Teamsiliconvalley - Sports Blog

Singapore Sprint Series - Triathlon

June 17th, 2008

Its official, I am now a triathlete! Its funny that after so long training I've finally completed my first actual triathlon, it was only a "sprint" distance (750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run) but its STILL a triathlon. It was the final event in the Singapore Sprint Series which was organized by TriBob and I have to say it was really well done - an excellent series of events with three different and unique (not east coast park) locations! I'm looking forward to next year as is Marisa and maybe Chunnie?

When setting up for this race, i was pleased to see dry ground unlike the week before!

For this race, I decided to start in the first wave, the men's competitive wave because, well... I think I am good enough to do that. :-) So during the start I stayed towards the back and the outside so as not to get in the way of all the fast swimmers. When the horn went off and we started swimming I was immediately kicked and knocked and put off my rythm and also swallowed a huge gulp of salty seawater. Despite all my training I didn't swim like i should have. I found myself rushing, i'm not sure how to correct this other than trying to tell myself next time to just relax and swim at my own pace and not get excited. I found myself out of breath during most of the swim but when I got out of the water I was quite surprised to see that my time was 15:30, which is very fast (for me)! But, I would later realize that the reason I was faster was that it was just a fast course or it was shorter because everybody's time was just as fast. Also, my official swim time included some of the run into transition (which was long) so the time was 16:42.

I thought that the bike leg was really good, a nice loooong, flat, straight stretch of road for 5km. So back and forth on the 5km stretch twice meant 20km. I felt quite good and actually was going fast, overtaking most people and averaging above 33km/h! Along the route, even though it was quite sparsely populated, I still noticed people cheating (drafting) and also one dummy avoided the speed strips on the road by going all the way across two lanes of the road to the opposite side, even though crossing just one lane is against the rules. My bike time was 35:53.

And now on to the run... Actually after the bike leg when i went back into the transition area, it was not so easy to find my slot since Speedie was not hanging there waiting for me like he was the previous time through transition. I actually ended up going to the wrong bike rack and having to climb under that rack to get to my real spot. I don't think i wasted too much time and soon headed out on the run. It was a good run, i initially started out quite fast, something like 4:30 for the first km but slowed down when i realized that since i didn't wanna blow up after just a short while. I kind of relaxed until during the 2nd and last of the 2.5km laps, i saw a guy go by me, going slightly faster. I was like OH NO YOU DON'T! So i kept pace with him, letting him lead me along. I followed him until we were just less than 1km from the finish and i turned up the speed and blew by him. Funny thing is, i'm not even sure that he was on the same lap as me, but it did motivate me to run faster and finish the race really strong. Run time was 24:29. So in all I finished in 1:19:25, good enough for 62nd (out of 352) overall and 11th (out of 40) in my age group.

After i finished i grabbed the camera and managed to get a nice shot of Marisa finishing. (her time is actually 5min less than what's on the clock since her wave started 5min after the clock started).

Here's TEAM HALL at the end of the race. Notice that we're all in uniform?

Entry Filed under: Multisport