Duluth Clinic Indoor Triathlon

All the talk of my brother, Tim, preparing for a triathlon kind of got me into a bit of excitement. I used to do a few triathlons in my day. Whoa! What do I mean in my day. Well, I thought I would give a triathlon a try. Ignore the fact that it has been about two years (at least) since I have had to do any swimming for any extended period of time. The Duluth Clinic Indoor Triathlon presented a nice way to do a triathlon. Each leg of the triathlon involved spending a half hour per section. So that meant I had to swim, bike, and run for a half hour each. The swimming was to be done in a pool doing laps, but the bike and running sessions were on a stationary bike and a treadmill, respectively. Given this layout to the race, I can't say that the individuals I saw wearing big GPS watches had a lot of advantage. The goal of the triathlon was to go as far as you possibly could in each leg of the race. The winner was the one that went the farthest total distance. My goal was to slug through the swimming as best I could knowing I would probably lose a little time in the swim. I was able to log .82 miles over the half hour. I am not even sure if that is good, but I can tell you my arms were pretty tired. I have not had to swim that far on my own for years. The biking went slightly better for me, as I was able to log 19.5 miles in thirty minutes. Not too bad, but I learned that you can wear biking shoes which clip into the pedals if you wish. I wore running shoes and had my shoes come out four times during the race. In addition, the bikes penalized you for being too fast. If you went over 140 rpm, the computer stopped logging distance and nothing would be recorded during that time. The best distances were gathered by those who were best able to maintain a controlled pace of as high as possible, but not more than 140 rpm. The fastest I saw was a 20.8 mile trip on the day. The final event was a run on a treadmill and that went pretty well. I logged the third furthest distance over the course of a half hour. I finished 6th out of 39 triathletes, but find that the biking was the part where I lost the most time. I think the use of biking shoes would have probably helped me achieve at least 0.5 mile further. My total distance was 24.64 miles for the day. I was only 0.13 miles from 4th place. and the top triathlete had a distance of 25.66 miles. Certainly within reason to improve upon in the future. Angela got some pretty good pictures. She took the first swimming photo to be shown on my blog. She also took pictures of me biking (I was so serious I kept my goggles on for a while). Kaia seemed to be bored so she decided coloring was more interested than watching her dad. This was a fun event which I have never done before (an indoor triathlon). Even with the weather as nice as it has been this spring, it was a well-run event held in a nice indoor facility.