Race Preview - Maple Grove Sprint Triathlon

I did the Olympic distance of this race last year, I didn't especially like some aspects of the race, and went so far as to say that if there were any other races I wanted to do on the same weekend this one would lose out. Well guess what? There aren't any other races, and I like racing, so I'm doing the sprint. I tossed around the idea of doing the Olympic right up till I registered, but in the end figured that if I'm having so much fun doing the shorter races I should do one last one.

Race Info
Unlike last year the Tristar event isn't happening, so I'm guessing things will be a little more organized just because there are fewer things to track.

The swim is triangle with left turns. I can't remember if I've done the counter clockwise triangle before or not, I suppose it won't matter much, it's probably that way to avoid looking into the sun or something. I swear last year they billed the swim course as .25 miles, this year it's .3. That's another 100 yards or minute and a half at my race pace.

The bike is a 14 mile loop, it's mainly flat. I mapped it out on mapmyride.com and it says less than 200 feet of overall gain. The elevation map seems to corroborate that as the highest point is only 60 feet higher than the lowest point.

The run is through neighborhoods around the lake. Most of it is pretty flat, there is a climb to get out of transition and then a set of hills at the end. I don't remember thinking the hills were killer last year.

Goals
I'm coming off of what basically amounts to two weeks of time off. Last week I did two hours, this week will hopefully be a little more than that. The week previous was only a couple of hours. I've needed a little while to recharge the batteries before I head into the last two months of my extended season. I've decided though that if I can get some swim yards in and at least one good feeling run I'll be ready for the race.

My goals for december looked like this

	Goal	Pace
Swim	7:45	1:25 per 100 yards
Bike	39:00	21.5 miles/hour
Run	23:00	7:45 mins/mile
Total	1:13

If I execute on that, that is good enough for top 15, and top three in my AG (based on last years results.)

Closing Comments
I'm looking forward to this race, it's the last short race of the year. I'll put in a little bit of time this week to make sure my water arms and running legs won't feel odd on race day, but the plan is to head into this race full speed. I read recently, an endurance event is 50% physical and 90% mental. Now I'm no math major (but I could have picked up a math minor with maybe one more class) but that appears to add to 140%. That aside, the physical is there, I just need to believe I can do it. I can do it.