I was planning on skipping the stroke and stride this week, just because I was feeling slightly burnt out on racing, but my pool is closed for 2 weeks for renovations so I decided to do the 1500m swim for the first time.

I met up with Meg and her friend Owen at the race (she has a different friend with her every time I see her) and got prepped. This time I wore my HR monitor and watch into the water and also kept my race number on a belt. The weather was overcast to start and lightning was once again a possibility, leaving the lifeguards watchful and prepared to tell everyone to get back to shore in the midst of the race.

It was strange starting in the first wave for a change. The horn blew and I plunged in and started swimming. I had no plans to do any freestyle in this race. The 1500 was a new entity to me and I wasn’t willing to botch it on my first try by exhausting myself on the first lap. I quickly slipped to the back of the pack and knew that, while I wouldn’t be last out of the water as I had feared at the start, I was going to be one of the last. After going around the second buoy I started getting passed by the 750m swimmers who were leading their wave but I just kept right on plowing ahead. When I got to shore I turned and headed back for the start, running along the sand. When I got there, I realized I had run too hard along the sand and was much more out of breath than I ought to be. I could hear kids cheering as I waded out to start the second lap and looked back to see a couple more people doing the dash for their second lap.

I plunged back into the water an immediately lost my stroke for a few beats. Fortunately I found it again pretty quickly, although I was still catching by breath from the run for a while. The first buoy seemed further off than it ever had before, but I told myself it didn’t matter how it looked, it was still in the same place as before and even if it wasn’t, I still had to get to it. I could still see quite a few people in front of me, but it was a much less chaotic scene, almost serene. There was hardly any splashing and everyone was spread out. I didn’t come near anyone else for the remainder of the swim and no one else came near or passed me.

Going round the second buoy, I looked off to my right and could still see several swimmers plugging away behind me. All apparently swimming freestyle. I can’t imagine being that slow freestyle that I would finish behind someone swimming the breast stroke.

I felt enormously satisfied when I finished, feeling very fresh. While I knew I had a 5k run to go still, I had done enough of those that I wasn’t worried about it. I had gotten my 1500m swim in, just shy of a full mile (1600m) and a little more to my Long course distance (1930m). There is now no doubt that I can do this.

The transition went fine and the run was a little slow 25:55, but I managed to get a free tri-towel for beating someone out in a sprint at the end. None of that really mattered though, I was victorious, I had conquered the 1500m swim.

Later I looked up my times, my first lap was not far off my last two 750’s (17:39) but my second was much slower (19:13), a combination of running along the beach and being tired from the run along the beach, plus a little natural slowdown. Still, my overall time (36:51) projects to a 47 or 48 minute 1.2 mile swim, which is perfectly fine with me. If I could keep close to a 17 minute pace then I should be able to finish in about 44 minutes, but I’m not going to get greedy and push it. I’ve allocated myself an hour for the swim, if I get some free time off that, I’ll take it gladly.

Let’s take a moment to daydream, shall we?

Let’s suppose everything goes great on race day, what’s the best case scenario?

Swim & T1 – I’ve mentally allocated an hour for this but best case scenario IMO is probably 50 minutes on the swim and first transition

Bike & T2 – I’ve given myself 4 hours for the bike ride and T2, but that’s an average speed of 14mph. I ought to be able to beat that. Best case scenario is 17MPH, which would be around 3:20 for the bike, putting me at 4:10 overall

Run – I haven’t given myself too much flexibility here, which may be a mistake. I’ve blocked out 2 hours for the run which is just under a 9:10 pace and I’ve been counting on that 2 hours pretty much all along. I’m pretty confident about my run at two hours and even think I can do a bit better than that. That said, the run is usually where people blow up, after lighting the fuse on the bike. I’ll just need to make sure I’m very aware of my effort level on the bike and start the run off cautiously.

I’m going to do some run testing at the gym tonight to see just what pace I think I can reasonably do. I want to do a run test similar to the LT test I did at BCSM but just using HR and pace.

UPDATE: I did the run test and while 2 hours isn’t out of the question, 2:30 is probably going to be more reasonable.