As someone who regularly volunteers to be in a safety kayak for the Grand Rapids Triathlon I can say the number one reason I see new triathletes having panic attacks during the swim is that race day is literally their first time doing open water swimming.
1:54. This is a great tip, even for seasoned triathletes like myself (35+ years experience) who are ‘front of the pack’ age group swimmers. In my last Ironman, id done ‘just enough’ swim training (6-7km per week) to swim 57-60 minutes on a fair course, BUT not without gassing myself. I wanted to swim comfortably and conserve al the energy I could for the two disciplines that followed. So I did what Taren just recommended. I took off from the gun at 1:30 swim pace out wide, by myself for 200M and then looked to the swimmers on the inside that were swimming the same pace as me and looked like they hadn’t just exhausted themselves in the excitement. I used the next 200M to merge across onto what looked like a nice bunch of sub 60 minute swimmers who knew what they were doing and then followed them around very comfortably for the rest of the course. As it turned out the course was long (my Garmin told me it was over 4300M and the leaders - guys who would usually get out of the water in around the 45-47 minute range for a wetsuit swim (ie. the likes of Luke Mackenzie, Chris McCormack, Clayton Fettel etc), didn’t exit until around the 50-52 minute mark. That being said, I comfortably hit dry land in around 63 minutes and change. Job Done.
Thank you Taren. Great tips. My last Olympic Triathlon the swim start was chaotic. I started in the middle of the pack. WRONG! I will now take my time there. I had fun but now know where to push the effort. I still had gas in tank at end so I guess I could have pushed the run a little more. St. Malo, MB was a great race.
‘Separate your hydration from your calories. DO NOT use an all-in-one!!’ Serious question here- what would be the problem with using, say, a Maurten 320 mixed in each of your 750ml hydration bottles, along with some electrolytes? I’ve been doing this with success. But if there’s a better way I want to change.
I believe it has to do with the risk over sore stomach due to too much electrolytes, if that happens u cant take in more energy aswell and then u might be fucked. Now if u sweat heavily and have high salt content in sweat u might have less of a risk, but I never took a lab test on that, did u ?
