On the race course, it can sometimes be difficult to pass a team or to get some separation between you and a group of other teams; they can work hard to keep you in sight or follow your navigation. The Transition Area, on the other hand, is a much easier place to put time in to your competition and is frequently overlooked as a strategic opportunity. In a "short" 12-hour race like the
Tidewater Traverse quick transitions can be the difference between winning the race and finishing off the podium.
Take a bike-to-paddle transition:
- Do you really need to change out of your bike shoes for the paddle? Once you're paddling, slip your shoes off and go barefoot if you need to. It's faster than sitting in TA, changing your shoes/socks, and wasting 2 minutes of race time.
- Does your support crew have PFDs, paddles, and food staged in the canoe for you? Plan to eat/drink while you're paddling instead of while your hanging around the TA. Your support crew can tape all sorts of drinks and food to the interior of a canoe . . .
- Are you organized with your maps so you don't need to hang around in TA sorting out where you're going next? It can take 5 or 10 minutes just confirming you have the right maps and planning your route; when in doubt take everything (in a waterproof case!) and have your navigator sort it out on the way.
The same sort of logic can apply to any transition area and, unless you're in a race of 24-hours or longer, spending more than 15 minutes in a TA is like saying, "Winning this race is not that important to me." Now, it may be that winning the race
is, in fact, not a priority for your team; maybe you're just there to finish or for the comraderie and the experience -- this mindset is
particularly dangerous in a TA because you can easily burn 30 or 45 minutes without really knowing it. If there are 3 transition areas in a 12-hour race, and you spend "just" 30 minutes in each TA, that's 90 minutes total in TA and fully 1/8 of the 12-hour race time is spent transitioning.
Team HRAdventure has some funny tales of TA comedy. We spent 60 minutes in a TA once at the 30-hour NGAR in January (after a very cold paddling leg); our support crew had a fire going and we didn't have a strong sense of urgency. Even when we think we're going quickly through a TA, we compare our split times to some of the premiere teams around (
Litespeed,
EMS, etc) and they are often much faster in TA.
Since extra time spent in a TA is really time spent losing a race, we've worked to improve our transitions and have had some success with the following:
- Practice transitions during training, and transition with race-like intensity.
- Have a designated time-keeper who calls out 5 minute increments of time.
- Before the race, insist that your support crew push you out the door at each TA -- this is not the time for racers to get comfortable!
- Be organized. Whether it's keeping gear for a certain discipline all in one place, or having colour-coated containers for food, clothes, bike stuff, etc, have an organization system and make sure there are labels for the benefit of support crew. By the end of a race, support vehicles can get pretty trashed so don't spare any organizational effort.
- As you approach the TA, review what each person is doing and make sure everybody knows the plan.
As I said, we're far from pros when it comes to transitions but a little bit of effort can make a big difference. The TA is too often an afterthought for teams when, in reality, it's probably the easiest place on the course to pass a team!