Race Week: Patriot Half-Ironman - Day 2: Fears

Yesterday, I listed my goals. Today I list my fears. Having fears and talking about them doesn't mean I'm not confident, it merely means these are the concerns I've thought about in terms of the race:

1. race day weather - Being a bigger athlete, hot weather affects me more than most. The weather reports have been changing a lot with reports of everything from 80 degrees and sunny with a few clouds down to high 60's with some showers. Cloudy with a little rain I'm ok with. 80 degrees is about the top end of what I'd want to deal with, and anything hotter and I can really see my performance suffering.

2. climbing - In one of our longer training rides at the beginning of may, it turned into a veritable suffer fest when due to a slight bike problem I couldn't do much climbing. We did 40 miles, with a little over half the climbing we'll see Saturday, and I wound up walking a lot of those small hills. I know the bike issues aren't likely as I've gotten a tune up and it's behaving well, but climbing has never been my strong suit, so I'm hoping I can build up momentum after the first couple hills and just keep rolling throughout.

3. Burning out in the swim - Im still getting used to my wetsuit and my last 1.2 mile swim will be tonight or tomorrow, so I'm hoping to get it in, and not feel completely wasted and dreading the first hill on the bike. Last year leading up to Timberman I was swimming daily. Without the membership at the gym right now, it's 2x a week. One thing I didn't have at Season Opener that I will have at Patriot is 5 Hour Energy to down before the swim. I used to take it in T1 to help recover from the swim, but I figure I can use GU for that in transition and have the caffeine help me through the swim.

Honestly, that's really all I'm worried about. I got a nice new front wheel for my bike that now matches my rear (except in color), put one of the expensive tires Rach won last fall on it, and took it out for a short ride. Its lighter and the wheel rolls better. and  as I really push to lose weight for Rev3, I'll probably look at  some more upgrades (and if I lose enough weight, aerobars!) to prep for that race.