A couple months ago I heard about the San Francisco Triathlon on Treasure Island. At the time, I knew there was a sprint and an Olympic distance, but relegated myself to the sprint distance. However, after the last triathlon I did, I just decided to try for the Olympic distance. Last year, in 2007, I made a personal goal to do an Olympic distance tri in 2008, and the SF Triathlon seemed to be my last chance.
Well, I signed up for the event, which occurred yesterday morning. The race took place on Treasure Island in the San Francisco bay. Treasure Island is part of the island the Bay Bridge passes through. I woke up at the super early hour of 5am to make it to the island by 6am so I could check in and prepare my transition area before the early race start at 7:15am.
Since the island isn’t very big, the course was a series of loops. The first event, swimming was 1.5km, where I swam twice around a triangle with 250m sides. From there I jumped on my bike for a 40km bike course. The 40km course consisted of 6 laps of a ~6.66km circuit. After biking was the run, 3 laps at ~3.33km each, for a total of 10k. The distance are the same as the ones used in the Olympics, making this an Olympic triathlon, and thus, much harder than the previous sprint triathlons I’ve done.
My initial estimate for the course was to complete it all in about 3 1/2 hours, broken down as follows: 30min for the swim, 2 hours for the bike, and 1 hour for the run. The estimate for the bike was taken from a recent 25.4 mile ride that I completed in just under 2 hours. This ended up being the estimate that was very exaggerated because the triathlon course was so flat. With that being said, here is a breakdown of my results:
| Split | Distance | Time (min) | Pace | Rank (overall) |
| Swim | 1.5 km | 29:16 | 31:24 min/mi | 119 |
| T1 | 4:04 | 268 | ||
| Bike L1 | 15:01 | 16.5 mph | 297 | |
| Bike L2 | 13:58 | 17.74 mph | 328 | |
| Bike L3 | 13:50 | 17.91 mph | 310 | |
| Bike L4 | 13:41 | 18.11 mph | 282 | |
| Bike L5 | 13:31 | 18:33 mph | 251 | |
| Bike L6 | 14:13 | 17.43 mph | 234 | |
| Bike Total | 40 km | 1:24:16 | 17.64 mph | 281 |
| T2 | 3:55 | 418 | ||
| Run L1 | 17:05 | 8:14 min/mi | 139 | |
| Run L2 | 17:14 | 8:19 min/mi | 146 | |
| Run L3 | 16:29 | 7:57 min/mi | 114 | |
| Run Total | 10 km | 50:49 | 8:10 min/mi | 132 |
| Overall | 2:52:21 | 202 |
So as has been the case with all the past tri’s I have done, biking is my weakest link. I really need to do more bike training next time. I’m pretty sure that the only people I passed on my bike yesterday were the people with flat tires (and there were a lot of them!). The first place guy finished with a time of 2:04:49, which means I’ve got quite a bit of improvement to make. I’m not sure when my next tri is going to be, but now that I know what the Olympic distance is like, I know I can do many more of them.
November 9th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Awesome job – what a major accomplishment!
November 12th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Chris, Awesome job on the Tri, you killed it. The last two legs of the run were awesome!
December 11th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
It was even more amazing to be able to watch Chris participate in this major event. He had a goal to finish the triathlon. Not only did he finish but he finish with great times. Congrats!!!
March 18th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
I added this page to Digg
May 1st, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Nice blog and thanks for this latest post!