Triathlon Plan

It is now just under 4 days to go to the triathlon, so I am taking the advice that I should stop training to ensure I am fully rested on the day. I have never done a triathlon before so it is hard for me to judge what would be a reasonable time goal, but I am going to aim for 1:50 minutes in total. I am allocating my time as follows:

• Swimming 750m in 30 minutes: In the gym I normally complete my 750 meter swim under 25 minutes (in fact often below 20 minutes), but I think that 30 minutes will be a challenging goal for swimming in a lake.
• Cycling 20 km in 50 minutes: Based upon my training times, I think that this should be quite achievable. In fact this is where I will try to get ahead of schedule if possible.
• Running 5km in 30 minutes: I normally aim to complete a 10km fun run slightly below the hour mark. In theory I should be capable of doing a faster pace over 5km, but the fact that this will be the last leg of the triathlon will mean that it will be quite tough to even reach this pace.

I used to think that when people spoke about their Triathlon nutrition plan they were wondering what they should eat before and after the Triathlon, but it seems that it is also important for me to plan what I should eat and drink during the race itself. My current plan is:

• I will have porridge for breakfast the morning of the Triathlon since the slow release of energy from the Oats tends to keep me going. I will also indulge myself with a few espressos to top up my caffeine level.
• I will have a bottle of plan water attached to my bike for consumption during the cycle. I also plan to have two power bars stored in the pocket of my cycling jersey so that I can consume as much of them as I feel able for during the cycle. During training I found that it was almost impossible to open the wrappers while cycling at pace, so I will have the wrappers partly removed before I start.
• I don't think that I will need to eat any more during the running plase, but I will store a bottle of GatorAde in the transition area to bring woith me for the run. I think I might needs a more sugary drink at that stage of the event, I had experimented with the idea of bringing along Lucozade tablets and adding them to my water bottle, but again this is messay when I am getting tired so the bottle of GatorAde is plrobably more feasible.
• After the race I think I will replenish my fluids with Guinness the national drink especially while watching Galway beat Kilkenny for the second time this year in the All Ireland Hurling championship.

P.S. I found out why I was accidentally posting supersonic swimming times to DailyMile. I use the Tracks2Miles application and I had set my default distance units to be Km because this makes sense for running and cycling. When I entered details about a practice swim I would enter 750 in the distance field and then click on the drop down selection box to change my distance units to meters. What I didn't realise was that the application was trying to be helpful by automatically converting the distance I entered into 750000 meters (I didn't notice this  because I wasn't paying full attention, but also because the application automatically advanced focus to the comments field and hence the distance field was no longer visible).