FastSplits Winter Triathlon

It was a qualifier for the world winter tri championship in Germany. We just went for the heck of it.
5.0K Trail Run
7.5K Mountain Bike
6.0K X-Country Ski

I managed to finish in under two hours and even beat a few other people. It's a golf course in the summer and a X-ski place in the winter. It was about 18°F when the race started and the most challenging part of the whole experience was trying to pin my number on my shirt with my fingers too cold to work the safety pins.


The running on snow wasn't bad as it was mostly packed down and even where it was not packed down it was only a few inches deep. I wore regular running shoes and had no problem.

On the other hand biking on snow was a bit hard. I had let half the air out of my tires before the race to get more traction, and I knew I would be in low gears, but that first of three laps around the bike loop was really tough. I had to dismount about 10 times on the first loop becuase I got jammed up in the snow. By the second loop I had sort of learned to manage the snow and was only off the bike a few times after that. My friend Eric is an excellent mtn biker and never came off the saddle once. I had two technical issues on this portion:

1) the cuffs of my fleece pants kept catching my bike.

2) the cap of my water bottle froze solid and I was REALLY thirsty and water station had closed when running was done. I finally unscrewed the whole top and drank out of it like a cup as much as I could while riding an easy section and then threw it away. I was quickly thirst again but just had to tough it out the last hour of the race.

I got smoked on the X-country ski portion. I need to actually learn to do it. People were effortlessly ski-skating past me while I was laboriously poling myself along. I can ski-skate on downhill skis but every time i tried it on the x-c skis I just stumbled. Need to learn that kind of thing before the race starts.


The course was flat and not scenic. I finished in 1:43 which was about an hour after the winner. So maybe I missed the party but from what I could see of the apre-ski scene it was bagels, bananas, and some brownies and since we were all soaked with sweat and it was freezing cold out people didn't stick around. If there was an awards ceremony I didn't see it. Also they didn't post the times for us to see, though they did get them online fast. I might do it again if can learn to x-c ski fast.