Daybreak 2010

My MIL Marla, SIL Emily, and my mom there to support me - thanks guys!!

Signed up for sprint again in hopes of defending my title from last year. That and sprints are short, fast, and easier :) There, I said it, think what you will. Yes they're hard because you're going all out the whole time, but the way I race olympic distance is just like a sprint, just longer, which means more pain. Longer than that is different, hard in it's own respect, but more endurance than threshold pain (until the end anyway). So yeah, sprints are fun, less pain but still intense races. I've only put a good solid 2.5 weeks of training in before Daybreak, so sprint it was. Less stress.

Anyway, like the course, spent several days this year on the bike, and ran it once. Race morning was cold, but the winds were still and the rain held out. They moved transition to on the road, not on the boat ramp, which was roomier. Longer run through transition, but that's fun - I feel cool then - so I didn't mind :) Got there about 6am and got set up rather leisurely. So fun to chat with people around me, and realize I know more people than I thought. Or they know me. Being with PowerTri will do that to you I guess. I even had a girl ask me my name, and when I said Leslie, she said "Oh Leslie Howlett, I know who you are". That was cool!
They kicked us out of transition a little earlier than I expected, but it's fine. I'll get on to the report now.

Swim: 10:03. Nice still water, cold, but not IMSG cold, and even if it was, my attitude for that swim was "I spent an hour in very cold water, I can certainly do 10 minutes!". I only got 4 minutes or so of warm up, but it felt good. I felt confident. We took off and a girl tried to stick with me for about 100 yards, but then I led the rest of the swim and felt so good. Felt fast, warm, sighted pretty well, it doesn't help that it's a dark day and there were boat ramps to watch out for. Unfortunately the swim was pretty short, probably only 500-550 yards.

T1: Don't remember my time, but it was slow. Slow because I ran all the way down the street, but mostly because I took the time to put my shoes on in transition, something I haven't done in forever. But I was concerned about my hands being too cold to operate properly while moving, so I just dealt with it. Funny moment though, I had one foot popped out of the wetsuit and went to take the other out, stepped on my suit for leverage, slipped, and fell on my butt......right in front of a camera :) Luckily I don't think he caught it. That TriSlide, it's slick stuff!

Bike: 31:53. SO happy with it. I remember last year going as hard as I could intentionally and huffing and puffing the whole way up. I still pushed it hard this year, but wasn't quite as out of breath. Decent cross winds on 111 on the way down. Dropped nearly 3 minutes off last years bike split. Sweet.
T2 went fine until I went to hold onto the tongue of my shoe to pull it on. Totally couldn't use my fingers with any force due to the cold. Didn't put anything on after the swim and while I wasn't that cold on the bike, my hands apparently were. Sat down (hate that) and eventually pulled them on (almost tried with my teeth) and headed out.

Run: 22:26. My feet were cold and numb for the first 1.5 miles or so. Didn't make for the best running form. Finally got some feeling back and finished up. I'm glad I had previously run the course with my Garmin so I knew where the mile points were. That's the only suggestion I'd have for the race next year, is mile markers as that run course seems long sometimes. I was disappointed to have a slower run time than last year. I hadn't thought about it till a friend brought it up this week, but there was a good 1/4 mile section of the course that we didn't run last year, so that along with a running without the best feet under me for half of it could account for my slower run time. Still don't like seeing anything above 21 something, but it is what it is.

I felt good the entire time, probably mostly due to the great base IMSG training gave me. I still have a little more work to do fast twitch wise, but it was fun. Fun to go short and all out, fun to win by 6 minutes. I thought the race directors did a good job. Course was well marked, and there were 2 additional aid stations on the run. Seemed to have a lot of prize giveaways and results were posted fairly quickly. The timing website screwed some stuff up online, but it looks fairly repaired now.

So Aaron Shamy created this video (he creates some awesome stuff!) from Daybreak. Enjoy!


And congrats to my hubby for finishing his farthest race yet, a 15k, in under my goal time for him!