Race reports · 2023 · by Jay
Na Wahine & Kane Sprint: transitions, on the new bike
The first race on the new triathlon bike, a couple of weeks after it showed up. A sprint is where you learn transitions without them ruining your day.
Six weeks after a 70.3, a sprint triathlon is a strange thing to sign up for, and it was also the smartest race I did that summer, which I say knowing how it sounds next to Honu.
Why a sprint
There were two reasons for it. The triathlon bike had arrived the second week of July, and a bike that has never seen a transition area should probably see a small one first. And after the long, slow, hot build to Honu, a short hard race is a reset: a fast swim, a fast bike, a fast run, and home before the heat gets serious.
A sprint is also where you actually learn transitions. At a 70.3 a bad transition costs a few minutes out of a day that's hours long, so nobody practices them, us included, but at a sprint a bad transition is a real chunk of the race, so you learn to lay out the towel, rack the bike the right way, and get the shoes on without sitting down. The numbers from this one say it worked: 1:30 in the first transition and 1:23 in the second, on a bike I'd owned for a couple of weeks.
The day
It's a local sprint on Oahu with a swim, a short bike, and a short run, and I raced the Kane division and came in third in my age group, 1:16:24 on the clock: 13:35 in the water, 36:29 on the bike, 23:27 for the run, and the two transitions in between. I'm not going to describe the course in detail, because I'd be reconstructing it from the video and the video does that better, so watch it. Michelle was there too, racing the 5K that the event runs as its own race rather than the sprint triathlon, so we were both at the same start area on the same morning doing different things. The timing sheet for the tri only has me on it, which is why the card reads the way it does.
Looking back, I'd make the first one a sprint every time, because a sprint teaches you everything about the sport that isn't fitness: the swim start, the transition, and the first mile of running off the bike, and you learn all of that where a mistake costs minutes instead of the whole day, and then you go longer. The same goes for a bike bought in the middle of a season, which ought to race a sprint before it goes anywhere that counts, and four weeks after this one the same bike did 112 miles around the island.