place for bike splits.
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| Getting ready to dismount |
Started out on the run feeling pretty good and hitting a pretty could pace. The run course was also just an out and back. It started out on trail and then went to bike path. There was a little bit of rolling hills on the trail portion but the bike path was completely flat. Once I hit the turn around it felt like all my energy got zapped. This portion had no shade and it felt like the wind just died once I started heading back. Obviously, it's because I changed directions, but still, it made it unpleasant and difficult to try and get back to the pace I was running. As said earlier, it's nice to have turn arounds so you can see where you are placed at. The girl that was in first still had a good lead on me but the one that was in second wasn't too far ahead of me once I hit the turn around (half way mark). I couldn't see her ahead of me once I was going in the same direction. I thought that maybe she was further ahead than I had anticipated. As I kept going along I finally spotted her ahead of me at about mile 5. From there I just kept pushing myself to pass her. Once I did, I tried to put as much of a gap as possible and to try and get that run split. Unfortunately, I didn't get it. I ran a 42:20 about 50 seconds slower than the first place female run split. Ended up getting second place overall due to having a faster run than the girl who got third since she had faster swim and bike splits than I. That is one thing that I do always love about triathlon, it's not over until you cross that finish line (or in any race for that matter). Everyone has their strong suits. My overall time was 2:24:39.
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| Almost to the finish line |
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| Oranges are SOOO good after racing on a hot day |
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| Happy with my race |
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| Won $40 for placing second overall |
I'm happy with how the race unfolded, and that it's my first Olympic distance race for the year. Also, that I had no stomach problems. It appears that Zola and water works great for me. One of my biggest goals for this race, aside from nutrition, was mostly just to see what areas were improving and which ones needed some work. My swim and run are coming along nicely but from this race I can definitely see that I have been neglecting the bike. Time to get working on that!
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| Having some fun in Walla Walla. That is a bunch of chickens with eggs :) |
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| #191 - Sunkern - This was my race number |
If you're wondering why I have a Pokémon on my blog, well, it's because of my lovely nerdy sisters that wanted me to put the Pokémon that was the same as my race number. So expect to see a Pokémon at the end of each race report :) (Apparently, I'm nerdy too for going along with the Pokémon idea, which is not a bad thing :D)
