Triathlon Sprint Saint-Hubert 2022 (team)

Overall, this was a great event! And it was my first event of the season…. Yep, that far in the summer. I got COVID in early June and it fucked up all my training for a good month. I had to cancelled my 2 main events for this year: Ironman 5150 Mont-Tremblant and Ironman 70.3 Maine.
After putting COVID behind me early in the summer, my motivation for longer distances was really low and I decided to only register to a couple of shorter events, the first of them being this one, Triathlon de Saint-Hubert, and have fun instead of focusing on doing the best time possible.

This was a sprint relay triathlon, meaning you can do by team of 2 or 3, each participant doing part(s) of it . In our case, I did the 750m pool swim and the 20km bike ride, and my wife did the 5km run at the end (she gets to cross the finish line !!!)

Swim

It was my first swim in a pool since a long time ( I now swim in my swim spa 😎) and even if I did some swimming this summer, I didn’t do that much (maybe averaging 1/1.5 swim a week). Adding to that the fact that the swim started quite early and that it was pretty cold that morning, and that was all the ingredients I needed for fucking up my swim. I started out too fast… but after 2 minutes realized my breathing was too chaotic and I couldn’t keep going like this. I literally had to stop for 30 seconds, take a deep breath, relax and re-focus. After that, my pace was a bit slower, but it went super well.
I finished the 750m swim in 15m40s at a pace of 2:05/100m, which is pretty much my race pace since I started triathlon.

Bike

Elapsed Time	Moving Time	Distance	Average Speed	Max Speed	Elevation Gain	Calories Burned
00:36:05 hours	00:36:05 hours	18.99 km	31.57 km/h	37.38 km/h	257.00 meters	532 kcal

Overcast clouds, 17°C, Feels like 17°C, Humidity 82%, Wind 11km/h from NE – by Klimat.app

The bike ride went pretty well. I was a bit dizzy from the swim and the transition was slightly longer than was I expected (damn socks!), but overall I was happy with this part. I was not 100% certain of the speed / level of effort I would be able to maintain as I didn’t really train for short distances like this, but I think overall, I paced it quite well. I feel that I could have push a bit harder, specially because I didn’t have to run after, but it is what it is ! Overall I rode at around 31km/h as there was some wind and quite a lot of U-turns. My goal was to do 35km/h to get ready for my next event ( Montreal Olympic Esprit Triathlon), but due to the U-turns and the wind, I was okay with the results.

Run

Well… the run I didn’t do it, so not much to debrief here ! My wife ran it and it was fun to see her go and then cheer her as she crossed the finish line !

Final thoughts

Overall this was a great event and it was super fun to do it as a team of 2 with my wife! The event was family friendly and our daughter came to support us 🙂 Sometime it’s more about enjoying the event than trying to do a PR, and it felt good, specially after cancelling my 2 other events this season.