Fast transitions can make up for lost triathlon time

In triathlon, the shortest segments of a race are the transitions, in which competitors switch from swim to bike and bike to run.

But don’t be fooled by their brevity. While transitions compose only a modest percentage of a triathlete’s time, they can have a considerable impact on the flow of a race.

For the typical triathlete, transitions take up to a few minutes. For the pros, transitions last only seconds.

“A transition is a part of the race,” said Joe Umphenour, an Olympic Training Center resident and the runner-up in last September’s USA Triathlon Elite Nationals. “It’s not like they stop the clock in between the time you get out of the water and the time you jump on your bike. All of that adds up.”

Savvy competitors can use transitions to their advantage. Quicker transitions help triathletes keep up with faster competitors, saving them time that is much harder to make up on the course.

Pros are human, too
    Professional triathletes seem so infallible as they run out of transition, jump on their bikes, put their feet into their shoes — already clipped into the pedals — and glide away. But sometimes they make mistakes.
  
 In Sheila Taormina’s first World Cup race in 1999, she took the wrong bike out of the transition area and then had to return it. Luckily, the competitor to whom the bike belonged hadn’t yet made it to the transition. Taormina’s luck didn’t improve once she mounted her own bike as she crashed on the course.
   
Taormina’s first race as a pro — Saint Anthony’s in Clermont, Fla. — also was disastrous. When she approached the dismount line on the bike, the four women riding in her group took their feet out of their shoes and smoothly dismounted. Taormina hadn’t learned the skill, so she had to brake and clip out of her pedals, almost causing the whole group to crash. “A real rookie move,” she called it.

The pack gained about 20 second on Taormina, and she sprinted the first half-mile of the run to catch up. The effort caused her to pass out later.
  
One of Joe Umphenour’s favorite transition tales involves his friend and fellow Olympic Training Center resident Mark Fretta, who was ranked No. 1 in the world in 2006. In 2001, Umphenour was helping Fretta set up his transition area for one of his first pro races. Umphenour showed Fretta how to attach rubber bands to his bike shoes and pedals so the shoes wouldn’t drag on the ground when he ran to the bike mount line.
 
Umphenour didn’t think to check the shoes: Fretta had put them on the wrong pedals. During the race, Fretta realized his mistake and had to stop to put them on correctly. He missed the bike pack.