Last Call Tri – Aquabike

This morning’s latest event was the Last Call Triathlon, in which I did the Aquabike event. What’s aquabike? You swim, you ride, you’re done. So basically a tri without the run.

This was also the first time both Mrs. AdultOnset and I were in the same race! We were doing two different events, but it was fun sharing the experience for the first time 🙂

It was also the first time we had family members watching. My dad and both of our sons all came along to watch, learn, and cheer us on. That was fun.

TL;dr (for those of you with short attention spans)

I got 3rd overall (could’ve been 2nd but I’m dumb). 2nd overall for my gender. Had a lot of fun — but not a great venue for going really fast on a bike. My results.

For everyone else, read on!

The Swim

Both of our watches say it was 63 degrees in the lake. Which traditionally would have me “noping” right out of there. Teammate Tony loaned me his old long sleeved wetsuit recently and I have to assume that made the difference. I really didn’t think it was all that cold!

Lining up for the swim was… an experience. The shallow and mud bottomed Boyd Lake meant we had to wade out a bit and then slowly sink into the bottom of the lake while waiting for the horn to start us. It was a bit distracting and rather gross.

The swim itself was pretty uneventful. Nobody punched or swam over me: I call that a win, wouldn’t you?

For what it was worth, it was my fastest race swim ever as far as pace goes, so that’s cool too.

T1

As is my tradition, I had a slow transition at 3:07. Not entirely sure why it was so slow, to be honest. No bathroom breaks. No food breaks. No drying myself off and/or changing clothes. But whatever, I’ll own it and keep working on it.

Bike

Our swim wave was second to last to hit the water. So by the time we got out on the bike course the 5 mile loop was pretty crowded and we had to do that loop twice. My coaching instructions were to “redline it” and that was definitely my plan. However, there were some challenges.

There was about a 1.25 mile segment of each 5 mile lap that ended up on sidewalk. The good news: the sidewalk was MUCH smoother than the road it ran along (see next paragraph). The bad news is it was pretty hard to go fast/stay on pace with the amount of traffic on the sidewalk without being a totally reckless butthead, which I really didn’t want to be (but some may think I was pushing that definition a bit…)

After the sidewalk section, there was a turn-around to return back the other direction back on the road. The road was rough. Seriously, abusively rough. People were losing water bottles and equipment. My aero bars actually loosened up and started to rotate downwards. It was punishing for 1.5 miles or so going back.

There were some smoother sections though and I hammered ’em very hard. Had a blast! Ended up with an avg. speed of 21.3 and 272 watts normalized power. I feel I could do better, but you gotta work within the constraints of the course, just like everyone else.

T2

For some reason I thought I just had to run through transition and cross the run start line and I was done. So I did that. T2 of 45 seconds. Whooo!

Then I pondered a bit and realized there was nobody there to take the tracking chip so I probably really wasn’t done. Ran back to my transition area and took off my bike shoes and put on running shoes, but couldn’t decide where to go. Finally ran back out to the run course, then did a quick loop over to the finish line and got my name announced as finishing. Another 2 and a half minutes wasted. Second place overall beat me by 24 seconds.

Oh well. Live and learn. Next time!

Final thoughts

I really enjoyed the aquabike format. Definitely want to do it again. But really want to do it on a longer and more open course where I can play to my strengths on the bike a bit more. This event had the aquabike at a sprint distance and I think I’d like it better at the longer Olympic distance. Something to look for next year, I reckon.

I definitely loved being able to go all out on the bike and not worry about saving anything for the run. Definitely. 😍

And how did Mrs. AdultOnset do? She had fun and won her age group!