40 year old virgin

It's June and I've had this idea for a blog post after my first triathlon last August. (Hence the clever "virgin" title - my spam box ought to start filling up with weird comments, now).

However, in 4 days I will be doing my second triathlon, I'm now 41 and rapidly running out of time to post anything before I head over there.
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My first sprint tri was 750 m swim/20 km bike/5 km run. See here for my results. Training for it was sporadic but my swim would prove to need much improvement. I didn't fear the open waters, but the distance and effort proved a struggle; I was front crawling, back crawling, breast stroking (hmm more spam fodder there). The bike went fairly well, I was breathing hard the whole way, and the run sort of coasted into the finish line at an even pace.

I felt my next target should be an olympic distance but I was convinced by my "coach"/brother that half-Ironman was within my reach. So I've been training for about 18 weeks towards that goal. This distance is Ironman 70.3 or Swim 2km, Bike 90km, Run 21km.

I feel great about the swim, bike and run, although I feel my cycling could use some improvement in efficiency, but I've run out of time to do any more tweaking. I've purchased a new set of tri-shorts (last ones destroyed by chlorine) and new cycling shoes within the last week, so I'm risking introducing too many changes without testing properly. I've been wearing them during my work commute, but that's hardly the same conditions. Hopefully I'll have some time the day before the race to fine tune any shoe positioning. I've got a hand-me-down sleeveless wet suit this time and makes a huge difference in my swim effort. My in-laws have a trailer on a nice little lake about 350m long so I have done a laps there a few times to mimic the 2K swim.

I'm predicting around a 6 hour time, so hopefully I can post a good race report, and much sooner this time around.