Indoor Triathlon

Last Sunday, I did an indoor triathlon at the local JCC. I didn’t know what to expect and was quite nervous, but turned out I had no reason to. This indoor triathlon was 20 minutes of each exercise. A little different from a normal triathlon which is obviously biking > running > swimming in terms of time and as someone who does not enjoy the swim this was not going to be my best race.

As does every triathlon, we started out with the swim. I did 20 laps (1000 meters) in 20 minutes. I swam a large majority of this breaststroke because I’m just not confident with my freestyle stroke. The lack of confidence turns into a feeling of running out of breath in the water. This was before I started doing Total Immersion and this is exactly why I started TI. More on that later.

The bike part was done on spinning bikes equipped with bike computers. They looked at your wattage and divided it by your weight. I did well if you just look at watts, but because of my weight, I ended up 4th from last in this category. Frankly, given how I’ve done in previous triathlons, I’m not sure I buy this method of scoring, but I also don’t know how the competition in this race stacks up to a normal triathlon so I can’t really compare. If the competitors were more of top finishers in triathlons, then maybe this method is fine, but I won’t ever know.

The run went well. I finished second in my group (one guy beat me). I ended up running at about 6.6 mph. This is much better than my prior speeds in triathlons. Run Less Run Faster is paying off.

Overall, I finished 3rd from last among them women (13th from last overall). Again, given that I dont’ know how this competition stacks up compared to a real race, I’m not letting that poor showing ruin my training. Update regarding my recent training (hint: it’s going very well!).