Silverlake Tri - Race Report

I thought better late than never with this race report.

The Silverlake Tri is a local sprint tri located only 12mins from my house. I love this race as I am very familiar with the course and the competition.

Swim
The swim was good as I knew who my competition for the race was going to be before it started and all of us were on the left hand side for the wading swim start.
The gun goes off and so do we. I stayed next to one of the guys for the entire swim and we reached transition at the same time. The eventual winner in our age group was out 20 sec or so before us and is long gone.

T1
I think my transitions are fast and I had no issues except as I came out I messed up pushing buttoms on my Garmin and had to fiddle with that while on the bike for a minute.

Bike

This was the first race I raced with a power meter and I raced like the power meter was god and it really did not work out well. I tried to avg a certain power number but in the end I avg 20 watts lower because of some flawed thinking. ITs probably best to just redline for sprints and olys but oh well.

T2
This went flawlessly.

Run
I knew I was in a good position to podium going onto the run but I had no idea where I was at. So, I decided to try to put up a very solid run and see what happens and who I might catch. I use pace to keep me going hard on the run but for the first .5-1mile I just let my legs run as they are used to the 88-92rpms from the bike they tend to keep doing that for a while and that is a good pace, so I don't worry about it.
I do not see too many people during the run until about 1mile left and of course it was the guy I came out of the water with. I caught up with him and stayed on his heels for about 1.25miles just letting him set the pace. Then when I knew I could hammer it home with about .75mi or less left I dropped the pace and the other athlete.

After all of that I felt fine so I knew that I did not bike hard enough and probably could have ran harder. I will leave that to next race.

Results:
I ended up in 2nd in my age group despite the effort and I am happy with the results and the lessons learned.