Hey, I'm a beginner from Madison WI. Hopefully this report will be entertaining rather than boring... :)

Yesterday I participated in the Silver Lake Triathlon, in Portage, WI (my second Triathlon). It was great!
On the drive up, we were all marveling at the huge (for Wisconsin) mats of fog, then it cleared up momentarily while everyone was getting their stuff set up. During the race, it was cloudy and lightly misting the whole time, which I hear was a bit chilly for the immobile spectators, but was just about perfect for me. Promptly following the finish, the sun came out and it turned into a beautiful day.
Now, as for the race itself: the pre-race organization was a bit, well, disorganized, but during the race the officials did an excellent job making everything clear and straightforward. The course (1/3 mile swim, 16 mile bike, 5K run) was fairly scenic, but slightly inferior to the Ripon Medical Center triathlon when it came to looks. In utility, however, it was slightly superior. The swim course was easier to follow, and less weedy, the bike course was much less hilly (almost as scenic), though not really flat, and the run course was more open, which I liked because it made it easier to see where I was in relation to the finish.
My time, 1:28*, was an improvement of about 9 minutes over my first race, despite the bike course at this race being 1-mile longer. I finished second in my age group, though I have no idea how many people were in my age group (at least 2!). My splits were something like 10 minutes swim, 50 minutes bike, 23 minutes run. I’ll do another update later with my actual times and my overall standing.
Now I’ll just make some random comments on entertaining things that happened.
Once again there were many different swim strokes being used, though freestyle was of course most common. I passed a guy doing sidestroke, another doing backstroke, a couple doing breast stroke…
There wasn’t a whole lot of passing going on during the swim, after the first 50 meters or so. Every thing stayed pretty much the same from that point ’til the end. I think this had something to do with how well separated the wave start was. There really wasn’t a whole lot of overlap.
I was a little disorganized at T1, and ran in a loop around the rack were my bike was. Still, I managed to get out pretty quickly, and managed to hang about 20 feet behind the guy who had had his bike racked next to mine (it was a really nice bike). He looked like someone I would be able to drop on the run fairly quickly. We both passed a couple people, and everything was going dandy, until I shifted up onto my biggest chainring, and my chain fell off. I managed to fix it in under 30 seconds, and without actually dismounting, but I did come to a complete halt, and the guy in front of me got away. I was also passed by what felt like 20 people, but was actually 5 (hey, I got up at 5 am). After getting my chain back on, I managed to catch a few of the people who had passed me, and then stayed in pretty constant position for the rest of the bike, except for being passed by a few of the fast people from later swim waves. During the last 3/5 of the bike, I had a sort of rivalry with this other guy on a mountain bike (he looked like he was about 25), as we would both momentarily surge ahead, only to be passed after a couple minutes by the other. This happened maybe 6 or 7 times. It was fun. I beat him into the transition area, and then dropped him on the run. As I was racking my bike, there, lo and behold, was the guy who had set up next to me. Somehow I had managed to catch up with him on the bike. He got out of the transition before me, but my assesment of his running abilities had been accurate, and I passed him going up the first hill. The run was painful, but enjoyable. I passed a lot of people. I felt sorry for the kids handing out water and gatorade, because everyone was ignoring them. I entertained them by dumping loads of ice cold water on myself every time I went by. This was very refreshing. About half-way through the run, I realized that I had forgotten my race number. My stomach lurched for a moment, but then I decided that in this race they probably wouldn’t mind (it turned out they didn’t). My only regret near the finish was that I had no-one near by to sprint past.