A lot people from Breakaway are heading out to Vineman 70.3 this weekend, which got me thinking about finalizing my goals for my next race at the end of July, the Solana Beach Triathlon. It will be my first sprint. Technically, it’s probably my second sprint since my very first ever tri was the Super Sprint last May. This one is a tad longer in distance: 0.25-mi swim (0.4K), 9-mi bike (14.5K), and 3-mi run (4.8K).

After looking at the 2008 results in my age group for this race, the podium times are in the following ranges: swim = 7-9 min, bike = 25 min, run = 18-19 min, overall = 50-52 min. The transition times are not broken out, but are sandwiched into the swim and bike times. I’m thinking I should just go all out for all three legs in this sprint with maybe a little conservation on the swim since it is my weakest leg.

Forecast:

Swim – Most likely my fastest swim time for a quarter mile would be just about 7 minutes, so with transition I would like to get on to the bike segment in under 9 minutes.

Bike – For the bike leg I think the course is flat, so I’d like to go at least 24 mph, which is about 22.5 minutes. So let’s say I do it in under 24 minutes.

Run – By the time I get to the run, I know I’ll be tired, but I’d like to run at least 8 mph. So that means I should shoot for a 24-min run.

Overall – 57 minutes. I guess I’ll be happy if I finish the race in under an hour. But I’d have to have a superhuman swim and run to shave 10 minutes off to get my overall time down to 50 minutes.

Definitely, I’m going to be thinking about this race a lot more in the next two weeks. Time for some good visualization and daydreaming!