One of the first things people “say” when I tell them I’m a triathlete is “oooo” with that painful look on their face as if they just saw an olympic athlete sprint up to do a triple somersault over the horse only to miss the spring board and well..eat it! I immediately need to reassure them in saying that its NOT that bad!!
Really, for those of you reading this who are considering a triathlon for the first time, there are MANY forms and distances of triathlons! I assume that the people who “ooo” think that a triathlon means a 13 hour grueling event aka the Ironman. Yes that is a triathlon, but it is the Marathon of triathlons!
There are all sorts of distances up to that – Sprint, Olympic, Half or 70.3 and Ironman (I’ve even done a supersprint which was half the distance of a sprint!). I’m not going to give you all the distances here but basically they halve the distance of the Ironman with each lower level, so a 70.3 is 1/2, Olympic 1/4 and Sprint 1/8. There are even Biathlons, Duathlons, Xterra Triathlons and all sorts but we’ll get into that another time!
So, its not so bad. Most of you for the first time will do a sprint triathlon which on average will take you around 2 hours to complete total. The swim is about half a mile or 750-800 meters. So quite simply, my first tip is to use the swim as your warm up and to get into your race! This swim should take most of you about 15-20 minutes to complete which is the average time for a warm up. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t warm up before your tri but you really don’t need to go nuts! If you can complete this swim in practice then you will easily do it on race day. All you need to do is remain calm and collected, try to swim as efficiently as you can and before you know it you’ll be heading up the beach to T1!
Ok, so I’m sure I have left you with lots of questions but I will post more on this in my next tips!
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