ChrisStreeter
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2008 Treasure Island Olympic Triathlon

November 09, 2008 —

A couple months ago I heard about the San Francisco Triathlon on Treasure Island. At the time, I knew there was a sprint and an Olympic distance, but relegated myself to the sprint distance. However, after the last triathlon I did, I just decided to try for the Olympic distance. Last year, in 2007, I made a personal goal to do an Olympic distance tri in 2008, and the SF Triathlon seemed to be my last chance.

Well, I signed up for the event, which occurred yesterday morning. The race took place on Treasure Island in the San Francisco bay. Treasure Island is part of the island the Bay Bridge passes through. I woke up at the super early hour of 5am to make it to the island by 6am so I could check in and prepare my transition area before the early race start at 7:15am.

Since the island isn't very big, the course was a series of loops. The first event, swimming was 1.5km, where I swam twice around a triangle with 250m sides. From there I jumped on my bike for a 40km bike course. The 40km course consisted of 6 laps of a ~6.66km circuit. After biking was the run, 3 laps at ~3.33km each, for a total of 10k. The distance are the same as the ones used in the Olympics, making this an Olympic triathlon, and thus, much harder than the previous sprint triathlons I've done.

My initial estimate for the course was to complete it all in about 3 1/2 hours, broken down as follows: 30min for the swim, 2 hours for the bike, and 1 hour for the run. The estimate for the bike was taken from a recent 25.4 mile ride that I completed in just under 2 hours. This ended up being the estimate that was very exaggerated because the triathlon course was so flat. With that being said, here is a breakdown of my results:

SplitDistanceTime (min)PaceRank (overall)
Swim1.5 km29:1631:24 min/mi119
T14:04268
Bike L115:0116.5 mph297
Bike L213:5817.74 mph328
Bike L313:5017.91 mph310
Bike L413:4118.11 mph282
Bike L513:3118:33 mph251
Bike L614:1317.43 mph234
Bike Total40 km1:24:1617.64 mph281
T23:55418
Run L117:058:14 min/mi139
Run L217:148:19 min/mi146
Run L316:297:57 min/mi114
Run Total10 km50:498:10 min/mi132
Overall2:52:21202

So as has been the case with all the past tri's I have done, biking is my weakest link. I really need to do more bike training next time. I'm pretty sure that the only people I passed on my bike yesterday were the people with flat tires (and there were a lot of them!). The first place guy finished with a time of 2:04:49, which means I've got quite a bit of improvement to make. I'm not sure when my next tri is going to be, but now that I know what the Olympic distance is like, I know I can do many more of them.