I’ve had some time to reflect upon my performance at my first NYC triathlon, coincidentally also my first Olympic distance race. Going into the race, I have never done a 40km time trial on my bike. Yes, I’ve competed in many stand alone 10 km running races, but I didn’t know how my legs would hold up after 60+ minutes of timetrialing.
The first thing I wanted to know after the race were my numbers; more importantly, I was interested in my overall time. Because I was in the Men’s 24 & Under age group, we were the proud recipient of starting dead last, nearly 30-45 minutes that the first professional male had already crossed the line in Central Park! (Yeah, that’s two hours after the race began) So here it is, the numbers as they stand from my DEBUT OLYMPIC DISTANCE TRIATHLON:
Time trial swimming! No matter what people say about the Hudson River, the water was quite nice to swim in! And nothing beats a point to point swim, especially when this swim runs parallel to the shoreline from North to South. I posted a rather mediocre swim time when compared with my closest finishers. Nonetheless, I’m content.
40KM Time Trial. The course is straight forward, ride north, turn around, ride south to 56th street, turn around and head back to transition on either 72nd or 79th street (there were two transition areas). I left transition and cyclocross mounted my bike right before the technical climb onto the west side highway. It took me a couple of minutes to really settle in and dial down on my wattage. My Garmin is set to lap every 5 miles so that I can get my 5 mile splits. The first split averaged just over 200watts. At that point, I felt ecstatic! My heart rate was probably around 165-170 BPM (I don’t wear a HRM for races). I knew I had a tough 10km run in Central Park, so I decided that the current output of 200 watts was the tempo that I would use for the rest of the bike portion. And so, lap by lap, I averaged 200+ watts, which equated to about 22.5-23mph average. I am still a newbie when it comes to wattage so this is my only point of feedback.
I hit a mental bit of a grey area coming out of T2. My T2 was relatively slow since I had to fidget with my socks, wasting a good 10 seconds. I’ll be sure to practice my sock implementation…smh
Going into the 10KM run, I knew that I was not going to run a PR (that being a 36:28). But that wasn’t a time that I needed. Because the Garmin showed 1 hour & 30 minutes, I only needed 44 minutes to finish below 2:15. Sub2:15 was my goal.
The next 39 minutes on my feet was the most self-surprising experience!! Not only did I have enough energy to finish, but I had the drive to run a negative split. The first mile clocked in just over 6:50, which included a climb from transition onto 72nd street. From mile 2 to the finish, the run was generally the same as a 5 mile tempo workout. “So I said to myself, I’ve done this multiple times before with CPTC. I know all the hills!” And then at Mile 3, I heard someone cheer my name – it was Coach Tony from CPTC! Coincidentally, that was the part of the run when I really switched gears, opened up the stride a bit and found 6:00min/pace. I was then negative splitting with only half of the run to go.
Harlem Hill came and gone. The museum mile. Then down Cat Hill. A right turn onto the 72nd Street transverse. A loop around the fountain. And the finish chute. (Thanks Ken Tom for greeting me at the fountain, taking an awesome action shot!)
Race complete. 2 hours and 9 minutes.
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