Super league for triathlon (not the better known rugby) is an exciting new format now open for amateur multi-sport racing. I decided to make a trip to the Okanagan despite the smokey conditions from the wild fires that has taken over the whole province. Jen came to support me despite being a little hesitent as she should have been.
Photo Credit: Super League Triathlon - Penticton
Day 1 was a friday evening bike solo TT effort just under 15km on Area 27 motorsport race track. 3 painful counter clockwise laps and then a finishing shoot.
I had a blast ripping around on my roadie going about 35.9kph at 225watts. I thinking maybe I could have shaved off another minute or two easily with the TT bike and race wheels. Or even copying Stan's idea to tact on some aerobars for next time.
Day 2 was part 2 of this Equalizer event. The order of sports was known, but the length of each was as clear as mud or the same as smokey skies leading up to the gun start. It seems like this event totally attracts veterans to the sport despite its short and beginner friendly distances. Highly complex tactics came into play and this was also my first taste of draft-legal racing and perhaps more to come.
Finally we were told we do a single loops of each discipline to keep things simple and reduce exposure to the smokey skies. Only moments before lining up at the starting line roughly based from Day 1's order, we were also told we could back out of the event and anytime and still receive post race medals and swag. We giggled a little since the timing was a bit late for that.
The order was a swim-run-swim-bike-run. For me, I think the race can be broken into 2 phase: aquathon (swim-run-swim) and brick (bike + run). 
The swim really favoured the runners as half of it was an aquajog around the buoys. The transitions was key as nearly 10% of the time was spent there. I made the error of putting on socks which costed me 10s for each time putting on & taking off. The swimmers and the runners exchanged leads in pre-bike battle with swim-run-swim.
Once we all got to the bike, the dynamics of the race changed quite a bit. Peloton groups started to form.
Eventually I lost contact of a big group since different genders are required to not draft off each other. One moment of separation can mean getting dropped by the group. Roy, a super swimmer caught me and also did a lion share of the wind-blocking. I was lucky to stay on his wheel.
The final run was a sprint. I was going about 3:20 per km pace for the final mile-ish.
Jen and I decided that I should pull out of Day 3 racing since we got our super league experience, she got to see me go back and forth in the 4 transitions. Jen had to almost pause me for a second to decide if this was the final call. The decision was a heavy one for me, something I'm not used to doing.
Unfortunately for the event, we heard the next morning that the sunday event was cancelled, but we knew it was the 100% right call. We drove through most of Kelowna and Merritt the previous night and the smoke was awful, with visibility less than 800m!
