I’ve barely had a day to recover and sleep in after the Nautica Malibu Triathlon, yet here I find myself up early again for another race day in SoCal. I’m not complaining, there’s no other way I’d rather start my weekend day. This is the first year that the Herbalife LA Triathlon has been run in Torrance, CA so there were some last-minute tweaks that made for an interesting and fun race day. The course used to run from Venice Beach to Downtown LA, but LA is bidding on an upcoming Summer Olympics and want to have a proper ITU race course. That means the had to find a place to have a condensed footprint with a looping bike/run course. Throw in the desire for a sand run like Escape From Alcatraz and you end up with the opportunity to run a sprint or classic distance race all within the friendly and beautiful confines of Torrance.
The 700m swim course was relatively smooth, but the sand run up the hill into T1 was a good bit tougher than I imagined. Many people walked the hill, but I did my best to weave through traffic as I “ran” up the hill. I had previewed the 9.5mi bike and 5km run course a couple of weekends earlier, but I didn’t quite appreciate how much the bike course went immediately uphill out of transition. My current fuel when I get on the bike is a granola, almond, chocolate mix, but I wasn’t able to choke much of it down with how much wind I was sucking. The sprint bike course consisted of two laps with some fun hills to ascend and descend; I cannot imagine how guys in the Tour de France descend those mountains at such a high speed! Now on to the run course, which included a serious hill right out of T2 and then an out-and-back on the sand. To make matters worse, I managed to get caught up in the water on my way back and running through sand with waterlogged shoes is how do you say… not fun.
Overall I was satisfied with my timing and even managed to bring home 6th place in my division (not the podium finish that I continue to strive for). I managed a 14:34 swim (68th place overall), a 3:03 T1, a 35:13 bike (36th place overall), a 1:37 T2, and a 23:51 run (36th overall) for a final time of 1:18:16 (43rd overall, 6th in division).
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- LA Tri road closures
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- LA Tri bike course sign
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- LA Tri race bib
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- LA Tri post-swim grimace
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- LA Tri post-swim hill run
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- LA Tri sand run grimace
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- LA Tri – Finish Line certificate
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- LA Tri post-race smiles
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- LA Tri race results
Another weekend, another race day morning! #LAtri #letsdothis A photo posted by Jeffrey Paul (@jeffpaul) on
Tweet47th overall, 6th in division! #LAtri A photo posted by Jeffrey Paul (@jeffpaul) on
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