I'm full of excuses this morning... because I had pretty much the same time I did in last year's race.  They only posted the splits this morning, so I haven't had a chance to compare them with other races I've done... but I have a good idea what happened.

First, the field for this race is twice as large as other race I do, and they do a piss poor job of setting up their waves.  It's also a very community oriented race, which means there are a lot more novices than in a typical triathlon.  They set up the waves in groups of 50 people in the order you sign up.  Good races organize the waves by age and sex so that the people around you are more likely to be in a similar skill level.  For most races, I'm actually in one of the first 4 waves.  Yesterday I was in wave 16.  That means that all during the bike leg I was weaving around people on mountain bikes and touring bikes, and all sorts of people who don't understand the idea of riding on the right and passing on the left.

The other intangible part about it is that you tend to match the pace of people around you.  When so many people around you are going slow, you tend to slow down yourself.  This is especially true on this course which has a lot of climbs.  Normally after a climb I can recover decently and get back to full speed.  Yesterday I found myself staying slow after a climb for a lot longer.

The same thing happened during the run.  I simply wasn't motivated.  Don't get me wrong, this is an extremely difficult 5K run course, where about half is a steep uphill climb.  But when you get to the finish line and have enough energy to dust a guy in an all out 100 yard sprint like I did... you know you didn't have a good run.  Except for a brief calf cramp in the beginning of the run... I wasn't sore at all.  I just wasn't motivated to really get into it.

The heat wasn't terrible in the morning, and I don't think it got nearly as hot as they were predicting.  And of course it didn't help that I only got about 3 hours sleep the night before.  They did a good job of providing lots of water on the run (probably too much actually), and the people in the homes around the course were setting up sprinklers out next to the road for people to run under which was very nice.  It really just came down to the fact that I didn't compete in my race.  I competed in everyone else's.  That's one thing I haven't figured out how to overcome.