Singapore Sprint Series 2009 – Triathlon

About a week ago I went for a “long run” of about 15K and towards the end of it i started having a pain in my left ankle, it got bad enough that eventually I stopped running and just walked home. I wasn’t sure what brought it on but i RICEd it all the same (Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate) and was disappointed when a day later I didn’t see an improvement, in fact it didn’t feel any better until possibly Friday. That meant throughout the week I didn’t think I would be able to take part in the Tribob Triathlon (750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run) on Sunday – I was bummed! But luckily since it felt better on Friday I decided to test it out for a short bike ride on Saturday and that went well so i figured i would give the race a go!!

So, I was fit enough to race and I had my brand-spanking new Speedie 3.0 to race as well. Team Hall was there as were many members of The Breakfast Club.

From Tribob – Triathlon

Swim
It was an interesting test for me since I’ve been going for swim classes at SeaMonsta for about a month and I was curious to know if it has been helping. I didn’t find the swim nearly as tiring as the Aquathlon and despite me getting smacked in the face by somebody, it felt like it went by quite fast. My time from the race last year was 16:42 but this year i was shocked when i looked at my watch when i got out of the water because it read 14:46!! I would later find out my official time was 15:38 which is still more than a minute faster. Wow! Although I think from Marisa’s big grin she found the swim EVEN EASIER.

From Tribob – Triathlon

Bike
I made a big mistake here because I forgot to take off my cleat covers from my cycling shoes before setting up transition which meant I had to stop and take them off during the race. This felt like it wasted like 30 seconds just fiddling with them. The ride itself was shocking initially because i didn’t realize there was a head-wind and I actually thought i was so dead tired i couldn’t get up above 30km/h. Luckily when I turned around i was going about 36km/h and it was obvious there was a head-wind in one direction and a tail-wind in the other.

From Tribob – Triathlon

Run
I found the initial 2.5km lap of the run pretty difficult, perhaps I had not been doing enough run practices off of the bike or perhaps I had pushed a little hard on the bike? In any case I ended up having a time one minutes slower than last year. The good news is that my ankle got through the race unscathed. After that I stood at the finishing line taking pictures of fellow Breakfast-Clubbers. Some of them even looked like they won the race:

From Tribob – Triathlon

When the results were tabulated, I finished 9th in my age-group for the race. In the series, I went one better this year and finished 8th although I would value this 8th place finish more since there were 204 participants in the series which is more than double than the previous year.

Another piece of exciting news is that Team Hall got some publicity on the website covering the race. Check out our dear mother in the last photo on RedSports.sg. Fame!!

From Tribob – Triathlon

Tags: singapore, singapore sprint series 2009, triathlon, tribob