Wednesday: Swim and Splits are Out for the Music City Triathlon

This morning, we were up late at the Sloan house, after a rather rocky night of infant wakefulness.  My favorite thing is when everyone sleeps through the night without even a peep, and last night was just not one of those nights.  SO, when it was time to head out to swim, things were not running in timely fashion.  Also, the most frustrating thing of all: the car seat was in the wrong car, so there was much running back and forth between cars, rearranging, and situating.  We did get out the door for swim, but we were running late. Ivan had a hard core meltdown when I dropped him off at the nursery and I got to the pool only to find that it is Senior Olympics week in Middle Tennessee, so we didn't really have our own lanes or even a coach.  

We all just scrunched into a lane together and our old swim coach, Dennis, took pity on us and wrote a workout on a big dry erase board.  Workout as follows:

• 400 warmup
• 400 kick
• 4 x 200 (odds IM, evens swim)
• 400 kick
• 8 x 100 descend
• 400 kick

I felt pretty good about getting in 3200 meters.  I swam my 8 x 100's at about 1:45 intervals.  It was a reasonably hard workout after my race on Sunday, from which I am still really not recovered.   

So splits are out for the Music City Triathlon and my times are interesting.  In 2009, my swim was 31:02, my bike was 1:33:44, and my run was 49:53 (the bike time included transition time, as does the run time.  That is just how they did the splits last year).  For 2010, when the splits came out, I had dropped from 7th to 8th place in my age group, and my times are as follows: 32:27 swim with a four minute transition afterwards, 1:34 bike with a 2:21 transition afterwards and a 50 minute run.  There was a ten minute total time difference between my two races.  

I mean, when I really look at the numbers, it was a bad race. My swim was a couple of minutes slower, my bike is slower (and I am biking SO much more than last year) and my run was slower.  I know that the heat was a factor, but that is no excuse for a slower swim.  I have no words for my slowness on the bike, and honestly, with the heat, my run was probably as good as it could have gotten.  This is all rather disappointing.  Maybe it was the pink eye/ heat combo that resulted in poor performance.  

Hmmm.